Most remarkably, Ives’s experimentation took on a new seriousness.

Armed with techniques learnt from Parker and perhaps inspired by the
compositional systems of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that Parker
described in his music history lectures, such as organum, counterpoint and
rhythmic stratification (Scott, 1994), Ives began to produce, not mere sketches or
improvised ‘stunts’, but finished pieces that explore new procedures. Most
significant is a series of sacred choral works, mainly psalm-settings, that Ives may
have tried out with singers where he was organist, although no performances are
registered. Psalm 67 uses transformations of a five-note chord (arranged to create
the impression of bitonality) to harmonize a simple melody in a style resembling
Anglican chant. Psalm 150 features parallel triads that are dissonant against
sustained triads. Psalm 25 deploys angular, dissonant two-voice canons over pedal
points and includes a whole-tone passage that expands from an unison to a whole-
tone cluster spanning almost three octaves. In Psalm 24 the outer voices move in
contrary motion, expanding from a unison in each successive phrase and moving
first by semitones (often displaced by octaves), then by whole tones, 3rds, 4ths,
4ths and tritones, and finally 5ths; after the golden section of the work, there is a
contraction, phrase by phrase, using the same intervals in reverse order, to make
an approximate palindrome.

Psalm 14, also written around 1899, takes singers and listeners on a fascinating
musical journey which goes beyond the bounds of the tonal context. This is already
prefigured in the opening canonic entrance of the four voices on the tones g – d – a
– e, which combine to make up a chord in fourths. Then the choirs are separated,
taking turns striding from C, B flat and A flat Major to G flat Major, the farthest
point on the circle of fifths. At the sixth verse, Ives returns again to the starting key,
only to stay in E flat Major (the key of the Trinity) in the final, seventh verse.
However, he concludes the supplication for the salvation of the people of Israel out
of captivity with a mixture that tends toward the minor. This setting is also marked
by a high degree of mastery in terms of counterpoint and harmony, which conjures
up the world of Reger or early Schoenberg, although the incisive treatment of
language is reserved for Ives alone.

Psalm 24 was written in the summer of the year 1894, a few months before Ives’
father George unexpectedly died on November 4, and is seeped in his father’s
experimental spirit, in the bold beginning, for instance, with lines moving asunder
out of the unison as if in a mirror-image and ruthlessly dissonant leaps in the
individual voices which, however, can again and again be put together into sounds
capable of traditional interpretation.

In Psalm 67, written in the same year but revised in 1898, Ives works with
prescribed bitonality: soprano and alto in C Major, tenor and bass in G Minor. The
layout of the setting is strictly symmetrical. The middle stanza, the fourth (“O let
the nations be glad for joy”) is composed as a fugato, while homophony prevails in
the outside stanzas, 1 – 3 and 4 – 6. The two keys placed one above the other yield
a ninth chord (C – E – G – Bb – D) which actually tends toward F Major, making for
a wonderful, hovering effect which constitutes this setting’s actual fascination.