Volume 14, Number 10 · May 21, 1970
The Ives Case
By Virgil Thomson
Charles Ives started life in 1874 at Danbury, Connecticut, an upland rural county seat manufacturing felt hats. He had for a father a bandmaster, a civil war veteran who trained his son's ear and hand and who exposed him at the same time to all the musical pop art of his day—dance tunes, sentimental songs, darnfool ditties, revival hymns, and patriotic marches. Undergraduate years at Yale, with the expert instruction of Horatio Parker, turned him into a church organist and a well-based general musician. Throughout this time his student works and other youthful pieces passed for wild, and no doubt would today (vide the horseplay of his organ—Variations on 'America,' composed at eighteen).
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