Why is Ives music so dissonant?
Much of it isn’t dissonant! Here’s what Wilfrid Mellers has to say about this topic in his wonderful book Music in a New Found Land (reprinted 1987): The first quality [of Ives’ music as a whole] is its acceptance of life-as-it-is, in all its apparent chaos and contradiction; and it is this that encouraged him to employ any and every technique that seemed empirically appropriate, whether drawn from conventional European music, from folk improvisation, from chapel or bar-parlour, or from the sounds of the natural world. . . . [T]he second quality of Ives’ music . . . is that the attempt to discover unity within chaos is in essence a transcendental act (44-45). Another great quote from Mellers: “Ives . . . would have said that all his music . . . was only a sketch. . . . [A]ll he would have claimed is that some sketches were less complete than others” (51).
