T HE late composer Henry Cowell, in Charles Ives and His Music, the first and best book on Ives, reveals some interesting particulars about this American composer who has only recently begun to receive any real attention.? Born in Danbury, Connecticut, Ives attended Hopkins Grammar School and Yale University where he showed a great interest in baseball as well as in music. His father, Danbury's leading musician and bandleader, deeply influenced his life. He taught him not only the traditional lessons of instrumentation and theory but, through his inveterate experiments and searches for new sounds, he also democratized the boy's ear. He made it clear that there were really no good or bad sounds except as tradition had made them so. And thus Ives had some reconciling to do when he studied composition at Yale with the traditionally-minded Horatio Parker who still felt that American composers had a long way to go before the sound of their music could equal that of their European models. After baseball, his job as organist at St. Thomas Church in New Haven, his musical studies, and graduation from Yale in 1898, Ives's life took a strange turn. He went to work as a five-dollara-week clerk for the American Mutual Insurance Company until 19o6 when, in partnership with Julian Myrick, he established his own insurance agency.2 At the time of his retirement in 1930, Ives was wealthy and the firm of Ives and Myrick was the largest agency of its kind in the country. During the years before World War I, while he occupied his New York office at 38 Nassau Street and was