Midday Music in Lincoln: In four concerts, ALL THE WRONG NOTES: Charles Ives at 150 celebrates the 150th anniversary of composer, keyboardist, actuary, and businessman Charles Ives. Largely rejected in his youth, this native son of green New England famously gained renown only later in life and is today remembered as an iconoclast of American music. Ives’ musical agenda might best be summed up by the Connecticut minister who programmed Ives over the protests of his congregation: “God gets awfully tired of hearing the same thing over and over again.” Ives was a relentless visionary yet also a traditionalist, worshiping Beethoven and turning up his nose at Ravel and Schoenberg, whose music he claimed he never heard. Described variously as “gibberish,” “impossible,” like “awfully indigestible food,” Ives’ works draw directly from European techniques and suffuses them with the spirit and sounds of early 20th-century America, quoting popular tunes, band music, revival hymns, barn dances, and ragtime, invoking memories of holidays and parades alongside references to Transcendentalist philosophy. 

This third concert on Oct. 31 features Charles Ives’ Three Quarter-Tone Pieces, S. 128, performed by two players on two pianos, one de-tuned by a quarter-tone, followed by two solo works that will each be played by one pianist on two quarter-tone pianos simultaneously: Little Pieces for Quarter-Tone Piano by Tui St. George Tucker (Thomas Feng) and Hommage to Josef Mattias Hauer, from Three Hommages by George Friedrich Haas (Jack Yarbrough).