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Scriabin and Ives:

An Unanswered Question?
By Lincoln Ballard

A newly discovered Carnegie Hall program bill from March 1924 documents one of
the few New York performances of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy that took place in the
decade after his death. Heard after Brahms’s Double Concerto and Stravinsky’s Le Chant
du Rossignol, Scriabin’s piece capped the program. Significantly, a letter from Clifton
Furness documents composer Charles Ives’s attendance at this concert, a fact that
contradicts Ives’s explanation in Memos (compiled in the 1930s) that he avoided
concerts due to lack of free time and out of fear of contaminating his creative ideas.1
Moreover, works of such contemporaries as Ravel or Stravinsky that Ives encountered
struck him as simply “morbid and monotonous.”2 But curiosity piqued his interest that
afternoon; Ives and Furness intended to assess the Poem of Ecstasy.3
By all accounts, critics and audiences responded enthusiastically to Scriabin’s tone poem.
Olin Downes of the New York Times noted that while the piece had once been “an annoyance
or a bewilderment to unaccustomed ears,” it had finally garnered critical acclaim.4 Hardly an
enthusiast of modern music, Ives surprisingly found the Poem of Ecstasy to be truly
impressive. So much so, in fact, that Scriabin became a recurring topic in letters between
Ives and Furness during the weeks following the March 1924 performance.
Ives had good reason to eschew the concert hall. Regarded by many scholars as the
foremost American composer of the twentieth century, he vehemently defended his
originality against accusations of derivativeness. Florent Schmitt blatantly accused Ives of
plagiarism while Walter Goldstein implied that Ives pilfered the advanced techniques of
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

1. In his letter of 6 April 1924, Furness singled out the Poem of Ecstasy as “the one we heard last week.”
See Ives, Memos, edited by John Kirkpatrick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 138 n3.
2. Ibid., 138.
3. Jan Swafford, Charles Ives: A Life with Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 340. Swafford cites
a letter from the Unpublished Charles Ives Oral History Project as evidence of their intent (box 29, folder 9).
4. “Scriabine at His Best,” New York Times (29 March 1924), p. 14 col. 3. Downes hailed the work as a
“gorgeously effective piece for modern orchestra” that displayed a “commanding expression of a
strange and unparalleled individuality.” Though he derided early Scriabin as “weak and imitative” and
the late works as “experimental and of debatable value,” Downes intimated that Scriabin excelled in
such middle period works as the Poem of Ecstasy.
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38 Journal of The Scriabin Society of America

the Concord Sonata from Scriabin, Schoenberg, and Leo Ornstein.5 On the defensive, Ives may
have exaggerated his ignorance of contemporary music.6 His 1922 response to Goldstein
(which he never mailed) fumed, “Ain’t never heard nor seen any of the music – not even a god
damn note – of Schoenberg, Scriabin – or Ornstein...”7 Ives protests too much for, as we will
see, by 1922 he was already familiar with Scriabin’s music or on the verge of being so.
Unlike Schmitt and Goldstein, Harold Schonberg viewed Ives as a singular pheno-
menon who was oblivious to contemporary music trends. He lauded Ives’s mastery of
the most progressive compositional techniques and marveled at semblances between
the Concord Sonata (ca. 1916) and Scriabin’s “Black Mass” Sonata op. 68 (1912-13),
conspicuously noting that “Ives had never heard a note of late Scriabin when he
composed the ‘Concord’ Sonata.”8 Schonberg insisted that Ives single-handedly forged
techniques that became hallmarks of twentieth-century musical style. As late as 1975,
Frank Rossiter echoed Schonberg’s sentiments when wrote that Ives “was about as close
to complete isolation as it is possible for a creative artist to be.”9 He depicted Ives as
ostracized by a genteel society that was blind to his genius, and blamed Ives for valuing
the opinions of conservative amateur musicians. Ives’s biting dissonances and jarring
syncopations, Rossiter asserted, symbolized his frustrations with a parochial public.
In hindsight, it seems that these critics overstated their cases. While Ives remained
outside the music profession, his desire to stay involved in music impelled him to
cultivate friendships with avant-garde musicians residing around New York City
throughout the 1920s. Research findings by J. Peter Burkholder and David Michael
Hertz, for example, have documented Ives’s familiarity with the music of Stravinsky and
Debussy.10 The peculiar case of Ives’s affinity for Scriabin’s music, however, remains
largely unexplored. These two composers make odd bedfellows, as it were, considering
Ives’s chauvinistic attitudes on musical style, which demanded that music uphold
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

