Charles Ives American visionary

Modernist, patriot, man of religion, insurance coverage dealer: a brand new field illuminates one among classical music’s most singular voices, and his recording legacy, explored by Peter Quantrill

It didn’t take Schoenberg lengthy, after emigrating to the US in 1933, to dimension up the native scene. ‘There is a superb Man residing on this Country – a composer. He has solved the issue the best way to protect one’s self and to study. He responds to negligence by contempt. He isn’t compelled to just accept reward or blame. His identify is Ives.’

Like Beethoven’s deafness, it’s value making an allowance for sure elementary background elements which don’t name consideration to themselves when listening to the music. At least in maturity, Ives by no means wrote for cash. He had no have to. Once graduated from Yale (in 1898) and the strong however restricted steerage of Horatio Parker, Ives went into insurance coverage, and revolutionised the business over the following 20 years with progressive options to property planning.

Down with ‘good women’

So Ives composed not as a passion, however as a self-supported vocation, like Mahler on this regard. Even greater than most composers, the primary and solely pair of ears he needed to please was his personal. If others preferred what he wrote, all properly and good. He may afford to be caustic about his critics, and he was, in a tone of emasculating scorn calling them ‘aunties’ and ‘good women’.

Above: Ives and his spouse, Harmony, who later established annual ‘Charles Ives Prize’ scholarships with the American Academy of Arts and Letters

The telescoped nature of Charles Ives’ output as a composer is a second essential issue. He was born in 1874 (in Danbury, Connecticut) and died in 1954; nearly all his music emerged in a three-decade interval between the Variations On ‘America’ from 1891 and Symphony No.4, which was accomplished round 1923. Ives then lived the second half of his life in a chronic nightfall after which twilight – not not like his up to date Sibelius, however occasioned by each bodily and psychological decline, centring on a case of diabetes.

Something for everybody

Very a lot not like Sibelius, this nightfall left the Fourth Symphony and Concord Sonata, his two late defining masterpieces, in a state of provisional completeness from which they needed to be rescued by different sympathetic arms. It is likely to be tempting to take a postmodernist perspective and say that on this approach his aesthetic embodies sure modernist tenets of fracture and insurrection. But Ives would have given the notion brief shrift.

More than most composers – Beethoven being the exemplar on this regard – there’s something for everybody in Ives’ work. The sacred choral music is basically the work of his energetic however pious teenage years as a church organist. The songs are the place we discover Ives the melodist, within the home-on-the-range custom of Stephen Foster, and the place his contested place in relation to the European classical custom comes into sharpest focus, in settings of Romantic German poetry.

Ives later compiled 114 of his songs as an autobiographical assortment, initially meaning to organize them chronologically, latest first. Then on the final minute he jumbled them up, with a purpose to alarm and irritate the ‘good women’ who may sit on the piano and sing by way of a dreamy Romantic lyric resembling Feldeinsamkeit or The Housatonic At Stockbridge, then flip the web page and discover themselves confronted with the experimental expressionism of Thoreau or 1, 2, 3.

Perhaps much less acquainted than the 4 symphonies, Ives’ 4 violin sonatas additionally chart his musical journey to the outer reaches of tonal language after which past, a journey he took parallel to however unbiased from Schoenberg. No 2 has a barn dance, No 4 exhibits youngsters at play: Ives’ music is rooted in place and time as a lot as it’s impressed by American Transcendentalist literature of writers resembling Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, translated into notes within the unavoidable monster of piano literature that’s the Concord Sonata.

Hooked on Ives

YouTube hosts an hour-long movie of the Fourth Symphony’s belated full premiere, led by Stokowski in 1965. It options the Columbia producer John McClure speaking concerning the preliminary influence of the music, by way of John Kirkpatrick’s first recording of the Concord Sonata, ‘like a primary shot of heroin’. Not lengthy after that premiere, McClure decided to file each word of Ives, lots of them for the primary time. The fruits of his labour have lastly been compiled in a brand new field from Sony, which heads our checklist of Essential Recordings [below].

Above: Baritone Gerald Finley, joined by pianist Julius Drake, recorded 31 of Ives’ songs at All Saints’ Church in 2004 for Hyperion

Well earlier than Stravinsky, Ives was writing music in two (or extra) keys without delay. This approach lends items resembling the primary of his Three Places in New England their distinctive rigidity between tonal safety and slippage. Likewise, when two acquainted tunes or rhythms mix and collide, humorous issues occur, resembling No 2 of the Three Places.

Different instances

The reception of Ives may have been very completely different if the dying Mahler had been capable of make good on his promise to conduct the Third Symphony in Europe. Instead, it took McClure and American musicians of the stereo technology, resembling Bernstein and Tilson Thomas, to offer Ives his due as greater than a (extremely regarded) insurance coverage govt. The music lacks a performing custom within the mould of Mahler or Stravinsky. Even his best-known piece, The Unanswered Question, can sound utterly completely different throughout recorded variations that change in size between 4’38” and 9’16”.

All these themes come collectively within the Fourth Symphony, which is the ‘all the things piece’ to face alongside the Concord Sonata in his output. The hymns and the marching bands of his childhood, the reminiscences and literature of his thoughts, the polytonal and polyrhythmic textures, all mix to ask, within the composer’s phrases, ‘the looking questions of What? and Why? which the spirit of man asks of life… one thing to do with the fact of existence and its spiritual expertise’.

Nowhere left to go

The Fourth’s third-movement fugue appears to belong to an earlier, extra harmless age – and in a way it does, as an growth of a part of his First String Quartet, written whereas he was nonetheless a scholar at Yale University. Every interval and facet of Ives’ work is related to the others, nonetheless superficially disparate they seem. It could also be that, well being and confidence however, Ives had written himself out within the Fourth, simply as Sibelius did within the Seventh and Tapiola. Simply put, that they had nowhere left to go.

Above: The RCA and Columbia Album Anthology from Sony: nearly all of the Charles Ives you’ll ever want throughout 22 CDs

Modern recordings of the Fourth, led by Litton [Hyperion] and Dudamel [Deutsche Grammophon] attain a brand new diploma of musical and technical readability, not least because of editors who’ve continued to work out what Ives had in thoughts from the unholy mess of the manuscript. Ives’ horrible handwriting had initially compelled him out of the junior actuarial division and into consumer conferences. His music might be messy, too, however in its sincerity, the directness of its switch from thought to sound, is all of the extra true to life.

Essential Recordings

The Album Anthology 1945-1976
Sony 19658885962 (22CD)
From Kirkpatrick’s Concord to Bernstein’s Second, this can be a trove of traditional albums with unique jacket covers and good annotation.

Symphonies, Orchestral Sets
Sony 19439788332 (4CD)
Michael Tilson Thomas leads the CSO, SFSO and RCOA in all the foremost orchestral music. Expansive however detailed digital-era sound.

Concord Sonata
Avie AV2678
Donald Berman – grasp Ives scholar in addition to pianist – pours a life’s work of perception right into a affected person and far-sighted studio account.

Songs
Hyperion CDA67516
The first of two invaluable surveys of Ives undertaken by Gerald Finley and Julius Drake. Superb diction and a nice sense of enjoyable.

Violin Sonatas
Deutsche Grammophon 4779435
Hilary Hahn and Valentina Lisitsa have the measure of the folksy-modernist idiom. Close-up studio sound, authentically ‘home’.

Psalms
Hänssler CD93224
The SWR Vokalensemble underneath Marcus Creed illuminate Ives’ church-organist previous. Unrivalled for completeness and precision.

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April 17, 2025 at 02:42PM