Music - Peter Conrad celebrates Charles Ives, the man who first made America sing

Walt Whitman once claimed "I hear America singing", though what he actually heard - apart from his own megaphonic monologues - was imported sopranos such as Jenny Lind singing Italian operas at the outdoor concerts he attended in New York. America did not begin to sing until Charles Ives wrote music for it.

Ives, who died 50 years ago, made America sing, shout and barnstorm the heavens in jubilant symphonies, vocal settings of poems about dead cowpunchers or circus bands blaring down Main Street, and orchestral rhapsodies that transcribe the clanging of fire engines, the impressionistic rustlings of Central Park after dark, and the fizzy flare of calcium lights outside a Yale fraternity house.

His scores, as the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas says, are "gleeful, goofy, ecstatic and nostalgic". Nothing human was alien to Ives; he knew that American music had to be loud, expansive and chaotic. His father, a bandmaster in a Connecticut town, rejoiced when his own brassy troupe collided with another band playing a different tune at a different tempo, and applauded the young Charles when he found him playing the piano using his fists not his fingers.

Ives also understood that a truly American music must reinvent the European art form. At Yale, he competitively composed lieder using German poems already set by Schumann or Brahms; a new Ives CD by the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the mezzo-soprano Susan Graham includes his version of Dvorak's Songs My Mother Taught Me - better than the original because more touchingly tentative.

He soon gave up such cocky revaluations of the past, and experimentally worked out the procedures that came to be characteristic of modern music: microtonal slitherings, palindromes, a vagrant atonality. Leonard Bernstein was wrong to call Ives "an authentic primitive", as folksy as Grandma Moses or a cigar-store Indian. He received no credit for his innovations, because no one played his work. He therefore quietly earned his living, like the poet Wallace Stevens, as an insurance salesman.

The business of America, then as now, was business not art. His Second Symphony was first performed in 1951, 50 years after he composed it, with Bernstein conducting. Ives did not attend the concert, but dropped in on some Connecticut neighbours to hear a radio relay from Carnegie Hall. He waited for the final chord - an abrupt, jarring dissonance - then spat into the fireplace, wandered off to the kitchen, and made no comment.

In her contribution to the new disc, Susan Graham sings some of his quirkiest miniatures. "Soliloquy", subtitled "A Study in 7ths and Other Things", muses about nature while exploring the mellifluousness of what Ives called "the Yankee drawl". "Ann Street" spends less than a minute paying gabbled homage to the narrowest, shortest street in Manhattan. There are also samples of Ives the Romantic pantheist. "Thoreau", spoken and then sung, is his anthem to the hermit of Walden Pond, and "The Housatonic at Stockbridge" makes audible the voice of that "contented river", beside which Ives walked with his wonderfully named consort and muse Harmony Twichell.

After Graham's curtain-raiser, Aimard tackles Ives's vast Concord, Mass, 1845, a tour of the New England town which was the headquarters of transcendentalism. For want of a better name, Ives called it a sonata, though it is actually a symphony played by a solo pianist (with occasional assistance from a flute, the instrument that Thoreau kept in his cabin, and a soothing viola). The peremptory motto from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony resounds throughout. The four movements constitute a philosophical treatise, with the stress and strife of Emersonian will leading to the contemplative calm of Thoreau. But the sonata also resembles a compendious social novel, eavesdropping on four different households: among its characters are Nathaniel Hawthorne, assailed by the bogeys of puritanical conscience, and the loquacious father of Louise May Alcott, discoursing about "spiritual physics".

After debating metaphysical and psychological puzzles for 50 minutes, the sonata expires in beatific silence as Thoreau attunes himself to the respiration of nature. Concord, brilliantly performed by Aimard, is a reminder that America once represented the hope of a redeemed humanity and a harmonised world.

The Ives recital by Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Susan Graham is available from Warner Classics. Ives is featured in three concerts at the BBC Proms: the Fourth Symphony on 24 July, "Songs of Ragtime and Reminiscence" on 22 August and Concord on 30 August

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