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General Category => Gustav Mahler and Related Discussions => Topic started by: Leo K on January 28, 2007, 05:44:33 AM
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I remember discovering Ives during my senior year in High School. I had checked out a Leonard Bernstein record that featured four different lectures on composers, Ives being the last one I believe. I'll never forget the sound of his Fourth of July (from his Holiday's Symphony) blaring from my turntable in the middle of the night as I lay in bed, eyes wide open. Thus began an obsession that last lasted for years (and is still with me, forever and into the next life!).
I love his music, but more and more I've come to love his ideas even more than the actual sounds he produced (I can get into more detail on this later).
I hope you all won't mind if I post some essays/documentaries on some of his works. I've been putting alot of various thoughts/research together on another forum for people new to Ives and it's been pretty fun.
For alot of you here, much of this stuff may be old hat and etc. So I hope this isn't a bother. :) Feel free to interupt at any time with recommendations and other discussion.
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In the 'postface' to his 1922 song collection 114 Songs, Ives wrote:
...[A]n interest in any art-activity from poetry to baseball is better, broadly speaking, if it is held as a part of life, or of a life, than if it sets itself up as a whole--a condition verging, perhaps, toward a monopoly or, possibly, a kind of atrophy of the other important values, and hence resting unfavorably upon itself. ... If a fiddler or poet does nothing all day long but enjoy the luxury and drudgery of fiddling or dreaming, with or without meals, does he or does he not, for this reason, have anything valuable to express?--or is whatever he thinks he has to express less valuable than he thinks?
This is a question that which each man must answer for himself. It depends, to a great extent, on what a man nails up on his dashboard as "valuable." Does not the sinking back into the soft state of mind (or possibly non-state of mind) that may accept "art for art's sake" tend to shrink rather than toughen up the hitting muscles--and incidentally those of the umpire or the grandstand, if there be one? To quote from a book that is not read, "Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy-chair?" Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason are we not inclined to call them beautiful? ... Possibly the fondness for personal expression--the kind in which self-indulgence dresses up and miscalls itself freedom--may throw out a skin-deep arrangement, which is readily accepted at first as beautiful--formulae that weaken rather than toughen the musical-muscles. If a composer's conception of his art, its functions and its ideals, even if sincere, coincides to such an extent with these groove-colored permutations of tried-out progressions in expediency so that he can arrange them over and over again to his delight--has he or has he not been drugged with an overdose of habit-forming sounds? And as a result, do not the muscles of his clientele become flabbier and flabbier until they give way altogether and find refuge only in exciting platitudes--even the sensual outbursts of an emasculated rubber-stamp, a 'Zaza,' a 'Salome' or some other money-getting costume of effeminate manhood?
114 Songs was Ives's second privately printed publication (about a year after the Concord Sonata) in order to "clean house" as Ives put it. He felt as if each song was like an article of clothing...pants, underwear, shirt and etc...hanging on a clothes line for all his "nieghbors" to see, which Ives felt was a good way for any "vain" man (to be humbled).
The quote above illustrates Ives hatred for "sissie-fied" art. He couldn't stand mannered music, or music written to please or promote fantasy (for this reason he hated Mozart and Wagner, to name a few). Ives went over the top at times in his rants against the "sissies" of the Europeanized tradition of musical America in the early 20th century, such as Toscannini and etc. He also had a fear about becoming soft, effeminine and weak...'un-man-ley' in his music. I think biographer Jan Swafford speculated this fear stems from Charlie's childhood, when it was more acceptable for a boy to play baseball rather than piano. When asked what instrument he played, Ives would often reply, "shortstop!"
Composer Eliot Carter claimed Ives purposely added more and more dissonance onto his youthful works as he got older,in order to be more 'modern' and spite the establishment. Whatever Ives actually did, there is no doubt that he was often angry, but I feel this 'anger' fueled his creativity in a good way (Beethoven comes to mind). In the end, Ives's strong sense of the mystery of existance, and his transcendental freedom between the physical and spiritual conditions of nature is what is heard most in his music.
Here is my favorite song from 114 Songs:
General William Booth Enters Into Heaven(1914)
Text: Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)
Booth led boldly with his big bass drum
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The Saints smiled gravely and they said, "He's come,"
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
Walking lepers followed rank on rank,
Lurching bravos from the ditches dank
Drabs the alleyways and drug fiends pale
Minds still passion ridden, soul flowers frail:
Vermin eaten saints with moldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of Death
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
Ev'ry slum had sent its half a score
The world round over. (Booth had groaned for more).
Ev'ry banner that the wide world flies
Bloomed with glory and transcendent dyes,
Big voiced lassies made their banjoes bang,
Tranced, fanatical they shrieked and sang;
"Are you? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?"
Hallelulah! It was queer to see
Bull necked convicts with that land made free.
Loons with trumpets a blare, blare, blare,
On, on, upward thro' the golden air!
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
Jesus came from the court house door,
Stretched his hands above the passing poor.
Booth saw not, but led his queer ones
Round and round the mighty courthouse square.
Yet! in an instant all that blear review
Marched on spotless, clad in raiment new.
My benchmark performance of this work is not the solo piano version, but the chamber orchestra and choir version performed by The Gregg Smith Singers, Ithaca College Choir, The Texuas Boys Choir of Fort Worth & The Columbia Chamber Orchestra. This orchestra version was not totally arranged by Ives, but he did supervise the arrangement.
Conducted by Gregg Smith
From the Columbia LP Stereo MS 6921 (out of print LP...released in the 70's I believe).
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Great points! "General William Booth" is a great song, as is "Charlie Rutledge" - it's hilarious! The best symphony written by an American that I know of, is the Ives 4th. But I also love the ending of his second symphony, where Ives has the trumpets play "Columbia, Jem Of The Oceans" at a full fortissimo, then finishes everything with a huge, dissonant chord. The first time I head that, I just died laughing - and it still makes me laugh.
Barry
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Great points! "General William Booth" is a great song, as is "Charlie Rutledge" - it's hilarious! The best symphony written by an American that I know of, is the Ives 4th. But I also love the ending of his second symphony, where Ives has the trumpets play "Columbia, Jem Of The Oceans" at a full fortissimo, then finishes everything with a huge, dissonant chord. The first time I head that, I just died laughing - and it still makes me laugh.
Barry
I agree the Ives 4th is the best American Symphony. Regarding recordings of this work, I feel the Faberman, Stokowski and Ozawa accounts dig deeper into the work than MTT. There is something about MTT's version that seems calculated somehow...I never really liked it that much, though the sound is good. I haven't really heard the more recent recordings out there yet, such as the John Adams and etc.
I have a real affinity for the 2nd...it's problably my favorite Ives overall, next to the restrained and lyrical 3rd.
Charlie is always good for a great laugh! I've laughed out loud to many songs..."soooometimes Nature's nice aaaaand sweet, like a little dandy..sometimes it ain't!!!" and etc.
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Check out the first, original version of the second symphony on Naxos. It's different, and it's equally good. Also, while they're really expensive, the new Andrew Litton/Dallas Symphony recordings of the four symphonies on Hyperion (two discs) are really outstanding; with excellent sound quality too. Litton's 4th is particularly wonderful. It's coupled with the first symphony, and "Central Park In The Dark". The Dohnanyi/Cleveland recording of the fourth symphony is quite good also.
Barry
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Check out the first, original version of the second symphony on Naxos. It's different, and it's equally good. Also, while they're really expensive, the new Andrew Litton/Dallas Symphony recordings of the four symphonies on Hyperion (two discs) are really outstanding; with excellent sound quality too. Litton's 4th is particularly wonderful. It's coupled with the first symphony, and "Central Park In The Dark". The Dohnanyi/Cleveland recording of the fourth symphony is quite good also.
Barry
I have heard the Naxos disc, and it's my favorite recording of the 2nd...but I haven't yet heard the Litton recordings....thanks for the heads up on those! Ditto on the Dohnany...totally agree.
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Ives's music became (not right away, but eventually) more dissonant, complex, conceptual and exciting after he met and started to court Harmony Twitchell (1876-1969).
(http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/5738/harmony2cu1.jpg)
Harmony...a registered nurse...the women who made a man out of crazy Charlie...Charlie who just graduated from Yale in 1898 (with a D+ average), who was all over the map musically, always cuttin' up with his pals, moving to New York (coney Island, bars, central park in the dark, ann street, ragtime baby), getting started in the insurance business, living with his batchlor buddies in some joint called Poverty Flat...
Harmony's brother Dave Twitchell, was an alumni of Poverty Flat and a best friend of Charlie. For ten years she only knew Charlie as her brother's best friend. Charlie was this guy who played the organ at Center Church in New Haven. Harmony would sit there quietly in Church with her friend Sally, who would nudge Harmony everytime Charlie purposely deviated from the hymnal harmonies he was supposed to play.
Harmony was the daughter of the great Reverand Joseph Twitchell and his lovely wife Harmony. The parishioners who frequented Rev. Joes church included: Charles Dudley Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and close friend Mark Twain. Harmony called Mark Twain 'Uncle Mark'. Her father was close to the great writer, who is the 'Harris' character in Twain's The Tramp Abroad.
Ives would later write: "I heard Mark Twain say through his own mouth, nose and cigar as he pointed across the room...to Mr. and Mrs. Twitchell: 'Those two blessed people-how greatly indebted I am to them.' "
(http://illuminations.berkeley.edu/images/mark_twain.jpg)
When Ives was courting Harmony, he had to present himself to Uncle Mark for 'approval'. "Well," said Twain, "the fore seems all right; turn him around and lets see about the aft." Then Twain turned to Harmony's sister Sue, who had told him about Charlies music, and he said, "Now that the young man has joined the Twitchell Family, he will get the same inspiration from his Harmony that I did from Joe and his Harmony."
Charlie and Harmony's first date occured on July 30, 1905. They went to a concert in Hartford to hear Dvorak's New World Symphony. Their courtship was a very Victorian courtship...very slow and formal, almost imperceptable to the human eye..."wary of too-impetuous steps, each unsure of the others feelings, each fearful of dissapointment"...
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[continued from above]
In 1906 Ives responded to his love of Harmony by finding his voice as a composer.
The Unanswered Question was written in July of 1906. Biographer Jan Swafford comments:
In the 1930's, when he was rummaging for new pieces to put before the public, Ives picked up "The Unanswered Question," carefully revised it, and attached a program something like what must have been on his mind in 1906. The strings are "the silences of the Druids, who know, see, and hear nothing"; over this indifferent universal background the trumpet repeatedly poses "the perennial question of existence"; the winds are the "fighting answerers" who, for all their sound and fury, get nowhere. ... The program also encompasses a philosophical idea that Ives would address incomparably in his music and in his writings: in contemplating the sublime mystery of creation, a question can be better than an answer [180-81].
Meanwhile, Harmony starts to write Charlie. Her letters are friendly and reserved, but the attraction is there and they must play the Victorian romance game. In December they go out to Williamsburg, Virginia to visit a close friend of Charlie's. Later she writes and tells him she loved the trip, and Charlie (fighting back bad health and depression) writes back..."It rained constantly and I took you back to the Holland House and bid you goodbye for sometime and felt very badly and felt as if I'd lost and left behind all that meant anything real to me."
About three weeks later, Ives has his first heart attack at age 32.
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[continued from above]
At the start of 1907, Ives recovers from his heart attack by lieing low at Old Point Comfort, some health spa in Virginia....not even seeing his beloved for a time. During this time he and Julian Myrick plan a new insurance ageny of their own. Meanwhile Harmony continues to write Charlie, revealing herself more and more. By setting her poetry to music (within the radar of Victorian parlor song vernacular), in particular a poem she wrote in 1906 called The World's Highway, Charlie nurtures the courtship along...maybe a little too slow for Harmony, who starts to hint that she's ready for him to make a move. Her poem literally tells him she's ready to leave the world she once knew (her nursing the sick from slumhouse to slumhouse) for him:
For long I wandered happily
Far out on the world's highway.
My heart was brave for each new thing
And I loved the far away.
I watched the gay bright people dance,
We laughed, for the road was good
But oh! I passed where the way was rough
And I saw it stained with blood.
I wandered on 'till I tired grew
Far on the world's highway
My heart was sad for what I saw
And I feared the far away.
So when one day, O sweetest day!
I came to a garden small.
And a voice my heart knew called me in
I answered its blessed call.
I left wandering far & wide
The freedom and far way
Bu my garden blooms with sweet content
That's not on the world's highway.
By the summer of 1907, Ives could breath a sigh of relief...Harmony was dating him exclusively and there was not a suitor in sight (and she had had many, as Ives painfully knew)...inspired, Charlie decides to play her his 'real' music...his experiental stuff. With her sitting next to him on the piano, he bangs out The Unanswered Question and Central Park in the Dark.
She is not offended. She would write later, "He Fixed it...so I could understand it somehow..."
Charlie tells her afterwords in a letter, "You are always absolutely loyal and loving and gentle and always have understood me, from the beginning. I always felt that intuitively as you always seemd to understand intuitively. That was one of the most wonderful things about it all."
In the autumn of 1907, on a trip to the Adirondocks, Charlie (after two years of courting) works up the nerve to tell her he cares for her, and quickly apologizes for being too forward! She writes, "I dont feel badly Charlie to have you say you care and there is just one reason why I dont & I shant tell you until you ask me."
Ives now undertands it is time to lay everthing on the line...and announces his decision to visit her at her home at Hartford.
Just as he about to leave...he gets sick again.
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[continued from above]
(http://www.charlesives.org/imagesgal/14_127.jpg)
Very concerned, Harmony writes, "I'm so sorry, Charlie, that being sick is what kept you yesterday--I thought it was lots to do perhaps...I'm awfully dissapointed--these days are so heavenly...But I shant enjoy them now until I know about you."
As soon as he recovers, he sets off from New York to meet his Beloved. It is October 21, of 1907, the time of year Harmony calls "the peace of God." The next day, on the Wood Road to Farmington, he spills his guts as they walk side by side. They kiss. "When you said there what you did," remembered Harmony afterwards, "I was swept into a flood & can't remember much else...that moment can never be changed or lost---It is one of the supreme moments of existence."
At the end of their long Victorian courtship, Charlie and Harmony appear to find a kind of spiritual rapport together that will intimately last till Charlie dies in 1954.
Harmony writes:
Darling--I feel so strongly what you say about our love...bringing happiness into other lives besides our own---I know the joy and beauty of it can be communicated to others and that is what I long to do with it---to give out of my abundance that the world may be a little happier.
I think, as you say, that living our lives for each other & for those with whom we come in contact generously & with sympathy & compassion & love, is the best & most beautiful way of expressing our love...but to put it too in concrete form of music or words would be a wonderful happiness, wouldn't it? I think you will & that will be doing it for both of us, my darling...
