Charles Ives: On Beauty and other quotes

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"If [a composer] has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?" (CI: A Life With Music 143)

Ives made is money selling insurance.


"God must get awfully tired of hearing the same thing over and over again, and in His all-embracing wisdom could certainly embrace a dissonance -- might even enjoy one now and again."


"Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to, do not bother us, and for that reason, we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently,—possibly almost invariably,—analytical and impersonal tests will show, we believe, that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep. A narcotic is not always unnecessary, but it is seldom a basis of progress,—that is, wholesome evolution in any creative experience. This kind of progress has a great deal to do with beauty—at least in its deeper emotional interests, if not in its moral values. (The above is only a personal impression, but it is based on carefully remembered instances, during a period of about fifteen or twenty years.) Possibly the fondness for individual utterance may throw out a skin-deep arrangement, which is readily accepted as beautiful—formulae that weaken rather than toughen up the musical-muscles. If the composer's sincere conception of his art and of its functions and ideals, coincide to such an extent with these groove-colored permutations of tried out progressions in expediency, that he can arrange them over and over again to his transcendent delight—has he or has he not been drugged with an overdose of habit-forming sounds? And as a result do not the muscles of his clientele become flabbier and flabbier until they give way altogether and find refuge only in a seasoned opera box—where they can see without thinking?"

(This is from his Essays before a Sonata.)

"Please don't try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have -- I want it that way."
- A note to his copyist, Mr. Price

Comments

jaypercival said…
Another good one:

“The trouble with modern music is that it's somewhat too intellectual...the brain has been working a little more than the bigger muscle underneath (what you may call it, spirit, inner blast, soul?).”
― Charles E. Ives
September 12, 2013 at 11:41 AM
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