aworks :: "new" american classical music

Symphony No. 3 (1901-04). Charles Ives

An article without byline in the Old Colony Memorial describes a rehearsal of four American works by the Plymouth Philharmonic Orchestra:

The players of the Phil toiled Friday night. In privacy, with intimacy, they harrowed the works of four American composers in preparation for Saturday night's concert. Going over the same ground again and again would begin with difficulty and end gloriously...Karidoyanes had said earlier that the Ives would prove the biggest challenge to the orchestra and the audience. It's a complex piece with dramatic rhythmic and melodic shifts. It leaves lots of discretion to the conductor. This conductor wanted to get it right.

The Charles Ives page on Wikipedia is a featured article, one of five hundred selected as best from the universe of four hundred seventy thousand articles. I  My only contribution was to add a link to Scott Mortensen's definitive Charles Ives site, although I see six months later someone deleted it. Progress...
 

Symphony No. 2 (1897-1902). Charles Ives /dallas/

Punch Shaw reviews a Dallas Symphony Orchestra concert by describing it as a series of snapshots:

...anyone who attended left with aural and visual snapshots for their album of musical memories...Click. Here's a keeper. As the concerto neared its end, Chang leaned over the music stand of concertmaster Emanuel Borok. They were eyeball to eyeball, bow to bow, two masters of the violin locked in a musical embrace. Rapture. Pure rapture.

Ok.

At the end, he trashes Ives' Symphony No. 2:

No need to waste mental film on the Symphony No. 2 by American composer Charles Ives that closed the program. Almost every note in this meandering, five-movement work comes from somewhere else. Besides, the orchestra is recording this symphony for a CD, so it is already preserved for all posterity.

Sigh.

Symphony No. 2 (1897-1901). Charles Ives

Madbard suggests:

The jig music that plays on Prince Eric's ship in The Little Mermaid sounds suspiciously like a passage in Charles Ives' symphony #2.

As usual, Scott Mortensen has an excellent web page on this symphony:

In many regards, the Symphony No. 2 represents the pinnacle of Ives' success as a respectable composer. By "respectable," I mean that in this symphony Ives was working within the confines of a clearly defined formal tradition. More broadly speaking, by "respectable" I also mean that this work sounds more acceptable to folks regularly listen to Romantic composers like Brahms, Dvorak, and Tchaikovsky.

In the terminology of the Fourth Turning, Ives wrote the piece in an awakening period equivalent to our 1960s and 1970s, in an era of spirtuality, utopianism, and youth attacks on the social order. While this music still sounds conventional, it begins to combine thematic material, foreshadowing Ives' future experiments. "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean" is the notable borrowed tune in the first and last movements.

Ives quoted by David Ewen:

The future of music may not lie entirely with music itself, but rather in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits, the aspirations and ideals of the people, in the way it makes itself a part with the finer things that humanity does and dreams of.

Fifty years after its creation, Leonard Bernstein premiered the work in 1951, while Ives was still alive. I have a mild preference for the Third Symphony over this one, but both are recommended, although there are some who might find them overly conventional. And unsurprisingly, the first Little Mermaid movie is better than the second.

The Unanswered Question (1906). Charles Ives /autumn/

Linus Gelber at Pepper of the Earth writes that Ives' The Unanswered Question suggests September sun and the coming Autumn.

• Prior aworks post on The Unanswered Question.
• Full Real stream via abeillemusique.
• Jazz version MP3.
• Preston Wright's Flash demonstration of Ives technique of spatial sound.
• In 1906, Charles Ives had a physical breakdown, partnered to start an insurance company, began courting his future wife, and the San Francisco earthquake was the first major natural disaster to be photographed.

The Unanswered Question (1906). Charles Ives. /societal relevance/

In an essay "Movies as Mirror on Society", San Francisco film critic Mick LaSalle writes about current movies reflecting a lack of faith in both individuals and institutions:

If anything, American movies are more cynical and despairing than before. Their implicit message: People are garbage and the world is terrifying.

I buy into the somewhat different Fourth Turning historical doctrine where we are near the end of an unraveling era ("third turning") , where people hold institutions in low esteem but view themselves with high esteem:

Wars are fought with moral fervor but without consensus or follow-through. Eventually, cynical alienation hardens into a brooding pessimism... During an Unraveling, an obliging society serves purposeful individuals, and even good people find it hard to connect with their community.

LaSalle also links post-World War II film noir with Charles Ives:

I see noir as a despairing response to conformity, depicting the individual's lone wail and his subsequent submersion. Or to put it another way, noir is the cinema's equivalent of composer Charles Ives' "The Unanswered Question."