May I live to guard & grow more worthy of the love you give me...always, darling we will give God thanks & praise for revealing Himself as much as he has in each of us to the other--I dare to love you so fully, so utterly because it is all just God & religion...no one ever had a clearer call to their life's fulfillment & duty than I have had thru my love...my dear dear love.
July 28, 1908. A little more than a month after their wedding, Charlie and Harmony walk near Stockbridge, along the Housatonic (in New England) on a Sunday morning.
Ives:
We walked in the meadows along the river, and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and elm trees were something that one would always remember.
When they get back to New York, Harmony notices Charlie writing on his stave paper, attempting to get their serene walk along the Housatonic at Stockbridge into music.
Ives writes on the early sketch during the work's conception:
Housatonic Church across River sound like Dorrnance [a favorite hymn]. River mists, leaves in slight breeze river bed--all notes and phrases in upper accompaniment . . . should interweave in uneven way, riverside colors, leaves & sounds--not come down on main beat . . .
Ives also inserts a poem (by poet Robert Underwood Johnson) into the score:
"Contented river! In thy dreamy realm--
The cloudy willow and the plumy elm:"...
...Thou hast grown human laboring with men
At wheel and spindle; sorrow thou dost ken;...
Thou beautiful! From every dreamy hill
What eye but wanders with thee at thy will,
Imagining thy silver course unseen
Convoyed by two attendant streams of green...
Contented river! And yet over-shy
To mask thy beauty from the eager eye;
Hast thou a thought to hide from field and town?
In some deep current of the sunlit brown
Art thou disquieted--still uncontent
With praise from thy Homeric bard, who lent
The world the placidness thou gavest him?
Thee Bryant loved when life was at it's brim;...
...Ah! There's a sensitive ripple, and the swift
Red leaves--September's firstlings--faster adrift;..
...Wouldst thou away!...
...I also of much resting have a fear;
Let me thy companion be
By fall and shallow to the Adventureous sea!"
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Wow! Thanks. I happen to really, REALLY like Ive's "The Husatonic At Stockbridge". Great piece. 8)
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Wow! Thanks. I happen to really, REALLY like Ive's "The Husatonic At Stockbridge". Great piece. 8)
Yeah, same here...I love all the versions of that piece...song, chamber and full orchestra. I even like MTT's full orchestra version with a choir singing the lyrics. :)
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Third Symphony "The Camp Meeting" (1904)
I. Old Folks Gatherin'
II.Children's Day
III.Communion
(http://www.charlesives.org/imagesgal/14_091.jpg)
Ives on holiday, scoring the 3rd Symphony, his wife Harmony relaxing beside him.
(A page from the score)
(http://www.markzobel.com/images/fig2.11.gif)
[Charles Ives:]
I seemed to have worked with more natural freedom, when I knew the music was not going to be inflicted on others. And this is probably one of the reasons that, not until I got to work on the Fourth Symphony, did I feel justified in writing quite as I wanted to, when the subject matter was religious. So many of the movements in things used later were started as organ preludes and postludes etc. for church services, [and] I knew that they might be played. One has a different feeling in forcing your “home-made” on a public that can’t help itself, than on a friend who comes to your house and asks you to play. (You have to finish at a public hymn, but a friend can walk out!) In other words, a congregation has some rights which an intimate or personal friend hasn’t in full…Anyway, in considering my music, the secular things—that is, those whose subject matter has to do with the activities of general life around one—seem to be freer and more experimental in technical ways.
On looking at this page from the Third Symphony, I am reminded of the Alcotts score from the Concord Sonata. Like the Alcotts, the score of the symphony looks serene and very much like a hymn. In fact the Symphony is primarily based on various hymns that Ives remembered from his childhood. This 3rd symphony is a relatively early work, very tonal compared to his later work, and can be grouped with the 1st and 2nd Symphonies, the 1st String Quartet and the Violin Sonatas.
Over the years, I have come to really love Ives's early Symphonies, and his 1st String Quartet. According to the quote above, Ives felt that he wasn't yet 'free' in his early work, and he was more self-concious over what he presented to the public. This may be true, yet that doesn't diminish the real truthful beauty of his early work. Sometimes I enjoy these works even more than his later, more dissonant work. The early symphonies in particular project an acheing pastoral mood from the viewpoint of a romantic 19th century individualist, with one foot still rooted in reality, that ultimately sounds more rich and satisfying than a sentimental or romantic view. The 3rd Symphony is the climax of Ives's early style, and a kind of bridge between his past and his experimental future.
The work's subtitle "The Camp Meeting" gives us the context of this very nostalgic music. Ives's childhood memories of outdoor camp meeting rivivals were very meaningful for him, and problably connected him to his father on a deep spiritual level.
[from in online encyclopedia]
Camp meeting, outdoor religious meeting, usually held in the summer and lasting for several days. The camp meeting was a prominent institution of the American frontier. It originated under the preaching of James McGready in Kentucky early in the course of a religious revival (c.1800) and spread throughout the United States. Immense crowds flocked to hear the noted revivalist preachers, bringing bedding and provisions in order to camp on the grounds. The meetings were directed by a number of preachers who relieved each other in carrying on the services, sometimes preaching simultaneously in different parts of the camp grounds. Shouting, shaking, and rolling on the ground often accompanied the tremendous emotional release that followed upon “conversion,” although these extravagances were opposed and discouraged by conservative ministers. Camp meetings were usually held by evangelical sects, such as the Methodists and Baptists, and by the Cumberland Presbyterians and other newer denominations that developed out of the religious revival. In modified form they continued to be a feature of social and religious life in the region between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi River until comparatively recent times. In a sense, they survive in summer conferences and assemblies, such as the Chautauqua Institution, in revivals, and their spirit is captured by some televangelists.
Ives scholar Mark Alan Zobel writes:
Of course, by Ives’s time camp meetings had ceased to be conducted out of necessity and had become more of an elective form of worship. Moreover, getting to the meeting place was much less of an ordeal. The roads were better and the rail systems were well established. Travel in Connecticut during the late nineteenth century was hardly the same as, for example, Kentucky in the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, extra effort was required. Families still had to bring substantial provisions and cumbersome camping gear. The roads, though better, were generally flat dirt rather than paved or stone. Washed-out roads and wagon-wheel ruts hampered the camp meeting folk of Ives’s time just as they did the frontier families of the early 1800s. Only those willing to endure the struggle and discomfort made it to these outdoor encampments.
This idea of enduring adversity and gathering together is a theme that seems to have captured Ives’s imagination. In Memos, he recalls images of farmers and their families traversing the countryside on foot or in wagons, all making their way to the meeting place. One imagines Ives (then age four) witnessing the scene—perhaps from his family’s buggy while en route, or perhaps from within a tent erected on the campsite. The memory is of ordinary people coming from all around to take place in some strange, adult ritual that young Charlie could barely have understood. It must have looked unlike anything he was used to. Surely he had seen gatherings before: people going to church in Danbury, family celebrations at home, and holiday parades in town. Nevertheless, the experience of seeing so many travel so far to a seemingly remote place must have excited him—if for no other reason but that it was something out of the ordinary.
The 3rd Symphony takes us through a whole day at one of these Camp Meetings. The first two movements give us a different point of view (old folks and children), and finally, in the last movement, all come together and share communion with the Divine.
Next: Old Folks Gatherin'
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I believe that the 3rd symphony was the one that Mahler was allegedly taking a look at.
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Yes, thats correct...Soon I will post up a little discussion on this when I cover the 3rd Mov. of Ives's 3rd. :)
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I.Old Folks Gatherin'
Each movement of this symphony is based on an organ prelude Ives wrote for the Central Presbyterian Church in New York City (these early organ works are now lost). By 1902, Ives was working three of these pieces into a symphony, and in 1903 he worked on the short score (with most of the orchestration indicated). The pencil sketch of the final version was finished in 1904. He would continue to revise it over the coming years (it was probably fully completed in 1911).
The first movement of this symphony is a based on a Prelude Ives played on Dec. 12, 1901 at the church.
Personally, what I love most about the 3rd symphony is Ives's writing for the trombones (and horns for that matter), especially in the first movement. The trombones appear after the curtain opening-like gesture of the strings, and all of a sudden...we are witness to a kind of wide open space of memory, green hills and camp meetings over a wind of New England sun and air. I feel this way over the course of the whole symphony.
The first movement features these hymn tunes: Carl Gläser’s Azmon (1829), Charles Converse’s Erie (1868), and William Bradbury’s Woodworth (1849). Mark Zobel notes that "Azmon is most commonly paired with Charles Wesley’s hymn O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing (1739)".
(When I was a kid, I sang O For A Thousand Tongues To Sing in Church so many times I memorized the tune, so when I first heard this work I was suprised to recognize this tune and a couple of others. My grandfather played hymns in church, and taught me to play also, so I think this is one of the main reasons I love Ives's hymn derived works. Most who were brought up in church would know alot of this symphony from the get go.)
[Mark Zobel writes]
Several aspects of the musical context illustrate the idea of gathering. For example, the main theme is not heard at the beginning. Rather, it emerges from fragments of hymn tunes presented at the outset, which then coalesce into a complete thematic idea—a technique J. Peter Burkholder has called cumulative setting. Just as the camp meeting worshippers came from all around the countryside, these fragments appear from throughout the orchestra, and occur in such variety as to suggest the diverse individuals that Ives saw coming over the hills. Just as there was struggle in getting to the camp meeting, there is a “struggle” among these fragments to be heard as coherent units. At the end, they coalesce as though having been gathered together for the greater purpose of sounding out a complete tune—just as the camp meeting folk gathered together in song for the greater purpose of worship.
Regarding the use of these tunes, musicologist J. Peter Burkholder writes:
We have seen that most of Ives’s works based on existing music use borrowed material within a formal and thematic structure that is coherent even if the listener does not recognize the borrowed tunes. Programmaticism plays a role in a relatively small number of works, and in only a few are the borrowings to be understood primarily as fulfilling a program or illustrating a text. Yet in addition to the works whose borrowings can be explained in terms of a musical procedure or extramusical program, there are several in which the process seems entirely arbitrary, like a joke or compositional tour de force. These are the works in the tradition of quodlibet, a small group in Ives’s output but a significant influence on some of his greatest compositions. There are two basic techniques of linking existing tunes in a quodlibet: contrapuntal combination, in which tunes are piled on top of one another, and successive combination, in which fragments of various tunes appear in quick succession, whether in the same or a different instrument.
Ives was big on adding 'extramusical' associations in his works by using these hymns. The hymn tunes in this symphony create a context, or setting that:
[musicologist Peter Burkholder]
served more than purely musical functions for Ives. Because the themes were drawn from American hymn tunes, they carried extramusical associations, from the specific words and images of the hymn texts, to the feelings evoked by hymn singing or the flavor of American song. Together with the form itself, which embodies a progression from fragments to wholeness and from vagueness to clarity, these associations give Ives’s cumulative settings three kinds of extramusical significance: a celebration of American melodies; a sense of the spirit in which these hymns were sung; and…a perfect musical parallel to the experience described in the text or program.
I should mention the numerous "shadow lines" heard throughout the music. They are usually played on a solo instrument, such as a clarinet or violin, and they are generally dissonant in contrast to the general tonal discourse of the music. Certain recordings feature these "shadow lines" more than others, depending on the conductor's choice between various editions of the score. Ives wrote these shadowlines in the 1904 pencil score, but in the end, he was quite ambivalent about their use and crossed them out. However, he later requested that they be reinstated in later editions of the score. He basically didn't want these shadow-like melodies to intrude onto the main discourse of the music, so he generally left it up to the conductor to decide. Ives never explained why he wanted them there in the first place.
This movement (in most editions used) ends with a shadow line...a solo violin playing What a Friend We Have in Jesus . Zobel writes:
As Ives recalled, his father sometimes led the singing with a violin. Could this line be representative of Ives’s father? For that matter, might all the shadow lines be representative of his father’s influence? George Ives was skilled with a number of instruments, and the diversity of instruments in which the shadow lines appear could signify his presence in Ives’s memory. Whatever their meaning for Ives, their presence leaves much to the imagination which, in the end, may be what Ives most wanted.
(http://newyorkphilharmonic.org/ives/img/YR_Trumpet.jpg)
George Ives
Next: A Children's Day
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I really have been enjoying these tidbits on Ives. I really appreaciate you doing this. I'll keep reading as much as you keep posting. Thanks.
Barry
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Thanks Barry...I'll keep posting then :)
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...continued from above...
II. A Children’s Day
Harmony Ives became pregnant within the first weeks of her marriage to Charles. Both were excited and anxious to start a family, but during the month of April of 1909, a pregnant Harmony was taken to the hospital due to a problem with the pregnancy. Tragically, she had a miscarriage and was given an emergency hysterectomy in the process. She was in the hospital for a month. She would never be able to have children again.
A devastated Ives worked on the song based on a poem by Keats, called “Like A Sick Eagle”:
The spirit is too weak;
mortality weighs heavily on me
like unwilling sleep,
and each imagined pinnacle and steep
of Godlike hardship
tells me I must die,
like a sick eagle looking towards the sky.
As the 1909 summer came to a close, Charles and Harmony went vacationing with her family at Pell Jone’s lodge on Elk Lake in the Adirondacks. Harmony recovered from her operation here, writing in her diary, “A perfect vacation. Charlie working on the Symphony.”
(http://newyorkphilharmonic.org/ives/img/YR_ElkPk.jpg)
The photo above shows Charles sitting close to his wife, working on the 3rd Symphony during their vacation. Who knows what kind of thoughts or emotions went through his mind while orchestrating the second movement, A Children’s Day, but whatever he was going through, his work was progressing with a strong maturity and confidence. The playing children in his Symphony would continue to play for eternity, like a film tucked in a dreamy corner of the mind, easily recalled.
Charles Ives:
At the summer Camp Meetings in the Brookside Park the children, (more so the boys) would get marching and shouting the hymns…and the slow movement [Children’s Day recalls] a serious time for children, Yes, Jesus Loves Me—except when old Stone Mason Bell and Farmer John would get up and sing—and some of the boys would rush out and throw stones down on the river.
Mark Zobel writes:
Another key aspect of Ives’s childhood was play—imaginative, inventive play. Ives grew up during the golden age of childhood in which play of this kind was central. In a time before television, video games, and computers, play was a highly social and creative venture. Creative play and playing music often went hand in hand in the Ives household. Ives recalled once that, where practice and music making were concerned, George was not against a reasonable amount of “boys fooling.” Such fooling included playing a fugue in four keys at once, singing a song in one key and accompanying in another, performing more than one song at a time, and performing off-beat, wrong-key accompaniments to familiar tunes. Far from frivolous wastes of time, these musical experiments stimulated Ives’s creativity, ventures that would pay off later during his compositional years. As Ives later recalled, “what started as boy’s play and in fun, gradually worked into something that had a serious side to it that opened up possibilities.”
