...continued from above...
II. A Children’s DayHarmony 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.”
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
The Happy Land
Fountain
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.(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