Charles Edward Ives was an American actuary, businessman, and modernist composer. Ives was amongst the earliest American internationally renowned composers to achieve recognition on a global scale. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Later in life, the quality of his music was publicly recognized through the efforts of contemporaries like Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, and he came to be regarded as an "American original". He was also among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements, and quarter tones. His experimentation foreshadowed many musical innovations that were later more widely adopted during the 20th century. Hence, he is often regarded as the leading American composer of art music of the 20th century.
Henry Dixon Cowell was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher, teacher and the husband of Sidney Robertson Cowell. Earning a reputation as an extremely controversial performer and eccentric composer, Cowell became a leading figure of American avant-garde music for the first half of the 20th century — his writings and music serving as a great influence to similar artists at the time, including Lou Harrison, George Antheil, and John Cage, among others. He is considered one of America's most important and influential composers.
Nicolas Slonimsky, born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimskiy, was a Russian-born American musicologist, conductor, pianist, and composer. Best known for his writing and musical reference work, he wrote the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns and the Lexicon of Musical Invective, and edited Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians.
William Howard Schuman was an American composer and arts administrator.
Henry Dreyfuss Brant was a Canadian-born American composer. An expert orchestrator with a flair for experimentation, many of Brant's works featured spatialization techniques.
Carl Ruggles was an American composer, painter and teacher. His pieces employed "dissonant counterpoint", a term coined by fellow composer and musicologist Charles Seeger to describe Ruggles' music. His method of atonal counterpoint was based on a non-serial technique of avoiding repeating a pitch class until a generally fixed number of eight pitch classes intervened. He is considered a founder of the ultramodernist movement of American composers that included Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford Seeger, among others. He had no formal musical education, yet was an extreme perfectionist—writing music at a painstakingly slow rate and leaving behind a very small output.
The Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840–60 is a piano sonata by Charles Ives. It is one of the composer's best-known and most highly regarded pieces. A typical performance of the piece lasts around 45 minutes.
American classical music is music written in the United States in the European classical music tradition. In many cases, beginning in the 18th century, it has been influenced by American folk music styles; and from the 20th century to the present day it has often been influenced by American folk music and sometimes jazz.
String Quartet No. 1 is a musical composition by Charles Ives. Music historian and theorist Robert P. Morgan wrote that the quartet "was Ives's first mature composition of extended length, and its extraordinary fluency gives ample evidence of his solid control of traditional musical techniques. Moreover, the work is considerably more than a facile exercise based on classical models; there are already indications of the Ives to come, in the extensive quotations and, above all, in the composer's ability to bend the form to suit the idiosyncrasies of his own musical inclinations."
The Rhythmicon—also known as the Polyrhythmophone—was an electro-mechanical musical instrument designed and built by Leon Theremin for composer Henry Cowell, intended to reveal connections between rhythms, pitches and the harmonic series. It used a series of perforated spinning disks, similar to a Nipkow disk, to interrupt the flow of light between bulbs and phototoreceptors aligned with the disk perforations. The interrupted signals created oscillations which were perceived as rhythms or tones depending on the speed of the disks. Although it generated both pitches and rhythms, it has often been described as the world's first drum machine.
The Unanswered Question is a musical work by American composer Charles Ives. Originally paired with Central Park in the Dark as Two Contemplations in 1908, The Unanswered Question was revised by Ives in 1930–1935. As with many of Ives' works, it was largely unknown until much later in his life, and was not performed until 1946.
The Second Symphony was written by Charles Ives between 1897 and 1902. It consists of five movements and lasts approximately 40 minutes.
The Symphony No. 2 in C minor, Op. 17 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was composed in 1872. One of Tchaikovsky's joyful compositions, it was successful right from its premiere and also won the favor of the group of nationalistic Russian composers known as "The Five", led by Mily Balakirev. Because Tchaikovsky used three Ukrainian folk songs to great effect in this symphony, it was nicknamed the "Little Russian" by Nikolay Kashkin, a friend of the composer as well as a well-known musical critic in Moscow. Ukraine was at that time frequently called "Little Russia".
A Symphony: New England Holidays, also known as A New England Holiday Symphony or simply a Holiday Symphony, is a composition for orchestra written by Charles Ives. It took Ives from 1897 to 1913 to complete all four movements. The four movements in order are:
John Kirkpatrick was an American classical pianist and music scholar, best known for championing the works of Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Carl Ruggles, and Roy Harris. He gave the first complete public performance of Ives's Concord Sonata in 1939, which became a turning point in the composer's public recognition. Kirkpatrick played an important role in Ives scholarship, and he was leader in the Charles Ives Society. One important example is his role in the editing of Memos, which is a collection of Ives's autobiographical writings. At the time of his death Kirkpatrick was a professor emeritus at Yale University, where he had also been the curator of the Charles Ives archives.
Orchestral Set No. 2 is the title of a three-movement work by the American composer Charles Ives. A typical performance lasts around seventeen minutes. Composed between 1915 and 1919, it represents musical reminiscences of the composer. Like its predecessor, the First Orchestral Set, Three Places in New England, it was not conceived as a single entity but rather assembled from separate compositions.
Hallowe'en, also initially entitled Allegro vivace: Hallowe'en, is a short composition for piano quintet by American composer Charles Ives. It was probably composed in 1907 and was part of Three Outdoor Scenes, a collection of pieces that also included Central Park in the Dark.
The Gong on the Hook and Ladder or Firemen's Parade on Main Street, normally shortened as The Gong on the Hook and Ladder and also initially entitled Allegro moderato, is a short composition by American composer Charles Ives.
"Hymn: Largo cantabile", S. 84/1, sometimes also referred to as "Largo cantabile: Hymn" and often shortened as "Hymn", is a composition by American composer Charles Ives written in 1904. Grouped in the suite A Set of Three Short Pieces, it is published and commonly performed as a standalone work.