From which I'll conclude The Unanswered Question is not really speaking to us now, 60 years into the battle of overcoming conformity. I still like the work, though, as does Kenneth Walton in the Scotsman:

Not for nothing was his [Ives] best-known piece called The Unanswered Question - a startling contradiction of musical styles written in 1906 that somehow achieves penetrating unity through its unconventional diversity. Ives, in his personal and musical life, was such a paradox.

The Unanswered Question (1906). Charles Ives

I have been thinking about my response to the music of Charles Ives over the last week or so. Then, Lynn at Reflections in d minor commented on Samuel Barber:

Beyond his famous Adagio for Strings and the wonderful String Quartet in B minor from which it was taken, I haven't found much by Barber that appeals to me a great deal.

I entered the worlds of both Ives and Barber by first hearing a really compelling work (The Unanswered Question, Adagio for Strings). With Barber, I went on to find other music of his I like, in a low-key kind of way. But with Ives, after hearing his eye-opening work, I went on to give him the benefit of the doubt on anything else he has done. I may ultimately disdain what I hear but something clicked initially so much that I am compelled to try to repeat the experience. John Adams' Shaker Loops provoked the same response in me. How one piece can shape my experience with the rest of a composer's work amazes me, especially since Barber's Adagio did not give me that same sense of momentum.

So, the intersection of my Ives and Adams enthusiasm (and maybe my American music enthusiasm in general) is the CD where John Adams conducts American elegies, including The Unanswered Question as well as excellent music by David Diamond and Ingram Marshall. Ironically, Adams' own Eros Piano is the weakest piece on the CD. Amazon samples much of the album.

By the way, I've also learned to not recommend The Unanswered Question to the unitiated; it's just too jarring, although I find it stimulating. My current guidance would be to start with Ives' more conventional first three symphonies (and skip the 4th which is "out there").

From the Steeples and the Mountains (1901). Charles Ives

In a used CD bin, I found "A Portrait of Charles Ives," a 1992 recording by Ensemble Modern and Ingo Metzmacher. It's a compendium of Ives' program music.

From Metzmacher's bio: Ingo Metzmacher has recorded extensively for EMI Classics since 1992 when his first CD, “A Portrait of Charles Ives” with the Ensemble Modern, was nominated a Grammy Award and earned the Grand Prix from the Académie Charles Cros.

Metzmacher went on to record an orchestral arrangement of Conlon Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano. Compared to the original player piano recording, Ensemble Modern is colorful, riveting, illuminating and an excellent introduction to that work.

From the Steeples and the Mountains is a programmatic work based on his mother's recollection of church bells warning of a fire started by lightning:

"Pretty soon the air was alive with the sound of ringing bells--but my husband stood outside on the back porch like a man entranced, till the bells finally died down and the fire was stopped."

Other more contemplative works on the CD include Adagio Sostenuto (At Sea) and Mists. His A Set of Pieces for Theater or Chamber Orchestra is also promising.

So, I had high hopes for the Ives CD. It is not the eye opener that Ensemble Modern's Studies for Player Piano was. This may be due to the somewhat incoherent music bundled on one CD. Unlike say the Philip Glass Etudes for Piano Vol. 1 CD (also in that used bin), this selection of music is unpredictable and chaotic. "Unpredictable and chaotic" probably being a fair characterization of Ives' music in general.

Amazon samples the Tilson Thomas recording of From the Steeples.

Three Places in New England for Orchestra (1903-14). Charles Ives

Matthew Guilford, blogging bass trombonist for the National Symphony Orchestra (and currently on tour), writes about Charles Ives and his Three Places in New England:

The finale movement of Three Places in New England, The Housatonic at Stockbridge, is a poignant music picture of this river. The strings provide the constancy of flowing water motion, with a rich C# major chorale from the winds and brass murmuring in and out of the texture, suggesting bends and dips in the river’s course. It sounds eerie, dark and beautiful to me. I can actually see the color of the water from listening to the music-it is a blue/gray shade so dark that it is almost opaque. The water is cold as well, the kind that would numb your ankles if you waded in longer than a few minutes. Only great music can paint these pictures for you.

Ives deserves better PR.

String Quartet No. 1: From the Salvation Army (1897-1900). Charles Ives

The Poz Life doesn't like the music of Charles Ives. He was supposed to yet again play an Ives string quartet at a chamber music workshop but managed to be able to play something else. Clearly, too much Ives is a problem for all of us...

aworks files this under String Quartet No. 1 although that's not clear. Yale's descriptive catalogue does in fact describe the two Ives quartets.