Oxford Studies of Composers

CHERUBINIBasil Deane

DEBUSSYRoger Nichols

FUXEgon Wellesz

GIOVANNI GABRIELIDenis Arnold

HINDEMITHIan Kemp

MACHAUTGilbert Reaney

MARENZIODenis Arnold

M ESSIAENRoger Nichols

PALESTRINAJerome Roche

SCIIOEN BERGAnthony Payne

S IIOSTA KOV IC HNolnran Kay

-fNLLISI)uul I)oe

WII,I}YE| )rrvid Ilrowrt

Oxford Studies of Composers (14 )

IVES

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK

LondonOXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK TOI.I.ONTO

r977

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro-duced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in anyform or by any means, eleclronic, mechanical, photocopy-ing, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of

Oxford University Press.

t)\L,r(l IJilir(rsity Press, Pl/alton Steet, OxfordI'I^\lIIIIV NIW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON

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(t) Oxford University Press, 1977

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To John Kirkpatrick

FOREWORD

CH,c.nrss Ives was born on zo October r874 in Danbury, Con-necticut, in the rolling, wooded land of southwestern New Ensland.He descended from old Anglo-American stock. The griatestinfluence on his life, his thought, and his music was that of hisfather George lves, Danbury's principal musician, a versatileinstrumentalist, conductor, and musical arranger who had a uni-quely open mind about musical possibilities and experimented con-stantly with unconventional tone systems and instruments. He gavehis son Charles a thorough grounding in traditional (and non-traditional) music theory and a lasting love and respect for theAmerican vernacular music of hymns, popular and traditionalsongs and dances, ragtime, brass bands, and theatre orchestras.Ives attended Yale University from 1894 to r898, studying therewith Horatio Parker, eminent figure among the German-trained'Second New England School' of academic composers who hadno truck with American vernacular music, seeking inspirationrather in the art music of the European classic-Romantic tradition.

Ives's eclectic, individualistic, and radical works found almostno sympathetic performers or listeners; although his vocation wasclearly to musical composition and he was a church organist fromI889 to t9oz, he decided to give up a career as professional musi-cian for one in the insurance business. This he pursued with greatsuccess from r898 until his retirement in r93o. Meanwhile, theonset of World War I, a severe heart attack in 19r8, profound dis-illusionment with the results of the American elections of Novem-ber t9zo, and-perhaps most fundamentally-the strain of hisdouble life and the rejection by others of his music had virtually

(.nrl(.(l lrt',.',, torrrposirrg: lcw works postdate r92I, which saw alltrrtl lrttt'.1 ol '.1r111'q.

llt.trr r.r.rr 1r;o.' (rr'lrcrr lrc rcsigned from his last organist's job) andtr,.,, llrr'tr'lrrrl rrot bccrt a single performance of Ives's musicI'r'rrlr irtrrl lry rrrryorrc's cflbrts besides his own. His private printingsf rr.trtccn tr)t() iur(l 19zz of the Second Piano Sonata ('Concord'), alrrrrrk rrf / rrrrr'.r lfulbre a Sonata, and a volume of I I4 Songs weretlrr' lrr rt slt'ps tow:rrcl the diffusion of his music beyond a tiny circleoI lir rrr rly rrntl ll'icrrcls. BLrt it was not for many years that it graduallylrcl',rrrr to bc hcard, let alone accepted or prized, on any significantrurlc; lrnd csscntially, the current view of lves as America's firstHr'('itl c()n'lposcr (some would say its greatest) dates only sinceWorld War ll.

Sincc rro general survey of Ives's music has been published, ithas sccmed worth the effort to attempt one, even in a book thatnrust necessarily be very brief. Hence the organization of thisvolume according to the principal genres in which lves worked.Ilut this organization also reflects the fact that lves's compositionalcareer, lasting roughly from t89o to t925, did not follow a clear-cut line of development chronologically. Not only would it be diffi-cult to define 'periods' in that career, as one can with composerslike Beethoven or Stravinsky, but one cannot really generalize about'the lves style'; stylistic pluralism was characteristic of his musicalmost from the beginning. Simple and complex, traditional andradical, conventional and experimental, homespun and rarefied,spiritual and slapstick--these and many other dichotomies jostleeach other in neighbourly fashion throughout his life as a com-poser. So too do modes of musical expression derived from widelyvaried sources. lves was explicit about the inclusiveness with whichhe embraced the whole sonorous world that he knew or couldimagine as potential raw material for his music:'The fabric ofexistence weaves itself whole. . . . There can be nothing "exclltsive"about a substantial art.'r Thus his music has roots not only in thatof the masters (and lesser composers) of European and Americanart music and in the friendly vernacular traditions of his nativeNew England (hymn tunes, country fiddling. camp-meeting songs,brass-band marches, piano rags, patriotic and popular ditties, songsof hearth and home) but also in 'unmusical' sounds-horses'hooves on cobblestones, out-of-tune volunteer church choirs, the

1 Quoted first in Henry Bellamann, 'Charles Ives; the Man and his Music', MusicalQuarterly, xix (t933), pp.45*58.

6

crack of bat and ball, the special quality of 'a horn over a lake', theclash of two bands at opposite sides of a town square each playingits own march in its own tempo-and in untried sounds as well-harmonies in massed seconds or other novel stacks of intervals,microtones, tone-rows, rhythmic and metric serialism, uniqueinstrumental combinations.

**:3r3

This study relies much on the three main sources of documenta-tion for lves's music and his writings about it: John Kirkpatrick'scatalogue of Ives's manuscripts and his edition of Ives's Memos(dictated in r93z)and Howard Boatwright's edition of lves's EssaysBefore a Sonata,The Majority and Other Writings. (Full citationsof these will be found in the 'Selective Bibliography' at the endof this volume, and grateful thanks are due to W. W. Norton &Co., Inc., for permission to quote from the latter two.) Quotationsfrom the Memos or the Essays are noted parenthetically as suchin the body of the text; quotations from lves's manuscript mar-ginalia derive from Kirkpatrick's catalogue, under the entries forthe works to which they relate, unless indicated otherwise.