Ives chose hymns that would complement the playful, happy atmosphere of this movement. The main tunes used are The Happy Land , Naomi (arr. Lowell Mason), and Fountain (arr. Lowell Mason).
Here are some musical examples of these hymns (from Zobel’s dissertation on this Symphony):
Naomi
(http://www.markzobel.com/images/fig3.1.gif)
The Happy Land
(http://www.markzobel.com/images/fig3.2.gif)
Fountain
(http://www.markzobel.com/images/fig3.3.gif)
The lyrics to The Happy Land could be Ives’s testimonial to his sacred memory of childhood, his muse, a tangible promised land where he can still hold his father’s hand and feel protected, and watch his father take up the violin and lead a chorus of farmers and townspeople to sing:
There is a happy land, far, far away,
Where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day;
Oh, how they sweetly sing, worthy is our Savior King,
Loud let His praises ring, praise, praise for aye.
Come to that happy land, come, come away;
Why will you doubting stand, why still delay?
Oh, we shall happy be, when from sin and sorrow free,
Lord, we shall live with Thee, blest, blest for aye.
Bright, in that happy land, beams every eye;
Kept by a Father’s hand, love cannot die;
Oh, then to glory run; be a crown and kingdom won;
And, bright, above the sun, we reign for aye.
(http://www.charlesives.org/imagesgal/14_111A.jpg)
(Ives and his daughter Edith in 1924)
Even though Ives worked the Naomi hymn (see notation in above example) into his Symphony years before the loss of their child, Mark Zobel noticed a “striking parallel” between this hymn and “certain events in Ives’s life” that are worth mentioning here, which I’ll briefly describe:
--In the Book of Ruth, Ruth allows the aging and childless Naomi to adopt her [Ruth’s] own son. This enables Naomi and her new husband to have an heir, and also saves Naomi and her husband from being social outcasts. The lyrics of the Hymn are a prayer of thanks and gratitude for God’s intervention:
Father, whate'er of earthly bliss
thy sovereign will denies,
accepted at thy throne, let this
my humble prayer, arise:
Give me a calm and thankful heart,
from every murmur free;
the blessing of thy grace impart,
and make me live to thee.
Let the sweet hope that thou art mine
my life and death attend,
thy presence through my journey shine,
and crown my journey's end.
--In 1916, Charles and Harmony adopt a young girl named Edith, which in turn gives Charles and Harmony a new found peace and Joy during a particularly difficult and stressful time in their lives and marriage. Zobel observes:
Just as Naomi’s adoption of Ruth’s child eased a complicated social and economic situation, the Ives’ adoption of Edith eased the complications of the preceding years by bringing new happiness into their lives.
It is not known whether Ives was conscious of this parallel or not, but Zobel states:
Ives’s choice to retain the tune in later versions (particularly in the 1909 revision which, interestingly, was scored during their vacation at Elk Lake in August while Harmony was recuperating from the surgery) suggests that the tune might have taken on a special significance for him given the events of the preceding four months.
Next: Communion
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III.Communion
(http://www.charlesives.org/imagesgal/smCEI_57.jpg)
Ives at Yale
In May 1896, Ives handed in the one major work assigned for his sophomore year at Yale. His First String Quartet (subtitled “From the Salvation Army”) is a seed that would later blossom into the Third Symphony.
Like the later work, this Quartet was put together from various pieces he wrote for organ and strings at church. The Quartet is an experimental piece, mostly made up of gospel hymns. The first movement is a fugue based on the hymn Missionary Chant (“From Greenland’s Icy Mountains”) and Ives would later orchestrate it and place it in his Fourth Symphony.
This Quartet is a rather loose and rambling student work, but it is one of my favorite moments of Ives’s hymn reflection-music (a fantasia-communion of hymns), and very much a blueprint for his later larger works. The use of hymn quotations are very much like the Third Symphony, except at this stage the writing is not as conceptually or formally strong as the Symphony.
The First String Quartet probably offended his Professor, Horatio Parker, who Ives would later despise, but at the same time Ives learnt much about abstract musical form from his teacher. Ives remembered how Parker went off the rails when it came to revival hymns or popular music of any kind…Parker would shout, “In music they should have no place. Imagine, in a Symphony, hearing suggestions of street tunes like ‘Marching through Georgia’ or a moody and Sanky Hymn!”
(http://www.classical-composers.org/img/parker_horatio.jpg)
Horatio Parker
Biographer Jan Swafford mentions how in 1900 Parker would lecture his students how revival music was, “Vulgar with the vulgarity of the streets and the music hall. If sentimentality is evil…what shall we say of vulgarity?...Let the stuff be confined to the mission where it may do some good. Among people of any appreciable degree of refinement and culture it can only do harm.”
Jan Swafford:
What could Parker do then, then, with his student who seemed incurably infested with crude hymnody and program music, who without shame could title a string quartet, that purest of genres, “From the Salvation Army?”
To be continued…
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…continued from above…
(http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/mahler.jpg)
Gustav Mahler
In New York, early on in 1911, Gustav Mahler walked into the Tams Music Copying Service (along Tin Pan Alley). While browsing around inside, he noticed the score to a Third Symphony by some unknown American composer named Charles Ives. After looking the score over closely, Mahler decided to take it with him back to his home in Austria, possibly intending to have this work performed in the future. Mahler was almost finished with his tenure with the New York Philharmonic (as Director), but his time in New York had reportedly been an unhappy one. Mahler returned to Vienna, but his heart disease was very advanced and he died in May.
Jan Swafford writes:
Mahler had glanced at a Symphony by an unknown and apparently amateurish American and recognized a kindred spirit. He saw a composer placing, as he did, the commonplace, the humble, the shopworn in a symphonic context, and in the process renewing both the material and the symphonic genre. Mahler also saw a deliberate and touching musical naïveté close, in its Yankee voice, to his own way of evoking Austrian folk songs and landlers.
The finale of Mahler’s own Third Symphony is very similar to Ives’s Third. Both finales are slow and rather meditative and mystical. Even the programmatic content is similar; in Mahler the theme is love, and in Ives the theme is communion. The differences lie in the length and the dynamics. Mahler uses around 25 minutes and ends with a glorious crescendo, while Ives takes about 7 minutes and remains relatively quiet throughout. Different strokes for different folks…yet both are great.
Henry Cowell:
He [Ives] feels that music, like other truths, should never be immediately understood; there must always remain some further element yet to be disclosed. A complete musical statement, in all its clarity and simplicity, like any absolute truth is an ultimate, not a beginning. Ives reserves it, therefore, for the culmination of a work.
The finale to Ives’s Third has eluded me for many years. It is almost like water. When I try to remember the music, I have a difficult time remembering its sound. I vaguely remember a kind of kaleidoscope mish mash of strings and woodwinds that meander through a forest, with no direction. When I was first getting to know this work, I often would stop listening after the 2nd movement, or I would fall asleep if I decided to stick it out. The movement feels formless. This effect may have been what Ives intended. Unlike the other movements, he doesn’t quote from as many hymns.
This may be because of the title…Communion…resolving from separation into an enjoining energy…individual-less.
Mark Zobel:
The title [Communion] was never used when the organ piece on which it was based was played in church. Only when the music was recast in the form of a symphony (a decidedly secular genre) was the term invoked in a programmatic way. It seems clear that Ives, though perhaps not in the role of preacher, was trying to suggest something of the inner life to the listener as well as emulate the decidedly non-sectarian spiritual tone of his hero Beethoven, whose Ninth Symphony has achieved a state as close to universal as any symphonic work of the modern tradition. Just as the hymn tunes Ives borrowed would undoubtedly have suggested something devotional to postwar listeners, the use of the term communion was perhaps calculated to suggest something deeper than an outdoor encampment.
In the past, I haven’t really listened to this work with a story in mind. As I mentioned earlier, I really love Ives’s writing for the trombones, but his complete orchestration of this work is glorious. More than any other work by Ives, I usually listen at the sonority of the instruments rather than a ‘story.’ Yet, as you might have guessed, I really like the ideas Mark Zobel puts forth in his dissertation on this Symphony. He has given me a new appreciation for this work. Now I realize the great concept behind this Symphony:
Mark Zobel:
How interesting that Ives chose communion, a theologically loaded term, as the theme for this final movement, especially since the symphony depicts a Christian journey of sorts…we have seen how Ives’s tune-usage illustrates the idea of a journey. In Old Folks Gatherin’, Ives gives the listener his impressions of people coming from all around the countryside to take part in the camp meeting. Musically, he represents this in the form of a cumulative setting wherein tune fragments are gathered together from around the orchestra to coalesce at the end into a unified thematic statement. In Children’s Day, Ives gives the listener impressions of childhood playfulness. Here, he uses devices such as quodlibet and wrong-note accompaniments to familiar tunes in order to represent (1) children at play on the campground and (2) the kind of “boys fooling” that often characterized music making in his childhood home. On one level, the ideas expressed in Old Folks Gatherin’ and Children’s Day suggest a program for the symphony wherein people arrive as “old folks” and are then transformed spiritually into a child-like state of innocence which then prepares them to receive communion. Intended by Ives or not, the pattern of events depicted in this symphony bears a striking resemblance to Jesus’ scriptural admonishment about first becoming like little children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. This does not indicate that Ives is deliberately making a theological argument, only that there is a striking parallel between this aspect of the Biblical narrative and the musical context thus far.
Moreover, the final movement lends further support to that parallel. Perhaps realizing that the communion ritual is rather mystical and abstract, and that it embodies properties that are not of the familiar world, Ives used fewer familiar tunes here than in the previous two movements. In Old Folks Gatherin’ and Children’s Day, borrowed materials appear in almost every measure. Here, however, the borrowings are relatively rare. Just as there is little of the familiar world in the theology of the communion ritual, there is little of the familiar musical world in this final movement.
The subtleties of this finale are deep and lasting. There is a quality in the quiet strings that hints of a plane beyond quietness. Now that I’ve learned to listen closer (but not consciously, strange enough) I can now recall the little bits I like. The work no longer feels claustrophobic…feels more wide open and transparent, almost like a secret everyone knows that doesn’t need to be said out loud. The finale to the Third is a kind of prototype for many similar endings in Ives’s future works: the Piano Trio, the 2nd String quartet, the Concord Sonata, and the 4th Symphony among others.
The Third Symphony had its premiere on April 5, 1946 under Lou Harrison’s direction with the New York Little Symphony. Much critical acclaim followed this performance, leading to the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Ives on May 5, 1947 for music.
Characteristically, Ives called the award “a badge of mediocrity” and also quipped, “Prizes are for boys, I’m grown up.” However, in private, Ives intimated in a letter to friend Lou Harrison that he was flattered by the award.
Mark Zobel:
As of this writing, one hundred years have passed since Ives completed principal composition of the Third Symphony in 1904. Questions as to its enduring significance may seem ill timed now, as grass roots America (the tunes of which Ives eagerly borrowed) scarcely knows the name of Charles Ives, much less any of his music. He is certainly beloved by pockets of music-lovers the world over, but to speak of this particular work as somehow preserving the essential spirit of the American camp meeting tradition with the same widespread and long-standing influence as the Epistles would be an overstatement. As music, the Third Symphony is an important part of America’s musical heritage. As a pastoral and mythic vision, however, it is awaiting discovery.
Currently, America’s musical attentions lie elsewhere—whether on the popular songs of our time, or masterworks more central to the canon. Just as the Great Depression, the spread of Fascism, and World War II primed postwar audiences for the Third Symphony’s tonal familiarity and tuneful reminiscences, one wonders if the declining economy, spread of terrorism, and war in Iraq might not prime the audiences of today. We owe it to ourselves to find out, because this symphony has things to teach us about the beauty of the inner life which, for Ives, was a most wonderful “place in the soul, all made of tunes, of tunes of long ago.”
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An Election (It Strikes Me That...)
For Male (in unison) Chorus and Orchestra
Also known as...
November 2, 1920
for Voice and Piano
(http://www.lib.msu.edu/vincent/findaids/harding.gif)
President Harding
Ives wrote this work in response to Harding's presidential victory (won by a landslide) in 1920. In the score of the song, Ives writes, "sung as a soliloquy of an old man whose son lies in Flander's Fields." We don't need to get into the details of the political arena at the time (Harding led a corrupt and incompetant administration), but on hearing the music it is obvious this is one of Ives's 'blowing off steam' pieces. I never think too much on the political anger when I hear this work...I really love the unison voices and the ending, which is my favorite Ives ending ever. He wrote his own lyric, which reads more like a rant:
It strikes me that
some men and women got tired of a big job; but, over there our men did not quit.
They fought and died that better things might be!
Perhaps some who stayed at home are beginning to forget and to quit.
The pocketbook and certain little things talked loud and noble, and got in the way;
too many readers go by the headlines, party men will muddle up the facts,
so a good many citizens voted as grandpa always did,
or thought a change for the sake of change seemed natural enough.
“It’s raining, let’s throw out the weatherman, kick him out! Kick him out! Kick him out! Kick him out! Kick him!”
Prejudice and politics, and the stand-patters came in strong, and yelled, “slide back! Now you’re safe, that’s the easy way!”
Then the timid smiled and looked relieved, “We’ve got enough to eat, to hell with ideals!”
All the old women, male and female, had their day today,
and the hog-heart came out ofhis hole;but he won’t stay out long,
God always drives him back!
Oh Captain, my Captain!A heritage we’ve thrown away;
but we’ll find it again, my Captain, Captain, oh my Captain!
I discovered some a great commentary on this work, by Emily Graefe:
The song raises issues of the duty of each citizen to vote intelligently, and to uphold the founding fathers’ vision of democracy. It focuses on the dualities of the individual’s duty to action and passivity in relationship to the betterment of society. Although sung by one man, there is dialogue between him, who speaks of the duty the individual as to society, and the people who have forgotten this duty. They are shown as passive, while the singer is active. The song pities those who wanted to keep the status quo. They are presented in stark contrast to the soldiers who fought and died for change in World War I. The listener is reminded of this with
the brief musical and lyrical quotation of the popular war song, “Over There” by George M. Cohan, in measure six. We are told that the soldiers “fought and died that better things might be!” whereas “the timid smiled and looked relieved, ‘We’ve got enough to eat, to hell with ideals’!” The Transcendentalists would see the timid as resigning their individuality to what society proscribes, instead of challenging ideas and finding something to believe in.
