Charles Ives

Charles Ives was born in 1874 and died in 1954 -which makes him an almost exact contemporary of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Unlike Vaughan Williams, however, there is nothing of the pastoral, idyllic and folksong about Ives' music! Rather, he developed experimental music, with polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters and quarter tones. That lot makes his music a bit of a challenge to traditional ears (and probably explains why a lot of his music was not performed in his own lifetime). It also makes him, in my view, far more a cousin of Percy Grainger than anyone else I can think of: both composers have a habit of, if they start off with a tune at all, veering it off in unexpected directions, with lots of crazy-sounding layering.

Putting it bluntly, mentioning Charles Ives can instil a sense of dread in some people (myself included for many years), but he's worth listening to, if only for the sense of what an unbridled imagination can do in music!

His output was not enormous in any genre, so it's not too difficult to get familiar with quite a lot of it fairly quickly. What might be considered his 'core' or most important and characteristic works is suggested here, along with recommended recordings and (where available) free YouTube versions of each:

A really useful video-biography about Ives can also be found on YouTube.