The dedication of this book is acknowledgment of the enormousdebt owed by me (as by all other students of Ives) to the artistry,the scholarship, and the generosity and grace of spirit of JohnKirkpatrick, to whom is due even the possibility of viewing lves'smusic in the round. Students in my Brooklyn College and CityUniversity of New York seminars have contributed many valuableinsights, especially Carol Baron, Carl Skoggard, Laurie Spiegel,Judith Tick, Jodi Vogel, and Robin Warren. Four others towhom I am especially grateful for having read and criticized thebook in draft form are Janet Hitchcock, Sidney Cowell, IainFenlon, and Vivian Perlis.

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7

CONTENTS

I The Songs

2 The Choral Music

3 The Keyboard Music

4 The Chamber Music

5 The Orchestral Music

Selective Bibliography

page

9

28

73

95

42

57

I. THE SONGS

Ivrs's songs make a good point of departure for a survey of hismusic. They span his life as a composer: his earliest known work(Slow March; ?1887) and his last completed one (Sunrise; 19z6\are songs; in between, he wrote about r5o others, most of which hegathered into the book of rr4 Songs.In the songs we meet theimmense diversity of compositional manner and material-theinclusiveness-that characterizes Ives's work as a whole; also itsrange, from the miniature to the mighty, the ultra-simple to thebewilderingly complex, the comic to the profound. To begin withthe songs, moreover, is to affirm that the very foundation of lves'smusical personality was a melodic gift of grace and power.

Ives is notorious as a radical pathfinder who arrived-alone,virtually uninfluenced (except by his father)-at modes of musicalexpression that other composers of international stature exploitedsystematically only later. But he remained in many ways a latenineteenth-century American, a product of that era termed byLewis Mumford 'the brown decades'. The subject matter of Ives'sworks is overwhelmingly retrospective: memories of boyhood lifein a New England country town. And the kind of song he wrote ingreatest numbers is the 'household song' of sentiment, voicingsome emotion of affection, nostalgia, or yearning; pleasant to per-form and to hear, and not too demanding technically. It had beena favourite American genre for a long time; Stephen Foster's songsfor the parlour were neither the first nor the last of the sort. Prac-tically all of Ives's early songs are in this vein, beginning with S/owMarch, composed at age 12 or 13, a gentle account of the burial ofa family pet (Ex. r).

Ives's borrowing of the 'Dead March' from Handel's Sall forthe introduction (and also the epilogue) of SIow March is the firstinstance of his lifelong practice of musical 'quotation'; more thanI5o tunes have been identified as such in his works, mainly tradi-tional American hymn tunes, popular and patriotic songs, marches,

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Masses) as in the graphic arts or literature, had fallen into disuseby the nineteenth century, or was exploited self-consciously, oftenwith programmatic or nationalistic aims. But lves's 'quotations'have nothing to do with nationalisn, folklorism, or mere localcolour. Like those of Joyce, Pound, or Picasso, they were as

natural to him as pure invention: the pre-existent melodies that sooften figure in his compositions were simply part of his auditoryexperience, just as susceptible to reworking into an artistic presentas the storehouse in memory of a novelist or poet, or the visualexperience (whether of nature or prior art) of a painter. Of coursethe tunes that Ives borrowed had associations for him, but his useof them usually goes far beyond mere associative value. Borrowedmelodies are sometimes the very basis of the musical fabric, andthey are treated variously, from the baldest verbatim quotations ofsingle tunes or collage-like assemblages of them to the most subtlecloudy allusions, reminiscences, and half-rememberings. ln TheThings Our Fathers Loved (t9t7), for example, bits of six Americanpopular songs are quoted, and in He Is There! (tgr7) snatches ofno fewer than thirteen pre-existent tunes appear. On the other

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hand, in Down East (rgrg) a dreamy chromatic introductiorr givcsway to a tantalizingly familiar, homespun melody (Ex. z); only

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near the close of the song does Ives actually quote precisely LowellMason's hymn tune Bethany ('Nearer, my God, to Thee'), reveal-ing it (Ex. :) as the nostalgic, pervasive source of the entirecomposition.

Er.3 Botheny

Many of lves's mature songs, though clearly in the tradition ofthe household song, transcend its usual technical and artistic limita-tions by carefully-wrought details of style. ln Ttuo Little Flowers(r9zt) the vocal melody, having begun almost predictably in smoothcontours of pitch and rhythm, is interrupted by three tiny rhythmicjolts (marked 'x' in Ex. +). These highlight in a subtle way thesyntactical divisions of the verses, and they prepare the whollyoriginal climax, at which the line traverses a downward tenth topause suspensively on'all'(unless the singer cannot make it; andIves offers an easier alternative, in the kind ofgesture to practicalexpediency that characterizes much of his music). Similar rhythmicdisruptions punctuate the ends of each half of At the River and ofSerenity (see Ex. r4).

I1

lvcs was not abovc parodying the household song, for he detes-ted the banality, morbidity, and maudlin sentimentality (as opposed

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to genuine sentiment) that had traditionally marked the genre. Oneof his most devilish 'take-offs' (his term for parodies, sometimesimplying a hint, or more than a hint, of wicked satire) is On theCounter (r9zo). Its text (by lves) is a derisive sneer at'the same oldchords, the same old time, the same old sentimental sound', itsmusic a cracked-mirror reflection of Ethelbert Nevin's, ending witha rueful quotation of Auld Lang Syne after teasingly leaving theparodied composer's name to be supplied by the singer (Ex. S).

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If the household song is at the core of lves's lyric art, other typesof song are part of it as well. These fall into three groups: songs thatspring from the bedrock of American vernacular-tradition music;songs based on radical experiments in tonal or rhythmic organiza-tion; and songs that share the aspirations, and usually the abstract,non-associative musical language, of the Euro-American art-songtradition.

