Charles Ives (1874-1954): Piano, Chamber and Vocal Works
Charles Ives was born in 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut, a
small New England town dominated by the Ives clan. His
father, however, rejected the conventional life to become a
musician. After leading reputedly the finest band in the
Northern army during the American Civil War, George Ives
provided musical nourishment for his townspeople while
simultaneously undertaking musical experiments that
sowed the seeds of his son’s development. Charles was
twenty, enjoying college life, when his fiercely selfdisciplined,
adventurous father died. He lost the only person
who heard his music sympathetically and perceptively.
Charles had been sent to Yale to learn the basics of
composition from the mainstream composer Horatio
Parker, who found the young man’s music insufferable. A
few years after graduation, Charles understood that earning
a living in music required compromising his musical vision.
He therefore entered the insurance business, becoming a
legend in the business and achieving enormous financial
success, which his employees attributed to an unfailing
understanding of human nature.
For some fifteen years he spent gruelling days in
business and nights composing, but in 1918 suffered a
massive heart attack. With his health deteriorating he wrote
his last work in 1926 and retired from business. He lived
until eighty, however, revising his scores and quietly using
his affluence in the cause of American composition. Apart
from his indefatigable wife Harmony, and close friends
such as composers Henry Cowell and Carl Ruggles and
their wives, Ives was almost completely isolated musically.
Cowell published some of his music; scattered
performances attracted some attention. Performances of his
music begin in earnest in the late 1930s, when the pianist
John Kirkpatrick unveiled the monumental ‘Concord’
Sonata. Then a 1946 performance of his Third Symphony,
conducted by Lou Harrison, led to a Pulitzer Prize. The
musical world was beginning to appreciate Ives’
significance just as he died in 1954.
These bare facts tell but little of an extraordinarily
visionary mind. An heir to New England
Transcendentalism, Ives shared its reverence for the beauty
and power of the individual, and its mystical faith in the
one-ness of humanity and nature. He detested the stale
traditions that dominated musical life: ‘rules’ were
acceptable only if they facilitated creativity. In this spirit he
constantly sought new and appropriate means of ordering
his impulses, arriving at compositional methods that
anticipated the thinking of generations yet to come.
‘Playability’ was never an acceptable limitation: ‘Is it the
composer’s fault that man has only ten fingers?’
To Ives, ordinary mortals at worship, singing roughly
and out of tune, but from the soul, knew more about music
than those with flawless vocal techniques. His love of
spontaneous, untrained creativity led him to unprecedented
feats of compositional virtuosity. For if one loved the spirit
of a revival meeting, where everyone sang from the heart, in
his and her own tempo and key, why should a musical
impression of such an occasion be tyrannized by the
conventions of having one key, one tempo, or one
conductor at a time? He loved to quote popular music, not
to make the public feel comfortable, but because he was at
one with the music of everyday life. Unfortunately, his
uncompromising search for an honest expression of a
nation’s soul produced music that most people refused to
perform. This visionary Ives is the subject of the present
recording.
The pieces for instrumental ensemble are Ives at his
wildest. The Gong on the Hook and Ladder, later set for
small orchestra, is heard here in its original version, dating
from about 1912. Ives wrote:
“The Annual Parade of the neighborhood
Volunteer Fire Company was a slow marching
affair - for the Hook and Ladder was heavy, and
the Gong on the hind wheel ‘must ring steadylike’
- and coming downhill and holding
backward fast, and going uphill out of step, fast
and slow, the Gong seemed sometimes out of
step with the Band, and sometimes the Band out
of step with the Gong - but the Gong usually got
the best of it. Nobody always seemed to ‘keep
step,’ but they got there just the same.” |
In Re Con Moto et al (about 1915-16), subtitled
‘Studies in space, time, duration, accent, and pulse’, is a
ferociously complex example of Ives determination to
stretch the ‘ear muscles’. Hallowe’en (about 1914) ‘is but a
take-off of a Halloween party and bonfire - the elfishness of
the little boys throwing wood on the fire, etc. etc...’ To
illustrate the growing bonfire, the strings enter
progressively, in different keys, with oddly-placed accents.
