ou won't get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds," was what Charles Ives's father, George, told him. He must have listened, because his music is as far removed from pretty as Pretty Boy Floyd was from boyish.

Ives's biographer, Jan Swafford (Charles Ives: A Life With Music), wrote: "Ives thought and composed in paradoxes, all founded on those in his own life: a young organ prodigy who practised hard but would rather be out playing baseball, a socialistically inclined businessman who got rich in the insurance industry, an individualist who exalted community, a fierce democrat who sometimes wrote fiercely challenging music, a Romantic idealist who conceived a music of the future? the best description of Ives is Ivesian."

It's the 50th Anniversary of his death this year ? last month, actually ? so all around the world, concerts have been held to honour him and the music he composed. He's underappreciated, so one hopes these efforts will lead to a greater understanding of who and what he was.

He was?well, if Walt Whitman is America's First Poet, Ives is America's First Composer. You'll catch a wild, heroic ride to heaven with either one of them, and neither one could have existed anywhere but in the frontier atmosphere of the USA.

Writing in Newsday last month, staff writer Justin Davidson said Ives was "so wildly original that nearly any musical trend that followed could claim him as a forerunner.

At the moment, he appears to have foretold DJ culture, in which music is not made but mixed. The raw material is other people's sounds, fed into a console, then stretched, reshaped and recombined."Ives used the orchestra as a vast mixing board," Davidson quoted the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams as having said. "Up to that date, when composers orchestrated they thought in terms of counterpoint. But he's thinking of many, many channels emerging from the miasma of sound. That's astonishing. Nobody had ever thought of that."

Davidson thought the best Ives conductors were illusionists. "Some years ago," he recalled, "when Michael Tilson Thomas led the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the Symphony in New York, they turned Carnegie Hall into a boundless, faceted space.

In the movement, a percussionist playing chimes summons distant church bells tolling across snowy fields. When Ives's score moves the wintry scene indoors, where polkas and waltzes collide in the rafters of a dance hall, Tilson Thomas assigned a violin solo not to the concertmaster, but to a player in the rear of the string section, so the obsessive fiddler who keeps sawing out old folk tunes seemed to be lurking in a nether corner."

Anyone who wants to understand what made Ives tick has to start with his father, George. During the Civil War, he was the bandmaster of the band said to be the finest in the Union army.

After the war, he went back to his home in Danbury, Connecticut, to make his living as a kind of musical Jack-of-all- trades. He was a huge influence on his son, who was devastated when his died, and spoke about his father constantly until the end of his life.

Biographer Jan Swafford wrote that "The story of Charles Ives's mature music has to do with the intersection of a great inborn gift for music, a thriving musical atmosphere in Danbury ? largely in vernacular forms, but including classical music from local players and visiting ensembles ? and a father who raised his son with the same inquiring, iconoclastic approach to music as his own. George Ives would have his boys sing in one key while he accompanied in another; he built instruments to play quarter-tones; he played his cornet over a pond so Charlie could gauge the effect of space; he set two bands marching around a park blaring different tunes, to see what it sounded like when they approached and passed.

"Just as importantly, George Ives taught his son to respect the power of vernacular music. As a Civil War band leader he understood how sentimental tunes such as , , Stephen Foster songs, and marches and bugle calls were woven into the experience of war and the memories of soldiers. Much as did Gustav Mahler a continent away, Charles Ives came to associate everyday music with profound emotions and spiritual aspirations. One of his father's most resonant pieces of wisdom came when he said of a stonemason's off-key hymn singing: 'Look into his face and hear the music of the ages. Don't pay too much attention to the sounds ? for if you do, you may miss the music.'"

There's a story that when Stravinsky was asked for his definition of a musical masterpiece, he said Ives's was the embodiment of his idea. pictures what is now called in America Memorial Day, or Remembrance Day in Britain. Ives would have watched, as a child, as his father's band marched to the town cemetery playing a mournful tune. He would have heard, as the crowds stood among the decorated graves of the war dead, his father play on his trumpet, and he would have heard the band march back to town playing a lively tune designed to lift people's spirits. From those memories, Ives shaped an extraordinary musical stream of consciousness, in which revolutionary musical techniques are used to paint a profound collective memory. It would have made a fine piece to have played a week ago, on Memorial Day.

That kind of complexity characterises most of his work. Jan Swafford writes, of his masterpiece, the Fourth Symphony: "?one finds the same kind of point in the grand pandemonium of the second movement, called ... In the vertiginous climax of the movement he stacks up a brass-band march, , bits of snatches of ragtime, atonal fistfuls of piano, and an assortment of other freelance manifestations. In the concert hall, those masses of sound tumbling and crashing in air are and jaw-dropping. The whole movement feels rather like being transported into the moil of Manhattan in a particularly riotous rush hour. Such a cityscape, as a matter of fact, is the picture Ives the long-time Manhattanite intended to paint. It is a memorable specimen of his singular Impressionism. Debussy's Impressionism is about nature, wind and waves; much of Ives's music, busy or simple, wild or sentimental, is about scenes in the life of families, communities, and nations: cityscapes, holiday parades, barn dances, camp meetings, football games, the polyrhythmic patter of feet passing on the street. Ives composed all those and a good deal more ? including a number of sweet songs right out of the Victorian parlour.

"In the Fourth Symphony's , the astute listener will notice something remarkable about this apparent bedlam: in its outlandish fashion, with sometimes a dozen and more separate parts roaring along together each on its own path, all this grand and glorious noise is somehow going somewhere, moreover going somewhere together, in the same direction. It's an epic pandemonic chorus of individual voices in an unaccountable but unmistakable march towards the same transcendent somewhere. Each part marches in its own way, own style, own tempo, own key, and maintains that individuality in the climax ? here the , there a brass band, in the distance a ragtimer, and in the middle.

"In the mystical finale of the Fourth, just before the coda's evocation of an old tune, myriad murmuring voices coalesce around a chord progression such as an organist would use to introduce a hymn. Then a chorus enters on in a cloudy D major, that key and hymn the foundation of the symphony, those words its essential goal ? to take us Nearer. The chorus is wordless, because Ives wanted us to recall the words in our own hearts and minds, to complete his thought. At the end the music seems to evaporate into the stars, still searching."

She calls the Fourth Symphony his masterpiece. Others think fills that bill. It is extraordinary, that's for sure. He called it a "cosmic drama". There are three layers. In the background a quiet and hauntingly beautiful chorale of strings represents, said Ives, "the silence of the Druids." Over that a solo trumpet proclaims, again and again, an enigmatic phrase representing "the perennial question of existence". In response to each question, a quartet of winds Ives called the "fighting answerers" runs around in search of a reply, becoming more and more frustrated until they reach a scream of rage. Then the trumpet asks the question once more, but is answered by?silence.

Ives did not believe he could make a decent living at music, so he went to work for an insurance company when he left Yale University, then started one of his own. It made for a tough life, but he believed in hard work. Between 1908 and 1917, he composed at a pace hard to believe, given that his insurance agency was also burgeoning. From these years comes the completion of much of his greatest work: ; the symphony ; the intense ; most of the ; the ; the ; the sprawling, raging ; many songs both progressive and traditional; and studies in various states of completion including .

He didn't seem to mind. In something he wrote at the time, he asked whether beauty in music wasn't too often confused with something which "lets the ears lie back in an easy-chair."

"If a composer's conception of his art, its functions and ideals, even if sincere, coincides to such an extent with these groove-coloured permutations of tried-out progressions in expediency so that he can arrange them over and over again to his delight ? has he or has he not been drugged with an overdose of habit-forming sounds?"