<<  -- 5 --  Jennifer Paull    IVES AND THE ESTABLISHMENT

Ives had worshipped his father, a bandleader who was always trying to 'stretch' his ears with unusual sounds. George Ives would make Charles play the piano with with the right and left hands in different keys. Ives had started to learn the piano, cornet, and violin at the age of five, and later, to the despair of the neighbours, the drums.

At fourteen, he was the youngest church organist in Connecticut. On Saturdays he played ragtime piano in bars. Diversity was his middle name !

Sometimes his tome-consuming interest in music would leave him wondering why he was inside while other youngsters were playing outside. So, he would join them for sports -- running and tennis, football and baseball, and excelled at these too.

In fact, Ives excelled in everything he touched. He was not only diverse in his talents, but he must have had a phenomenal IQ as well as an eidetic memory !

Virgil Thomson called him 'a man of noble thoughts, a brave and original genius'. Again, that could apply to Antonio Gaudí !

Not a man to do anything by halves, Ives wrote in an afterword to his no-fewer-than 114 songs :

'An interest in any art-activity, from poetry to baseball, is better, broadly speaking, if held as a part of life,. than if it sets itself up as a whole -- a condition verging towards...a kind of atrophy of the other important values, and hence reacting unfavourably upon itself.'

He thus delighted in his own capacity to be diverse, to be different, and to know more about life than many who specialise in one field to the detriment of all others. To cultivate one garden and ignore the rest is to have an imbalanced humus for awareness to grow.

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