Charles Ives for kids: his life, his music, and what to play first

Charles Ives was an American composer who lived from 1874 to 1954. He ran an insurance company by day and wrote music on nights and weekends. His music mixes hymns, marches, and popular songs, and it often plays two or three of them at once. Almost nobody heard it for decades. The best first piece for a child is “The Unanswered Question,” six minutes of quiet mystery.

Quick facts

• Born: 1874, in Danbury, Connecticut
• Died: 1954, in New York City
• Era: Modern
• Played: organ and piano
• Known for: “The Unanswered Question,” Three Places in New England, the “Concord” Sonata, and four symphonies

The life in short

Ives’s father, George, was the bandmaster in the town of Danbury. He had led an army band in the Civil War when he was a teenager. George loved to experiment with sound.

He had his children sing a song in one key while he played the piano in another. He built instruments to play the notes between the notes. Once, he sent two bands marching toward each other from opposite ends of town, each playing a different tune, so he could hear what happened when they met.

Charles soaked all of this up. At 14, he became a paid church organist. He was good at sports too, and he was captain of his school baseball team.

He studied music at Yale University. His teacher wanted proper, European-style pieces. Ives wrote them, and he kept his wilder ideas to himself.

After college, he made a choice. He believed that a composer who had to sell music to feed a family would end up writing what people already liked. He went into the insurance business. His company became one of the most successful in the country.

For 20 years, he wrote music after work and on weekends. He did not look for performances. Stacks of scores piled up in his barn.

His health failed in 1918, and he wrote little after the 1920s. Bit by bit, younger musicians found his music and began to play it.

In 1947, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony. He had written it about 40 years earlier. He gave the prize money away.

What the music sounds like

Ives wrote down the sounds of the New England towns of his boyhood: a church choir a little out of tune, a band passing in a parade, a fiddler at a barn dance, fireworks on the Fourth of July.

He did not tidy them up. If two bands played different tunes at once in real life, he wrote two tunes at once. The result can sound like a jumble. Listen for the tunes inside it, and it turns into a picture.

He also wrote calm, simple, beautiful music, and he liked to set the two side by side.

Pieces to play first

“The Unanswered Question.” Strings hold soft, slow chords from start to finish. A trumpet asks the same question seven times. A group of flutes tries to answer and grows more and more upset. The last question gets no answer at all.

“Putnam’s Camp,” from Three Places in New England. A child at a Fourth of July picnic hears two bands at once. It is loud, funny, and full of tunes.

Variations on “America.” He wrote it for organ at 17. The tune is the one Americans sing as “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Each variation dresses it up in a new and sillier costume.

Symphony No. 2, last movement. A race of American tunes, ending on one huge wrong chord that he added as a joke.

Things to do together

Count the questions. Play “The Unanswered Question.” Count the trumpet’s questions on your fingers. Ask what your child thinks the question is.

Two tunes at once. One person sings “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Another sings “Twinkle, Twinkle” at the same time. That is the sound George Ives liked.

Name that tune. In “Putnam’s Camp,” listen for “Yankee Doodle.” Raise a hand when it goes by.

Collect sounds. Sit on the front step for five minutes. List every sound: a dog, a truck, a bird, a radio. Ives made music out of lists like this.

A composer nobody heard

Ives’s Second Symphony waited about 50 years for its first performance. He did not go to the concert. He listened to the broadcast on a radio.

Later American composers looked to him as a pioneer. Read about one of them in Copland for kids, and about the conductor who led that first performance in Bernstein for kids.

Print and play

Fill in a composer study notebook page for Charles Ives. Read about more composers in American composers for kids. For the era he lived in, read modern classical music for kids.

For more composers by era, see classical composers for kids.