OT: Charles Ives

[Leo K]

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.


George Ives


Next:  A Children's Day

[barry guerrero]

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

[Leo K]

Thanks Barry...I'll keep posting then

[Leo K]

...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.”



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

[Leo K]

III.Communion


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!”


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…

[Leo K]

…continued from above…


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.”

[Leo K]

An Election (It Strikes Me That...)
For Male (in unison) Chorus and Orchestra

Also known as...

November 2, 1920
for Voice and Piano


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:

[Leo K]

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



Lincoln..."Oh, Captain, my Captain."



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:

[Leo K]

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).

 

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

[barry guerrero]

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

[Leo K]

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?

[Leo K]

I. Emerson



[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:



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):



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…

[Leo K]

II. Hawthorne



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):



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...

[Leo K]

III. The Alcotts


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)


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...

[barry guerrero]

This is so cool. Thanks. I'm still following every word of it.

Barry