The Greatest Man (1921)

Charlie Rutlage (1920-21)

The Cage (1906)

Tom Sails Away (1917)

Those Evening Bells (1907)

1, 2, 3 (1919)

Charles Ives had no inhibitions about style. If he felt that a popular style - parlour song, gospel song, cowboy song, whatever - was appropriate to the text he was setting he didn’t hesitate to use it, even though he might well apply harmonic or rhythmic complexities entirely alien to it. He wasn’t too fussy about his literary sources either. Anne Timoney Collins’s The Greatest Man he found in the New York Evening Sun in 1921 and, taking the parlour song as his model, created a masterpiece of characterisation. The artless repetition of the same dotted rhythms, the metrical jolts where the rhythms don’t fit, the lack of punctuation, the ungrammatical harmonies (apart from the proud C major on “Dad’s some hunter too”) amount to a brilliantly achieved musical equivalent to a child’s excited conversation - but without betraying its innocence.

Charlie Rutlage, on the other hand, is a merciless send-up. A fairly average cowboy song at the beginning and the end, in the middle it runs into a crazy stampede of dramatically declaimed narrative and heavily punched chord clusters at the moment of disaster. The Cage, inspired by a visit to the zoo in 1906, is one of Ives’s more serious songs. The composer’s own free-verse text is matched by a setting without bar lines, its aimless rhythms and its piano chords imprisoned in dissonant accretions of fourths reflecting the plight of the leopard in the cage. Ives wrote the words too for Tom Sails Away, one of several wartime songs by a pacifist composer who, it is said, “could get fightin’ mad about his pacifism.” In this case the mood is one of gentle recollection with a closing echo of Over There to place the song in its First World War context. Those Evening Bells is another poetic inspiration, its harmonic vagaries lifting the atmosphere out of the ordinary at the end.

As for 1, 2, 3, all sixteen words of which are by Ives himself, it “was written,” according to the composer, “as a joke, and sound like one!”