Variations on America by Charles Ives/Schuman
This is a witty, irreverent piece for organ which Ives composed at age 16. According to his biographers, it was played by Ives in organ recitals in Danbury and in Brewster, New York, in the same year. At the Brewster concert his father would not let him play the pages which included canons in two and three keys at once because they were “unsuited to performance in church--they made the boys laugh out and get noisy.”
This is Ives’ earliest surviving piece using polytonality. William Schuman wrote a most effective orchestra transcription of this work in 1964, and it is this version upon which William Rhoads based his equally effective band transcription.