The vernacular tradition of American music is the source ofsuch purposeful pleasantries as the group in r 14 Songs that Ivescaiied '5 Street Songs and Pieces' (Old Home Day, In the Alley,A Son of a Gambolier, andThe Circus Band,besides Down East)and of the nostalgic, Sunday-morning group of '4 Songs Based onHymntune Themes' (Watchntan, At the River, His Exaltation, andThe Camp Meeting). There is a manuscript sketch dating fromIves's first year at Yale (1894) for the brassy march music of TheCircus Band (the words came later); the same year, perhaps evenearlier, Ives worked up a popular dance tune, Little Annie Rooney,into the rollicking wedding song, Waltz. He adapted A Son of aGambolier (l8qS) from two earlier piano marches he had written;in it he quotes a traditional melody (of Irish origin ?) and near theend invites the improvisatory participation of a ,Kazoo Chorus[:]

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The four hymn-tune songs exemplify lves's lifelong practice ofrevising, rearranging, adapting, or recomposing earlier works. Allfour derived from instrumental pieces. Watchman (r9r3), based ona tune by Mason, was taken from the last movement of the FirstViolin Sonata (the Watchmarz sections of which were themselvesadaptations from a setting of r9or, now lost, for soprano andorgan); it was to reappear, recomposed, as the first movement ofthe Fourth Symphony. At the River (?t9r6) came from the thirdmovement of the Fourth Violin Sonata; His Exaltation (r9r3) fromthe first movement of the Second Violin Sonata; and The CampMeeting (tgrz) from various parts of the Third Symphony's lastmovement that use the hymn tune Azmon.

Popular-music idioms inform many other songs as well. Thetranscendental text of Walking (t9oo*?z) mentions 'a roadhouse,a dance going on' (to be spoken, if voiced at all), and the pianolaunches into an interlude in ragtime rhythms (Ex. 6). Spoken textis explicitly demanded in the central climax of the cowboy ballad

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r-O Copyrighr 1939 by Arrow Music Press, Inc. Copyright assigned 1957 to Associated Music Publishers,I nc. Used by pcrmission.

Charlie Rutlage (rgzolzt)-or, rather than spoken text, an originalkind of Sprechstimme (lves had not heard or seen Schoenberg'skind) in which the vocal rhythm but not the pitches is notated. Atthe beginning and the end of the song, guitar-like strummingaccompanies the voice, and lves's setting of the colloquialisms ofthe poetry is so sensitive that it is difficult to sing it with anythingbut the appropriate drawling accent of the American Southwest.Example 7 shows the transition from the peak of the recited section

14

(up thc vollay, o r@d.housc,

back to the music 'as in the beginning'. Ives's footnote is a re-minder of one of his most startling statements-'My God ! What hassound got to do with music!' (Essays 84)-and the piano part towhich it refers is a powerful example of his use of tone-clusterstoward expressive ends.

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€) C-o,pyright 1939 bv Arrow Music Press, Inc. Copyright assigned 1957 to Associated Music publishersInc. Used by permission.

A kind of musical deadpan humour shines through the brief songon lower Manhattan's impudent little two-block-long Ann Streetand the lurching merry-go-round music of The Side Show(both rgzl). Childlike music in skipping rhythms related to chil-dren's play-party songs appears in both the early Memories (rSqZ)and the late The Greatest Man Qgzt). Akin to popular Americansongs in their texts' concern with topical social and political issues

-virtually musical editorials-are Noy. 2, rg2o or The Election

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( r t;.r r ), wlriclr bcgins wrth the homespun line'It strikes me that . .'.llluirtrit.t,(r921), on a humanitarian theme so central to tu.r'itlrinking that he gave the song the place of honour as No. r int 14 Songs; and'3 Songs of the War' (In Flanders Fields, He IsThere!, and Tom Sails Away; all ryt7), their music a network ofpopular and patriotic tunes from the American past and present.

To turn directly from lves's songs of popular inspiration tothose of radical musical organization is to reaffirm the scope of hismusical vocabulary and the open-mindedness, the inclusiveness, ofhis musical attitudes as well as his inventiveness, daring, andvisionary reach.

In Like a Sick Eagle (2t9o9) not only are both melody and har-mony so chromatic as to be virtually atonal but lves suggests thatthe voice slide from note to note (in a line moving mostly by semi-tones) through quarter-tones, as a violin had done in the originalchamber-orchestra version. Wholly unbarred, the song has a steadyunderlying pulse in quavers that is organized by the voice into longserpentine phrases, no two of the same length and all set offagainstshorter, asymmetrical groupings in the accompaniment. Thus themusic is projected on two planes seemingly quite independent ofeach other. Similarly unbarred, 'atonal', and on two planes is TheCage (arranged in 1906 from a chamber work of the same year).Its background chords are built up by perfect fourths and fifths;the foreground melody moves mostly by whole-tones. Said lves:'Technically this piece is but a study of how chords of 4ths and 5thsmay throw melodies away from a set tonality. . . . [The] principalthing in this movement is to show that a song does not necessarilyhave to be in any one key to make musical sense. To make music inno particular key has a nice name nowadays [tglz]-'3nf6n4li1y".'(Memos 55-6) ('Nice', in lves's vocabulary, was a particularlydamning epithet, meaning conventional, conformist, meek, andweak.)

Mists (tgto), set to a lovely poem by lves's wife, HarmonyTwichell, on the death of her mother, has three or four planesdepending on how one listens. One is the grateful, shapely vocalmelody, another the tolling betl of the bass. Between these is agently oscillating stream of misty augmented triads, which isshadowed high in the piano register by a similar stream that shouldbe 'scarcely audible'. This 'shadow' (a favourite concept of [ves) islike a distant choir humming heterophonically along with themiddle plane, or like a mirror-reflection of it seen from afar (Ex. 8).

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O Copyright 1933, Merion Music, lnc. Used by permission.

Such visual and spatial analogies as these often leap to mind inhearing Ives's planar, heterophonic polyphony, and well theymight, for he thought in such terms:

A natural procedure in a piece of music, be it a song or a week'ssymphony, may have something in common [with] a walk up a moun-tain. There's the mountain, its foot, its summit-there's the valley-theclimber looks, turns, and looks down or up. He sees the valley, but notexactly the same angle he saw it at [in] the last look-and the summit ischanging with every step-and the sky. (Mentos 196)

This notion, mildly as Ives puts it, was in fact one of his mostradical, and it is an important key to much of his music, which isoften a multi-faceted, multi-layered-indeed, multi-djmensional--microcosm in which individual objects or events co-exist, eachmaintaining its individuality yet influencing and being influencedby the others. Ives viewed such a co-existence as no more threaten-ing to 'order' in music than, say, the co-existence in a forest oftrees, rocks, mosses, flowers, animals, and insects is threatening toorder; 'order'is here an irrelevant concept, or one too narrowlyconceived.

