The Rest Is Noise Series: Invisible Men: American Composers from Ives to Ellington. Alex Ross

young male, Yale’s “Dasher” Ives, had a sort of macho hang-up with respect to American classical-music culture, which, to his eyes, appeared to be an “emasculated art,” controlled by women patrons, effeminate men, and fashionable foreigners (“pussies,” “sissies,” “pansies,” and so on). More prosaically, Ives may have lost faith when an acquaintance was picked to teach at Yale as Parker’s heir apparent.

      Instead, Ives chose to make his living in life insurance, at which he proved remarkably adept. He was a proponent of the hard sell, skilled at getting people to buy policies that they didn’t know they wanted. He didn’t go door-to-door himself; his job was to think up sales techniques that could be passed along to a network of freelance brokers. Ives codified his innovations in the pamphlet The Amount to Carry, which laid out a sales pitch “simple enough to be understood by the many, and complex enough to be of some value to all!” Ives told each salesman to plant himself firmly in front of a potential customer’s door and “knock some BIG ideas into his mind.”