Charles Ives's Holidays Symphony

I have wanted to hear this symphony performed for more than three years now. Perhaps more than any other piece of music, it has had the most transformative effect on my life. It was the first piece of classical music that I truly loved. For about a month I was entirely obsessed with it. I did not yet understand Purcell or Shostakovich, Josquin or Rodrigo, Bach or Haydn -- they were all fathomless streams of notes to me -- but something in Ives's music gripped me. And none of his work gripped me more than the Holidays Symphony.

It is easy to deceive oneself into thinking one knows why an important event in one's past occurred. Nevertheless, looking back I think I became fascinated with Ives because he was at once a traditionalist with a love of the most modest manifestations of civilisation, yet also someone who saw the grander purpose in these things, how they too lead to something transcendent. I approached Ives less as music and more as a Chestertonian argument in favour of re-enchanting the ordinary. It was at this time that my worldview shifted from the dreary utilitarianism and sensualism that I had acquired by osmosis, to one formed in reaction to this and in pursuit of truth, beauty and goodness. I was looking for meaning, and in Ives I began to find it.

Music has changed me more than anything else. In music I found something about the world that truly filled me with wonder and joy. I never before knew such music existed; for I never knew there existed something more than the numbing superficiality and vulgarity of modern popular music. In our anaesthetised society we have forgotten the power music can have over us. One thing I appreciate about Islam is that it recognises the danger of music. Music is the reason for squalor of urban nightlife (which could not exist without its barbarous music; silence would reveal the stupidity and evil of it), it can be the sound and rhythm that motivates the soldier, it can be a means of avoiding introspection and manipulating people's decisions (e.g. shopping and advertisement). But it can also be the sounds that bind a community and a nation, the consolation in times of grief, the complexity that reveals our nature more than any novel, genetic study or, God forbid, psychology paper. Ives understood this social function of music, which too many composers and musicians seem to forget.

The fourth movement of the Holidays Symphony, 'Thanksgiving and Forefathers' Day', is one of the most inspired and beautiful symphonic fourth movements. It far exceeds the tedium of Beethoven 9, and is far more rewarding than the buoyant life-affirming endings in most of the great symphonies (enjoy them though I do). 'Thanksgiving and Forefathers' Day' is first menacing, then indulgently simple, then modestly grand. When the chorus enters at the end does not feel tacked on like Beethoven 9 -- nor did Ives have the impertinence, unlike Beethoven, to make you suffer through 20 minutes of it, ruining an otherwise decent symphony. What Ives includes is, as I said, the most modest and yet the most grand of things: a hymn. The movement starts out with dense symphonic brooding, gives way to the most beautiful of folk songs, and ends spectacularly and yet humbly with the hymn. When you hear it you realise how much you love life. But not in the way that Beethoven 5 does -- that joyous rollick. Rather, you realise how much you love the ordinariness of life, the texture of life itself, not merely the exciting moments in an otherwise flat existence. I used to view life the latter way. I think Ives helped me see it more as the former.