Charles Ives Quotes

• Every great inspiration is but an experiment.

  Charles Ives

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Experiment, Great

• Please don’t try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right… I want it that way.

  Charles Ives

  Topics in Uncategorized

• A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day’s unity.

  Charles Ives

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Experienced, Explained

• Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone’s. The meaning of ‘God’ may have a billion interpretations if there be that many souls in the world.

  Charles Ives

  Topics in God

  Tags in Matter, Interpretations

• But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.

  Charles Ives

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hope, Music

• If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.

  Charles Ives

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Better, Heaven

• In ‘thinking up’ music I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.

  Charles Ives

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music, Mind

• If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?

  Charles Ives

  Topics in Children

  Tags in Nice, Wife

• One thing I am certain of is that, if I have done anything good in music, it was, first, because of my father, and second, because of my wife.

  Charles Ives

  Topics in Father

  Tags in Music, Wife

• The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.

  Charles Ives

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Whole, Existence, Fabric

• It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.

  Charles Ives

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Audience, Necessity

• There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life.

  Charles Ives

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Heart, Thinking, Nothing

• Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.

  Charles Ives

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Perfect, Times

• You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

  Charles Ives

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hope, Reality, Vitality

Charles Ives (14)

Birth:	20th October, 1874
Death:	19th May, 1954
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Composer

About

Charles Edward Ives is one of the first American composers of international renown, though his music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, he came to be regarded as an "American original". Ives combined the American popular and church-music traditions of his youth with European art music, and was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones, foreshadowing many musical innovations of the 20th century.

Related Authors

• Bill Dixon
• Charles Ives
• Thomas M. Sterner
• Arthur Schwartz
• Bill Frisell
• Lydia Lunch
• Malcolm Williamson
• Anton Rubinstein
• Charles Mingus
• Harry Lawrence Freeman

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 5th January

Births

• 1773 - Richard Heber
• 1931 - Alfred Brendel
• 1975 - Kylie Bax
• 1947 - Mike DeWine
• 1900 - Yves Tanguy

Deaths

• 1963 - Rogers Hornsby
• 2010 - Kenneth Noland
• 1998 - Sonny Bono
• 1867 - Alexander Smith
• 1942 - Tina Modotti