Insurance Man

Thirty-five years ago, before Stravinsky and the Viennese Atonalists had cut their modernistic teeth, a shy, bearded Yankee named Charles Ives was busy writing his own kind of modernist music. Nobody paid much attention to Composer Ives's strange, complicated scores. But little by little the few music-lovers who did hear them began to realize that Ives was neither a trickster nor a crackpot, but a writer of real, live music. Today Ives is regarded even by conservative critics as one of the most individual and authentically American of all U. S. composers. But performances of his music are still few & far between.

Last week Ives's Second Pianoforte Sonata, almost entirely neglected since he completed it in 1915, got its first Manhattan performance at a recital by enterprising U. S. Pianist John Kirkpatrick. Composer Ives's long-unheard work turned out to be a sort of musical equivalent to Author Van Wyck Brooks's The Flowering of New England. Subtitled Concord, Mass., 1840-60, it attempted to paint in music the surroundings and personalities of such famed New Englanders as Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau and the Alcotts. Most listeners found Composer Ives's complicated tone-portraits hard to grasp at one sitting. But respected New York Herald Tribune Pundit Lawrence Gilman unwrinkled his critical brow, crowed ecstatically: "Exceptionally great music . . . the greatest music composed by an American."

Many people who have never heard of 64-year-old Composer Ives know him as the crotchety, grizzled, retired partner of the conservative William Street insurance firm, Ives & Myrick. A practical Yankee, bristle-bearded Ives long ago decided that he couldn't make a living writing the kind of music he wanted to write. On his graduation from Yale in 1898 he served as a church organist, playing in Danbury, Conn., Bloomfield, N. J., and finally in Manhattan. Weekdays he plugged as a clerk for Mutual Life Insurance Co. Industrious and daring both as businessman and composer, Ives soon formed his own insurance managing agency, helped build it into one of the largest of its kind in the U. S. But Ives never let his business interfere with his composing. His evenings and holidays were spent, pen-in-hand, over an old desk, piling up a huge heap of manuscripts that were later to bring him fame.

Shrewd Charles Ives refuses to see anything strange about his unusual double life. Says he: "There can be nothing 'exclusive' about a substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of experience of life and thinking about life and living life. My work in music helped my business and my work in business helped my music."

One reason for Composer Ives's long obscurity is his horror of publicity. Though he has lived and worked in the midst of Manhattan's hubbub, he has never taken any part in the city's musical life. He never goes to concerts, abhors evening dress, is mortally terrified of being photographed. He never reads daily newspapers, and no journalist has ever succeeded in interviewing him.

A philosopher as well as a composer and businessman, Ives often writes lengthy prefaces to his compositions. Each movement of his Second Pianoforte Sonata is preceded by a long essay in hardbitten English. Of them he remarks in his dedication: "These prefatory essays were written by the composer for those who can't stand his music -- and the music for those who can't stand his essays; to those who can't stand either, the whole is respectfully dedicated."

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