Ives’s Three-page Sonata

Unlike his monumental First Sonata, aka the Concord Sonata, the American composer’s Third Piano Sonata is a stitch in time at under ten minutes in length. It was perhaps never really meant to see the light of day, given it was begun in the early 1900s and went unpublished until 1949 – just a few years before Ives’s death. He is said to have composed it as something of a joke, a means of winding up pretentious audience members. That idea is born out in the playful quirkiness of the three distinctive movements, one of which even quotes the chimes of Big Ben.