Ives's layered polyphony is sometimes so dense, the relation-ships between its co-existing events sometimes so subtle and their

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clrirotic cvcn through many listenings. But that lves's musicaltlrought was'chaotic'is belied by his not infrequently turning to'pre-compositional'plans which are then pursued, with some rigour,in a work. Paradoxically, the result of such plans-themselves any-thing but chaotic-is often so unusual and knotty in sound that theear fails to hear the logic and perceives even this carefully orderedmusic as bordering on chaos. In the late song On the Antipodes(r9r5-23) lves may have intended to exploit this paradox. Thepoem is about the paradoxical ('antipodal') extremes of Nature:'Nature's relentless; Nature is kind. Nature is Eternity; Nature'stoday ! . . .' The music, for soprano or chorus and two pianos withoptional organ at the close, is in disjunct sections which mirror theextremes of Nature expressed in the text. At beginning, centre, andend, however, the song is anchored by a recurrent series of giantchords, each made up systematically of different stacks of super-imposed intervals. The sequence of these chords is carefullyplanned: from an opening sonority built up by perfect flfths, othersof successively smaller stacked intervals appear, until one ofcrushed-together semitones is reached; then the process is re-versed, and the sequence ends (as it had begun) with an immensechord of fifths. In Ex. 9, the last section of the song, the structural

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basis of these chords is indicated beneath the music: p : perfect,d : diminished, a : augmented, M : major, and m : minor.The final, strident, frustrated question of the poet (lves) is expressedthrough a vocal line that leaps through a series ofjagged intervals.

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19

This line is not haphazard either: not only is it a twelve-note series,

it is a carefully structured set of permutations of a three-note cell

spanning a major third, with an inner minor third (Ex. to). (The

second vocal part, to be sung if the work is performed chorally,follows another twelve-note series')

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Another song, So/i/o quy, is better known for this kind of proto-serialism, perhaps because of its hinting subtitle: '. . . a Study in

Tths and Other Things'. lts text, like that of On the Antipodes (andalso by lves), is about man's ambivalence before Nature:

When a man is sitting before the fire on the hearth,he says, 'Nature is a simPle affair.'

Then he looks out the window and sees a hailstorm,and he begins to think that 'Nature can't be so

easily disposed of!'

The first verse is set almost monotonously as a drawling recitativeover harmonies slowly swinging back and forth above a bass mov-ing from dh to D q (i.e. a seventh). The second verse is a contrast inevery way-tumultuous, frantic, stormy. The voice races chromatic-ally in very wide intervals (the first phrase containing all twelve

notes without repetition). The piano rushes similarly, first througharpeggios built of major sevenths (or minor ninths), then throughchords built, like those of On the Antipodes, on varying structuralintervals. A midpoint is reached, then everything is repeated inretrograde, including the sequence of bar-lengths (5, 6, 7, 8, and 5

semiquavers to the midpoint, then 5, 8,7,6, and 5), and also byinversion (arpeggios up in first half, down in second).

Sotitoquy dates from l9o7; thus it anticipates similar uses oftwelve-note material, wide-spanned vocal melody emphasizingsevenths and ninths, and techniques of retrograde and inversion inthe works of the Viennese school. Also prophetic, but anticipatingrather the polytonal techniques of Stravinsky, Milhaud, and others,is an even earlier work, the Song /br Harvest Season (t893), one oftwo youthful 'fugues in four keys'. In this song, scored for soprano

with either organ or brass trio accompaniment, Ives explores thepossibilities of imitative counterpoint in which bass, tenor, alto,

20

and soprano voices are respectively and consistently in (', lr, llh,and E[.

If the songs just discussed revealthe experimental,'radical', andprophetic side of lves, another group is more unambiguouslywithin the tradition of art song based on texts of some poetic ele-gance. At Yale, Horatio Parker habitually assigned well-knownsong texts to be newly set by his students; lves set a number whileat the university, more later. Thus there are Lieder by him-e.g.Widmung (Mtiller) and Die Lotosblume and lch grolle nicht (bothHeine)-and mdlodies as well, e.g. Chanson de Florian and Rosa-munde (B6langer). Comparisons with European composers' earliersettings are not always to Ives's disadvantage: he had learnt wellhis models (Schubert, Schumann, Brahms; Massenet, Godard), asthe graceful first period of Feltleinsamkeit (r8ql) can suggest(Ex. rr).

Er11 Allegretto molto tranquillo

G) Copyright 1935, Merion Music, Inc. Used by pernrission

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Serenity (r9r9; Whittier). All three have delicious details of text-setting. ln Et,ening, one may point to the perfect match between

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speech-like rhythm and grateful melodic arcs (Ex. r2a) and theutterly tranquil conclusion (Ex. rzb), with crystalline notes high inthe piano suggesting the 'wakeful nightingale' of Milton's verses;'conclusion' may be the wrong word, for the song really does notend, it simply fades away. Maple Leaves ends with delicate fallingsequences in the voice which lead to a final phrase that fluttersdown like the autumn leaves of the title (Ex. r3). In Serenity,two

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@ Copvright 1932 by Cos Cob Prcs, Inc. Copyright assigned 1957 to Associated Music Publishers, tncUsed by permission.

chords related to the cloudy m6lange of distant bell tones, asunique and unforgettable as Wagner's 'Tristan chord', oscillatehigh above the 'unison chant' of the voice part. Ives breaks thisostinato twice, releasing the slight tension built up by the sinuouschant and pointing up the ends of Whittier's stanzas; and he pre-cedes the last word of each stanza with a catch-breath that lendsa subtle emphasis, underscoring the two basic founts of serenity,love and peace (Ex. l4).

