[Andrea Grenadier is a writer/editor based in
Alexandria, Virginia. She is a 1978 graduate of Mary Washington College with a
B.A. in American Studies, focusing on music, fine arts, and history. She
completed her first (self-published) novel, The
Journal of My Plague Year in 2005, and has published several poems in Pennsylvania English. She is currently
preparing her first chapbook, What Brings
Me Here, and can be reached at algrenadier@earthlink.net.]
O, Pioneer!: Charles Ives and the “Concord” Sonata
In a 20th century full of cranky, iconoclastic American
composers, the musical pioneer Charles Ives would still hover among the top
five, perhaps with a bullet. He was also, most certainly, the only American composer
who had a highly successful career in insurance.
There is music, and there is music so far ahead of its time,
it will always sound modern. You could pick up Ives’ Piano Sonata No. 2,
“Concord, Mass., 1840-1860” — composed from 1909 to 1915 and published
in 1920 — drop it into the vast contemporary music ocean, and be unable to guess
its age. It’s that strange and that rhythmically complex, with
abrupt polyrhythms and general mayhem invoking marching bands, parlor tunes,
hymns, and chasing through it all in a variety of guises, the four-note motif of
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which forever obsessed Ives. It’s also wildly
entertaining, surprising at every kaleidoscopic turn, wistful, affectionately
dreamy of times past, and powerfully evocative. To Ives, it also felt
unfinished, perhaps on purpose.
Why this particular piece has always stayed with me is a
mystery, 40 years after hearing it for the first time in a Fine Arts seminar at
Mary Washington College. In 1974, the year of Ives’ centenary, a full-scale
re-examination of his life and works was well underway. Despite having won the
Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1947 for his Symphony No. 3, The Camp Meeting, Ives’ music was largely ignored in his lifetime. I
must have heard John Kirkpatrick’s 1968 recording for Columbia in the music
library. (Kirkpatrick premiered the work in 1939.) The view from the music library
was particularly poetic; you either looked onto some majestic trees toward the
amphitheater, or if you were sitting on the other side of the building, you
became part of an elegant colonnade in the shape of a horseshoe. If you walked
through those columns past all the practice rooms on any given afternoon, you’d
hear a perfect mash-up of the history of music. That’s what hearing Ives was
like.
Ives, who lived from 1874 to 1954, spanned 80 remarkable
years in music. Ives’ father George was a bandleader, and it is said (although
this may have been just a charming story to entertain students), that the
experience of hearing the marching band — as well as another band at opposite
sides of the town square playing simultaneously — must have entered Charles
Ives’ work almost the same way: opposing rhythms and harmonics heard as through
a window as the sounds rise and fade, the bands having moved on. In his
teaching, George Ives’ broad approach to music theory must have encouraged his
son to experiment with the polytonal/bitonal harmonies and complex rhythms found
in his music, as well as a cultivated-meets-vernacular approach. In the 1890s,
he studied composition at Yale University, under Horatio Parker.
The “Concord” Sonata is a devil of a piece to play.
Some material dates back as far as 1904, but Ives did
not begin substantial work on it until around 1911, and largely completed the work
by 1915. When it was first printed in 1920, Ives wrote an
elaborate, 30,000-word “program note” in which he explained that the
four-movement sonata was an “impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that
is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over a half century
ago.” It introduces us, in order, to Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and the Alcotts.
E.B. White had a fine phrase that characterizes the sheer restlessness of the
piece: “chronic perplexity.” This unsettled and searching
quality defies rootedness, except in its contemplative-rich Alcott movement,
with a haunting flute solo.
When the polymathic pianist-librettist-essayist Jeremy Denk
recorded Ives’ Sonatas No. 1 and 2 in 2012, I was once again drawn to Ives. In
the February 6, 2012 issue of The New
Yorker, Denk describes in “Flight of the Concord” the joys,
the hell, and the unending neuroses of recording the sonata, while also
discovering that the editing could be the most nerve-wracking part of
the process. It’s a fine read, especially if you like the idea of knowing how
musical sausage is made, from
selecting the piano and recording to the editing
suite.
To know the first movement “Emerson,” is to dwell
in the philosopher’s Transcendentalism. It begins with Beethoven’s Symphony No.
5 four-note motif, and expresses Emerson’s core beliefs with impressionistic
waves of sound. I have always found much restless conflict in this movement,
perhaps much like Emerson’s philosophy itself. It dances from sweetness to
passionate outbursts, like a philosophical Q&A session with the universe. Emerson’s
belief that “all is connected, and God is in all things,” reflected his idea
that all of nature’s elements in the universe were representations of the soul itself. These may not sound like radical ideas now,
but when expressed in 1841, they made
Emerson an iconoclast — something that
Ives must have viscerally understood.
The next movement, “Hawthorne,” is best described
as rollicking and playful, with fantastical outbursts. Hawthorne-as-moralist is
not to be found in this often-witty movement; in “Essays Before a Sonata,” Ives
writes: “The substance of Hawthorne is so dripping wet with the supernatural,
the phantasmal, the mystical —so surcharged with adventures, from the deeper
picturesque to the illusive fantastic, one unconsciously finds oneself thinking
of him as a poet of greater imaginative impulse than Emerson or Thoreau. He was
not a greater poet possibly than they—but a greater artist.” Listen closely, and in the middle of the
movement, you’ll find some syncopated ragtime, some well-placed musical pauses,
and some crashing dissonant chords. You’ll also hear one of Ives’ more
eccentric technical directions, when a 14-3/4-inch piece of wood (it’s in the
score) is evenly deployed over the black keys — decades before John Cage and
his “prepared piano” experiments.
“The Alcotts” movement begins with a hymn-like
treatment of Beethoven’s four-note motif. You can almost hear them in the
parlor as if in conversation: a gentle statement, the crashing motif in
response. There’s gentle interplay of themes into the fabric with wholehearted
simplicity, a folk tune and a pentatonic melody. Stephen Foster is also here,
sentimental and romantic.
The final movement is Thoreau’s, which Henry Cowell
called “a kind of mystic reflection on man’s identification of himself with
nature.” “Thoreau” is an autumn day of Indian summer at Walden Pond, and
memorializes not only Thoreau, but Ives’ father as well, who died before Ives
entered Yale in 1894. About Thoreau, Ives wrote: “He was divinely conscious of
the enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her rhythms and the harmony of her
solitude…” Tellingly, Ives also compares Thoreau to the musical impressionist
Claude Debussy. Considering the profound influence the father had upon the
son’s own musical experimentation, the movement is restless and meditative, the
offstage flute toward the final third weaves the four-note motif, calling in a
pentatonic melody against gentle chords. It is a tribute to nature, to beauty,
and to loss.
In searching for a suitable recording, you won’t be
at a loss — there are 23 versions listed here at Arkivmusic.com. A new and
notable biography of Ives, Mad Music: Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel by
Stephen Budiansky is a recent addition to the growing Ives bookshelf. On my own shelf is one of the earliest and
finest academic assessments, by composer Henry Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music, published in 1955.
[Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think?]
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