Later in life, the quality of his music was publicly recognized through the efforts of contemporaries like Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, and he came to be regarded as an "American original".

[10] The Iveses, descended from founding colonists of Connecticut, were one of Danbury's leading families, and they were prominent in business and civic improvement.

His father taught him and his brother (Joseph) Moss Ives (February 5, 1876 – April 7, 1939[13]) music,[12] teaching harmony and counterpoint and guided his first compositions; George took an open-minded approach to theory, encouraging him to experiment in bitonal and polytonal harmonizations.

It is considered challenging even by modern concert organists, but he famously spoke of it as being "as much fun as playing baseball", a commentary on his own organ technique at that age.

Here he composed in a choral style similar to his mentor, writing church music and even an 1896 campaign song for William McKinley.

At Yale, Ives was a prominent figure; he was a member of HeBoule, Delta Kappa Epsilon (Phi chapter) and Wolf's Head Society, and sat as chairman of the Ivy Committee.

[18] His works Calcium Light Night and Yale-Princeton Football Game show the influence of college and sports on Ives's composition.

[21] During his career as an insurance executive and actuary, Ives devised creative ways to structure life-insurance packages for people of means, which laid the foundation of the modern practice of estate planning.

As a result of this he achieved considerable fame in the insurance industry of his time, with many of his business peers surprised to learn that he was also a composer.

In his spare time, he composed music and, until his marriage, worked as an organist in Danbury and New Haven as well as Bloomfield, New Jersey, and New York City.

While Ives had stopped composing, and was increasingly plagued by health problems, he continued to revise and refine his earlier work, as well as oversee premieres of his music.

His widow, who died in 1969 at age 92, bequeathed the royalties from his music to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the Charles Ives Prize.

[27] Ives's career and dedication to music began when he started playing drums in his father's band at a young age.

The piece also amply demonstrates Ives's fondness for musical quotation: the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony are quoted in each movement.

The difficulties in performing the rhythmic complexities in his major orchestral works made them daunting challenges even decades after they were composed.

Ives began to acquire some public recognition during the 1930s, with performances of a chamber orchestra version of his Three Places in New England, both in the US and on tour in Europe by conductor Nicolas Slonimsky.

One of the more unusual recordings, made in New York City in 1943, features Ives playing the piano and singing the words to his popular World War I song "They Are There!

In Canada in the 1950s, the expatriate English pianist Lloyd Powell played a series of concerts including all of Ives's piano works, at the University of British Columbia.

He received praise from Arnold Schoenberg, who regarded him as a monument to artistic integrity, and from the New York School of William Schuman.

The source of this account was Ives; since Mahler died, there was no way to verify whether he had seen the score of the symphony or decided to perform it in the 1911–12 season.

Another pioneering Ives recording, undertaken during the 1950s, was the first complete set of the four violin sonatas, performed by Minneapolis Symphony concertmaster Rafael Druian and John Simms.

In the early 21st century, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is an enthusiastic exponent of Ives's symphonies, as is composer and biographer Jan Swafford.

American singer and composer Frank Zappa included Charles Ives in a list of influences that he presented in the liner notes of his debut album Freak Out!

[38][39] The Unanswered Ives is an hour-long film documentary directed by Anne-Kathrin Peitz and produced by Accentus Music (Leipzig, Germany).

This was released in 2018 and shown on Swedish and German television stations; it features interviews with Jan Swafford, John Adams, James Sinclair and Jack Cooper.

Polytonality; atonality; tone clusters; perspectivistic effects; chance; statistical composition; permutation; add-a-part, practical-joke, and improvisatory music: these were Ives’s discoveries a half-century ago as he quietly set about devouring the contemporary cake before the rest of us even found a seat at the same table.

I think this experience of non-knowledge is more useful and more important to us than the Renaissance notion of knowing A B C D E F..."[47] Cage also praised Ives's "understanding... of inactivity and of silence..."[47] and recalled having read an essay in which: [Ives] sees someone sitting on a porch in a rocking chair smoking a pipe looking out over the landscape which goes into the distance and imagines that as that person who is anyone is sitting there doing nothing that he is hearing his own symphony.

I doubt whether we can find a higher goal namely that art and our involvement in it will somehow introduce us to the very life that we are living and that we will be able without scores without performers and so forth simply to sit still to listen to the sounds which surround us and hear them as music.

[48])Conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic won a Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance for Ives's Complete Symphonies (Deutsche Grammophon, recorded in 2020).

[51][52] Note: Because Ives often made several different versions of the same piece, and because his work was generally ignored during his life, it is often difficult to put exact dates on his compositions.