An heir to New England Transcendentalism, Ives shared its reverence for the beauty and power of the individual. His love for spontaneous, untrained creativity led him to explore compositional methods that anticipated not only the ideas on atonality formulated by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern but the radical experimentalism of composers of the second half of the twentieth century. All the works on this disc, from the ferociously complex pieces for instrumental ensemble to the microtonal works for keyboards, represent Ives at his wildest and most visionary, intent on stretching the ‘ear muscles’.