Ives Three Places in New England

In 1929, the conductor Nicolas Slonimsky contacted the American
composer Charles Ives about performing one of his works. This was
a bit of a surprise for Ives, since he had a checkered reputation
among musicians and audience members, if they even were familiar
with his name at all. In fact, he was much more famous during his
lifetime as an extremely successful insurance executive! Ives
mostly composed in his spare time, and his music was mostly
ignored or ridiculed as that of a person suffering from a crisis
of mental health. Most of his music was never performed during
his lifetime, and even today, he is thought of as a great but
extremely eccentric composer, and orchestras and chamber
ensembles often struggle to sell tickets if his name appears on
the program. But for those who love Ives, there is an almost
evangelical desire to spread his music to the world. I’m one of
those people who loves Ives, and it is one of my personal
missions to bring his music to as many places as possible. The
piece I chose to talk about today is Three Places in New England,
or the New England Symphony, a piece that is a perfect amalgam of
what makes Ives such a spectacular composer - his radical
innovations, his ahead of his time experiments, his humor, his
humanity, his warmth, and the staggering creativity that marked
all of Ives’ great works. We’ll start with a little biography of
Ives in case you’re not familiar with him, and then we’ll dive
into Three Places in New England.  By the end of the show, I
hope, if you’re not already, that I will have converted you into
an Ives fan for life!