Charles Ives Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.

Charles Ives
But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.

Charles Ives
An apparent confusion, if lived with long enough, may become orderly... A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day's unity

Charles Ives
Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone's. The meaning of 'God' may have a billion interpretations if there be that many souls in the world

Charles Ives
Music is one of the ways that God has of beating in on man.

Charles Ives
Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair.

Charles Ives
Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?

Charles Ives
It will probably be centuries, at least generations, before man will discover all or even most of the value in a quarter-tone extension. And when he does, nature has plenty of other things up her sleeve.

Charles Ives
If he [a composer] has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?

Charles Ives
All melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads, when once the penetrating keynote of nature and spirit is sounded-the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat, which make the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood and the sap of the trees.

Charles Ives
Music may be yet unborn. Perhaps no music has ever been written or heard. Perhaps the birth of art will take place at the moment in which the last man who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone forever.

Charles Ives
Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.

Charles Ives
Please don't try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have — I want it that way.

Charles Ives
The word "beauty" is as easy to use as the word "degenerate." Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you.

Charles Ives
Everyone should have the opportunity of not being over-influenced.

Charles Ives
For the man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing considerd with his devotion to his art.

Charles Ives