As we have seen, Paris and Vienna, centers of intense activity in all the arts, were also the first centers of modernist music. Echoes of modernism, some loud, some soft, were heard elsewhere in Europe: in Italy, where there was a short-lived movement called Futurism, and in Germany, Russia, Hungary, and England.

America, meanwhile, had no rich tradition of classical music, and what we did have was resolutely conservative. So it is amazing that a major modernist composer should have emerged in the United States as early as 1900. Emerged is not quite the word, for what also amazes is that Charles Ives worked in isolation, composing in his spare time. His music was little performed until the 1950s.

Many of Ives’s compositions have American subjects, such as Central Park in the Dark and Some Southpaw Pitching. His Holidays Symphony includes movements titled “The Fourth of July,” “Thanksgiving,” and so on. These pieces regularly employ American music from outside the classical tradition: Folk songs, popular songs by Stephen Foster, gospel hymns, and ragtime are all quoted, sometimes in great profusion. Ives especially favored the hymns he remembered from his youth.

Ives was our first important nationalist composer. But he was also more than that: a true American original, a man with amazingly radical ideas about music, and a bold experimenter with musical materials. Ives anticipated many of the most talked-about musical innovations of the early part of the twentieth century — and of the later part, too.

Writing highly dissonant music was the least of it. He also wrote music for pianos tuned to quarter tones (rather than conventional half steps) and several works in which certain elements can be played, or not played, or played differently, depending on the performer’s choice. For the whole length of his Psalm 90, for chorus, organ, and bells, low C sounds continuously in the organ pedals — for nearly eleven minutes. In one of his major works, the Concord Sonata of 1915, the pianist has to use his elbow and a special wooden block that holds sixteen notes down at a time.

To get an idea of the extraordinary range of Ives’s work, we examine two works — one of them little known, the other very famous.