Art & Creativity Quote by Charles Ives

Ives is pushing back against a very American itch: the need to pin everything down, to make art behave like a diagram. His phrase "curious definiteness of man" sounds almost affectionate, but it carries a jab. Curiosity, in Ives's framing, becomes a demand for proof, clarity, and clean meaning - the kind of listening that turns music into an object to be solved. He’s not anti-intellectual; he’s anti-reduction. The target is the listener (and critic) who wants music to deliver a single, agreed-upon message, as if a symphony should come with a caption.

The pivot to "maybe" matters. Ives doesn’t issue commandments; he stages a refusal to close the case. That open-handed doubt mirrors his own compositional practice: polytonality, collisions of hymn tunes and marching bands, layers that feel like multiple realities happening at once. His work often sounds like a town square where competing truths overlap. "Definiteness" can’t survive there, and that’s the point.

Calling music a "transcendental language" plants him in the lineage of New England Transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau): the idea that the deepest forms of knowledge are felt, not itemized. Then he turns the screw with "in the most extravagant sense". Extravagant is a provocation against tasteful minimalism and against the polite claim that music should be merely expressive. He wants it to exceed its job description - not to translate life, but to outgrow it, to remain stubbornly bigger than what we can confidently name.