Charles Ives was an American composer of the late Romantic and early modernist periods, born in Danbury, Connecticut, and educated at Yale University before settling in New York City, where he built a highly successful career in insurance while composing largely in his spare time. His output includes four numbered symphonies, chamber works such as the Concord Sonata, and over a hundred songs, marked by pioneering use of polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, and quotation of American vernacular and hymn tunes. Largely unperformed and unrecognized during his most productive years, he died in New York City in 1954 following a stroke.

Ives is regarded as among the first American composers to achieve international stature and is celebrated as a singularly original modernist voice, having anticipated techniques associated with later twentieth-century avant-garde music decades before they became widespread. Largely rediscovered late in life—he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1947 for his Third Symphony—his work has since become a foundational reference point for American concert music.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ives