23

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G) Copyright 1942 by ,Arrow Music Press, Inc. Copyright assigned 1957 to Associated Music Publishers,Inc. Used by permission.

It is unfair to lves to single out one song as his greatest, but thebiggest and most dramatic, and one which synthesizes varioussources of his lyric art, is General William Booth Enters IntoHeaven (lgt+). This is a setting of portions of Vachel Lindsay'spoem celebrating the militant revivalism of the first commandinggeneral of the Salvation Army-a 'Glory trance', lves once calledit. Much of the song is march-like, and it begins and ends with atypical marching band's drumbeat (Ex. t5). The whack of snaredrums and the thud of a bass drum limping a bit behind are

24

Je - sus knall thc 5i - lhca

-

oa c- tar - ni -ly- ii

II

ri

:!I

embodied in dissonant clusters of a sort Ives had invented when, asa boy, he practised on a piano the drum parts he was to play in hisfather's band.r In various guises and transformations this kind ofsonority pervades General Booth.

Er.16

Allcgm moderato (Morch tine)

I

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&

ft

O Copyright 1935, Merion Music, Inc. Used by permission.

- I '[I] got to trying out sets of notes to go with or take-off the drums. . . . A popular

ctrordin the right hand was . . . one with two white notes with the thumb, having thelittle finger run into a 7th or octave-and-semitone over the lower thumb note'

bold - ly with

(Arc

25

Lindsay's poem has Booth leading a noisy company of the blind

ancl the leproLls, of convicts, social rnisfits, and outcasts, through

the gates of heaven. As they circle the ocotttt-house square' Jesus

upp.urr, stretching out his hands over the mob to heal and purge

them;suddenly, they are'spotless, clad in raiment new', and thcy

march off into the distance. Tireir refrain throughout is a line frorn

a Salvation Army hymn:'Are you washed in the blood of thc

Lamb ?' Ives chose not to set this line to the tune r"rsually associatcd

with it but to a dilTerent one derived from Lowell h4ason's hynrrt

Cleansing Fountain (Ex. r6). As is often trile in lves's works thrtt

are based on pre-existcilt tunes, his early referertces to the sourc!)

are fragmentaiy and allusive;only late in the song does he offcr lt

clear and more or less completc statement of it.

Er t0 Cleaneing Fout&in

'rililItl

I

Lindsay includes in his poem interlinear instrumental sugges-

tions which lves takes irrto account: headiitg the poem is the

instruction 'Bass drum beaten louclly', on which lves elaborates, as

we have seen; at a mention of 'banjos' lves qttotcs thc beginning ofJames A. Bland's song Ofi, Dent Goltlen Slippers!, composed forminstrel shows (with which the banjo was associated); and where

Lindsay calls for a 'blare, blare' of trumpets, lves introduces the

military bugle-call Reveille. At the momerlt of transfiguration,when jesus appears, Lindsay s'ggests 'sweet flutc music'. Ives re-

sponds with i passage of moving tenderness (Ex. I7) in which the

,ing.l. circles 'round lnd rolnd' on a three-note figure, the piapist's

rigfit hand circles similarly but in a two-note cycle, while in the

*iddt" of the accompaniment, strangely askew metrically and

rhythmically, the melody of Clean.sing Fountair winds its tranquil

(Memos 4z-3). Ives's next comments suggest how such 'imitative dissonance' led

nuirrutiy to i general preference for complex, non-traditional harmonic materials:lWhat siarted als a boy;s play and in fun, gradually worked into something that had

a serious side to it that opened up potsibiiities-and in ways sometimes valuable, as

the ears got used to and acquainted with these various and many dissonant combina-

tions. I iemember distinctly, after this habit became a matter of years, that going

back to the usual consonant triads, chords, etc., something strong seemed more or

lessmissing....'

26

way. The healing complete, the crowd marches off, singing trium-phantly. (Ives here and there writes in an extra voice part, inviting

@ Copyright 1935, Merion Music, Inc. Used by permission.

choral performance if desired.) The song ends with a haunting,off-key version of the refrain, set to hymnbook harmony; then thedrumbeats, lower-pitched as if in the distance, fade-.as a bandmarching away', wrote Ives in the manuscript.

Ja - sus coha froh thccourt hou*

rourc oil roud ond rourd 6d rourd _ddd_rand ond roud_ ond * ro6d ond bundhgd - y c@rl - hou$ :46re,_

27

2. THE CHORAL MUSIC

FoR more than thirteen years from the time the Danbury Newsreported (on his birthday in t888) that he was 'the youngest

organist in the state', Ives was a church organist and, as such, acomposer of church music. However, after his decision to go intobusiness in tgoz, he resigned his post at Central PresbyterianChurch in New York City and shortsightedly (as it turned out) lcftmuch music there; all this was apparently thrown out when thechurch changed sites in I9r5. The loss-of choral works as well as

church solos and organ compositions-is sad, for the choral music

by Ives that remains includes works of high and fresh quality. Theyfall into three groups: sacred works, most of which date from lves'syears on the organ bench and in choir lofts; partsongs, only a fewof which, from the Yale years, remain; and other secular works,virtually all of which postdate the turn of the century.

What is amazingamong the early sacred choruses is the imagina-tive stylistic leap lves made between several compositions pre-served from the early t89os and a group of psalm settings madeprobably in the summer of 1894. In the two anthems Turn Ye,

Turn Ye (?r89o) and Crossing the Bar (?t89t) there is hardly a hintthat Ives was to become an 'irregular' as a composer. Both are

well-crafted, pleasant pieces, but in a conventional church style

that later generations rejected as too sweet to be powerful and toopredictable to be exciting. Ives listed his having composed some

twenty-odd such works 'alla Harry Rowe Shelley and DudleyBuck' (both of them Connecticut organist-composers with whomhe studied while at Yale). The more expansive Easter Carol (1892;

revised ?r9or) is stronger but stillsquarely in the Victorian anthemtradition.

The series of psalm settings is another matter altogether' Since

Ives wrote of his father's having tried them with the Danburychoirs, they must predate the fallof r894 (when George Ives died).