Ives presents his bias clearly and the listener does not doubt which set of people he believes are better individuals. The soldiers possessed individual honor and duty to serve their country and force a change for the better. The people at home, on the other hand, are easily satisfied and lose their desire to change the world for an ideal. They do not act on their own accord because they are part of a group mentality and possess a placidity that prohibits their own ideas from being fostered.
Musically the piece is varied. As is evidenced by the lyrics, a dialogue is set up between two different groups that represent action and inaction, which gives the song a unique character. This is handled musically by the use of staccatos in the accompaniment when the group speaks. An ostinato figure beginning in measure four is said to be played in “an uneven and dragging way,” showing the sluggishness of the passive group and makes that inaction cohesive throughout the piece. The staccatos show how their mentality is detached from the larger understanding of what is good for society. Throws of passion are tempered by lines that are practically spoken, which help to express the duality present in the song. The music enhances the whirlwind of emotion shown in the lyrics.
The song incorporates unusual musical ideas to further Ives’ point. To begin with, the piece has no key signature or time signature. This is common in Ives’ music because of his chromaticism and polyrhythms, but also, those things would simplify the piece and break it down into conventional language, just as politicians break things down for the public so they feel they have nothing worth voting for. Ives shows the contrast between “there” and “here” by the triplet rhythm groupings for the “there” section (m. 6, 7) in the beginning. It is found in both the melody and the accompaniment, either separately or together.
This unifying rhythm shows the unity in duty to the country and society. Also, the texture of thick chords shows unity because the notes are played together. This rhythm is not found again until the ending call to “my Captain.” Also not heard until the ending is a triple forte dynamic. It occurs in the beginning on the word “fought.” The soldiers’ duty was expressed through action, whereas society’s desire to “quit,” is marked by a pianissimo. Underpinning the phrase “beginning to forget and to quit” are minor descending chords to show his melancholy over this fact.
The state of the majority’s inaction is shown musically. When Ives is describing the common attitude as being “to hell with ideals,” he has the singer descend on a chromatic scale. This motion alone shows the exhaustion and release with which the individual can easily resign his role as an active citizen. Details like these descending chromatic figures show the general downtrodden nature of the country’s political situation. The five-note clusters in the left hand of the accompaniment for “to hell with ideals” are ascending and come together with the descending right hand line. The result is not harmony and agreement, but collapsing inwards and is another example of the inactive mood he tried to create. Both the chromaticism and tone clusters do not serve a traditional purpose harmonically.
By associating these stagnant musical ideas with the inaction of society, Ives further links his text to the music. The murkiness of the clusters of tones is ambiguous and unpleasant, especially for the audiences of his day. They represent the passive citizens in the song, and the unharmonious nature of the clusters marks the citizens’ grating effect on the country. The dark dissonances serve to echo the dark place that the American government is in: the alternative path of the individual, one in which he resigns his duty to society, leads to a dim world with little enlightenment.
The ending section with the call to “my Captain” is the climax of this emotional and bitter critique on society. One might expect this hopeful end full of major chords and clear harmony because of its hopeful ending that America will reclaim its past of involved government. Ives chose not to be so simple for this ending. The chords in the last five bars are the same, beginning with a loud proclamation (f) followed by a quiet one (p).
This is symbolic because the dynamics show the polarity that exists between individualism and the group. The first chord is anchored in the bass clef with a C-major chord. The vocal melody outlines a C-major chord before hovering around e, only to settle on c, giving the impression that C is the root. What is placed in the accompaniment on top of the C chord, though, is an A-minor chord.
This bitonality serves to demonstrate the two forces of individualism and group, with great tension resulting from the two. The second, quieter but more dissonant, is built out of a set of augmented fourths centered on C, D, and E (C to F-sharp, D to G-sharp, and E to A-sharp), which show that Ives chooses his intervals with some unifying element. The tonal ambiguity for the ending section proves that even though the past can be looked to for inspiration, it cannot be replicated. By evoking this past spirit, clarity is not reached because it has no place in the present. The diminuendo for the passage suggests that the memory will die away if it is not enhanced by a modern event to replace the ghost of the past.
The nation’s “heritage” is discredited because its citizens have neglected their duty of being informed about their government and living by high ideals. The song ends with a call to “my Captain,” Walt Whitman’s poetic reference to Abraham Lincoln.
Ives leaves the listener with an idealization of the past of Lincoln’s day when Ives believed that a strong individual led the country and when the people could be democratic about voicing their opinions. That age in history could not be repeated, though. The Transcendentalists felt the weight of the past pressuring them to live up to the ideals of their revolutionary forefathers, just as Ives fondly remembers an old way of American government. Ives recognizes that the past cannot be
recreated, so he uses this memory to propel the country into action.
The Transcendentalists used a similar technique in regards to the Anthony Burns slave trial. They did this by emphasizing America’s formative identity as a bastion of freedom. When southerners threatened to bring the escaped slave Anthony Burns back to the south, northerners
were rallied by the idea that they had to preserve their identity with freedom. By evoking images of the Revolutionary War, they moved the citizens of Boston to action to prevent the return of the slave. Ives believed that “the need of leaders in the old sense is fast going – but the need of freer access to greater truths and freer expression is with us.”
He used the memory of a leader to encourage citizens to become their own leaders empowered to make their own decisions.
I feel this is an great, if not essential work in Ives's catalogue. A great rant arqueing his political view and hatred for everything he considered weak and spineless in America. It has a hard, comical and industrial air about it. I keep imaging a cold winter sky every time I hear this. It is very raw and brittle sounding...very cold, in a sense. Yet the ending is such a blissful cry...the mood blooms into something else...MY CAPTAIN (Whitman's evocation of Lincoln after Lincoln's assassination).
My favorite version of this can be found on this reissue:
(http://www.musicweb.uk.net/Ives/CD_Sym_4_Stokowski.jpg)
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In a way, you can say this post is a continuation from the post above (Ives's piece on President Harding)...
Lincoln, The Great Commoner
For Unison Chorus and Full Orchestra
(http://www.library.yale.edu/musiclib/EAD/IvesIncipits/X184.GIF)
Lincoln..."Oh, Captain, my Captain."
(http://www.historyplace.com/lincoln/lincpix/chair.jpg)
This started as a song, written in 1921 and is included in Ives's 114 Songs. The orchestra version here possibly dates from 1923.
This feels like a companion work to An Election (It Strikes Me That...). The mention of "My Captain" in the Election, the unison chorus, and almost the same musical material (that awesome low bell) in both endings tie these two songs together. The brass writing is stunning and scary in a sublime way.
More great commentary from Emily:
Sometimes the individual needs a role model to be inspired by when he searches for ways to be active in his own transcendence. Looking to others for inspiration to be an individual, Ives chose to recognize Abraham Lincoln. While he has other songs named after people, such as “Walt Whitman” and “Emerson,” those songs deal with the ideology of those people rather than their actual lives. Initially Lincoln appears in “from ‘Lincoln, the Great Commoner’” (Song 11) with text by Edwin Markham and a poem by Ives placed under the title.
Ives returns to Lincoln later in the 114 Songs, as we have seen, by putting the former president in the crucial climax of “Nov. 2, 1920.” Conjuring up Lincoln brings up thoughts of individualism and the idealism and duty that accompany individual action. Another admirable characteristic was Lincoln’s commonness, which helped make him accessible to those looking for transcendental guidance. This is shown more in the Markham text rather than in the Ives poem (see following), especially in the opening line: “and so he came from the prairie cabin.”
The Transcendentalists greatly admired the common man. Looking to Lincoln as a commoner helps to encourage the individual’s journey towards enlightenment. By aspiring towards the simple life, one could escape from superficial elements of society and achieve transcendence.
Ives’ poem is meant to heighten the individual duty Lincoln exhibited to his country and
himself, and is a great insight to what he believed was the essential Lincoln. He lists the
challenges Lincoln had to face, “The curse of war and strife!/The harsh vindictiveness of men,” but noted that “What needed to be borne_he bore!/What needed to be fought_he fought!/But in his soul, he stood them up as_naught!”
For Ives, Lincoln’s duty to carry out his ideas is what should be admired and remembered. Ives could list his anti-slavery efforts or action in the Civil War, but all of the problems Lincoln faced could be simplified by stating that he did what he believed was right.
The song itself “from ‘Lincoln, the Great Commoner’” opens immediately with a sense
of action in the accompaniment. It is marked “firmly, but actively and with vigor” to show that when the individual becomes active he must do so with conviction.
And so he came from the prairie cabin to the Capitol,
One fair ideal led our chieftain on,
He built the rail pile as he built the State,
The conscience testing every stoke,
To make his deed the measure of the man.
So, came our Captain with the mighty heart;
and when the step of earthquake shook the house,
wrenching rafters from their ancient hold,
He held the ridgepole up and spiked again the rafter of the Home
He held his place he held the long purpose like a growing tree
Held on thro’ blame and faltered not at praise,
and when he fell in whirlwind, he went down as when a
Kingly cedar green with boughs goes down with a great down,
upon the hills!
The first half of the lyrics explains Lincoln’s convictions. The second half tells of the
strength of those convictions. To show the stability one needs to stand as an individual, Ives used recurring musical ideas to strengthen this point about being an individual. The piece is unified by a rhythmic motif (dotted eighth/sixteenth note) in the first part of the song. Aside from this rhythmic motif, he uses the opposite of that rhythm (sixteenth/dotted eighth) three times in a row during “came our Captain.” This is an important link to be made because it involves the subject, Lincoln, and the verb, “came,” to show how he fulfilled his duty to his country through action.
Later in the song, Ives repeats the same accompanying chord four times
underneath the phrase “held the long purpose.” The chord is based on perfect fifths stacked on top of one another beginning with e. As the fifth is a stable interval, Ives builds a chord on it to express Lincoln’s purpose and reliability in performing his duty. In contrast to Lincoln’s stability are the forces that tried to wrench America apart, which led to the Civil War. The harmonies throughout are centered on an E pedal tone, but Ives changes this to heighten the mood shift, caused by playing note clusters with the fist, achieved with the phrase, “wrenching rafters from their ancient hold.” Although within a designated range, the randomness of the notes the player will hit in his performance fury shows the chaos and unpredictability that contrasts with the repetition Ives uses to emphasize key points in favor of Lincoln.
Oh my god...that ending. Unforgettable. Enjoy.
Again, you can find this piece on this CD:
(http://www.musicweb.uk.net/Ives/CD_Sym_4_Stokowski.jpg)
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Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860
Written between 1904-1915
One of the happiest moments of my life was finally tracking down the score to his Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860. Some nice lady in a piano store ordered me the score, which cost around 20 bucks in 1989. I used to pour over that thing during camping trips, following along to John Kirkpatrick's classic perfromance from 1968 (Columbia MS 7192, out of print LP).
(http://www.musicweb.uk.net/Ives/CD_Piano_Sonata_2_Kirkpatrick.jpg)
The Concord Sonata (and most of his musical work, for that matter) is amazing in that it is really not about melody, harmony, or musical form in the conventional sense. The Concord Sonata was originally a Piano Concerto, also known as the Emerson Overture (based on the great transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson). The piano is portrayed as Emerson, and the orchestra is the congregation (or The Mass culture of America) reacting to Emerson's edgy, transcendental discourse. Great (very dissonant and wild) music and great concept!
From 1904 until 1915 or so, the piece morphed into a Sonata for a single piano, in four movements, each based on a transcendentalist literary figure(s):
i. Emerson
ii. Hawthorne
iii. The Alcotts
iv. Thoreau
This Sonata is Ives's problably his most personal work. He even wrote a book to introduce this piece, called Essays Before A Sonata (which you can read at ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03/ivess10.txt)
Like most of Ives's music, this piece is a 'happening' each time it is performed, like performance art, or like Jazz. However, the music seems very occupied over the concept of time, or at least thats how I've heard it. And I'm not just talking about the unique technical aspects he used, such as avoiding using time signatures for most of the Concord Sonata and etc. Ives was obsessed with the past...America's past as well as his own, especially his own childhood. I strongly feel that Ives is the forefather of 'conceptual' art.
Next...the first movement...Emerson
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I don't know if anybody else is still following this, but I think it's great. Man, you should be doing Ken Burns style documentaries for PBS. I don't know the Concord Sonata very well. I like it, but I find it hard to remember. I'll have to go listen to it now. For the mean time, I'm looking forward to your next episodes.
Barry
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I don't know if anybody else is still following this, but I think it's great. Man, you should be doing Ken Burns style documentaries for PBS. I don't know the Concord Sonata very well. I like it, but I find it hard to remember. I'll have to go listen to it now. For the mean time, I'm looking forward to your next episodes.
Barry
Thanks for the feedback Barry! I am honored by the Ken Burns reference, a favorite filmmaker of mine. Which recording of the Concord do you listen to?
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I. Emerson
(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emerson/emerson.jpg)
[from Ives's Essays Before A Sonata]
The religion of Puritanism was based to a great
extent, on a search for the unknowable, limited only by the dogma
of its theology--a search for a path, so that the soul could
better be conducted to the next world, while Emerson's
transcendentalism was based on the wider search for the
unknowable, unlimited in any way or by anything except the vast
bounds of innate goodness, as it might be revealed to him in any
phenomena of man, Nature, or God. This distinction, tenuous, in
spite of the definite-sounding words, we like to believe has
something peculiar to Emerson in it. We like to feel that it
superimposes the one that makes all transcendentalism but an
intellectual state, based on the theory of innate ideas, the
reality of thought and the necessity of its freedom. For the
philosophy of the religion, or whatever you will call it, of the
Concord Transcendentalists is at least, more than an intellectual
state--it has even some of the functions of the Puritan church--
it is a spiritual state in which both soul and mind can better
conduct themselves in this world, and also in the next--when the
time comes. The search of the Puritan was rather along the path
of logic, spiritualized, and the transcendentalist of reason,
spiritualized--a difference in a broad sense between objective
and subjective contemplation.
Here is a scan of the beginning of the Emerson movement:
(http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/7987/emersonnewsmileae1.jpg)
Notice that there is no key signature (at this point) or measure lines...it looks like a mess, and for a poor pianist like myself, impossible to play! Like a sentence out of Finnegan's Wake, one line of information contains alot of information, some more buried than others. There is apparently no 'linear' perspective, like a de Kooning picture we get everything at once:
[from Essays Before A Sonata]
The mud may be a form of sincerity which demands that
the heart be translated, rather than handed around through the
pit. A clearer scoring might have lowered the thought. Carlyle
told Emerson that some of his paragraphs didn't cohere. Emerson
wrote by sentences or phrases, rather than by logical sequence.
