Jan DeGaetanni - Charles Ives Songs

What self respecting music school burnout wouldn't snatch up Jan DeGaetani's 1976 recording of songs by Charles Ives? Not this one, certainly.

It's hard not to pretend that Ives is a major influence on my own music. The vacillation between bombast and melancholy, modality and dissonance creating strange textures.

What's harder to believe is the sheer coincidence of blindly picking a musical set at an insurance company, unknowingly making a Geico joke, my car breaking down, picking an organist from Oklahoma who died in a car crash, then randomly picking Ives (the most famous insurance salesman composer i know) out of my own top shelf collection. They are all very much coincidences, but you have to admit it would probably give a less aware person the heebie jeebies. Or, maybe that subconscious part of my brain is even more powerful than i am willing to accept. Either way, i don't wanna go back to work tomorrow.

Dear millibillionaires, please find a more useful and productive way to divide your wealth among us plebes than buying sports teams and supercars and pedophile islands.

Did you know Ives paid for the publication of his 114 songs himself and gave them away to anyone interested? That certainly seems more worthwhile to me than opening a chain of sub edible fast food restaurants, or bulldozing a neighborhood to reroute a 9 lane highway, or funding a remake of the Wizard of Oz, or whatever. Did you know John Malkovich lost his entire life savings to Bernie Madoff? I hope Elon Musk's rocket doesn't kill those NASA astronauts.

I wonder what Ives or Copland would think of the plight of the common man today. Probably "who in their right mind elected Scrooge McTrump's kid for president?!" More than likely they would be as confused as ever at how the machinery and wealth of our ingenuity has done nothing to elevate our spirit or good will. We delight in the suffering of others, and we argue at the highest philosophical level about how to keep it going for eternity. The wealthy are too dumb to do anything but under pay their laborers for the promise of more labor, and we elected a perpetually bankrupt grifter to spearhead our ultimate downfall.

We've come a long way from the tigers in their circus cages of Ives' day, only to thrill at watching it happen all over again, and hope that lady murdered her husband. I'm rambling, i apologize. For whatever reason, i can't help feeling like we would be better off without the endless cacophony of modern industry, the epilepsy inducing strobe lights of fictional reality, and the constant reminder that the common man is a burden our economic overlords are unwilling to bear. Let the laborer pay the manager what his services are worth and find out how much or how little value it deserves.

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