Picture a wealthy Manhattan insurance executive of the 1910s buried in mortality tables, then overlay one of the most radical avant-garde composers of the century, writing music the world would lack the vocabulary to understand for another 50 years. Both are Charles Ives, born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874. This episode traces how his father George, a Civil War bandleader with a New England reformer's streak, drilled him in bitonality, built quarter-tone contraptions, and taught him to hear two marching bands colliding in the town square as the true sound of the world.

We follow Ives from church organist at 14 through Yale football and studies with Horatio Parker to the actuarial department of Mutual Life, where he co-founded Ives and Myrick, helped invent modern estate planning, and found in overlapping timelines of risk a mirror of his  ...