His underlying plan of work seems based on the large unity of a
series of particular aspects of a subject, rather than on the
continuity of its expression. As thoughts surge to his mind, he
fills the heavens with them, crowds them in, if necessary, but
seldom arranges them, along the ground first. Among class-room
excuses for Emerson's imperfect coherence and lack of unity, is
one that remembers that his essays were made from lecture notes.
His habit, often in lecturing, was to compile his ideas as they
came to him on a general subject, in scattered notes, and when on
the platform, to trust to the mood of the occasion, to assemble
them. This seems a specious explanation, though true to fact.
Vagueness, is at times, an indication of nearness to a perfect
truth. The definite glory of Bernard of Cluny's Celestial City,
is more beautiful than true--probably. Orderly reason does not
always have to be a visible part of all great things. Logic may
possibly require that unity means something ascending in self-
evident relation to the parts and to the whole, with no ellipsis
in the ascent. But reason may permit, even demand an ellipsis,
and genius may not need the self-evident part. In fact, these
parts may be the "blind-spots" in the progress of unity. They may
be filled with little but repetition. "Nature loves analogy and
hates repetition."
In photoshop I color coded the main motifs (or in this case, the main musical ideas, as there are no 'set' motives with Ives):
(http://img66.imageshack.us/img66/6528/emersoncolorip7.jpg)
The two main ideas appear to be the green and red colored notes.
The green colored notes=what Ives called 'the human faith melody.' A decending (and sometimes acsending) note figure (an Ives original melody) you start to recognize after awhile.
The red colored notes=the Beethoven 5th motive:
[from Essays...]
There is an "oracle" at the beginning of Beethoven's Fith Symphony--in those four notes lies one of Beethoven's greatest messages. We would place its translation above the relentlessness of fate knocking on the door...and strive to bring it toeard the spiritual message of Emerson;s revelations--even to the "common heart" of Concord--the soul of humanity knocking at the door of the Divine mysteries, radiant in the faith that it will be opened--and that the human will become the Divine!
The human faith melody and the Beethoven 5th are the heart of the whole work.
The blue and yellow colored notes seem exclusive to the Emerson movement. I don't have a name for the blue colored note motive here, but at one point the 'blue note' theme is played by the horns in the Piano Concerto version. The yellow notes appear here and there, but it's been awhile since I studied this piece (and I can't get into more detail regarding them at this time), but they seem to move along fast in groups of three (like a 6/8 time signature).
Not every note in the work is related to these motives (and no scholar can agree on the exact number of motives), but the primal "human faith' and Beethoven motives are well known and heard.
Like a Jazz instrumentalist, Ives basically reinvents these motives over and over again throughout Emerson and beyond. Nothing is 'permanent'...the motives are never stated the same way twice:
[from Essays Before A Sonata]
The dislike of inactivity, repose and barter, drives one to the
indefinite subjective. Emerson's lack of interest in permanence
may cause him to present a subjectivity harsher on the outside
than is essential. His very universalism occasionally seems a
limitation. Somewhere here may lie a weakness--real to some,
apparent to others--a weakness in so far as his relation becomes
less vivid--to the many; insofar as he over-disregards the
personal unit in the universal. If Genius is the most indebted,
how much does it owe to those who would, but do not easily ride
with it? If there is a weakness here is it the fault of substance
or only of manner?
In the Concord Sonata score, Ives does mention the contrast between Emerson's prose and poetry, and seeks to express this in the Emerson music. The prose sections of the work have no meter (a masculine trait), yet the poetry sections are set within various musical meters (a feminine trait). As Jan Swafford comments:
The piece [Emerson] alternates between sections Ives called Prose and Verse, corresponding to the contrasting theme-sections of sonata form: the prose tending to be craggy, searching, heroic; the verse to be placid and lyrical.
Next…Hawthorne…
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II. Hawthorne
(http://www.liberliber.it/biblioteca/h/hawthorne/immagini/ritratto.jpg)
The Hawthorne movement has the more obvious sounding quotes...even if one doesn't recognize the actual name of the tune, it's easy to hear the tune is a hymn or march:
[from Essays...]
This fundamental part of Hawthorne is not attempted in our music
(the 2nd movement of the series) which is but an "extended
fragment" trying to suggest some of his wilder, fantastical
adventures into the half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal
realms. It may have something to do with the children's
excitement on that "frosty Berkshire morning, and the frost
imagery on the enchanted hall window" or something to do with
"Feathertop," the "Scarecrow," and his "Looking Glass" and the
little demons dancing around his pipe bowl; or something to do
with the old hymn tune that haunts the church and sings only to
those in the churchyard, to protect them from secular noises, as
when the circus parade comes down Main Street; or something to do
with the concert at the Stamford camp meeting, or the "Slave's
Shuffle"; or something to do with the Concord he-nymph, or the
"Seven Vagabonds," or "Circe's Palace," or something else in the
wonderbook--not something that happens, but the way something
happens; or something to do with the "Celestial Railroad," or
"Phoebe's Garden," or something personal, which tries to be
"national" suddenly at twilight, and universal suddenly at
midnight; or something about the ghost of a man who never lived,
or about something that never will happen, or something else that
is not.
Ives mentions in the score what the hymn tune is from, but unfortunately I no longer have the score, but the 'circus band' tune near the end of Hawthorne is a tune Ives wrote as a teenager. Swafford points out that "swatches of the Beethoven and Human Faith melodies turn up" here and there, as well as the popular American tune "Columbia, the Gem."
Here is a picture of a section of the score (a part where the player needs a "length of board" to press the keys down):
(http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~katsuwo/images/hawthorne.png)
By the way, the 2nd Movement of the 4th Symphony shares a simuliar concept with the Hawthorne movement (that of the strange journey along Hawthorne's "Celestrial Railroad"). The Ozawa account of the 4th brings out the Hawthorne "strangeness" more than the MTT account on Sony (although it is a good recording).
Next...The Alcotts...
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III. The Alcotts
(http://www.louisamayalcott.org/images/ohinsnowsm.jpg)
The Orchard House, home of the Alcotts
[from Essays...]
If the dictagraph had been perfected in Bronson Alcott's time, he
might now be a great writer. As it is, he goes down as Concord's
greatest talker. "Great expecter," says Thoreau; "great feller,"
says Sam Staples, "for talkin' big...but his daughters is the
gals though--always DOIN' somethin'." Old Man Alcott, however,
was usually "doin' somethin'" within. An internal grandiloquence
made him melodious without; an exuberant, irrepressible,
visionary absorbed with philosophy AS such; to him it was a kind
of transcendental business, the profits of which supported his
inner man rather than his family. Apparently his deep interest in
spiritual physics, rather than metaphysics, gave a kind of
hypnotic mellifluous effect to his voice when he sang his
oracles; a manner something of a cross between an inside pompous
self-assertion and an outside serious benevolence. But he was
sincere and kindly intentioned in his eagerness to extend what he
could of the better influence of the philosophic world as he saw
it. In fact, there is a strong didactic streak in both father and
daughter. Louisa May seldom misses a chance to bring out the
moral of a homely virtue. The power of repetition was to them a
natural means of illustration. It is said that the elder Alcott,
while teaching school, would frequently whip himself when the
scholars misbehaved, to show that the Divine Teacher-God-was
pained when his children of the earth were bad. Quite often the
boy next to the bad boy was punished, to show how sin involved
the guiltless. And Miss Alcott is fond of working her story
around, so that she can better rub in a moral precept--and the
moral sometimes browbeats the story. But with all the elder
Alcott's vehement, impracticable, visionary qualities, there was
a sturdiness and a courage--at least, we like to think so. A
Yankee boy who would cheerfully travel in those days, when
distances were long and unmotored, as far from Connecticut as the
Carolinas, earning his way by peddling, laying down his pack to
teach school when opportunity offered, must possess a basic
sturdiness. This was apparently not very evident when he got to
preaching his idealism. An incident in Alcott's life helps
confirm a theory--not a popular one--that men accustomed to
wander around in the visionary unknown are the quickest and
strongest when occasion requires ready action of the lower
virtues. It often appears that a contemplative mind is more
capable of action than an actively objective one. Dr. Emerson
says: "It is good to know that it has been recorded of Alcott,
the benign idealist, that when the Rev. Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, heading the rush on the U.S. Court House in Boston, to
rescue a fugitive slave, looked back for his following at the
court-room door, only the apostolic philosopher was there cane in
hand." So it seems that his idealism had some substantial
virtues, even if he couldn't make a living.
The Alcotts (3rd Move of the Concord Sonata)
(first page)
(http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~katsuwo/images/alcotts.png)
Whereas the Emerson movement is mostly masculine in nature...the Alcotts movement is more feminine and lyrical. Even the score looks peaceful and serene.
[From Essays...]
The daughter does not accept the father as a prototype--she seems
to have but few of her father's qualities "in female." She
supported the family and at the same time enriched the lives of a
large part of young America, starting off many little minds with
wholesome thoughts and many little hearts with wholesome
emotions. She leaves memory-word-pictures of healthy, New England
childhood days,--pictures which are turned to with affection by
middle-aged children,--pictures, that bear a sentiment, a leaven,
that middle-aged America needs nowadays more than we care to
admit.
The music for this piece started out as an overture for orchestra (for an orchestral Literature series that never got off the ground), now lost.
Again, we hear the strains of the Beethoven and Human Faith melody. Both are intertwined throughout...again, we hear how Ives radically changes the nature of a quoted source. The Beethoven motive, once a firey knock of fate at our door, is now a soft hymnal call, like a quiet autumn breeze on a Sunday morning. Unstead of Emerson thundering over his podium, we hear little Beth Alcott at her little spinet-piano inside her family's Orchard House:
[from Essays...]
Within the house, on every side, lie remembrances
of what imagination can do for the better amusement of fortunate
children who have to do for themselves-much-needed lessons in
these days of automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which
deaden rather than stimulate the creative faculty. And there sits
the little old spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott
children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at
the Fifth Symphony.
Next...Thoreau...
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This is so cool. Thanks. I'm still following every word of it.
Barry
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IV. Thoreau
(http://www.musicweb.uk.net/Ives/PIC_Thoreau.jpg)
[from Essays...]
Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but
because he did not have to go to Boston to hear "the Symphony."
The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine
his value as a composer. He was divinely conscious of the
enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her rhythms and the harmony
of her solitude. In this consciousness he sang of the submission
to Nature, the religion of contemplation, and the freedom of
simplicity--a philosophy distinguishing between the complexity of
Nature which teaches freedom, and the complexity of materialism
which teaches slavery. In music, in poetry, in all art, the truth
as one sees it must be given in terms which bear some proportion
to the inspiration. In their greatest moments the inspiration of
both Beethoven and Thoreau express profound truths and deep
sentiment, but the intimate passion of it, the storm and stress
of it, affected Beethoven in such a way that he could not but be
ever showing it and Thoreau that he could not easily expose it.
In this movement, the Human Faith melody reaches the edge of finality, or completeness...like a daydream almost fulfilled by an action in the waking state. Perhaps we glimpse Thoreau in Meditation at Walden Lake near his homemade cabin...communing with nature and the Divine and marveling on the interconnectedness of the apparent separation usually percieved between the two.
You may notice how simuliar this movement is with Ives's song "Thoreau." Both this song and this movement (of the same name) from The Concord are both derived from a lost piece called Walden Sounds.
The Human Faith melody, in a basic form (the melody always wants to descend before ascending):
(http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/2962/humannu6.jpg)
This basic motive is eventually translated to an almost perfect union with the Beethoven motive. In the score, Ives includes a second option...the performer can duet with a flute (Thoreau played the flute) to play the defining moment in the work:
(http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/341/thoreauvz5.jpg)
[from Essays...}
He remains in this mood and while outwardly still, he seems to
move with the slow, almost monotonous swaying beat of this
autumnal day. He is more contented with a "homely burden" and is
more assured of "the broad margin to his life; he sits in his
sunny doorway...rapt in revery...amidst goldenrod, sandcherry,
and sumac...in undisturbed solitude."
At times the more definite
personal strivings for the ideal freedom, the former more active
speculations come over him, as if he would trace a certain
intensity even in his submission. "He grew in those seasons like
corn in the night and they were better than any works of the
hands. They were not time subtracted from his life but so much
over and above the usual allowance." "He realized what the
Orientals meant by contemplation and forsaking of works." "The
day advanced as if to light some work of his--it was morning and
lo! now it is evening and nothing memorable is accomplished..."
"The evening train has gone by," and "all the restless world with
it. The fishes in the pond no longer feel its rumbling and he is
more alone than ever..."
His meditations are interrupted only by
the faint sound of the Concord bell--'tis prayer-meeting night in
the village--"a melody as it were, imported into the
wilderness..." "At a distance over the woods the sound acquires a
certain vibratory hum as if the pine needles in the horizon were
the strings of a harp which it swept...A vibration of the
universal lyre...Just as the intervening atmosphere makes a
distant ridge of earth interesting to the eyes by the azure tint
it imparts."...
Part of the echo may be "the voice of the wood;
the same trivial words and notes sung by the wood nymph." It is
darker, the poet's flute is heard out over the pond and Walden
hears the swan song of that "Day" and faintly echoes...Is it a
transcendental tune of Concord? 'Tis an evening when the "whole
body is one sense,"...and before ending his day he looks out over
the clear, crystalline water of the pond and catches a glimpse of
the shadow--thought he saw in the morning's mist and haze--he
knows that by his final submission, he possesses the "Freedom of
the Night." He goes up the "pleasant hillside of pines,
hickories," and moonlight to his cabin, "with a strange liberty
in Nature, a part of herself."
Jan Swafford writes:
The outer movements of the Concord are set in nature--the Emersonian mountaintops at the beginning, Thoreau's intimate woodlands at the end--and so America's two greatest visionaries of nature frame this work of strange liberties and deep import. In between we find in Hawthorne a phantasmagoria on the life of towns, of human societies, and in The Alcotts the society of home and family. The image of Concord, like Danbury a town both real and mythical, a symbol of eternal community and human aspiration, enfolds the four movements.
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I want to post an online discussion with David Porter (musicologist, member of the Charles Ives Society, and former contributor the Ives list) pertaining to this recording of the Emerson Concerto:
(http://shop.castleclassics.co.uk/acatalog/559175.gif)
David Porter did an excellant job reconstructing Ives's Emerson Concerto, so we could all study the first incarnation of the Emerson music Ives later reworked for the Concord Sonata. I highly recommend this disk (which also features an excellant version of the Ives 1st).
But first I'm going to post excerpts from an Amazon review of this disk from Bob Zeidler...one of my favorite reviewers on the net. As you will see, this review is referenced in the Porter discussion I will post next.
