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Browse piano sheets by Charles Ives on Zen Virtual Piano. The Cage is the 64th song in Ives's collection 114 Songs. David Heuser calls it an example of Ives's experimental side, a short song with a blunt philosophical text by Ives that has a split personality. The text grew out of a scene on a bench near a menagerie: a leopard's cage and a little boy who seemed to have watched the leopard for a long time. A small scene at a zoo turned into a brief and blunt song suggests how Ives could take an everyday moment and give it a philosophical edge. Danbury, Connecticut, was where Charles Ives was born on October 20, 1874; his father, George Ives, had served in the Civil War as the Union's youngest bandmaster. Ives liked to recount that his father once walked in to find him, aged five, hammering the Ives Band's drum parts out on the piano with his fists. A child who drummed on a piano and then grew up in a household of band music suggests a musician who learned by doing, and who may have kept that physical, hands-on approach to sound for life. Not long after Yale began, a stroke killed his father suddenly, a loss Ives never recovered from; he spoke of his father constantly and appeared to feel he was writing George Ives's music. Following part of his father's final advice, he set aside a musical career for business; leaving Yale in 1898, he arrived in New York as a clerk earning fifteen dollars a week at the Mutual Life Insurance Company. His success in insurance led in 1907 to the agency Ives & Co., formed with his partner Julian Myrick; its successor, Ives & Myrick, grew into the biggest agency in the nation. A grief-struck son who chose business over music suggests how closely his father's memory and his own writing were tied together for him, and how unusual a path that was for a major composer. In tears, Ives went downstairs around 1927 to tell his wife that he felt unable to compose, saying, "I try and try and nothing comes out right." Three years later he resigned from the insurance agency he had built. Recognition came slowly, yet Henry Cowell, Nicolas Slonimsky and Lou Harrison gave large parts of their lives to promoting him, and performances by Aaron Copland, Harrison and the pianist John Kirkpatrick brought Ives warm reviews and, in 1947, a Pulitzer Prize. Ives's mature scores quote everything from Beethoven to Stephen Foster and American hymn writers, so that the music becomes music about music, a symbol of human life, striving and spirituality. A late reputation built by dedicated advocates hints at a composer whose work needed time and champions before a wider audience could meet it.
Browse piano sheets by Charles Ives on Zen Virtual Piano.
The Cage is the 64th song in Ives's collection 114 Songs. David Heuser calls it an example of Ives's experimental side, a short song with a blunt philosophical text by Ives that has a split personality. The text grew out of a scene on a bench near a menagerie: a leopard's cage and a little boy who seemed to have watched the leopard for a long time. A small scene at a zoo turned into a brief and blunt song suggests how Ives could take an everyday moment and give it a philosophical edge.
Danbury, Connecticut, was where Charles Ives was born on October 20, 1874; his father, George Ives, had served in the Civil War as the Union's youngest bandmaster. Ives liked to recount that his father once walked in to find him, aged five, hammering the Ives Band's drum parts out on the piano with his fists. A child who drummed on a piano and then grew up in a household of band music suggests a musician who learned by doing, and who may have kept that physical, hands-on approach to sound for life.
Not long after Yale began, a stroke killed his father suddenly, a loss Ives never recovered from; he spoke of his father constantly and appeared to feel he was writing George Ives's music. Following part of his father's final advice, he set aside a musical career for business; leaving Yale in 1898, he arrived in New York as a clerk earning fifteen dollars a week at the Mutual Life Insurance Company. His success in insurance led in 1907 to the agency Ives & Co., formed with his partner Julian Myrick; its successor, Ives & Myrick, grew into the biggest agency in the nation. A grief-struck son who chose business over music suggests how closely his father's memory and his own writing were tied together for him, and how unusual a path that was for a major composer.
In tears, Ives went downstairs around 1927 to tell his wife that he felt unable to compose, saying, "I try and try and nothing comes out right." Three years later he resigned from the insurance agency he had built. Recognition came slowly, yet Henry Cowell, Nicolas Slonimsky and Lou Harrison gave large parts of their lives to promoting him, and performances by Aaron Copland, Harrison and the pianist John Kirkpatrick brought Ives warm reviews and, in 1947, a Pulitzer Prize. Ives's mature scores quote everything from Beethoven to Stephen Foster and American hymn writers, so that the music becomes music about music, a symbol of human life, striving and spirituality. A late reputation built by dedicated advocates hints at a composer whose work needed time and champions before a wider audience could meet it.
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Common questions
Charles Ives was an American composer born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1874 who also built a successful insurance agency.
The Cage is the 64th song in Ives's 114 Songs, a short song with a blunt philosophical text written by Ives.
He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, after performances of his music by Copland, Harrison and Kirkpatrick earned him glowing reviews.
He went into insurance, founding Ives & Co. in 1907 with Julian Myrick, which grew into the largest agency in the country.