Charles Ives was born on October 20th, 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut. His father, George Ives, was the Union’s youngest bandleader in the Civil War. After the war, George came home to Danbury to pursue a career as a musician and bandleader. Due to all of his musical efforts, George Ives was known as the leading musician in the region, and Danbury was recognized as a musical mainstay in Connecticut (and possibly in the entire New England region).
Charles Ives first showed interest in piano when at a young age he started percussively playing on it with his fists. He started learning the piano (and other instruments) from his father, but was eventually sent on to better teachers. His father, George, had hopes for Charles to be a great concert pianist, but Charles was drawn more to the organ. He began holding payed organ positions in churches by the age of fourteen. All
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While at Yale, he studied with a German-trained American composer named Horatio Parker. Parker, who felt that the conventional composition practices of European composers reigned supreme, trained Ives in the typical theoretical rules of the time. It was at the end of his college years that Ives, as a writing assignment, composed his first symphony.
During his first year at Yale, Charles father, George, died after suffering a stroke. This was devastating to Charles; his relationship with his father was one of deep, profound admiration and love.
In 1905, Ives spent a week with is former college roommate, David Twichell, which led to the development of a relationship with David’s sister, Harmony Twichell, whom Ives had actually met a decade prior while in college. Two years later in 1907, Ives proposes to Harmony and the two joined in marriage in June of the following year. Charles and Harmony had a deeply spiritual relationship, employing the ideology that their love for oneanother was representative of God’s love for