After over thirty years of a composition Charles Ives achieved publication (114 Songs and its companion self-published volume, Piano Sonata no 2) only in 1922 and at his own expense. Except for one genre nearly nothing of his had been publicly performed. 114 Songs is a comprehensive charting of his development from a careful youth to the most radical composer in history, but has one major omission: songs written as church solos (though there are a couple of songs that are adapted from original forms that were solos.

Ives left his native Danbury, Connecticut in 1892 to take residence in New Haven. Since is marks in school had been poor, he needed two years seasoning at a college preparatory academy before he could enter Yale in 1894 at the age of twenty.

By the time he left town, he was a veteran church musician. At thirteen, he had been the youngest chief organist of a church in Connecticut. He was employed at the Danbury Baptist Church, to which he returned on Sundays during his first year. (He was to remain a church musician until giving up his last such post in 1902.)

His church music only sometimes has traces of Ives' unconventional musical thinking. He seems carefully to have set this genre aside from the rest out of consideration for the congregations, who, he recognized, had a different purpose in going to church than to sing or hear radical new music.

So the reasons he did not include such works as this new music for the venerable hymn (written in 1776 by Augustus Montague Toplady) in 114 Songs might be a combination of the following: (a) his development did not occur in this genre, (b) he considered his earliest worship service music naïve, (c) this music had been publicly performed in church. (In addition, he left a quantity of his church music behind in his last job, and that church subsequently lost it.

Ives' melody for "Rock of Ages" was probably written for the talented contralto of the Danbury Baptist Church, Isabelle Raymond, and may have been the sacred song she sang on April 30, 1893, the last day of Ives' tenure as organist there. The Danbury News reported this performance and described Ives' song as "a fine composition."

The song is through-composed (i.e., no repeating stanzas), with new textures frequently appearing in the organ part. The melody has little similarity to the familiar tune of the hymn, although it has elements of its rhythm, and exhibits a degree of Ives' future harmonic daring.

Despite its naivety, it is an effective and original composition, infused with a feeling of certainty in Faith that is appropriate to the message of the hymn text.



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