One of my early discoveries was the musical work of Charles Ives (1874–1954), an American modernist composer of classical music. Oliver (Howie) Kline was a young designer who was hired by our office. He came from a family of opera and music performers, took me to some of the premiere performances of Ives’s work at the Boston Symphony in 1962, only eight years after Ives’s death.

Ives’s work epitomized the newly discovered concept of “simultaneity” in music, a subject that I continue to explore in my design work. According to music historians the concept of “simultaneity,” the juxtaposition of more than one complete musical texture “occurring at the same time” rather than in succession, appeared first in his music. (Some of his work is considered to be earlier than that of some of the European experimental composers, including Schoenberg.)

He created a pitch simultaneity, which is more than one pitch or a cohesive pitch assortment that occur at the same time, or “simultaneously,” introducing the idea that not all simultaneity successions need to be harmonic progressions.

In America, his significant contributions were mostly ignored during his life, which surprised me, since Koussevitzky premiered “Concerto for Orchestra,” one of the major works of Béla Bartók in 1944 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Hindemith had been teaching at Yale since 1940. Still, many of his works went unperformed for many years, partly because of the difficulties with performing the rhythmic complexities in his major works, making them daunting orchestral challenges even decades later and now, and the proverbial American cultural conservatism. 

He counts among the first composers to engage in systematic programming of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, tone clusters, and quarter tones, dissonances (which sometimes come from the juxtapositions of untrained voices), straining and sharpening the pitch, and others missing and flattening the pitch, creating a cluster of tones instead of a single tone, and experimenting with polytonality as with several simultaneous conversations in a room or two bands in a parade, separated by space/distance, each playing a different tune in a different key, further distorted by the wind that carries portions of the sound to clarity while neglecting others.

Ives is a tone designer of very complex narratives…my kind of guy.