2B

Ives's recollection was that they included settings of Psalms 67 , t 5o,54, perhaps 24, and part of Psalm 9o.

Best known, probably because it was the first to be publishedand recorded (in the late rg3os), is Psalm 67.Ives wrote an a cap-pella, bitonal setting, with the female voices in the orbit of C major,the male in that of G minor. He called it 'a kind of enlarged plainchant',r and it does remind one of choral psalm settings of theRenaissance, based on a Gregorian psalm tone, in block-chordfalsobordone style (Ex. r8)-at least in the opening and closingsections, which surround a contrasting fugato in skipping rhythmsthat is slightly reminiscent, in its sturdy straightforwardness, of the'fuging tune' style of eighteenth-century New England composerslike William Billinss.

@ Copyright 1939 by A.ssociated Music Publisher.s, Inc. Used by permission.

Psalm r5o is shaped llke Psalm 67 in three sections, with thesecond a fugato. The scoring is for boys' chorus and mixed chorus,with optional organ. Ives exploits the planar possibilities of thetwo-choir texture by giving the boys frequent long-held chordsagainst which the mixed choir moves in piquant, sometimes grind-ing, chromatic sideslips (Ex. r9a). The fugal entries of the centralsection are planned unusually: two cycles ofthem occur, each pro-ceeding from bass up through soprano, first on G, A, B, and Csuccessively (Ex. r9b), then on A, B, C, and D. Perhaps lves had inmind the 'Omnes generationes' movement of Bach's Magnifcat,with its similar procession of fugal entries by rising seconds.

Psalm 54 is also set in A B A' form, with a double canon as thecentral section. The outer sections are based on whole-tone mate-rials. Sopranos and altos are paired;they are played offagainst a

l Memos r78. The subtlety oflves's ear, and the independent conclusions he drewfrom it, are well brought out in his comments on the work's initial sonority: ,Har-monically [it] could be (would be in harmony books of nice professors) cataloguedas an inversion of the 9th. But . . . it seems to me to be a stronger chord than the 9th

-which makes one feel that all inversions are not inversions. not alwavs'.

Andante mactroo

29

lower plane of paired tenors and basses. In Verse t (Ex. zo) the

tenor-bass complex, singing in augmented triads, marches slowly

by whole-tones in lock-step down an octave (from C), rises a semi-

tone, then marches back up again (from C#) in whole-tones. The

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soprano-alto complex, dueting similarly in lock-step, and basicallyin major thirds (i.e. two whole-tones), weaves rhythmic arabesques

around the evenly paced lower voices. Ives brings back this first-section music for the last verses, but he reverses the roles of thetwo groups (and of course the registers of their two musics)' Thus'just as the initial tenor/bass slow march reverses itself-the effect

30

Er.l9

3.Proisa hinwithttreudc, lhc

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is circular, spatial-so does the entire work. The technique antici-pates some practices of Webern, much later.

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@ Copyright 19?3, Merion Music, [nc. Used by permission.

Psalm 24 takes a new tack. Its basic idea is that of a doublewedge, opening out then closing again. Each verse begins with thechorus (a cappella) on a unison C as central axis; then the voicesfan out, wedge-like, from this axis (sopranos rising, basses falling).The interval chosen for this expansion process itself expands fromverse to verse, like an opening wedge: the setting of Verse I fansout by semitones (Ex. zr), that of Verse z by whole-tones, that of

@ Copyright 1955, Mercury Music, Inc. Used by permission.

31

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Verse 3 by nTinor thirds, and so on. After the setting of Verse 7(expansion by perfect fifths) the process is reversed, though more

freely: the structural intervals progressively diminish in size, the

outer voices reverse their direction (sopranos now in descending

motion, basses ascending), and the shape of the entire work as a

double wedge is completed by a return to C.

The discussion above has said little of the text-music relation-ships or the expressive qualities of these psalm settings. All fourworks are powerful, to be sure, but they were after all the products

of a tg-year-old fledgling, trying his wings in unconventionalmodes of harmonic, textural, and rhythmic expression. They maywell be viewed as 'compositional 6tudes', with analogies to thelater studies by Milhaud in superimposed chords and bitonality orby Bart6k in scales and intervals.

Related in manner to these psalm settings but not so uncom-promisingly rigorous in construction is the Processional: Let There

be Light (r9or). Like the'refrain'sections of On the Antipodes,thework is based on chains of ever-different, 'artificially' constructedchords, all anchored to a constant C in the bass. The second choralphrase (Ex. zz) exemplifies the technique involved;the first is freer

harmonically, and other details in the piece suggest that lves had

assimilated into his general vocabulary materials and procedures

that earlier had been the stuff of '6tudes'. The music has consider-able expressive value in relation to the text; nevertheless, it has its

own abstract inner logic as well, as lves recognized when he listed

the work as performable by trombones (instead of chorus), strings,

and organ (see the scorings shown in Ex. zz)-

Ives seems to have composed part of the goth Psalm in t 894,

then reworked it to completion and performed it at Central Presby-

terian Church. But score and parts were thrown out when thechurch moved; only in tg4 did he set about reconstructing it, and,

as the remaining sketches make clear, he virtually recomposed it.Thus Psalm 90 as we have it is one of lves's last works (t923-4); his

wife remembered his saying it was the only one that satisfied him.z

The superb text is lengthy, and lves's setting, for mixed chorus'organ, bells, and low gong, reflects vividly the expressive contrasts

between and even within the verses. It is extremely sectional, but a

2 'Editors' Notes' to Ives, Psalm 90, ed. John Kirkpatrick and Gregg Smith (Bryn

Mawr, t97o), p. 3.

32

number of things keep it from falling apart: it is underscoredthroughout by an organ-pedal c; the music for each verse is suf-fused with the colour of one or another of four harmonic idioms

f,lcns (TlBB.)

