Ives was such a character. I was so intrigued with his music that I took the plunge and read his biography, a substantive tome. That was several years ago and I still remember certain gems from that book. He got the idea for his fourth symphony from hearing two marching bands crossing the intersection of two streets at the same time during a parade. He was a young boy then, but he was fostering the ideas in the late 19th century that would emerge as a groundbreaking classical composition in the early 20th century (although it was not given its proper recognition until the mid-20th century). His father was a musical influence, insisting that Charles learn to play the piano the "right way" before allowing him to indulge the music he heard inside his head. He used to have to go to movie theatres and pay the musicians who provided the soundtracks for the silent movies to play his compositions so he could hear what they sounded like outside of his head. He came to appreciate those musicians as highly accomplished because they could turn their musical repartee on a dime, depending on what scene was flickering up there on the silver screen. This after he had occasion to meet with a famous and highly regarded classical violinist at the time who dismissed Ives' music because he couldn't play it (I can't remember who exactly--was it Isaac Stern?...the same violinist who tried to give Einstein violin lessons but gave up telling Einstein his problem was he "couldn't count." lol)... His young daughter said it sounded like "Daddy's music" when the housekeeper dusted the piano keys. Ives made the bulk of his wealth selling life insurance; his net worth was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was a millionaire by today's standards. He wrote what was considered the definitive bible on how to close an insurance deal. He was devoutly religious but was given to, on occasion, cursing like a sailor. Later he had the grand idea of performing Symphony IV with two orchestras, each of them perched atop mountains across from each other, with two conductors, but the logistics of such an undertaking proved to be insurmountable. What a true American original.