Charles Ives

 Charles Ives was born 150 years ago today  in nearby Danbury, Connecticut.  Ives was an American modernist composer.  He was also a very successful and wealthy insurance executive.  His wife and he bought a plot in West Redding, Connecticut, and built this fine "cabin."

"Three Places in New England" is Ives' best known work.  The work is in three movements.  I have taken photographs for each of the three movements.

The first movement is inspired by Augustus St. Gaudens' statue on the Boston Common, Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment.  Shaw was a white officer from Boston in the Civil War, who led  Black volunteers on a failed assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina.  Shaw and many of his men died.

I visited Boston in August and went looking for this statue, which is across Beacon Street from the Massachusetts State House.

The second movement, Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut, is inspired by American Revolutionary War hero General Israel Putnam's encampment in the harsh winter of 1778-79 .  Today the site is  a Connecticut state park.  In 2023 I photographed this statue of Putnam by Anna Hyatt Huntington.

Ives enjoyed hiking with his new wife when they honeymooned in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.  That pleasure was in Ives' mind when he composed the third movement, The Housatonic at Stockbridge.  I took this photograph in August when I was in the Berkshires to hear Yo Yo Ma at Tanglewood.