“There is a great Man living in this Country—a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one’s self-esteem and to learn [sic]. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives.”

These words were written by Arnold Schoenberg, the famous inventor of 12-tone composition, that were found among his papers by his widow following his death in 1951. 

Schoenberg’s is just one of a plethora of praise that have been laid upon Ives, arguably America’s finest and most influential composer, who at the same time is practically unknown to audiences of both his time and ever since. This unfortunate state of affairs will be remedied, at least for the next week, through a series of talks, recitals, concerts and other performances at four venues across Buffalo Niagara. This festival of Charles Ives, a collaboration of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Music Department and Slee Hall Concert Office at the University at Buffalo, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, and the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library. For a downloadable brochure listing all the following events, go to www.dailypublic.com.

The main event is the pair of M&T Classic Series, multi-media concerts this Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 2:30pm at Kleinhans Music Hall. (Call for tickets: 885-5000.) But things actually get underway today at 3pm when baritone and Ives specialist William Sharp presents a vocal master class in Baird Recital Hall at UB’s North Campus that is free and open to the public.

Mr. Sharp gives a vocal recital, also free, on Thursday, April 9 at 8 pm in Kleinhans’ Mary Seton Room. And he will be soloist and reader with the BPO, musician, writer and historian Joseph Horowitz and video artist Peter Bogdanoff, in Horowitz’s audio-visual-live-music and spoken-word performance of “Charles Ives’ America.” Before that, Mr. Horowitz will give a talk on “Mark Twain and Charles Ives” at the Library’s Central Branch at noon on Thursday, April 9. Free admission.

This weekend is full of other events that explore the influential vitality and artistic wellspring that is Ives’ music. On Friday, April 10 at 7:30pm, pianist Eric Huebner performs Ives’s groundbreaking Concord Sonata, with William Sharp reading texts that relate to the personages who inspired each movement, and a lecture by Nancy Weekly. Saturday, April 11 at 2pm, internationally touring Buffalo-based dance company LehrerDance perform a program that “takes its inspiration from the Charles Ives story:…listen[ing] to marching bands playing simultaneously in his town square and the wondrous cluster of sounds” he experienced. At 7:30pm that same day, Emil Schult and BuffFuxus perform an Ives tribute concert on electronic instruments. And on Sunday, April 12 at 7 pm, the Harmonia Chamber Singers perform a tribute to the spirit of Charles Ives. The foregoing four events all take place at the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College; museum admissions may apply.

Last but hardly least, the Slee Sinfonietta under the direction of Brad Lurman and the participation of mezzo-soprano Julie Bentley perform Ives’s acknowledged masterpiece, Three Places in New England, along with his Set of Pieces for Theater or Small Orchestra. The concert also presents works by a few of the composers who, influenced by Ives, led the Avant-garde in American classical music: Conlon Nancarrow, Lou Harrison and Carl Ruggles. This concert takes place Tuesday, Apr. 14 at 7:30pm at Slee Hall on the UB North Campus. General admission is $15, UB faculty/staff/alumni is $10. 

Whew! Now, you’re probably asking, why should I care to attend these events? If you are a true music lover, you should (or will) feel deprived of not having heard, live, and possibly for the first time in your life, such masterworks as Symphony No. 2 (the first truly great symphony by an American), the Concord Sonata for piano, and Three Places in New England. In addition you’ll hear live the boisterous Variations on “America” and the ethereal Unanswered Question, as well as an all-too-brief sampling of some of Ives’ over 114 songs. Festivals of Ives’s music such as this are as rare as hen’s teeth. To miss any part of it is to not know the sound of true, unbounded genius that grew out of the very soil you stand on.

We know a lot about Ives the man. Born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, his first teacher was his father George, a very capable band leader who, recognizing early on that his son was something of a musical hellion, told the boy: “You have to learn the rules before you can break them.” He attended Yale, studying music under the esteemed Horatio Parker of whom he had a great respect and admiration but who was governed too much “by the German rule.” “Parker was a good composer and widely known, and Father was not a composer and little known,” Ives said, “but from every other standpoint I should say that Father was by far the greater man.”

After graduation Ives moved to New York City, where he became very successful in insurance (he laid the foundation of the modern practice of estate planning). His substantial income allowed him to continue to work at his true calling: music. Until the end of the 1920s, he wrote four symphonies, two string quartets, over a hundred songs, and a myriad of other works, few of which were ever performed in his lifetime and none published except by Ives himself, who paid for the printing of his 114 Songs and gave them away to anyone who would sing them.

Ives’s earliest musical influences were the band music his father conducted, hymns heard at prayer meetings, and tunes from vaudeville and the music hall. These are the stuff that much of his work (for example the Second Symphony to be performed this weekend) is made from. Known in business as a retiring, kindly man and a supportive employer, socially he was reclusive during his New York years: He never attended concerts or the opera; he didn’t own either a phonograph or a radio. 

Worsening health may have played a role. In 1951, Leonard Bernstein conducted the premiere of his Second Symphony in a Carnegie Hall concert that was broadcast. Ives, by this time retired to Connecticut, didn’t even bother to attend. Instead he went to neighbor’s home and listened on the radio. When it was finished, Ives rose, spat in the fireplace, and left without saying a word.

From this, we may gather that the only music that was important to Ives was the music he heard in his head, and that this music is the music he wrote assiduously (the Second Symphony took 9 years). His exploration of novel and experimental compositional techniques was far ahead of his time. He believed strongly in music’s ability to uplift and inspire, while being impatient with listeners who balked at his exploration of form. “Listen like a man!” he would bellow.

The BPO chose to call this festival “Charles Ives: An American Maverick.” In the 2008 presidential campaign we heard “maverick” used a lot as a self-description of a politician who say he doesn’t always follow the dictates of his party. To be a maverick was to not do what you were expected to do all the time: you were a maverick by comparison. This sense of the word totally misses the point with Ives. A “maverick” is an unbranded calf; it does not really belong to the herd amongst which it stands. It is an unknown—unlabeled, a cipher, independent; all potential with no expectations. Such was Charles Ives, the scion of his New England Transcendentalist precursors like Emerson and Thoreau, who put great value on self-reliance and independent thinking. In this sense, Ives was a true maverick: without specifically wearing its brand, he absorbed its spirit into every cell of his being. And that makes for a powerful musical experience you must not miss.