The first time he heard Ives, 'I was absolutely floored'

John Heiss vividly remembers his first encounter with the music of Charles Ives.

Most musicians of his generation do. Heiss is 67, and when he was a student, Ives was better known as one of the great pioneers of the life insurance business than as a composer.

Heiss is now a conductor and composer on the faculty of the New England Conservatory, which this week hosts a festival curated by Heiss that celebrates the work of Ives. Back in the early '60s, when Heiss was a graduate student at Columbia University, his teacher, composer Otto Luening, played to the class a pioneering recording of Ives's great setting of Vachel Lindsay's poem about the founder of the Salvation Army, ''General William Booth Enters Into Heaven."

''I was absolutely floored," recalled Heiss in a recent conversation in an NEC classroom. ''And the chord that comes on the words 'blind eyes opened on a new sweet world' was just about the most beautiful harmony I ever heard." Heiss moved to the piano and began singing that phrase, and the chord, when it came, was indeed profoundly beautiful.

''I had to hurry home to try to figure out that chord," said Heiss, continuing his story. ''When I got there my dad was chatting with a neighbor and friend who worked for New York Life Insurance. I started talking about this completely original and eccentric composer I had just encountered, and he started talking about somebody like that who had completely transformed his own business. I didn't realize until later that we were talking about the same person."

By the early '60s, Heiss was making his way in New York both as a composer and as a flutist especially adept at new music. His ear won the praise of Stravinsky when he corrected a number of errors in the parts to the composer's Mass during a rehearsal. (''Are you the pitch doctor?" Stravinsky inquired). Heiss's interest in music had begun in childhood; he idolized his cousin, Joan Bennett Kennedy, a more advanced student of the same piano teacher his parents sent him to at age 4; at 9 he started the flute, working with several of the most prominent teachers of the era.

In 1967, when composer Gunther Schuller became president of New England Conservatory, he brought Heiss along with him. Heiss is one of the city's most serious musicians, but never self-important; he's always ready to tell you what his students have just taught him. One of his primary responsibilities has been NEC's Contemporary Ensemble, and over the years many singers and instrumentalists who are now principal players in the Boston Symphony and other major orchestras have passed through the group.

In 1981, an NEC activity that had been an on-and-off affair became an official annual event, a weeklong festival involving as many of the students and performing ensembles as possible. Heiss hasn't programmed all of the festivals, but he's been in charge of most of the ones organized around prominent contemporary composers, many of whom have attended the festivals -- Witold Lutoslawski, Olivier Messiaen, Gyorgy Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Sir Michael Tippett, Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez, and others. Heiss loves to share special memories of the festivals -- like the time Ligeti withdrew to the student lounge to compose a new ending for a piece -- and he cherishes letters of congratulation he has received from some of the composers.

This week's festival, ''Charles Ives and His World," is Heiss's 15th -- and his second devoted to Ives. The first was back in 1983. ''After 22 years, all of us know Ives a whole lot better," he says. ''This music is so terrifically good, and so important to us as Americans. I've already put about 30 hours of rehearsal into next week's concerts, and as always when I am working on Ives, I find the music is even better than I thought."

The festival, which starts tonight, includes concerts, seminars, master classes, a film, and panels. (Full disclosure: This reporter participates in one panel.) Stephen Drury will re-create his notable interpretation of Ives's ''Concord" Sonata, and there will be a performance of the recently reconstructed ''Emerson" Piano Concerto.

Ives was born in Danbury, Conn., in 1874, the son of a bandmaster. He was thoroughly trained as a musician at Yale, but he chafed, even then, against the polite constraints of his teachers. He worked as a high-profile church musician until he founded an insurance company in 1907. He continued to write music until about 1930; it was a patchwork quilt of hymns, rags, marches, patriotic songs, references to Beethoven and classical composers, and Ives's own bold, prescient inventions and innovations in harmony, polytonality, and complex rhythms. The work's design and effect, like a great quilt's, reflects the personality of the person who fashioned it. Although Ives lived until 1954, he heard very little of his music professionally performed. (His biographer, Jan Swafford, recalls meeting elderly theater musicians who remembered Ives as an odd figure who would turn up after shows, lean over the pit, and offer the players cash to stay on and read through his scores.)

Probably the most important Ives premiere during his lifetime was the pianist John Kirkpatrick's performance of the ''Concord" Sonata in 1939, 20 years after it was written. The critic Lawrence Gilman proclaimed it the greatest music ever written by an American, but Ives's work was so original and demanding that it was slow to find performers and to reach the public. ''Beauty in music," Ives once wrote, ''is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair."

Ives was not in the business of upholstering easy chairs. Much of his work long remained inaccessible, in manuscript, and most of what was published was full of errors. A scholarly edition of Ives's Fourth Symphony has been in progress for decades now but still hasn't been published. Swafford believes that the premiere of the Fourth Symphony under Leopold Stokowski 40 years ago, even with inexact details, represented the turning point in the composer's fortunes; since then Ives has become an American icon.

The reason for this, Swafford said in a phone conversation, is that ''Ives represents the best of America, the country at its most idealistic. He worked across the boundaries of high and low art in his day, and that is one of the most essentially American things about him. Also he had a kind of deep idealism about humanity and about music itself. He believed the human race was progressing and that music was part of it."

Swafford conceded that some of Ives's music needs to be explained before the public will understand it: ''Some of his music may sound like pandemonium, but by the end of it we can hear that everything has been moving in the same direction. People leave Ives performances on a real high."

According to Heiss, Ligeti once paid Ives the ultimate tribute: ''I've tried to invent new things all my life," Ligeti said, ''but everything I ever thought of, Ives has already done." Added Heiss, ''The important thing about Ives today, 50 years after his death, is that he still changes our horizons."

All Ives

Schedule for ''Charles Ives and His World" at the New England Conservatory. All events except the BSO concert are free. For details, call 617-585-1122 or visit www.newenglandconservatory.edu/concerts.

Tonight: Chamber music and the ''Concord" Sonata with pianist Stephen Drury.

Tomorrow: Film about Ives, ''Are My Ears on Wrong?"; lecture-demonstration by Drury, ''The Difficulty of Ives"; music for choirs and chamber orchestra (including a work by Ives's teacher Horatio Parker).

Tuesday: Film, ''Are My Ears on Wrong?"; panel, ''Conducting Ives" with John Heiss, Gunther Schuller, James Sinclair, Charles Peltz, and Jonathan Elkus; ''Songs, Marches and Outdoor Scenes," NEC vocal soloists and Wind Ensemble.

Wednesday: Film ''Are My Ears on Wrong?"; panel, ''Ives in His Time and Ours" with Ives biographers Jan Swafford and Vivian Perlis; orchestral works, including the ''Emerson" Piano Concerto in the realization by David Porter, NEC Festival Orchestra and Chorus, David Loebel, conductor, and Keith Kirchoff, piano.

Thursday: ''Singing Ives," master class with soprano Helen Boatwright and baritone William Sharp;film, ''Are My Ears on Wrong?"; lecture by Jonathan Elkus on Ives's Second Symphony; James Levine conducts BSO in program including Ives's Second Symphony, with preconcert lecture by Swafford.