ATD: Re: Brevity's Raincheck

[pynchonoid]

I don't know the genealogy either.

--- robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:

> Which makes me ask: What about Ruggles? I once asked
> Michael Tilson Thomas. He didn't know.

Unlike Pynchon who keeps writing wonderful novels as
he gets older, Ives wasn't able to compose much after
he got into his 50s, his biographer reports  what
sounds like a pretty thorough breakdown, physical and
mental, and spent time preparing his works for
publication, watching the moment pass for his
difficult Modern music as a sweeter-sounding American
20th century music (Copland, et al) came onto the
scene.  (As a teenager, Ives played organ at the local
church and is reported to have inserted strange,
dissonant harmonies in the hymns that would have the
old ladies squirming in their pews, a bit of
anarchistic humor that recalls some scenes in GR.)

Another Pynchonian affinity:  Ives was a kind of
actuarial pioneer, he made his fortune with one of the
first (maybe the first? I forget) big insurance
agencies in NYC, he was especially praised for his
innovations in marketing, advertising, training sales
people, and he brought to the insurance business a
vision of a world where a working person could make a
small investment in a policy that would at least cover
funeral expenses and avoid further debt.

Ives seems to have followed the musical trend
described in the Beethoven-Rossini debate in GR,
approaching an abstract ideal that, to my ear at
least, echoes what Picasso and Braque were doing as
they created Cubism. Ives' big piano sonata is worth
listening to more than once, if only for the way he
takes apart Beethoven's famous dot-dot-dpt-dash V. for
Victory motif and spins it off in different
directions.

Ives also loved baseball, sharing another Pynchonian
interest (or so I've heard). 



>  -------------- Original message
> ----------------------
> From: pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com>
> > Charles Ives, quintessentially American, Modern, &
> > Transcendental, and a Pynchon soul-mate, imo. 

http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"

http://OnlineJournalist.org

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com