Art & Creativity Quote by Charles Ives

A brass band with wings is Ives in miniature: the most American of ensembles, strapped to the most un-American accessory, flight. He’s describing imagination as a noisy parade that suddenly lifts off the street. That’s not just whimsy; it’s a manifesto for how his music works. Ives keeps one foot planted in public sound - marches, hymn tunes, town-square clamor - while the other reaches for something ecstatic and unaccountable, the kind of transcendence people usually reserve for church.

The intent is quietly defiant. Classical composition, in Ives’s era, still came with European manners and a polished sense of “proper” form. Ives is saying his raw materials aren’t salon-approved; they’re massed brass, civic ritual, and memory. The “back of my mind” matters, too: this isn’t careful, academic planning. It’s subconscious recall, half-heard snippets from real life colliding in the psyche. That collision is basically his signature technique: overlapping tunes, competing tempos, the sensation of walking past two bands at once and realizing the chaos is the point.

The subtext is also about permission. A winged brass band is an image of scale: loud, heavy, communal sound made capable of lift. Ives frames composition as letting the ordinary become visionary without sanding down its roughness. It’s a secular American dream rendered in timbre - not escape from the crowd, but elevation of it.