Tracing the Development of Extended Vocal Techniques in ...

vocal music. He experimented with polytonality and the concept of juxtaposing ideas and
techniques together. The “American original” 22 composed without apology or conviction,
believing that expression linked music to text, an idea that resurfaced in later
exploitations of the voice.
His progressive ideas were far more advanced than that of his contemporaries,
and as Kyle Gann, author of American Music in the Twentieth Century, pointed out, his
forward thinking foreshadowed many trends to come.
Ives’s music, most of it written in near-total isolation, contains a list of
innovations that anticipates the majority of 20 th -century musical trends:
unprecedented dissonance, densely heterogeneous textures, instrumental groups
set apart from each other in space, unusual means of playing the piano keyboard,
classical appropriation of ragtime, quarter-tones, simultaneous tunes played in
different tempos, and widespread quotation of folk music, popular music, and
hymns. 23
Carol Kimball, in her book Song, also explained his advanced compositional techniques
“predate by several decades, the later “avant-garde” works of Schoenberg, Prokofiev, and
Stravinsky.” 24 This is especially important as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912), is
argued by many scholars to be the foundation on which EVTs was built. 25 Ives was also
beginning to utilize the voice in a non-traditional fashion similar to Schoenberg’s
22 Carol Kimball, Song: A Guide to Style & Literature. (Seattle: Pst...Inc., 1996), 233.
23 Kyle Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century. (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997), 7-8.
24 Carol Kimball, Song: A Guide to Style & Literature. (Seattle: Pst...Inc., 1996), 233.
25 No conclusive documentation was ever found which would suggest that Schoenberg or
Humperdinck influenced Ives.
22