The music of Charles Ives—one of the most important composers in the history of the United States—fuses his native country’s popular and urban music with Western classical art’s formal architecture. The result is music that combines mastery and extroverted simplicity in a way that recalls Ives’s father’s wise advice when they once heard a farmer singing out of tune: “Don’t pay much attention to the sounds. If you do, you may miss the music”. Ives’s first mature work, the String Quartet No. 1, took shape over the course of several years and multiple revisions, and foreshadows the bold and expressive style that would become the composer’s signature.
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