Ives

He sold insurance by day — the agency he ran with a partner was among the largest in America — and composed at night and at weekends. He barely wrote for publication; much of the music went unperformed for decades, and the Third Symphony was forty years old when it won the Pulitzer in 1947.

Several kinds of music sound at once in his work: hymn tunes, marching bands, ragtime, colliding like two bands passing each other across a town square. That layering predates the comparable European experiments by more than a decade. In The Unanswered Question the trumpet puts the same question again and again, the strings do not move, and the woodwind grow steadily more agitated — written at the end of the nineteenth century and sounding like the 1960s.