Music Made From Memories Charles Ives' Holiday Symphony

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“It’s all right to do that, Charles,’ Ives remembered his father saying, ‘if you know what you’re doing.”

 

Unlike George, most people were simply puzzled by Charles’s experiments. That of his father-in-law’s doctor was typical:

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Charles Ives

“A doctor in the sanatarium (where my father-in-law was convalescing) looked at it strangely, and assumed I was the patient.&rdquot;

As was that of his old friend, Edgar Stowell:

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Charles Ives

Edgar Stowell and family drove over to Hartsdale from where they were living then just north of White Plains. Stowell was then a teacher in the Mannes Music School Settlement. It was in the summer of either 1912 or 1913. I had The Fourth of July score on the desk. He looked at it and said, That’s the best joke I’ve seen for a long time. Do you really think anybody would be fool enough to try to play a thing like that?


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