Amazon review of the Emerson Concerto:
Charlie Done Right. Part III October 31, 2003
Reviewer: Bob Zeidler (Charlton, MA United States)
Superficially, this new Naxos release of Ives's 1st Symphony and the premiere recording of his Emerson Concerto resembles an earlier Naxos release of his 2nd Symphony and Robert Browning Overture (a review of which I gave the sobriquet "Charlie done right"). The resemblance is in the pairing of an "accessible" Ives work with one more "knotty." In each case, the symphony receives a performance using a new critical edition (by Jonathan Elkus in that earlier release and by James Sinclair in this one). And each critical edition affords a fresh view of such "accessible" Ives. But the similarities shouldn't be overdrawn; while the Robert Browning Overture is knotty under the best of circumstances, the Emerson Concerto turns out to be more accessible than I expected; a pleasant revelation.
...the Emerson Concerto in its recording premiere, hardly arrives "unannounced," as Alan Feinberg, the soloist here, has performed the work (to splendid reviews) in concerts since its concert premiere in 1998. But for most of us this is a "first hearing."
The work is"realized" by David G. Porter, an Ives scholar who must number among the fearless of this small community, from incomplete sketches of an "Emerson Overture" for piano and orchestra (one of four such proposed overtures on literary figures, of which only the Robert Browning Overture saw completion). According to Sinclair's authoritative "Descriptive Catalog of the Music of Charles Ives," the terms "overture" and "concerto" can be used interchangeably.
While Ives never completed the work, he did succeed in subsuming many of its themes in the Concord Sonata and the Four Emerson Transcriptions for Piano that are closely related, thematically, to the Concord. By far the most famous of these themes is the four-note "Fate" motive that begins Beethoven's 5th Symphony, a theme for which Ives ascribed greater "universality" than did Beethoven himself.
Ivesians coming upon this work for the first time will find it to be a fascinating, and at times compelling, mix of "the old" and "the new and strange." For the most part, connections to the Concord and the Emerson Transcriptions will be recognized, but of course transmogrified. The "Fate" motive seems to be more dominant here than in the keyboard equivalents; it is clearly the unifying theme for all four movements. Feinberg is absolutely heroic in his performance (as he needs to be, needless to say).
Orchestrating the work (and here Porter has done a superb job) clarifies far more than it obscures, vis-a-vis the keyboard works. As would be expected, shattering dissonances live side-by-side with passages of transcendent beauty. I was even able to pick out a passage or two where quarter-tones seem to have been employed by Porter; they are for the most part in the quieter passages, and they simply glow with beauty.
Next...an online discussion with David Porter...
I saved this conversion that occurred last year on the Ives list...it was a revelation to hear Porter discribe the process of editing together such a difficult work, and he also mentions the Mahler 10th completion.
Here are the names of the people involved in this discussion.
Scott Mortenson: Moderator of the Ives Yahoo List
Mike (don't know his last name): Frquent poster with good insights into Ives's music.
Porter: Ives Scholar and Editor
Emerson Concerto discussion
w/ David Porter (on Charles Ives List) from March 29 to June 7, 2005.
David Porter:
I looked up and read the Amazon review, which was new to me. Just
for the record, when he notices quartertones and muses that I may
have added them, the truth is, No, they are specified by Ives,
either in a musical notation or a verbal description (they only
occur in the statements of one passage and only in the cellos).
With all the verbal notes and memos he left in the sources, I still
wonder why he didn't try to resurrect the Concerto format. He was
asked on at least one occasion if he had a piano concerto on hand.
He has these memos scattered through all the sources (copies, copies
of copies, etc.), sometimes even referring to page numbers of a
missing (or never made) score. It isn't like he didn't have a full
orchestral draft in mind, and the only conclusion I came to is that
he may have re-realized the full orchestral score is he had been
asked for it and his health had allowed. Seriously, anyone else
would have been able to do this if they had just taken the time to
collect together all the materials and TRIED to do it. Because I
remember thinking to myself before the premiere that it was really
odd that no one else had tried this in the over 60 years since Ives
had first made these materials available, and 50 years since he last
fooled around with getting "Concord" revised. (The phrase "fooled
around" is apt -- read some accounts of the process.)
Scott Mortenson:
David, now a question for you: Do you prefer [John] Sinclair's version
to [Christoph] von Dohnanyi's? They're quite different in places, tempo-wise.
Porter:
Christoph's versions (I have the 4 from Cleveland and also the BBC
broadcast) is more "stately" or old-worldish, but it's not really a
fair comparison because we were still working out details in
Cleveland right up to the premiere (not due to them -- due to –some-
at Schirmer who had fought me along the way and sent parts out that
didn't match the score -- and once in a while a question about
individual notes -- these are painfully obvious in the tape of the
Italian group's premiere). Cleveland also uses my original
conservative scoring (based on 1912 works like "St. Gaudens") while
Jim [James Sinclair] did some score enrichment by revising wind voicings and adding a
timpani part (all with my approval). Jim's tempos are more up as
well.
I'd rather talk about [the] Concord [Piano Sonata] because I have both of Hamelin's recordings and I think
they are the best around.
This piece [the Concord] didn't really make it for me
until I heard his [Hamlin's] first CD. Even JK's [John Kirkpatrick’s] two performances (I have the
1st on tape and 2nd on LP) didn't do anything for me. (I think if JK
had done more investigating into the Transcriptions and the Studies
he would have been more to my liking as his familiarity with the
music would have been enhanced -- but he always preferred the 1st
edition and it was his dilly-dallying with helping Ives revise the
score for the 2nd edition that caused some of the delay in bringing
that out. The other pieces just didn't get hold of his interest. So
I'm told.) It really isn't realistic to make a comment like "Jim's
is better" even though in technicality it is, because the comparison
isn't fair. BTW there is a German recording with Stefan Litwin in
the can but I have no idea if/when it will be released.
Scott:
Also, do you have the text/URL of the Bernard Holland NYT
article?
I'm wondering WHY he thought the Emerson Concerto out of bounds.
Porter:
I have it, I think in plain text format too. He just didn't like the
work when he heard it, and then he went on his 2nd piece into
wondering why people bring out things like this and even the other
movements of Mahler's Tenth (he pretty much says Cooke et al spoiled
the Adagio for him). I was studying the Mahler sketches before I
got into Ives and corresponded with Cooke (when he was recovering his
health from the trials of the Wyn Morris recording project) and I'm
totally in favor of what he did. (I think Mazzetti has gone far
afield in his realization, from what I've read, but I still want to
hear his latest score.) Another "BTW," the title-pages for those
sketches tell a lot about the genesis of the Tenth -- that the
Finale was written first, that the "Purgatorio Order Inferno" was
later planned as the opening movement, and that the Adagio was written
last. I think from this that this explains why he went to the
Adagio first when drafting his first full scores, and left the last
movement, the oldest one, in its sketch-state only when he died --
he'd get to the old stuff later, but wanted to deal with the new
stuff first.
After that going-far-afield, do you want me to post or E-mail you the
texts? They are kind of long. Heh, I posted the 2nd article on
Usenet a couple of years ago and got some readers' reactions -- my
favorite is, "I say, this is the worst piece of drivel I have read
in a long time."
As I've said before, I didn't add a single note to Ives's music
(although to be perfectly honest, I did have to edit a basic text
for passages where more than one piano version was in existence and
I did make choices there). I just scored some passages, and when I
could I based my scoring on existing passages or other pieces'
orchestrations from the same years. In some places it was obvious
what to do -- looking as it did like other sketches I've copied out
in full score -- such as three string parts in RH and two in LH =
Violins and Violas for RH and Vc & DB for LH -- a no-brainer. There
are some "funny” places but they're all Ives -- I remember Jim questioning me on a
few places and all I could do was cite a manuscript page or a verbal
memo written by Ives himself. (One place is the cascading string
chord in the middle of the "variations on a simple theme" in mvt ii -
- Ives's memo tells exactly how he wanted it done or had done in
some missing score.) But in the end it's all there, even down to
single measures where he indicates that a whole contrapuntal line
had been for such-and-such an instrument or instruments.
It struck me as odd that Ives had been circulating copies of this
stuff since about 60 years ago when I first looked at it, and no one
else had tried to do this score, or hadn't seen what was there and
could be done. Sixty years! It's all there, and I don't know why
no one else tried it.
To be continued...
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...continued from above...
Mike:
This is my first post. I have been an Ives maniac for over thirty
years and when the recording came out of the Emerson "Concerto" (It
was really supposed to be the "Emerson Overture for Piano and
Orchestra, another "Men of Literature" piece, the magnificent Robert
Browning Overture being the only other one in any sort of completed
state) I hesitated, knowing it was only an early version of
the "Emerson" movement of the second piano sonata.
Indeed probably 80% (IMHO) comes from the "Emerson" movement, or
should we say vice-versa, since the Concerto came first.
As this is my first post, I am going to strike a controversial chord
(pun intended). Although I greatly love the "Thoreau" and "Alcotts"
movements of the Concord Sonata, and can get my mind around
the "Hawthorne" movement (although I feel it's a bit too
rambling), "Emerson" has always posed a problem for me.
The longest movement of the sonata, "Emerson" undoubtedly contains
some of Ives's most powerful and eloquent music, but also most
difficult, for musician and listener alike.
It may well be the densest, most heterophonic, most dissonant piano
piece written before 1950. It alternates between chaos and simple
beauty, which given its subject and his philosophical positions, is
what it should be doing.
Regardless of this, the difficulty of it in many ways stems from
Ives cramming so much music into two hands. Yes, I know you can
play a six-note chord with one hand by bending your thumb so it
covers two keys. But "Emerson" begs the question how much is
expanding the range of the piano to sound orchestral, and how much
is simply trying to transcribe an orchestral work for piano?
The "Emerson" movement, of course, is not merely a transcription of
the "Concerto," nor do I claim it to secretly be one. But the use
of one sonority for all lines of melody and harmony makes it all the
more difficult to do any "ear-stretching."
Indeed, Ives could not have been totally unaware of this since the
full version of the Concord Sonata has brief additional parts for
other instruments, a viola in "Emerson" and a flute in "Thoreau"
(would "Thoreau" be as effective without the flute solo?). Much of
the time in "Emerson" one has a feeling of holding onto a life raft
in the midst of a violent storm, waiting for an interval of calm.
The Ives enthusiast would state that what I said above is exactly
the point. Emerson's questing to understand the order of a most
disorderly universe probably couldn't be expressed except with a
nearly incomprehensible frenzy of counterpoint. But like
Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (a work I do revere), deliberate
obfuscation seemingly becomes exhausting after a while, if not
actually tiresome.
Finally getting to the "Concero," the material of the "Emerson"
piano work suddenly evokes a much different reaction. Tangles of
notes, when spread between piano and orchestra, or between just
orchestral instruments have more of a sense of cohesion than one
would have expected just listening to the piano piece.
Likewise other parts, such as what I believe are permutations of the
lyrical "Human Faith" melody, evoke quite different feelings when
played by hushed strings or solo flute than by piano alone. This
enhanced lyricism through orchestration is, in fact, quite in
keeping with the feeling of the Adagio of the Browning Overture.
I cannot contend that this lyricism is non-existent from the version
of "Emerson" for piano alone, but the orchestrated form evokes
deeper emotional feeling, again like _Browning._
It is not that there are not chaotic sections to the "Concerto."
But they feel more like the momentary chaos in pieces like "The
Fourth of July," or the coda of the second movement of the Fourth
Symphony: incomprehensible, but fitting to the moment (both, of
course, are about the excitement of the Fourth of July).
The reasons for "Emerson" being transformed from orchestral to
chamber music are not exactly difficult to discern, though.
Although the alternations of piano alone and orchestra at full blast
do make musical sense, the large amount of music for unaccompanied
piano (including the last minutes of the Concerto) must have made
Ives think it might all make more sense as a solo piano work. And
indeed it can be said the Concerto, at eight minutes longer than the
solo piano piece, says pretty much the same things as the piano
piece manages to do with greater concision.
Nonetheless, there is something about the Concerto. Not enough to
displace the sense that the solo piece is a sublime expression of
the ideas both works share. But enough to say that
this "unfinished" quasi-concerto can be appreciated as more than
simply the earlier, embryonic version of the later piece. Perhaps
in some ways it is even more moving than the version in
the "Concord" Sonata.
Indeed, in one place the Concerto changes a phrase in the piano to
give it, in some ways, more resonance than it has in the chamber
work. It is the last expression in the finale of the "Beethoven
Fifth Symphony" motto, played with a thundering Tschaikovskian
fortissimo, instead of the quiet expression of it at the end of the
sonata's version.
Some contend Ives never actually got to what would be the last notes
of the Concerto (he stated it was unfinished and, as symbolic of
Emerson, could never be). Nonetheless, this hammered passage,
followed by flittering little (almost inaudible) fragments of
unresolved melody that actually end the Concerto, seems as exact an
ending anyone could produce, and more fully realized than in the
Concord Sonata.
Scott:
A very interesting post. Thanks for sharing it with us.
For a long time, the "Emerson" music was tough-going for me. I couldn't
really get much of a foot-hold on it. More than anything else, the thing
that opened it up for me was listening to Ives' own recordings--specifically
all of the improvisations based on the Emerson music. Much of this
listening was passive, "in the background" sort of listening. But I kept
playing it over and over. After that, I turned to Hamelin's (first)
recording, and the whole work very suddenly made a lot more sense. I could
follow it and enjoy it. Later, I read the "Essays Before a Sonata" and the
whole sonata came into focus even more. Now I love it and probably listen
to it more than any other of Ives' compositions.
I think that it's interesting that you find the concerto/overture version
easier to "hear" or preferable or perhaps more fully realized. (Don't want
to put words in your mouth. ;-) I have really enjoyed it too. But to my
ears the version for orchestra is MORE jarring to my ears than the sonata,
rather than less. But that may be just because I've listened to the sonata
so much.
To be continued...
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Leo,
I thought you might be interested in what Dave Hurwitz has to say about the very same Naxos release. Without trivializing the Emerson concerto, it's Naxos' recording the symphony that D.H. finds revelatory. I can tell you that David likes Ives an awful lot - every bit as much as he likes Mahler. He grew up in the same part of the country, and has looked at some of the Ives material stored at Yale. I'm going to pick up this release right away. Anyway, here goes:
The Emerson Concerto, a reconstruction by David G. Porter from Ives' "developed draft", gets top billing here, but it's the First Symphony that comes as the real revelation. In conversation with the present writer, conductor and Ives scholar James Sinclair offered the opinion that the reason Ives didn't finish the Emerson as a piano concerto was largely practical: he didn't trust himself as piano soloist, and no one else would have touched the piece in the first decade of the last century when he wrote it. Of course, both Ives and Sinclair were right, and much of the material for the concerto found its way into the Concord Sonata, and happily so.
While I am hardly in a position to judge Porter's work regarding its faithfulness to Ives' intentions (inasmuch as they can be determined), the piece strikes me as thick, clunky, episodic, and slow moving, lacking that typically Ivesian energy and abandon. It sounds more like Carl Ruggles, though with less of both polish and purpose. The important question in evaluating any effort such as this is whether or not it tells us anything really new or essential about the composer. As an interim stage on the way to that certified masterpiece, the Concord Sonata, I suppose it's interesting--but I wouldn't call it necessary, even though the redoubtable Alan Feinberg plays it about as well as we have any right to expect, and Sinclair probably knows it better than anyone in the universe except perhaps Porter himself. Ives fans, of course, should hear it and draw their own conclusions.
No, the big news here is the First Symphony, a work that should appeal to the universe beyond the Ives ghetto, particularly as this performance ought to be regarded in most respects as its premiere on disc. I don't say this lightly: excellent recordings already exist by Eugene Ormandy and Michael Tilson Thomas (both for Sony), but Sinclair not only has a new edition (with additional percussion in the finale that Ives specifically indicated in a letter but that never made it into the previously published score), he also has an interpretation that will prove a revelation to anyone who ever thought of this work as small-scale and unadventurous.
Of course, compared to the mature Ives it's tame stuff, but with all of its repeats in place and lasting some 45 minutes, the work now has a bigness of vision and greatness of heart that identifies it, emotionally at least, as genuine Ives, indelibly stamped with his irrepressible personality even at this early stage. The first movement, episodic though it may be, moves with majestic confidence toward its Brucknerian close, the quirky passages (such as the Stravinskian second subject for solo flute) standing out more vividly then ever before. The second movement, taken very slowly, now becomes a real Romantic adagio, clearly inspired by the Largo of Dvorák's "New World" Symphony (English horn solo and all). The perky scherzo perfectly sets up the athletic but very grand finale (so curiously reminiscent of Nielsen's Second Symphony, except that the Ives came first), with that riotous extra percussion toward the end clearly opening the door to the Second Symphony and the masterworks to come.
No one active today has a better feel for this music, for its past influences as well as its future destiny, than James Sinclair, and he galvanizes the players of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland to produce warmly idiomatic, extremely satisfying results. As anyone who has heard Naxos' excellent Malcolm Arnold symphony cycle from this venue might have guessed, the sonics also are outstanding in every respect. Whatever my reservations about the Emerson Concerto, for the symphony alone this disc deserves a very strong recommendation. Don't miss it!
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Wow...thats a GREAT review and I agree that the 1st upstages the Emerson here (though the Emerson is interesting for historical reasons)...thanks for posting it. When I first bought the disk I was thinking of the Emerson Concerto...which I do really like as you already know.
Yet when I played the 1st Symphony I was taken on a journey that Ives hadn't yet shown me...you could say I was taken aback on how meaningful the performance was and my perception of the Ives 1st totally changed. I was used to MTT's version, but this was so good I did a double take. I remember first listening to it on a walk in the sunny afternoon, and I felt like I was transported to an afternoon in 1896 New England...the vivid pictures the music started in my thoughts really told a kind of story...a day-in-the-life of a youth in 19th Century America. Each movement moved the story along in a convincing manner. It's amazing how little details like the first movement repeat totally shifted my understanding and appreciation of this work (and finally the Scherzo and Finale had interest and wasn't boring). The pacing was surberb in every way, and the instrumental detail very engaging. Sinclair is a great Ives interpeter.
I was listening to this recording of the 1st again today in fact, and again was impressed by this rendition...so it was apropo of you to post Hurtwitz's review. Thanks!
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This is such a great CD...I've been listing to this alot in the car lately...upon listening to the Emerson Concerto yesterday, I realized what I like so much about it. It's the second movement that makes this reconstruction worthwhile. The second movement is more reflective, serene (mostly anyways). The human faith melody sounds awesome in Ives's original orchestration (at least the parts that were finished anyway). My favorite section in the Piano Sonata are the quieter serene parts in the Emerson movement, the human faith melodies in their various transformations, so to hear it in orchestral form is quite a treat.
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That makes sense to me. I still need to pick up this release; and I will - soon enough.
Barry
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I re-bought this the other day:
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The 2nd Symphony is becoming my favorite work by Ives. This is a great CD, but I'm still not quite used to the faster tempo on "Where, oh where are the Verdant Freshman" in the 2nd movement. It doesn't wreck the experience, but I'm used to the usual slow tempo that Bernstein adopted there. My favorite recording of the 2nd is the Harold farberman:
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It's the first recording I owned of this work.
Anyways, I just ordered the new critical edition of the score and look forward to pouring over every last bar!!
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I really like that "original version" recording of the 2nd symphony (Naxos), but now I can't remember why. If I recall correctly, the ending is a bit different as well. We played the normal version one time in Redwood Symphony, and it was just tons of fun to do. I love the ending!
Farberman is a better conductor than he often gets credit for being.
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Leo,
I picked up the Emerson Concerto pretty cheap today. I agree with you - I like the second movement best also. Actually, I like both of the two inner movements. Much of the finale is very good too. There's much that reminds me of Messiaen, particulary the string voicings. Also, it's not true that nothing reoccures in this piece. The descending half-step harmonies become a leitmotif of their own - that's how often they reoccure. Many short cells and "licks" do repeat themselves. Even the Beethoven's 5th motto repeats itself. The piece just isn't thematic in any tradional sense, obviously. Much of the second movement makes me think more of a sophistocated New York skyline at night than it does of Emerson's rugged wilderness. I enjoyed hearing it, and want to listen to it a few more times. I didn't get to the symphony yet.
Barry
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Leo,
I picked up the Emerson Concerto pretty cheap today. I agree with you - I like the second movement best also. Actually, I like both of the two inner movements. Much of the finale is very good too. There's much that reminds me of Messiaen, particulary the string voicings. Also, it's not true that nothing reoccures in this piece. The descending half-step harmonies become a leitmotif of their own - that's how often they reoccure. Many short cells and "licks" do repeat themselves. Even the Beethoven's 5th motto repeats itself. The piece just isn't thematic in any tradional sense, obviously. Much of the second movement makes me think more of a sophistocated New York skyline at night than it does of Emerson's rugged wilderness. I enjoyed hearing it, and want to listen to it a few more times. I didn't get to the symphony yet.
Barry
I agree regarding the repeating motives and cells. The same can be said of the Emerson of the Sonata itself...where the music seems to have three main themes. First, that descending half-step figure that begins the movement is everywhere, just like the concerto (as you mentioned)...then there's the Beethoven 5th, and then the softer, more delicate themes that seem to be variations of the "human faith" melody. In the score for the sonata Ives called the "masculine" sounding parts Emerson's prose and the softer parts (which mimic that half-step theme by descending downward) were called Emerson's poetry, which which makes sense because the softer parts actually have a time signature (that of course changes in almost every measure). I guess one can surmise that Ives learned more from his Yale music professor (Horatio Parker) than he like to admit. Parker really schooled him in Brahm's and Beethoven's use of motives and etc. Again, like Ives does in his 2nd Symphony (and other works), there is an interesting mixture of American-like themes mixed up with European procedures that gets more sophisticated as Ives matures.
In the first movement of the concerto, I really like the writing for the french horns, which sometimes play this heroic-like theme (which is also in the piano part sometimes) that seems to be a new motive.
When I hear the second movement I think of a bright sun on a cold autumn morning, and sometimes I think of Harmony Ives in their country home in Redding, sitting and sewing or something!! The begining of the 3rd movement brings Thoreau's flute to mind.
The Emerson Concerto may not be as tight as the Sonata movement...but it does get better with each listen...Ives's Emerson stuff had always intriqued me. I have the Ives Plays Ives CD, and it's an interesting document of Ives's obsession with the Emerson themes. Over and over he plays what he called the Four Transcriptions from Emerson. Each of these four transcriptions are related to the unfinished Emerson Concerto. Ives was a great piano player too, although the recordings suffer from limited sound (he recorded between 1933 to 1943).
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Here is more of that online conversation with David Porter about the Emerson Concerto and it's reconstruction. Porter is discussing the piece with other posters on the Yahoo Ives List:
Mike:
Because of your [Scott’s] comments, I pulled out the Kalish rendition of the
Concord Sonata and listened to the Emerson movement.
One thing is hearing the Concerto made the sonata movement's
organization clearer to me. It is as if the Concerto were a
simplified version of the sonata movement, even though this doesn't
sound like the case. Of course a good amount of stuff in the
Concerto doesn't make it into the Sonata.
Not only that, but things more elaborated on in the Concerto are
presented in a briefer, more restrained fashion in the Sonata. This
could likely have been because Ives conceived the "Concerto" as a
piece for "the masses," while the Sonata is a much more intimate
experience, requiring toning down, just as acting on stage differs
greatly from acting on films or on television.
I'll agree that you can't put one of the pieces over the other.
They are the same material largely presented in two irreconcilable
and, therefore, incomparable ways.
Nonetheless, there are overall organizational ideas in the Concerto
that aren't in the Sonata.
The first, of course, is the separation of the music into two
blocks: the piano block and the orchestral block. The
interpretation that the orchestra is the universe and the piano is
Emerson seems correct. The piano and orchestra seldom work
together, essentially at odds with each other throughout the piece.
The "Beethoven motto theme," which is essentially the orchestra's,
is not heard in full version by the piano until the solo at the end
of the fourth movement. What's more, the only time the piano and
orchestra seem absolutely in sync is in the presentation of
the "Human Faith" theme near the end of the second movement. The
third movement opens with the piano and solo flute playing together,
but in counterpoint, not in unison. Then the orchestra and piano
separate again and never really reconcile.
The fourth movement has an almost heartbroken feeling to it, as
though the synthesis of self and the world Emerson seeks is, and
will always be, beyond his grasp. As stated above, the Concerto
ends with the piano (and, therefore, Emerson) alone, finally able to
articulate the Beethoven Motto theme, some sense of concilation in
what Emerson had achieved.
The sonata movement, of course, lacks the second component, the
orchestra. Ives manages to have the universe and Emerson still
present by creating two new blocks of music: fortissimo and
heterophonic, and pianissimo and essentially homophonic. The
antagonism is no longer in separate instrumental groups, but
integrated into the music, itself. The sonata movement also follows
the "sequence of events" described in the Concerto above. One can
hear the four separate divisions of the sonata movement just as one
can in the Concerto.
The absence of the orchestra, however, makes the "oppositional"
sense of the music quite different. Everything is filtered through
Emerson's mind, rather than existing as a separate entity from him
needing reconciliation. This seems correct as an expression of
Emerson's desire to be a "transparent eyeball," something virtually
non-existent that the world just flows through and becomes a part of.
What the sonata movement lacks, however, is the sense of pathos
present in the Concerto. The Concerto is about Emerson's struggle
with the world; the sonata movement is about the world flowing
through Emerson. The conflict in the Concerto is between Emerson
and the world. The conflict in the sonata movement is Emerson's
working toward understanding the chaos of the world, something
slightly different.
This does give the Concerto a more haunting, though less mystical
quality than the sonata movement. The Concerto only barely achieves
a sense of transcendentalism at the end of the finale. The sonata
movement goes in and out of this sense throughout its duration.
Which is the better approach? The Concerto obviously arises out of
the idea of Beethovenian symphonic struggle with the cosmos, rather
than the Tschaikovski or Brahms concertante style. This makes it
feel connected to present and past at once. The sonata movement
seems essentially disconnected with the past. Despite the Beethoven
motto, it has more in common with Beethoven's late quartets than his
Fifth Symphony. The reverse seems true of the Concerto.
Ultimately, it is the pathos that wins me over, but this is just my
soppy sentimental heart talking. My brain knows either version of
Emerson can be preferred.
Porter:
This is one of the most eloquent commentaries on the pieces that I
have seen in a long time.
(Porter next addresses Scott’s comment on Ives’s improvisations on Emerson heard on the Ives Plays Ives CD):
Those "improvisations" aren't improvisations at all. They were in
the Concerto (the first one is in the surviving sketch pages,
although sketchy in places -- it's clearer, but not much more, in
the MS for Study #9), and when Ives dropped them they first became
Studies. Studies 1, 2 & 9 are from these cadenzas, but most of #1
went into the First Transcription, and I suspect that #9 didn't
exist until that happened.
And it was after Ives's June 1933 recording sessions that he wrote
them all out (all except for the part that was in Study #1, although
he wrote a variant out on an unrelated page in the same Hanke copy
photostat -- this is the passage that's also in "Over the
Pavements"). And I think the reason he wrote them out was that
after he heard the recordings his hope that someone else could write
them down from those recordings was impossible. See "Memos" where
he writes that he hopes someone else can write them down for him.
This is why I date the main Transcription source for the Concerto,
Photostat positive copy "C" of the Hanke copy, with the fresh pages
with 2 of the cadenzas to be interleaved (cadenzas 1 & 3 = Studies 9
& 2, respectively), to be Fall 1933.
(now Porter Addresses Scott’s Praise of Hamlin’s recording of the Concord, which Scott stated helped make the Sonata more understandable for him)
Same here. (There's a Gershwinesque quality to that recording.)
Scott:
David P., I'd be interested in hearing what you think of the
differences between the two works. Do you find one them easier to "wrap your
ears around"? Or do you hear them as totally different works? And
which do you prefer?
Porter:
Actually, I don't "prefer" one to the other, although I do like the
orchestral setting more than the piano-only texture. I like a good
performance of the Sonata over a mediocre one, and that's about the
only real difference. The orchestral version does clarify for
other people the piano version. But I got very deep into this
morass (like Universe Symphony or 3rd Orchestral Set) and the works
exist in a different place for me than they would just about anyone
else. You know John Kirkpatrick had little or no interest at all in
the Concerto or the Transcriptions or the Studies other than a very
surface or general sense, or I'm sure he would have seen that the
Concerto was a revivable reality. I mean, look at what the guy
did -- he realizes works like "Johnny Poe" which are a lot more
incomplete, and never got beyond the two editions of Concord with
all the Emerson music! (And he always preferred the 1st edition.
Heh, the story goes that Ives had to send Harmony over to his house
to retrieve his materials for revising the Sonata when it became
clear that JK just wasn't interested enough to do it! And then JK
goes on to record the 2nd edition twice! But he always said that
he preferred the "clarity" of the 1st edition over the
changes/restorations of the 2nd edition.)
I've done this before, but I would like to clarify a few details
just for general interest.