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summarized by the organ in an introduction; and the serene dia-tonicism ofthe first verse returns for verses r4-r7, surrounded bya nimbus of bells and gong ('as church beils, in the distance'). itselfforecast in the introduction. Ives's setting of individual verses is

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33

governed by his characlerization of each of the ilrtroductory har-

ironic idioms (as shown in the captions of llx. z3); these harmonies,

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however, are not mechanically applied but merely allowed to tintthe various verse settings, as for example in Verse I I (Ex' z4): the

harmonic structure associated with 'Cod's wrath', appearing fourtimes, serves to underline in a natural way the words op-ow'r',

'anger', 'fear', and 'wrath'. The serene final section flnds all ten-

siois resolved. The choral harmony is rooted in American hymnody

with its relaxed subdominant emphasis. Seemingly in the distance,

a nebulous cloud of faint bell sounds shimmers, all the more

34

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nebulous because each bell circlescycle (Ex. z5): Bell I's cycle is of

in its own ostinato rhythmicten quavers; Bell II's, nine;

Rcl or c Lng

@) Copyright 1970, Merion Music, lnc. Used by permission.

Bell III's, twelve; Bell IV's, eight. (Only the last, with the organ,synchronizes with the regular I metre and phrasing of the chorus.)

Religious in impulse and expression if not intended for serviceuse ([ves once described the work as'from a "Harvest Festival" ')is the set of three Harvest Home Chorales (?r8g8-?r9or) for mixedchorus, organ, trumpets, and trombones on mid-nineteenth-century hymn texts (but without musical quotations). Soberly jubi-lant in their choral expression but with the brass often building to

know-eth the

35

a tumult of pealing praise, they are, wrote Ives, 'a kind of outdoor

music and have something in common with the trees, rocks, and

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(O Copyright 1970, Merion Music, lnc. Used by perrlission'

men of the mountains in days before machinery'.3 what they seem

to have in common with these things is a great elemental strength

and a tangled yet harmonious co-existence of disparate elements.,Lord of the Harvest" the second piece of the set, exemplifies these

s Letter to Lelrman Engel, ln 'Lerters oJ Cotrtposers, ed' G' Norman and M' L'

Shrifte (New York, I946), pp. 345-6.

36

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qualities most clearly. It is based on three metric planes; in Ives'snotation, which forces all three into a I metre, their relationship(as 6:9:4) is shown in the diagram below:

,T:r-1-, "+[+,Li,'i"oroolroo;'11

Like the deep C of Processional or Psalm 9o, a low C# anchors themovement tonally; it sounds throughout. Above it, a twelve-barcycle of harmonies revolves slowly four and one-half times: (r)alone, as introduction; (z) under a tenor melody; (3) with basscounterpoint added to tenor melody; (4) with soprano/alto duetadded to the male-voice pair. There is a pause for two hushedechoes of the end of the phrase 'New praises from our lips shallsound'(chanted freely by the chorus, as a canticle); then finally atruncated repetition of (4), with climactic new instrumental voices.closes the movement. The harmonic cycle on which this cumulativeset of variations is based is itself circular:as seen in the introduc-tion (Ex. z6), bars 8-r3 are a retrograde ofbars r 6, not note-for-note but bar-for-bar (bar 13 : bar r, 12 : 2, rr :3, etc.). The

8r.26

@) Copyright 1949, Mercury Music, Inc. Used by permission.

entire movement's structure, elemental and audible, is like a cosmosin which planets orbit around a star, moons around planets. and

37

planets and ntoons themselves revolve. It has an awesome sense ofinexorability, intensified by the slightly faster tempo at which each

revolution of the cycle is to be taken. The ending (Ex. zl) is shatter-

ing; its F versus C# final chord, so inconclusive out of context, ispripared and justified by the double tonal implication, Cf shiftingto F, of the 'prime' choral melody of the tenors (q.v. in Ex. z7)'

a) Copyright 1949, Mercury Music, lnc. Uscd by pcrtttisston'

At the opposite pole from llurt'cst Hotne Clrcrales is the concert

carrtata The Cele.stictl Country ( r898-9)' for soloists, chorus, organ,

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and orchestra. For one unused to Ives's stylistic pluralism, it wouldbe difficult to imagine these two contemporaneous works as pro-ducts of the same composer. In seven movements plus several briefinstrumental interludes and an 'intermezzo' for string quartet, thecantata is thoroughly conservative, along the lines of those worksby Elgar (The Dream of Gerontius) and Parker (Hora Novissima)-and, ultimately, Brahms and Mendelssohn-that exemplify theVictorian choral cantata/oratorio. The text, a hymn by HenryAlford, is extravagantly hortatory ('Forward, forward into Iight!'is its theme), and Ives matches it with long, urgent arcs of melodyand rich, energy-laden Romantic harmony. The big work hangstogether well, part.ly because ol' thernatic intcrconnections betweenmovements (r and 7;3,4, and 6) and partly because of the recur-rent 'octad' harmonies-eight-note chords bLrilt up by thirds, thconly unconventional feature of the work-common to all five ofthe irrterludes (see below, p. 43). The Celestial Country was per-formed at Central Presbyterian Church in rgoz anc'l was reviewedlavourably (the last time for many years that music by lves was soreceived); nevertheless, it was not the kind of music that Ives reallywanted to write, and he turned his back on both the choral cantatagenre and its conventional stylc.

The secular choral music by lves that is extant is scanty; a num-ber of scores are lost or irrcontplcte, and others he lcft r-rnfinished.Of a baker's dozen of partsongs dating from his preparatory schooland university ycars, less than a handful are complete. These reflectthe popularity in American schools of lves's time of student choralgroups, especially male glee clubs. Three Yale soltgs are pleasanttrifles: A Song of Mory's (r896), The Bells oJ yale (rg97-g), andThe Boys in Blue (t897 or later). The disruptive dissonant chordsIabeled 'cloud sounds' by Ives that appear three times in the manu-script of The Boys in Blue may have been ideas toward anotherwork (Ex. z8).

iS 0ptional 'cloud sound (instrumental)

@ Copyright 1976 by Peer International Corporation. Used by permission.

