Remembering Charles Ives on his birthday 🎂
📷 Eugene Smith, 1945
"His music ineluctably anticipates the future because it originates from a perspective that sees time as laid out, simultaneously not successively, in space."
- Jonathan Cott
"No one else seems to hear it the same way. Are my ears on wrong?"
- Charles Ives
US Postal Service, 1997
Lou Harrison tells a sad story about Charles Ives, who composed in an 'aerie', on the top floor of his brownstone. One day he came down the stairs with tears in his eyes & said, "It doesn't work anymore, I can't do it anymore."
"And that was the end."
📷 Clara Sipprell, c. 1947
On Charles Ives's birthday, I'm listening to Leonard Bernstein's 1960 recording of his 2nd Symphony
The portrait on the cover is by Halley Ershine.
Lenny called him "Our first really great composer, our Washington, Lincoln & Jefferson on music."
Raymond Moreau Crosby's 1890 drawing of Charles Edward Ives with his roommate, Mandeville Mullally, at Yale. Ives wasn't an especially good student, but his favourite courses, besides music, were in English & American literature.
@smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.