A version of this article appeared in the lavishly illustrated Heritage of Music: Music in the Twentieth Century, vol. 4, ed. Michael Raeburn and Alan Kendall, with consultant editors Felix Aprahamian and Wilfrid Mellers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), now reprinted by permission. Since that date there have been many studies of Ives and more publications under the auspices of the Charles Ives Society. Copland studies, not mentioned in footnotes below, have included: Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (London, 1999); Gail Levin and Judith Tick, Aaron Copland’s America: A Cultural Perspective (New York, 2000); Aaron Copland and his World, ed. Carol J. Oja and Judith Tick (Princeton, 2005); all of which I reviewed in Gramophone.

Charles Edward Ives has been claimed as both the first distinctively American composer and the first great composer to emerge from the United States.1 The music of Ives is certainly distinctively American, reflecting the elements of the definition provided by Henry and Sidney Cowell in their biography, Charles Ives and His Music (1955): ‘To experiment and to explore has never been revolutionary for an American; he is unaffectedly at home in the unregulated and the untried. In a vast new country experience is direct, intense and various, and so grass-roots creative activity in the United States has been marked by an exuberance and a diversity that are shocking to sensibilities developed in older cultures whose essence is refinement and selectivity. In all the arts Americans quite naturally bring together elements that elsewhere appear as irreconcilable canons of radically opposed thought.’

But Ives was not by any means the first composer to show such American traits. Attitudes later associated with Ives can be found as early as colonial times. William Billings (1746–1800), who lived in Boston and worked as a tanner and singing-teacher, was just as opposed to academicism: ‘I don't think myself confined to any rules for composition laid down by any that went before me. Nature is the best dictator.’ In his part-song ‘Jargon’, published in The Singing Master's Assistant (1778), Billings celebrates ‘hateful discord’ in fourteen measures containing only one consonant chord – an eighteenth-century equivalent of Ives’ take-offs to stretch the ears and the mind.