5. Goldstein wrote, “To me the sonata seems to be expressed in the Schoenberg - Scriabin - Ornstein
idiom, the musicality of which is not yet comprehensible to me.” Henry Prunières of the New York
Times similarly noted, “There is no doubt that [Ives] knows his Schoenberg, yet gives the impression
that he has not always assimilated the lessons of the Viennese master as well as he might have.” See
Ives, Memos, edited by John Kirkpatrick, 12, 15.
6. Ives denied knowledge of Schoenberg in a letter to E. Robert Schmitz dated 10 August 1931. Evidence
suggests, however, that he heard Pierrot lunaire with Furness as early as 1923. See Carol Oja, Making
Music Modern: New York in the 1920s, 288. Ives also claimed to have heard only snippets of Stravinsky in
between 1919-20.
7. Swafford, Charles Ives: A Life with Music, 319.
8. Schonberg added, “there is an amazing harmonic and textural relationship between the two
composers.” See “Natural American, Natural Rebel, Natural Avant-Gardist,” New York Times Magazine
(21 April 1974), 82. Theorist Allen Forte, however, has demonstrated that the musical excerpts cited by
Schonberg (Sonata No. 9, mm. 137-39; Concord Sonata, “Hawthorne,” p. 41, system 2) share only one
pitch-class set (5-24) and thus “the musical components of the two passages are entirely different.”
See Forte, “Ives and Atonality,” In: An Ives Celebration, edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Vivian Perlis
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 161-62.
9. Frank Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America (New York: Liveright, 1975), xii.
10. Burkholder, ed., Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996);
and Hertz, “Ives’s Concord Sonata and the Texture of Music,” In: Charles Ives and His World(Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996). For other influences on Ives, also see John J. Gibbens, “Debussy’s
Impact on Ives: An Assessment” (DMA treatise, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1985).
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‘masculine’ qualities and never betray any hint of effeminacy or sensuality.11 How then
did Scriabin, with his openly erotic scores such as the Poem of Ecstasy, escape Ives’s
diatribes against supposedly effete or decadent composers?
This study argues that Scriabin’s music impressed Ives because it embodied
‘substance’ that surpassed mere entertainment while his ‘manner’ flaunted a harmonic
language as daring as Ives’s own. Both men also fashioned brands of transcendental
pianism that bear affinities in style and technique, further suggesting Ives’s knowledge
of the Russian’s works. As a fellow pianist-composer, Scriabin demonstrated to Ives that
virtuoso piano music could transcend the superficial and achieve the sublime. Ives’s well-
documented ties to the circle of Scriabinists surrounding Katherine Heyman, records of
concerts he attended, letters attesting to Ives’s piano performances of Scriabin, and
evidence of Ives’s possible borrowings from Scriabin support this reading. These
findings reveal the depth of Ives’s immersion in the New York musical avant-garde
during the 1920s and also document Scriabin’s surprisingly favorable reception in an era
when modernists were renouncing the excessive subjectivity of fin-de-siècle maximalism.

Ives and the Scriabinists

Lacking a supportive retinue for most of his creative years (1890-ca.1925), Ives
eventually found the artistic milieu that he outwardly scoffed yet inwardly craved.
During the mid-1920s he frequented a salon of fervent Scriabinists who held regular
private recitals and discussions of Scriabin’s music under the auspices of ultra-
modernist Katherine Ruth Heyman.12 This circle avidly performed and contributed to
the avant-garde repertory that was supplanting the Germanic canon. They promoted
ultra-modern works and naturally took to Ives’s music. Ives likely appreciated their
accolades and must have been impressed by their familiarity with the latest musical
styles. Attendees such as Clifton Furness and T. Carl Whitmer grew especially close to
Ives and helped introduce the public to his music (two recently discovered photographs
of them appear as Plates 1 and 2). Modernists such as Dane Rudhyar, Ruth Crawford
Seeger and especially Scriabin were avowed favorites of the group.
Clifton J. Furness was an undergraduate at Northwestern University in 1921 when he
delivered a lecture recital on the slow movement from Ives’s Concord Sonata, “The
Alcotts” – a service for which the composer heartily commended him.13 Furness served
as Ives’s chief companion in their mutual explorations of Scriabin’s music during the
1920s. He expressed a profound interest in occult philosophies and even studied under
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

