Charles Ives was not just an insurance man and “weekend composer,” but the executive who arguably invented estate planning and—with music written deep into the night—became the fifth person to win the Pulitzer Prize in music. Not just a Connecticut Yankee, but a scion of a family that founded enduring local institutions and advanced abolitionism, on the page and on the battlefield. Not just a participant in avant-garde music in the United States, but virtually a one-man philanthropic trust supporting it. Not just a bringer of hymns, marches, and parlor songs into symphonies and sonatas, but a musical tinkerer whose working years in New York—and ambition to evoke whole worlds and philosophies in his music—overlapped with those of Gustav Mahler.

Less well-known than Ives's The Unanswered Question or Concord Sonata, the Sets for Small Orchestra—flexible-instrumentation works that transform his songs into wordless miniatures—had never been gathered on one album until conductor and distinguished Ives scholar James Sinclair released his own set of sets in June 2023. In this ArkivMusic Live Q+A, Sinclair and fellow eminent Ivesian Jan Swafford discuss this Naxos album, which features several world-premiere recordings. The pair have often appeared together to share their expertise on Ives, as in documentarian Anne-Kathrin Peitz's film The Unanswered Ives, but in this interview, their interpersonal rapport became wonderfully apparent.