Charles Ives
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"Charles Edward Ives" was an American musical modernism/modernist composer. He 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".See: . Burkholter (p. xi) contests the widespread exaggeration of this to the position that Ives owed nothing to Europe. Ives combined the American popular and Hymn/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 music/aleatoric elements, and quarter tones,Burkholder, p.4 foreshadowing many musical innovations of the 20th century.

Sources of Ives' tonal imagery are hymn tunes and traditional songs, the town band at holiday parade, the fiddlers at Saturday night dances, patriotic songs, sentimental parlor ballads, and the melodies of Stephen Foster.

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

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.

The word 'beauty' is as easy to use as the word 'degenerate.' Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you.

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.

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.

In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones-when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now-perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized.

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.

You can fill this table up with people who are racist, homophobic, Satanist worshippers, sexist and we can be arguing but if you put on a song, I guarantee that people will stop and listen and that's what I love about music, it can bring people together.

Memories: (A) Very Pleasant; (B) Rather Sad.