One thing's for certain; when it came to questions, American composer Charles Ives preferred to leave them unanswered or at least open-ended. Ives' restlessly exploratory mind sought out the farthest reaches of music with the resources he had at hand, but upon reaching the edges of the universe, he was strangely incurious about the resolution; it wasn't about the answer so much as it was about the journey. Nevertheless, Ives' plunge into the unknown has provided a good deal of inspiration to contemporary composers, more so ...
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One thing's for certain; when it came to questions, American composer Charles Ives preferred to leave them unanswered or at least open-ended. Ives' restlessly exploratory mind sought out the farthest reaches of music with the resources he had at hand, but upon reaching the edges of the universe, he was strangely incurious about the resolution; it wasn't about the answer so much as it was about the journey. Nevertheless, Ives' plunge into the unknown has provided a good deal of inspiration to contemporary composers, more so in the twenty first century than in the twentieth. Pianist Heather O'Donnell has curated a program of "answers" to various gauntlets tossed down by Ives in mode records' Responses to Ives. Ives speaks for himself, but the answers are provided by composers Walter Zimmermann, Michael Finnissy, the late James Tenney, Sidney Corbett, and O'Donnell's husband, composer Oliver Schneller. O'Donnell's program was devised as an observance of the 50th anniversary of Ives' death in 2004, though...
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