Episode Details

Charles Ives ran one of the most successful insurance agencies in America by day and composed the most radical music in the Western world by night and on weekends. He quoted hymns, marching bands, and ragtime simultaneously, layered multiple keys and tempos on top of each other, and anticipated nearly every major development in twentieth-century music decades before the European avant-garde caught up. He won the Pulitzer Prize for a symphony written forty years before anyone performed it.

This episode traces Ives from his Connecticut bandmaster father through the Yale years, the insurance career that funded his creative independence, and the decades of obscurity before the world realized what he had been doing all along.

• Ives's father's experimental music education and the childhood that trained his polyrhythmic ear
• The decision to keep a day job in insurance so his music would never need to please an audience
• The radical compositions — polytonal, polyrhythmic, quoting multiple American vernacular traditions
• The Pulitzer Prize at seventy-three for a symphony no one had performed for four decades