First, the "viola" part is not to be played by a viola
in "Concord." It's simply "the viola part" from the Concerto. It
was also for bassoon and low bells (bells on the first of each set
of triplets, then continuing as the small notes in the Sonata
movement). How it got added the 2nd edition of Concord (through
the growth of the 4th Transcription) shows this quite plainly (a
long story that I won't repeat again here).
Next, there was apparently (in Ives's mind at the very least) a full
score to the Concerto that no longer exists. I found many, many
references to this score in patches for the revised edition and the
Transcriptions. There are even some references to specific page
numbers. But no such score exists now!
The long piano solo at the end: This was originally for the
unpublished "expanded" version of the 4th Transcription.
Kirkpatrick listed it as for a "page 14" of the Concerto, but it's
clearly for p. 14 of a photostat of Hanke's copy of the
Transcriptions.
Lastly, in the 1st edition of Concord, the movement ends with the
loud crashes of the Beethoven motif as in the Concerto (and the 4th
Transcription). The quiet version is new to the 2nd edition of
Concord.
You know, if it wasn't for the various copies of the Transcriptions
and patches for that and for the 2nd edition of Concord, this
Concerto wouldn't exist as it does. I was originally only going to
do the beginning and ending, which are almost complete in Ives's
hand, but I got so much encouragement to do the whole thing that I
went ahead and assembled every reference I could for the Concerto.
Ives did some pretty weird things with this music. You'll find a
source with one pencilled memo in it that tells you a passage was
for strings, or a series of patches labeled as "cadenza" material
that have no obvious relation to one another except that they are
patches for this piece.
In general, Ives wanted to tone down the music for his first edition
of Concord, while he wanted to reinstate much of the dissonances in
the 2nd edition, and he first carried this out by making the
Transcriptions. But he still left out many little details and
dissonances from the Concerto in the 2nd edition, and they only
exist in changes he made to one or two copies of the
Transcriptions. I spent a full week just on this in 1998 at Yale
doing nothing but spending all day in the library going over every
copy of the Transcriptions and Concord that had any kind of
Emersonian memo or emendation, at the same time I was getting proofs
from Schirmer. I wrote up this huge 10-chapter book on the whole
thing, four chapters just on the four Transcriptions as they were
changed from the original draft (this is Tom Brodhead's edition of
the Transcriptions), and it's astounding to see how many big and
little pieces of information are there. (Now, if only I could get
this book published...)
One more thing and then I'll stop. For all that Ives said about
this music being left unfinished, what he actually did, in his
emendations of copied scores and recordings, shows that whatever
unfinished-ness there was was miniscule. Every note that I put in
the score was written by Ives, and whatever scoring I did have to do
was minimal. Heh, I remember Jim Sinclair questioning the cascading
string passage in the "variations" section, and I told him with a
chortle that this was from a big paragraph Ives wrote about how he
had (wanted to or did) score it. And when Jim was recording it,
almost every time he questioned my scoring, I told him where Ives
had detailed that scoring. I did tend to be very conservative when
I was totally on my own, and I told Jim it was OK with me if he
beefed a few places up in those places, but it's kind of funny that
the more anomalous scoring passages are pure Ives.
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Well, I've been listening to this recording more and more:
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My favorite recording of the 2nd is the Harold Faberman account, but after listening to this and the Schermerhorn back to back a couple times already, I have to admit that the naxos is really excellant and is winning me over with each new listen. I'm finally getting used to the corrected tempos in the new criticial edition.
The 1st and 2nd Symphonies are works I can put on causually as well as listen seriously with full attention. The 3rd is almost like that as well, but the 4th demands my full attention, rightly so. What I really like about the 2nd is it's effortless dance with the
themes...the tunes develop and progress very naturally, humorously and seriously as well. In any given listening situation, I can
listen just to the surface, or listen at a deep level and find a profound discourse goin on, connected to Ives's own personal
nostalgia, but also connected to a more universal "Americana" that I definitely feel in sympathy with.
The 2nd is so musically evocative of the soil and culture from which it arose in an apparently more "simple" manner than the mature works, and it also evokes nature as well...I often think of thunder-filled clouds in the distance during the 1st movement. Now when I say "simple" I don't mean to imply the 2nd is not sophisticated, rather, I mean to suggest "simple" from the viewpoint of my ears upon hearing the "surface" of the music. Every year I appreciate more what Ives accomplished as a youthful composer. The 1st String Quartet is another great early work.
As I already mentioned, I recently bought the new critical edition score of the 2nd Symphony (edited by Jonathan Elkus), which is a real wonderful edition, beautifully put together with excellant commentary and an essay by the editor. The 2nd Symphony is fast becoming my favorite Ives symphonic work. I recently read the article "Quotation" and Paraphrase in Ives's Second Symphony by J. Peter Burkholder, and was taken aback with memories of my own grandfather playing many of these old tunes and hymns on his violin when I was young...we used to play Turkey In the Straw and Old Black Joe and etc :D
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I've got to go back and re-listen to the Naxos recording of the Ives 2nd. For the life of me, I can't remember what was radically different about it. I do remember liking it very much. On the other , I can't say that I've ever warmed to the Robert Browning Overture, but maybe that just takes some repeated listening as well.
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In the Browning Overture, I've just begun to recognize the motives Ives's uses in his song Paracelsus (a poem of Browning's). I discovered today this song was adapted from the overture, but the song is better than the overture in my opinion, although I have warmed to the overture somewhat recently. I read somewhere that Ives was dissatisfied with the overture overall.
There are some important differences from the new critical edition of the 2nd from it's older edition. The exposition repeat is reinstated in the 2nd movement, and the original tempo for the second theme is also reinstated (the tune based on 'Where oh where are the verdant freshman'). Missing bars in the finale are also brought back in...giving the finale a better structure. Is this what you are referring to Barry?
The naxos recording itself brings a wonderful, fresh interpetation that I find very appealing and I now feel it's the top choice for this work. I still treasure the Farberman for it's brooding quality however.
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"Is this what you are referring to Barry?"
Indeed.
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Barry, it appears these SACD Ives disks from Litton are very good. I saw Hurwitz's reviews on these recently...somehow I missed the news on these disks:
CHARLES IVES
Symphonies Nos. 1 & 4; Central Park in the Dark
Dallas Symphony Orchestra
Andrew Litton
Hyperion- CDA 67540(CD)
Reference Recording - No. 1: Sinclair (Naxos); No. 4: Dohnanyi (Decca)
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These are excellent performances in every respect: magnificently played, beautifully recorded, and conducted with unfailing intelligence. The First Symphony is a better piece than is often thought--immature, in its way, but also irreverent, and full of Ives' typical honesty and sincerity. This performance doesn't take the first-movement exposition repeat as does James Sinclair on Naxos, but it is a bit livelier overall and uses the latest edition (with the riotous percussion that brings the finale to a typically irreverent conclusion). The bottom line is that the music doesn't really sound like anyone else, and in Andrew Litton's hands the music in the outer movements, with its odd dissonances and freedom of modulation, clearly foretells the composer to come.
This performance of the Fourth Symphony is spectacular. I haven't heard the SACD (yet), but it's hard to imagine a more vivid engineering job. You can actually hear the steady percussive tread that wends its way through the finale at just about every point, no matter how dense the surrounding tangle of sonority. In the insane second movement, without ever underplaying the big eruptions, Litton lets us hear an unusual amount of the thematic material where you usually are least apt to find it: in the string parts. To a remarkable degree, although the jumbles still sound like jumbles (as they should), you can pick out individual strands from the welter of noise and follow them as the music progresses. It's the kind of approach that will have you coming back for more, and it keeps the music sounding always different and new. The chorus in the first movement and finale sings (or hums) excellently and is atmospherically balanced, while Litton finds both heartfelt simplicity and a surprising amount of passion in the third-movement fugue.
Central Park in the Dark makes a fine and unexpected bonus after the two big works. I am delighted not to encounter yet another recording of The Unanswered Question, a piece that for all its deserved fame offers no reason to own multiple versions of it. The only serious competition to Litton in the Ives Symphonies, taken as a cycle under one conductor, comes from Michael Tilson Thomas on Sony, who has less alluring sonics and the old edition of the First Symphony. For all intents and purposes, Litton stands in a class of his own. [10/24/2006]
--David Hurwitz
Ives: Symphonies No 2 & 3, Etc / Litton, Dallas So
Release Date: 10/10/2006
Label: Hyperion Catalog #: 67525 Spars Code: n/a
Composer: Charles Ives
Conductor: Andrew Litton
Orchestra/Ensemble: Dallas Symphony Orchestra
Number of Discs: 1
Recorded in: Stereo
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What a wonderful surprise it has been, seeing this release of the complete Ives symphonies on Hyperion. I have no doubt that Andrew Litton's cycle will serve as the reference for many years to come. The principal competition comes from Michael Tilson Thomas on Sony, featuring the Chicago Symphony and Amsterdam Concertgebouw orchestras. While good, and in spots excellent, MTT's heart really wasn't in the First Symphony, and the Concertgebouw, for all the beauty of its playing, lacks the rude heft to make something memorable out of the final appearance of Columbia the Gem of the Ocean at the end of the Second Symphony. That's certainly not the case here: the Dallas trombone section has a whale of a time, and Litton gives that shockingly dissonant raspberry an extra moment to make its point, just as Bernstein did. Purists may carp, save for the fact that doing it this way is very much in keeping with Ives' aesthetic--more to the point, it sounds right.
In any case, well before the finale's coda, Litton has made this recording of the Second Symphony the new standard by which others should be judged, and that includes Bernstein (both times). He milks the music's romantic side--the first and third movements--with unashamed emotionalism, and this makes the humor of the quick bits all the more telling. You won't hear a more insouciant account of the finale anywhere, while the second movement has a real spring to its step--its final bars are simply hilarious, less outrageous than the symphony's ending, but no less surprising in their own way. Litton's sweetly sentimental take on the lyrical second subject (based on the tune "Where Oh Where Are the Pea-Green Freshmen?") also bucks current orthodoxy, which has the melody played in tempo (Nashville on Naxos)--but once again it makes good musical sense.
The Third Symphony isn't as easy to play as it sounds, and Litton not only captures the music's flow to perfection, he gives the small wind and brass complement plenty of opportunity to shine, albeit sensitively. The march rhythms in the second movement skip along winningly (these are marching children, remember), and the slow finale's last bars feature beautifully judged bell sounds over their final, fading chords. As with the disc containing the First and Fourth Symphonies, the encore is unusual and very welcome. General William Booth Enters Into Heaven is one of Ives' very greatest songs, and it receives a rousing performance by Donnie Ray Albert and the Dallas Symphony Chorus. Finally, the engineering is rich, clear, and vibrant. A major achievement, no doubt about it.
--David Hurwitz
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I have the CD of symphonies 1 & 4. Indeed, it's extremely good.
Barry
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I just listened to the world premiere of the 3rd Orchestral Set (edited and realized by Porter and Josephson) this early afternoon. It is an emotional experience to listen to this for the first time, and puts me at a place of rest and reflection, as this impressionistic work opens the memory and imagination, and the daydreams start to flash on things remembered and wished for hopes.
Jan Swafford writes that "The Third Orchestral Set may stand as the most profound discovery of the many and ongoing efforts to reconstruct uncompleted Ives works," and I would have to agree wholeheartedly. James Sinclair and the Malmo Symphony are successful in executing these difficult, meandering scores, and bringing interest in the instrumental details heard everywhere within the sound picture. In this 3rd Orchestral set there are rare moments of intensity in volume, and the mood remains meditative and quiet in each piece, with the second movement slightly more agitated in character.
I like the fact that Ives, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern called their orchestral suites "sets" or "Pieces for orchestra" rather than stick the "symphony" label on these pieces. Sorry to generalize somewhat, but around the beginning of the 20th century, the "finale problem" didn't seem to be an issue. By labeling these works as "sets" one was free to make interesting pieces for orchestra without an apparent direction...of course I can't speak for the composers here, but in the orchestral pieces by the composers named above, I don't usually sense a "movement" towards a traditional ending, or culmination, at least in the case of Ives, who appears more concerned with a soundscape than narrative, paradoxical as this may seem when one reads the narrative titles of many of these pieces for orchestra. The dropping of the finale creates other interesting structural possibilities for a subtler approach, or an ambiguity that could be created for the sake of varied expression, such as heard in Ives' orchestral sets as heard here.
I owe my love for this music to my grandfather, Clarence Wahlberg (see photo below, where he is featured in a small farm town newspaper in the 80's):
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My Grandfather was a big fan of Irish Reels, and other Americana stuff like Turkey and the Straw, Grandma's Red Stocking, and Stephen Foster tunes among many more. He also had a passion for Hymns, and played those the most. He was obsessed with learning how to make his own violin, so he researched and started to learn by repairing old violins first. He had articles about Stradivarius and Gurarneri, two master violin craftsmen and would wax lyrical over these craftsmen who lived in the 17th century for hours. After many years of experienting and learning my Grandfather made his first violin...I think he was 64 years old at the time. He did all this while taking care of a farm spanning over 300 acres...with cattle and etc.
I was impressed by his singular passion...and although he taught himself to play since he was a child, in his 70's he was taking lessons from a classical violinist (I never met her though). He didn't play much serious classical, but he appreciated it. Later he would be amused by my growing interest in European classical music, calling it "longhair music" with a laugh! But at heart he was a country fiddler, who used to fire up dances at hoedowns when he was young...and playing in Church on Sundays as he got older. He had a wonderful unique tone I remember well. Somehow his violin sounded like Grandmother's singing...I was very impressed and in love with his playing.
Anyways...I digress...but this is a great release from Naxos...essential for any Ives fan...
--Todd
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Re: "sets" or "pieces for orchestra" (Ives, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern)
Thanks for calling attention to this, Todd. In all those biographies of Mahler that I've read in past weeks, I noticed that Mahler, too, was bothered by not having a more appropriate term than "symphony"--the term that carried too many connotations from the old classical era of Beethoven, Haydn & such. There was now a new kind of music that needed a new name.
--John H
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Very cool family story, Todd. Thanks for sharing, you longhair. I'm really glad that you like the 3rd Orchestral Set.
Barry
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I've finally snagged a few of these complete Ives symphonies sets, conducted by Harold Faberman...a set I haven't heard since 1990 or so (accept for the 2nd symphony)...I have much nostaligia just by looking at the cover:
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I especially remember Faberman's account of the Ives 4th...it may be the best, not in sound, but in spirit. Regardless, I also remember the almost too thin "George Martinish" production of the sound...which strangely, kinda works for these works.
I've been collecting Ives on vinyl for quite awhile now...I've been especially after the Ives vinyl I remembered checking out at the library when I was around 17 years old...with the purchase of this set I have now amassed all the Ives records I remember first coming across...a time of musical revelation and life changing all together.
--Todd