The Knoxville Symphony Orchestra under Aram Demirjian is performing Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2 on Thursday and Friday, November 16 and 17, 7:30 PM, at the Tennessee Theatre. [Tickets and Information]
“I have so many fair dreams and hopes about music in these days. It is a gospel whereof the people are in great need.” Charles Ives (1874-1954)
During my years in music school, I studied not only Ives’ compositions, but also various aspects of his life. Ives stood out in my mind as ‘the composer who worked for an insurance company.’ As an idealistic young musician, it was incongruous to me that a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer was, in fact, a businessman who worked at The Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York (MONY). Insurance, not composition, was the way he made a living and supported his family.
This was difficult for me to reconcile. How could Ives, a man considered a musical pioneer, have pursued composition on a part-time basis? Why was he not consumed with a passion for music that transcended any desire for stability and personal wealth? Where was the starving composer who sacrificed everything in pursuit of his art? His life certainly wasn’t romantic. It was downright dull. The man behind the music I so dearly loved was a mere mortal who worked for an insurance company.
But it wasn’t long before that dull life was the life I called my own. I began working at MONY myself when my career at New York City Opera was derailed by a financial shutdown in the early 80s. I went from singer to secretary in a heartbreaking second. But, as luck would have it, my boss was the head of Corporate Communications and quickly assigned me a fascinating project – write a piece about Ives. She gave me access to MONY’s bursting archives and I started to learn about Ives, the businessman.
My perspective started to shift. I was now a person contributing to the support of a family, a musician striving to find a balance between business and art, and another mere mortal working for an insurance company. Ives became a true hero to me – someone who epitomized American creativity, not only in the sound of his music, but in the quality and nature of his ideals.
Father Knows Best
These ideals were instilled in Charles from an early age by his father, George Ives. A highly-skilled musician himself, George laid the foundation for the musical road Charles would travel. George believed that “not every dissonance needs to be resolved.” He developed in Charles an awareness not only for the music that permeates our daily lives, but an appreciation for the inner expression that music is. When George was once asked, “How can you stand to hear old John bellow off-key the way he does at camp meetings?” His answer was, “Old John is a supreme musician. Look into his face and hear the music of the ages. Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds. If you do, you may miss the music.”
Charles developed an accepting ear that welcomed dissonance and cacophony. He cultivated an ability to hear beauty and harmony in conflicting sounds and tonalities. “Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair,” Ives wrote. “Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us and, for that reason, we are inclined to call them beautiful.”
Musical training aside, George also influenced his son in his career choices and felt that a man “could keep his music interest stronger, cleaner, bigger, and freer if he didn’t try to make a living out of it.” This philosophy was accepted by Charles, who later said, “If a man has a certain ideal he’s aiming at in his art, and has a wife and children whom he can’t support, should he let his family starve and keep his ideals? No, I say, for if he did, his ‘art’ would be dishonestly weakened and his ideals would be vanity.” Ives pursued a business path and reserved composing for evenings and weekends.
Ives & Company
Providentially, a relative of Ives’ was a medical examiner for MONY, where Ives was welcomed into the Actuarial Department. It was soon clear that Ives was not a born actuary, though he remained grateful for this firsthand experience in insurance fundamentals. He transferred to a local agency and immediately clicked with a young clerk named Julian Myrick and they established their own agency, Ives & Myrick.
Ives approached selling life insurance with creativity and zeal. He believed insurance should be patterned to the needs of the individual, considering the total personal and financial picture — a concept that to this day brings him recognition as the father of estate planning.
He set up a school for underwriters and taught his agents that there is “an over-appeal to the weakness of the average personality and an under-appeal to the strength of the average mind.” Ives felt strongly about life insurance and considered his profession one that made a profound difference.
Victim of His Culture
Ives is often criticized as being a victim of his culture, philosophies, and beliefs. Some feel his attachment to certain American values and institutions was so complete and literal as to narrow and stifle his career as a creative artist. Many Ives scholars maintain that he rejected his role as an artist and was thus a man hopelessly divided against himself — divided between the demands of his business and the demands of his craft.
I choose to believe that Ives approached both music and business with the same creative spirit and moral conscience. I do not envision Ives as a man divided, but rather, as a man whose actions were aligned with his artistic and pragmatic ideals. His efforts as a composer and as a businessman were equally fundamental to his pursuit of an American way of life.
During his lifetime, Ives experimented with virtually every significant technique of “modern” composition years before their use by even the most advanced European composers. In the field of insurance, his idea of integrating a person’s life insurance with his financial and family needs, his training school for agents, and his concept of estate planning, remain cornerstones of the insurance industry.
When I think on Charles Ives, I think of a man who famously said, “In ‘thinking up’ music, I usually have some kind of brass band with wings on it in the back of my mind.” Oh, what an image!
The life of Charles Ives is wonderfully summed up in the words of composer Arnold Schoenberg:
“There is a great man living in this country — a composer. He has solved the problem of how to preserve ones’ self and to learn. He responds to negligence with contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Charles Ives.”