11. Judith Tick’s article “Charles Ives and Gender Ideology” is a cornerstone for research on Ives’s gender
stereotypes. She used gender “as an analytical prism through which other ideas and values are
refracted.” By questioning the masculinity of famous composers throughout history, Ives “made his
own bid for the reordering of power” and dismantled the existing cultural patriarchy. See Tick, In:
Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, edited by Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 83-106.
12. In his 1931 definition of a “Scriabinist,” Leonid Sabaneev noted, “to me his name signifies something more than
a certain number of symphonies and pianoforte pieces. To me it stands chiefly for a particular aesthetic outlook,
the nature of which usually escapes the notice of those who are entirely immersed in sounds and interested in
nothing else.” Sabaneev, “Scriabin and the Idea of a Religious Art,” Musical Times 72 (September 1931): 789.
13. James Sinclair, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1999), 194. In 1928, Furness also premiered the fourth movement of the Concord Sonata, “Thoreau.”
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40 Journal of The Scriabin Society of America

Clifton J. Furness T. Carl Whitmer

Plate 1 Plate 2
Photograph reproduced courtesy Reproduced by permission of the
of New England Conservatory Theodore M. Finney Music Library,
University Library System, University of
Pittsburgh

Rudolf Steiner, who founded anthroposophy, a doctrine that espoused the development of
human cognition and quest for spiritual oneness. In 1926 Furness spoke of Ives as a
“musical Emerson” in an article entitled “Mysticism in Modern Music,” which appeared in
the anthroposophical journal Threefold Commonwealth. The parlance of that article reads
like a page from Scriabin’s secret journals: “This music of the soul, inwardly apprehended,
brings into conscious action the Will nature, the highest of the three-fold activity of the
human spirit...”14 Furness was always drawn to music infused with spiritual symbolism and
thus was naturally attracted to the transcendental element in Ives and Scriabin’s music.
Ives and Furness developed a close friendship throughout the 1920s and Ives even helped
Furness secure employment in New York City as a teacher at the Horace Mann School for
Boys in the Bronx.15 While at this institution, Furness cultivated yet another relationship that
secured him an entry in the marginalia of music history. Elliott Carter studied music there
from 1920 to 1926 and Furness instantly recognized his abilities. He brought Carter with him
to several avant-garde concerts that were regularly held in Greenwich Village; it was through
Furness that Carter met Ives in 1924. Furness also helped to bring Ives into contact with
other contemporary composers and musicians who were intensely interested in Scriabin.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

14. Quoted in Swafford, Charles Ives: A Life with Music, 321-22.

15. Ibid., 332. Furness later taught at Katherine Gibbs School and supervised at New England
Conservatory.
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Katherine Ruth Heyman also became acquainted with Ives through Furness. She was
an acclaimed master interpreter of Scriabin and was known in the 1920s and 1930s as the
“high priestess of the Scriabin cult.” Heyman was fanatical about the Russian, claiming that
she “met Scriabin on the moon and had an affair with him,” “saw visions to his music” and
translated coded messages from the deceased composer.16 With permission from the
Scriabin Museum in Moscow, in 1934 she founded the Scriabin Society in New York City.
Because of her profound interests in occult philosophies, Heyman admired the
transcendental element in Ives’s music, and at ‘conferences’ held in her New York salon
in the 1920s she performed “The Alcotts” (third movement) from Ives’s Concord
Sonata.17 An early pioneer of Ives’s music, on 5 March 1928 Heyman premiered
“Emerson” (first movement) from his Concord Sonata and lectured on it for Parisian
radio.18 She even introduced Ives to John Kirkpatrick, who later became the first
recognized Ives scholar. Ives, Furness, and Carter frequented her semi-private
‘conferences’ throughout the mid-1920s.19 Ives’s exposure to Scriabin’s music through
Heyman and other master interpreters must have deeply impressed him and likely
caused him to reflect upon his own efforts in solo piano music.
Yet another Scriabinist, T. Carl Whitmer (1873-1959), was a church organist in
Pittsburgh when in early 1921 Ives mailed him a copy of the Concord Sonata.
As a gesture of gratitude Whitmer mailed Ives his book, The Way of My Heart and
Mind. Whitmer had plans for a series of six “Spiritual Music Dramas” or Mysteries
for chorus, soloists, and orchestra that were conceived in a ceremonial style
mirroring Scriabin’s unfinished Mysterium.20 He purchased a Hudson River farm in
La Grangeville, New York and christened it “Dramamount” where he intended to
direct the Mysteries in an outdoor amphitheater over the course of a week. Ives
visited the farm in 1923 and personally related to Whitmer’s vision; he later wrote to
Whitmer that “the outdoor side of music, and the outdoor side of people, is
something that can be brought together and helped ... in what you are doing at

