Charles Ives (1874–1954) was a delightful American paradox. The composer of such moving, Brahmsian orchestral works as “Three Places in New England” and Symphony no. 3 “The Camp Meeting,” could also be a rip-roaring Connecticut Yankee. Early on, Ives combined a successful career in insurance with avant-garde composition, at a pace that eventually took its toll. Diabetes led to other physical problems, and after a health crisis in his early 40s, he stopped composing and doing business. Now a new “Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives,” edited by Tom Owens has appeared (University of California Press, 400 pages, $45) to unite these dichotomous careers.

Ives’s letters delightfully illustrate how a spiky musical modernist, whose roughly clotted and often unfinished works are the despair of some listeners and every music editor, could also be a cracker-barrel philosopher and refined man of culture. Ives was frightening to some kids; even grownups such as the composer Lou Harrison confessed they were scared by Ives’s habit of wildly swinging his cane to greet a visitor. The CD “Ives Plays Ives — The Composer at the Piano” is a joyous affirmation that a major loon can also be a major artist, with Ives playing the piano and roaring out his songs with abandon. Many of Ives’s most beloved works are like three Grandma Moses paintings superimposed on top of each another, with the expected sensory overload as a result.

The “Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives” underlines how important sports — especially baseball — were to Ives, and not just during his youth, when his school friends called him “Dasher.” In “Variations on ‘America,'” a work for organ composed around 1892, the organist’s legs stretch for the pedals like a base runner sliding into home plate. As late as 1948, Ives states in a letter that performing the organ “Variations” gave him “almost as much fun as playing baseball.” In 1938, after his friend the composer Carl Ruggles falls ill, Ives proposes to conduct Ruggles’ music at a memorial service by waving a baseball bat on the podium.

In his letters, Ives clearly contrasts this vigorous All-American sporting view of music with “ladybird prima donna conductors, Greek or Latin.” Yet Ives could also show refined cultural scope, far beyond his passionate love for the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which inform his majestic “Concord” Sonata for piano. When the Italian composer and music editor Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882–1973) writes to Ives in 1928, asking him to subscribe to a recently launched edition of the baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi’s works, Ives enthusiastically agrees. In 1931, when Ives hears that the New York Philharmonic is seeking a new music director, he writes to an old college friend on the Philharmonic’s board of directors, to nominate the remarkable Russian-born modernist Nicolas Slonimsky (1894–1995), a long shot to put it mildly. Ives admits in a letter to a different friend that Slonimsky was not “afraid of anybody and he has a very active mind — a bad combination sometimes.”

Ives himself combined rough macho posing and a tender solicitousness for family and friends. In an early 1907 letter to his wife Harmony, he proposes that a romantic stroll which they took in the Connecticut woods that autumn was the “greatest event in the history of this Country though the populace doesn’t know it — poor souls.” Ives’s daughter Edith sent him a long letter in 1942 to declare: “Your daughter – and her mother too, I know — will never cease to hold in her heart the great wonder of your love and understanding as a father and husband.” Ives is genuinely horrified when his close musical friend the composer Henry Cowell (1897–1965) is arrested in 1936 for having sex with underage boys and serves prison time at San Quentin. Yet Ives eventually joined a drive to free Cowell, and reconciled with him after his release and pardon. Later, when Ives’s friend and musical assistant Lou Harrison (1917–2003), a more discreet gay man with no scandalous baggage, suffers a nervous breakdown, Ives pays for his hospitalization with unfussy good will.

In his introduction, Tony Owens points out how Ives, unlike his arch-American contemporaries like Carl Ruggles, was never anti-Semitic. Modest in public ventures, Ives tells a group of friends not to name a new music society after him, as it would make him feel “like a hog.” The composer’s modesty and generosity make academic stinginess all the more glaring, such as when Yale University voted against giving Ives a posthumous honorary degree in 1954, an insult which still remains to be rectified. Such small-mindedness is happily countered by the abundant enlightenment to be found in this finely presented and scrupulously edited correspondence.