The ending is a take-off of ‘a regular coda from a proper
opera, heard down the street from the bandstand’. From the
technical point of view, Ives considered Hallowe’en one of
his best compositions.
The vocal selections convey something of the wealth of
his 175-odd songs, for which Ives wrote many of the texts.
Soliloquy, or a Study in 7ths and Other Things (about 1916-
17) was one of a few ‘experiments’ that Ives decided to
publish. The piano part moves through gradually shrinking
intervals to a crashing tone-cluster, and then reverses itself.
The violent vocal line can politely be described as atonal. In
On the Antipodes (1922-23) contrasting aspects of nature
are embodied in a series of phrases, each based upon a
single interval, a procedure anticipating compositional ideas
of decades later. Sunrise, apparently Ives’ last work, is
startlingly simple. Although the manuscript does not
specify the additional instrument, the editor John
Kirkpatrick makes an excellent case for using a violin.
Remembrance, a eulogy to his father, was arranged in 1921
from a small orchestra piece, The Pond (about 1906). The
Housatonic at Stockbridge (1921) is also a re-fashioning of
an earlier composition, the third piece of the orchestral set
Three Places in New England (1912-17, revised 1921). It
describes the Housatonic River, one of the mightiest in the
northeastern United States, as it progresses from a stream to
a torrent. In Aeschylus and Sophocles (1922-c.1924) a
futuristic harmonic vocabulary underlines the drama of the
poets’ dialogue.
Five Take-offs - the title probably signified
“improvisations” to Ives - was completed around 1909, first
performed in 1968, and only published in 1991. Although
Ives was a virtuoso improviser, these pieces are hardly
impromptu inspirations. In fact, each movement manifests
one compositional challenge. The title Seen and Unseen?
(Sweet and Tough) is illustrated by the superimposition of a
loudly-declaimed melody, reeking of middle-brow parlour
music, upon an irregular and dissonant accompaniment that
growls quietly in its own world. The brash exterior of The
Jumping Frog belies an elaborate rhythmic and intervallic
organizational scheme. In Song Without (good) Words - the
title alludes to Mendelssohn - the melody is supported by
harmonies that float in and out of tonality. Scene Episode, a
sort of prelude and aria, has a texture in layers that seem to
coexist as if in different levels of space. Bad Resolutions
and Good WAN, a New Year’s piece for 1907, illustrates
‘good’ and ‘bad’ resolutions harmonically: an innocent,
impeccable ‘hymn’ bolts to a grindingly dissonant coda. We
can imagine which resolution Ives preferred.
Ives’ work with microtones, fulfilling the artistic
potential of his father’s experiments, began early in the
century, but Three Quarter-Tone Pieces was completed
only in 1924, for a performance in New York at the French
pianist E. Robert Schmitz’s Franco-American Music
Society. The outer movements were originally conceived
for a double keyboard microtonal piano, played by a single
performer. As a practical measure, the piece was scored for
two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart to create a composite
scale of twenty-four tones. Each movement used
microtonality differently, often reflecting the theory of
microtonal harmony that Ives later articulated. In the first
movement, quarter-tones are used primarily for harmonic
rather than melodic purposes: in an impressionistic
atmosphere, whole-tone melodies and harmonies are
disoriented by microtonal chords between the two pianos.
In the high-energy, ragtime second movement, tunes and
rhythms bolt back and forth between the two pianos to
produce continuous quarter-tone melodic motion. The
finale is an eloquent fantasy on the patriotic song America,
the sense of which only gradually emerges. In a majestic
finale, the tune strikingly moves from quarter-tones to halfsteps
and then to whole-tones. The last-minute appearance
of La Marseillaise saluted Schmitz’s group and Franco-
American friendship.
© 2005 Continuum