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

16. Faubion Bowers, “Memoir within Memoirs,” Paideuma 2/1 (Spring 1973): 61. Heyman reportedly “felt
colors with certain compositions and had even been able to impress that color feeling on some of her
listeners.” See Emerson Whithorne, “‘Feels Colors’ as She Plays Piano: Katherine Ruth Heyman Tells
of an Interesting Phase of Her Work,” Musical America (28 August 1909): 23. For a recent article that
disputes Scriabin’s claims to synaesthesia, see James Baker, “Prometheus and the Quest for Color
Music: The World Premiere of Scriabin’s Poem of Fire with Lights, New York, March 20, 1915,” In: Music
and Modern Art, edited by James Leggio (New York: Garland, 2003), 61-95.
17. Tom C. Owens, “Openings to the Avant-Garde, 1921-32,” In: Charles Ives and His World, edited by
J. Peter Burkholder, 204-05. Also see Frank Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America, 231-34.
18. Swafford, 371. Also see James Sinclair, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives, 194.
19. Swafford cites Vivian Perlis, Unpublished Charles Ives Oral Histoty Project, Oral History Research
(Office file, Yale School of Music, New Haven), box 1, folder 14.
20. The term “mysteries” was borrowed from Theosophy and is detailed in Annie Besant’s Initiation: The
Perfecting of Man, which posits that in order to obtain spiritual transfiguration, adepts must undergo a
mystical process known as the “Path,” consisting of three stages: “Path of Purification,” “Path of
Enlightenment,” and “Path of Unification with God.” The second stage of this track involves a series of
initiations that induce a higher consciousness that reveals to the initiate previously hidden sensory
phenomena. Cf. Danuta Mirka, “Colors of a Mystic Fire: Light and Sound in Scriabin’s Prometheus,”
American Journal of Semiotics 13/1-4 (Fall 1996): 230-31.
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42 Journal of The Scriabin Society of America

Dramamount.”21 Whitmer and Ives

likely discussed Ives’s Universe
Symphony, another unfinished
work of monolithic proportions
that was conceived in the same
vein as Scriabin’s Mysterium; by
1923 Ives had been sketching his
work for eight years.22 Whitmer’s
Mysteries must have especially
fired Ives’s imagination, as his
Universe Symphony constantly
simmered in the back of his mind.
Also among Heyman’s affiliates
was ultra-modernist composer
Dane Rudhyar (born Daniel
Chennevière), who worshiped
Scriabin. Indeed, Paul Rosenfeld
obser ved that “Scriabin is
Rudhyar’s father in music.”23 For
both Rudhyar (1895-1985) and
Heyman, Scriabin ser ved as a
spiritual leader whose music
embodied deep connections to
Theosophy and the occult.24 Not
only does Rudhyar’s compositional
style bear such Scriabinian
trademarks as augmented-sixth
chords and layered polyrhythms,
but such titles as poèmes ironiques
Miss Katherine Ruth Heyman, Pianiste. (1914), poèmes tragiques (1918),
and Surge of Fire (1921) further
attest to his indebtedness to Scriabin. Rudhyar saw the Russian as “the one great
pioneer of the new music of a reborn Western civilization, the father of the
future musician.”25 In 1918, Rudhyar even stayed in Montreal with pianist Alfred
LaLiberté, who was one of the few pupils Scriabin admitted while living in Belgium
and Switzerland.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

21. Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Papers (New Haven: Yale University Archives, 1983), box 32, folder 13.
22. For more on the similarities between Scriabin’s Mysterium and Ives’s Universe Symphony, see Ballard, ‘The
Music of the Spheres: Two Total Sensory Experiences,’ In: “Similar Directions, Possible Influences:
Parallels Between the Music of Alexander Scriabin and Charles Ives” (M.M. thesis, The Florida State
University, 2001), 34-65. Also see Ives, Memos, 106; and Swafford, Charles Ives: A Life with Music, 346, 364.
23. Paul Rosenfeld, An Hour with American Music (London: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1929), 71.
24. Carol J. Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 51.
Also see Swafford, Charles Ives: A Life in Music, 340.
25. Oja, ibid., 102.
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It was Canadian pianist Djane Herz (1888-1982), however, a Scriabin devotee and
former pupil, who initially introduced Rudhyar to Scriabin’s music. During the early
1920s she formed a Chicago-based salon for ultra-modern composers that was
frequented by Rudhyar, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, and Ruth Crawford Seeger. When
the group moved to New York they congregated in Katherine Heyman’s apartment and
the home of patron Blanch Walton. Walton also offered room and board and hosted
receptions for the ultra-modernists.26 Through his alliances at these modern music
gatherings Rudhyar learned of Ives by no later than the end of the 1920s.27 Scriabin and
Ives were among the many spiritually minded composers Heyman’s circle admired.
Immersion in this spiritually charged atmosphere led Rudhyar to study
such Theosophical texts as The Secret Doctrine, a work that strongly informed
Scriabin’s thinking.
Rudhyar’s mystical inclinations heightened when in 1920 he visited Halcyon, a
Theosophical community located near Pismo Beach on the California coast. In the
Temple of the People he met composer Henry Cowell and the two men developed an
enduring friendship that was sparked by a common interest in Scriabin.28 They similarly
admired the spiritual element in the Russian’s music. Early in the 1920s Cowell made a
name for himself as a concert pianist, but later in the decade he took on a leading role
in modern music due in part to his enduring friendship with Ives, which began in July
1927 when Cowell invited him to subscribe to his burgeoning periodical, New Music
Quarterly (see Plate 3).29 Ives eagerly ordered twenty-five subscriptions and agreed to
contribute funds and select music for the journal; its inaugural issue featured works by
Ruggles, Rudhyar, and other ultra-modernists.
Since 1924, Ives annually subscribed to New Musical Quarterly, Musical Quarterly, and
Modern Music (the literary organ for Aaron Copland’s League of Composers); these
publications featured articles on composers from Alkan to Berg and Antheil. Ives probably
encountered Rudhyar’s name that year as the author of an article in Musical Quarterly
entitled, “The Relativity of Our Musical Conceptions.” That year the same journal featured
Herbert Antcliffe’s article “The Significance of Scriabin” as well as numerous other
writings that detailed the activities of modern composers. Additionally, Ives clipped and
saved dozens of articles about Schoenberg, Ravel, Stravinsky, and Bartók from
newspapers. Curiously, he collected articles concerning Russian music, the Russian
national anthem, and Serge Koussevitsky, who published Scriabin’s works from 1907 until
1911 when the two had an irreparable falling out over financial matters.30 By 1930 Ives also
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

26. Oja, Making Music Modern, 210. A close friend of Cowell, Walton even hosted the first meeting of the
American Musicological Society in 1930.
27. Swafford, 324.
28. Oja, “Dane Rudhyar’s Vision of American Dissonance,” American Music 17/2 (1999): 132. Rudhyar also
met Ruth Crawford at that time in Toronto; he and Herz initially introduced Scriabin’s music to her.
29. Ives response to Cowell remarked, “Your idea of a circulating music library via a magazine of unsaleable
scores is admirable.” Quoted in Swafford, Charles Ives: A Life with Music, 368.
30. Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Papers, 193-94. D51. Given Ives’s predilection for setting existing tunes, it
would not be unfathomable that he might have been thinking of using this melody in a collage
composition, although his setting of something Russian would require a kind of program unlike what we
expect from him.
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Plate 3 – Henry Cowell (l.) talking with Charles Ives, early 1940s. Ives appears to be
conducting something. Yale University, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library,
MSS 14, The Charles Ives Papers. Used by permission.
contributed funds to Edgard Varèse’s Pan American Association for composers.31 Ives’s
music appeared on nearly half the Pan American Association’s concerts. Though his days as
an active composer were exhausted, Ives strove to remain involved in music through philan-
thropic ventures such as these. In a 1974 interview with historian Vivian Perlis, Elliott Carter
clarified that “it was understandable that [Ives] would be drawn to interested musicians, no
matter what their other views, in a desire for human talk about contemporary music [...] Ives
was certainly interested in music of his time and didn’t remain aloof from it; as much as he
could be, he was a part of it.”32 Perhaps Ives wanted music to remain on his terms and any
professional involvement with it would upset the balance.
Ives’s contacts with the Scriabinists provided him with a rich resource to keep pace with
current music. Contrary to his comments in Memos, Ives stayed informed of musical
trends by reading newspapers, subscribing to modern music periodicals, and attending
concerts. Among his best sources of information were his younger, less reticent
colleagues. Though his associations with Heyman’s circle occurred after his creative
years, the hero worship they heaped upon the Russian would have made it impossible for
Ives not to pay close attention to his music.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

31. Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s, 195. When Ives retired from the insurance business
in 1930 he was a millionaire and eager to financially support Cowell’s periodical and other musicians.
32. See Jonathan Bernard, editor, Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937-1995 (New York:
University of Rochester Press, 1997), 99.
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Journal of The Scriabin Society of America 45

Practical Encounters
Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata supply the earliest direct evidence of his Scriabinist
leanings. First published in 1920, they suggest that he knew of Scriabin by the late
1910s. In “Emerson,” Ives cites Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Palestrina, and Scriabin as
evidence that all artists blend and are influenced by ‘romantic’ and ‘classic’ (read:
progressive and traditional) traits.33 Ives identified the Chinese philosopher Confucius
as an inspiration for Scriabin.34 As these writings are Ives’s summa musica, the reference
to the Russian is especially noteworthy.
Ives’s personal library provides further evidence. He owned score copies of selected
Scriabin etudes (op. 8 nos. 2, 3, 7, 8, 9; and op. 42 no. 7) and the Piano Sonatas Nos. 4,
5, 8, and 9, most of which are among Scriabin’s most popular sonatas. His West Redding
study also housed such modernist scores as Fauré’s Violin Sonata No. 2 and Rudhyar’s
Moments–Tone Poems for Piano.35
Letters from Clifton Furness also document Ives’s fascination with Scriabin. The first
mention of the Russian comes in a letter of 11 August 1922, in which Furness drew a
comparison between Ives’s song “Mists” (No. 57 from 114 Songs) and Scriabin: “The
harmonic effects [augmented triads] with the pedal-points in the low register of ‘Mists’ have
an almost Scriabinish timbre...” Furness’s casual reference to Scriabin assumes that Ives
was already familiar with the Russian’s harmonic and pianistic style. Furness wrote to Ives
again the following July, “I have been puttering around with the score of Scriabin’s
Prometheus and have started a piano transcription of it ... I am anxious for you to know it in
one form or another. How much I have enjoyed thinking thru [sic] that Scriabin symphony
that we played!”36 The specific symphony they played at the piano remains unknown, but a
third letter of 6 April 1924 may provide a clue. Furness informed Ives that
I’m sending you the program notes from the Boston Symphony about Scriabin[’s]
“Divine Poem” [Symphony No. 3], thinking you might be interested in some of the
information ... They miss totally the point of the introduction of “sensuousness” –
the way in which Scriabin transcends this (or as you said, builds out of it) is the
point and purpose of the whole work.37
It seems Ives especially admired the transcendent quality of the work, suggesting that
this may have been the symphony that he and Furness played together at the piano.
Ives’s fondness for Scriabin’s orchestral music was indulged again the following season
when Carter accompanied Ives and his wife to a Carnegie Hall concert featuring
Prometheus and the Poem of Ecstasy.38
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

33. Ives, Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings, edited by Howard Boatwright (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1961, 1962), 26. Ives believed that “a thing is classic if it is thought of in terms of the past
and romantic if thought of in terms of the future . . .”
34. No documentation has surfaced that acknowledges Scriabin’s interest in or knowledge of Confucius.
35. Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Papers (New Haven: Yale University Music Library Archival Collection, 1983), 193-94.
36. Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s, 51-52.
37. Ibid., 416 n17. At the end of the letter Furness told Ives that he had complimentary tickets for Heyman’s
all-Scriabin recital that month and asked if Ives and his wife Harmony would consider attending.
38. Carter, “Expressionism and American Music,” Perspectives of New Music 4/1 (Autumn-Winter 1965),
3 n3. The 1925 concert also featured Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe and Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps.