Charles Ives

The most ambitious and grandest of his projects would of course never see completion. For over forty years, Ives continued to supplement the material for his Universe Symphony, adding both notes and details. At some point, the scenario he envisaged got somewhat out of hand, Henry Cowell reported. “Several orchestras and large parties of singers, male and female, were to be placed in valleys, on mountain slopes and on summits,” and “6 to 10 different orchestras on several mountain tops, each moving according to their own time schedule, meeting each other only at the coincidence of their temporal cycles.” It was also due to the extreme manpower requirements that none of this ever came to pass. And while his own sketches show that he had envisaged the participation of about 200 musicians and 500 singers, Ives never began to compose the choral movements. It took Larry Austin almost 20 years to complete the existing material in a way that “respected as much as possible [Ives’] intentions’’. As the symphony progresses, an “earth chord” orchestra is joined by a “percussion” and a “rock formation” orchestra and, finally, by the four “Heavens” orchestras, which all together bring the piece to an end.