Charles Ives
John Adams composed "My Father Knew Charles Ives" in 2003 as a musical autobiography and as a homage to the early 20th-century American composer Charles Ives, who has been one of Adams's major musical influences. Adams's father Carl Adams did not actually know Charles Ives, but the composer observed many similarities between the two men's lives, and between their lives and his own. In the score program notes, Adams wrote: