Picture a wealthy Manhattan insurance executive of the 1910s buried in mortality tables, then overlay one of the most radical avant-garde composers of the century, writing music the world would lack the vocabulary to understand for another 50 years. Both are Charles Ives, born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874. This episode traces how his father George, a Civil War bandleader with a New England reformer’s streak, drilled him in bitonality, built quarter-tone contraptions, and taught him to hear two marching bands colliding in the town square as the true sound of the world.

We follow Ives from church organist at 14 through Yale football and studies with Horatio Parker to the actuarial department of Mutual Life, where he co-founded Ives and Myrick, helped invent modern estate planning, and found in overlapping timelines of risk a mirror of his music. Working nights and weekends, he pioneered polyrhythms, quarter tones and aleatoric writing, demanded a 14 and three-quarter inch block of wood in the Concord Sonata, and wrote a Fourth Symphony not fully performed until 1965. In 1927 he came downstairs in tears saying nothing sounded right anymore and never composed a major new work again, yet lived to receive the 1947 Pulitzer Prize and hear Bernstein premiere his Second Symphony over a kitchen radio.

• The 1907 collapse that biographer Stuart Feder suggests may have been panic attacks rather than heart attacks
• How hymns, Stephen Foster tunes and town band marches surface inside dense orchestral dissonance
• His secret financing of composers like Nicolas Slonimsky and his dismissal of prizes as being for children
• The 1920 pamphlets proposing a constitutional amendment for direct national referendums and the argument with Franklin D. Roosevelt over 50-dollar war bonds
• Maynard Solomon’s backdating controversy and John Cage’s embrace of the mud and silence in Ives’s work