**This Charles Ives American composer stamp is a part of the Legends of American Music series. Make sure to check out my hub page dedicated to this long-running and important project of the United States Postal Service.
***This post was originally published on April 15, 2021 and was updated on November 15, 2021.
Regular readers of this blog know that I have mixed feelings about the Legends of American Music series. This huge multi-year stamp project by the United States features more than seventy musicians across musical styles. The stamps are in genre sets and this is where the problems begin. Some of the sets, like jazz, are rather large and musically and generationally diverse. Others, namely country & western, are small and limiting. The U.S. rule disallowing living people from appearing on stamps left out important musicians, which really weakened sets like the one for rock & roll. My biggest problems are probably with the stamps featuring classical musicians. There are several sets: opera singers, composers & conductors, film composers. These sets are uneven and strangely, feature a number of non-U.S. born musicians. However, one highlight among the classical music stamps is the one dedicated to Charles Ives.
Charles Ives
Charles Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874. His father, George Ives, was a veteran band leader of the Civil War. George was also the leading musician in the community, conducting bands, choirs and orchestras as well as teaching. George also taught both of his sons, Charles and Joseph, a wide range of American music. The young boys also studied harmony, counterpoint, and composition with their father.
Charles was was a talented young musician and became a church organist by the age of 14. He also was an experimental composer, even in his early music exploring bitonal and polytonal harmonizations. Ives attended Yale university where he studied music and continued writing music.
However, after graduating, Ives enter the insurance business. In 1907, Ives began his own company with his friend Julian Myrick. He worked professionally in the insurance industry for his entire life. Yet, he was a prolific composer until health issues limited his composing in 1926. He died in New York City in 1954.
His Music
Ives was one of the first American composers to explore elements of experimental classical music including an expanded harmonic language and new musical structures. He drew upon ideas that were particularly American, including elements of folk songs and hymns in his compositions. He also gave his pieces names that were evocative such as “The Fourth of July for Orchestra,” “Country Band March,” of “Central Park After Dark.” Ives wrote for a wide variety of ensembles from string quartets to orchestras. Among his works were five symphonies and 114 songs.
Ives did not receive great popular acclaim during his lifetime. However, he won the admiration of many prominent musicians including Gustav Mahler and Leonard Bernstein. After his death, Ives’ music gained greater acclaim and he is now sometimes called the “Father of American Music.” In 1974, two decades after his death, Bernstein and Michael Tilson Thomas conducted a concert in Danbury that re-introduced Ives’ music to the public. Ives is now widely celebrated as a distinctly American modernist composer and his music is regularly performed.
The Stamp
Scott Number US 3164
The Charles Ives stamp was a part of eight stamps feature classical composers and conductors. The stamps were first available on September 12, 1997, though there was a separate ceremony in honor of Ives on his birthday in October of that year. The designs for these stamps were by Burton Silverman and by and large, they are better than other stamps in the Legends series. Many of the stamps in other sets are cartoonish, whereas the classical composers and conductors are more traditional portraits. The Ives stamp is particularly nice, featuring a respectable portrait of Ives outdoors, perhaps in a park.
A Fred Collins Cachet
I also have a beautiful hand-decorated cachet with a first day of issue cancellation. The overall image is drawn in ink, then watercolors are hand-painted to complete the work. On this envelope, is a portrait of Ives looking off to his right. Behind him are architectural elements from small town New England life: a barn, a church, and a covered bridge. In the lower left corner is a sign for Ives’ hometown of Danbury, Connecticut.
Fred Collins began making hand decorated cachets in 1978 and is well known throughout the philatelic community for his specialized pieces. He make a new design for each U.S. stamp issue and limits the run of his designs to a few hundred. You can see more of his work on his website.
Of course, you should check out some of Charles Ives’ music. Below, is his “Thanksgiving and Forefathers’ Day” from his A Symphony: New England Holidays. Enjoy!
