Charles Ives Quotes

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.

Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ear lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently - possibly almost invariably - analytical and impersonal test will show that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.

I don't write music for sissy ears.

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.

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

One thing I am certain of is that, if I have done anything good in music, it was, first, because of my father, and second, because of my wife.

If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.

In 'thinking up' music I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.

Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.

There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life.

The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

Every great inspiration is but an experiment - though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.

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

A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens ... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly ... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?

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

The future of music may not lie entirely in music itself, but rather in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits the aspirations and ideals of the people, in the way it makes itself a part with the finer things that humanity does and dreams of.

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

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