Charles Ives. Was he: an “American original” composer, crusty New England curmudgeon, gruff polemicist, successful insurance man? Well, he was a bit of all of those. Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, the same year Arnold Schoenberg was born. Yale-educated son of a band master, his work was barely known in his lifetime. He spent the last 28 years of his life in musical silence, dying in 1954. Today, many music lovers have heard at least one piece by Ives: “The Unanswered Question” for orchestra, or “Variations on ‘America,’” originally for organ, arranged several different times for band or orchestra.
His music combines many of the main techniques of 20th century music, such as polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, chance, quarter tones, and quotation from other works of music, sometimes all in the same work. But don’t let all that terminology scare you.
Pianists are sometimes asked to do a “forearm” cluster, or to depress the keys with a specifically measured piece of wood. He created giant symphonies, piano sonatas, string quartets, violin/piano sonatas, a piano trio, the list goes on.
Ives composed music of unparalleled density, a sort of “New England polyphony” as I like to call it, through the “mash-up” of simultaneous tunes, the result (some think) of hearing multiple bands, including his father’s, rehearsing on the village green in Danbury. He also uses hymn-tunes, ragtime, spirituals, and popular salon ballads like those by Stephen Foster, layering and distorting them.
A good approach to Ives for the novice is through his songs for voice and piano. Ives self-published his classic volume “114 Songs” in 1922. It contains a personal diary of his creative self in songs written from 1887 to 1921. Though there have been some additional discoveries, this book remains important to an understanding and appreciation for, and a love of Ives.
Some of the highlights from the songs: “Evening,” “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” “At the River,” “Tom Sails Away,” “The Circus Band,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Berceuse,” “Memories {A,-Very pleasant, B,-Rather sad,” and “Two Little Flowers.” By the way, if the poet is not designated at the beginning of the song, then it is “Harmony Twitchell Ives,” the composer’s wife. Now I ask you, how could a musician not marry someone named Harmony?
So, have a listen or an exploration with your bold pianist!
Also by Ives: His interesting writings are available in a classic “Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings.” A Norton Library paperback © 1970. Contains the links to the “Transcendentalist” philosophies of Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Thoreau. It also contains this wonderfully terse admonition, seemingly addressed to musicologists: “To divide by an arbitrary line something that cannot be divided is a process that is disturbing—to some.”
© 2009 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs
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