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, and I’m finally fulfilling a pledge to myself to do
a full show devoted to a single work of arguably the greatest and
most under appreciated American composer of all time, Charles
Ives. 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, and by the end, I
hope , if you’re not already, that I will have converted you into
an Ives fan for life! Join us!