For Charles Ives, dissonance was a sign of strength and machismo. During one concert, when the audience began verbally expressing its distaste for one of his works, he reportedly stood and chastised the crowd, admonishing people to "open your ears and listen like a man!" He had little patience for the musically unadventurous. The same attitude appears in a note Ives attached to a copy of his Three-Page Sonata from 1905, which indicated that the piece was "made mostly as a joke to knock the mollycoddles out of their boxes and to kick out the soft ears." Despite its title (which merely refers to the manuscript space occupied by the original sketches), the Three-Page Sonata is a substantial work, cast in three brief but challenging movements. The first, Allegro Moderato, weaves musical references to Bach (the letters of the name translating, in the German notation system, as the notes B flat-A-C-B), into a densely dissonant and polyrhythmic web. Meters continually change and gestures continually misalign; twice, the right-hand figure divides the beat into six notes, while in the same amount of time the left-hand executes five. The effect is one of continual disorientation. The middle movement, a languorous Andante, continues the intermusical references by quoting the melody from Ever of Thee, a piece by Bach's teacher Carl Foeppl. The third and final movement takes the form of a clumsy, discombobulated march. Its opening fanfare follows an angular chromatic contour; in fact, the melody portentously takes the form of a 12-tone row. Polyrhythmic layering here is used with comic excess, growing ever-more convoluted until, with a sweeping crescendo, the march is suddenly interrupted by an off-kilter ragtime passage. The march eventually resumes, but is interrupted once more by the doodling ragtime figure before returning for the flashy final cadence. For decades, the Three-Page Sonata existed only in sketch form, snatches of it dispersed among the papers that survived him. It wasn't until 1949, before Ives' death but probably without his supervision, that composer Henry Cowell prepared a published edition of the sonata. The 1975 critical edition of the piece prepared by John Kirkpatrick, curator of the Ives Collection at Yale, replaced Cowell's version as the definitive performance score. It also informed the lively and thoroughly unmollycoddling recording of the work prepared in 1999 by David Berman.

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