About ten other secular works have in common a scoring forunison chorus (with occasional divisi) and varied instrumentalensembles. A number of these were adapted from voiceless ensem-

ble pieces with a principal part for a single instrument under whicha text is sometimes to be found-songs 'with or without voices'.In turn, a number were readapted as solo songs for the book ofI I4 Songs, such as Serenity (originally sketched with an accom-paniment for harps and violins), The New'Riuer (initially a move-ment in the chamber-orchestra Set No. l, assembled in t9o6),Lincoln the Great Commoner (with large orchestra), Maiority orThe Masses, He IsThere!(a'war song march', readapted in I94z as

They Are There!), and An Election.In these songs for unison chorusand instruments, lves may have had in mind a Lincolnian 'people'schorus', a mass of voices speaking out as one: almost all are onsocialor political issues-even , in The New River (titled The RuinedRiver in one manuscript), on environmental pollution-and themassed voices, occasionally splitting into heterophonic clusters,have the effect of collective. not individual, statement, as in the

40

passage of Lincoln the Great Commoner givensongs Ives wrote characteristically:'Probably

as Ex. 29. Of suchthe old ladies (male

lrom their d . ciol hold,

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and female) would not-but there are some men who would[-]liketo hear some of thechoruses with orchestra today[,] especially thoseabout the world problems of the people, etc.[,] sounding up over thestone walls, and 'owest mountain".'a

{ Ibid.

our Cop-tdin-

4I

3. THE KEYBOARD MUSIC

Ivrs was himself a keyboard player, a professional organist for a

number of years and a remarkable pianist, althor-rgh a private one.

John Kirkpatrick, for whom he once played, recalled: 'lt was avery flitting kind of playing. He was all over the keyboard. . . . Itwas a very deft playing [out of] a very contrapuntal mind . . . notlimited to the scope of ten fingers.'r Of some forty keyboard worksby lves that survive intact, the mature ones, at least, reflcct these

aspects of his playing: most have a'flitting' quality, one of mer-

curiality and quasi-improvisation; in most, the texture is apt to be

challengingly contrapLrntal; and none is easy to play.As a keyboard composer, lves began, as an American boy in the

post-Civil-War period might be expected to have begun, with pianomarches and sets of variations on well-known hymns and popularand patriotic tunes. Six of the seven extant youthful piano marches

he later arranged as band or orchestra pieces, or as songs (e.g. A

Son oJ a Gantholier and The Circus Band). His earliest variatiotts,on Jerusalent the Golden (?r888), are lost, but the second set

(?r89r), for organ and on America (: God Save tlte King),survives

-remarkably competent, for a l7-year-old, as well as delectably

brash, virtuosic, and funny. The familiar air is forcshadowed in an

'impressive' introduction. After the Theme, in F major, there fol-low five variations, each of a different character, including a jig-ging DI transformation, a jogging polonaise version punctLrated bygiggles in four-foot stops, and a finale beginning 'as fast as thepedals can go' and eventually bringing back the introductory mate-

rial. The shifts in key betweert Variations II and lll (F to D[) and

IV and V (F minor to F major) are made with a boy's directness(but only an unusual boy's inventiveness): in interludes between

I Remarks macle during a panel discussion in the Charles Ives Centennial Festival-

Conference, t7-zt October t974. Ives can be heard as pianist in re-pressings of some

rare private transc|iptions in Charles Ives: The Hundredth Anniversary (ColumbiaM41z5o$.

/a+z

the two pairs of variations, the key to come is simply laid over theone being left, in a startling early use of bitonality, and an amusingone (Ex. 3o). The piece has other foreshadowings of the mature

@ Copyright 1949, Mercury Music, Inc. Used by pernrission.

Ives, especially in matters of rhythm, such as the twists of phrase-length in Ex. 3o (the F major stratum being foreshortened, the Dfone elongated) and the cross-rhythms of bars r 8z-5:2

"H#ful4? i i I

From the same period as the oAmerica' Variations come fourminuscule organ interludes to be played between stanzas of hymnssung by a church congregation. Ives described their style precisely(although he was referring to The Celestial Country): 'I played ashort organ Prelude, with eight notes (C E G Bh, Dh F Ah CD ppin swell organ, pedal playing the main theme ./ under these'(Memos 33). And he related these piled-up harmonies to a boy'splayful imagination: 'This boy's way-of feeling, if you can havetwo 3rds, major or mirror, in a chord, why can't you have another

2 Pointed out by Ives in Memos, p. 38, where he also mentions another variationthat has not survived; it had,the theme in canon, put in three keys together,Bb-Eb-Ab, and backrvards Alt Eh-Bb (bLrt this was not played in church concerts,as it nrade the boys lar"rgh and [be] noisy)'.

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one or two on top of it[?]it's an obvious and natllralway of havinga little 1*1r.' (Memos r2o-r).

A similar spirit ('Why not try it?') may have led to'AdesteFidelis' [sic] in an Organ Prelude (l8qZ). What was tried (and itworked) was, first, an inversion of the old hymn tune, then theinversion together with the original melody. Using the same

starting-point for both (F), inverting the tune produces a pure

Aeolian-mode melody on B[ (though the melody ends, as it begins,

on F), and Ives surroutrds the inversion with a soft, sustained BIminor triad, 'like distant sounds from a Sabbath horizon', accord-ing to a note in the manuscript. In an interlude before the appear-

ance of the original tune (cum inversion), and again in an epilogue,

this remote chord drifts down chromatically into the orbit of Fmajor; thus the prelude begins and ends in different keys andmodes, although in a most natural and unforced way.

In the Three-Page Sonata for piano (lgoS) we confront the

rugged, individualistic, 'tough', and mature lves. The work has

satirical aspects: Ives jotted down a memo, to go at its head, whichreads 'made mostly as a joke to knock the mollycoddles out oftheir boxes and to kick out the softy earsl'(Memos t55n); the

sonata's brevity-announced in its title, which refers to the three

manuscript pages the work occupies-is a kind of jab at tradition(of the sort MilhaLrd was later to perpetrate in his three-minutesymphonies and opdras minutes); and the manuscript has spoofmarginalia like 'Back to ISt Theme-all nice Sonatas must have

tst Theme'and'repeat znd Theme (as is right! and correct)"Nevertheless, although there are passages of great good humour,the music is seldom funny, and it has depths of inventiveness and

integrity that belie its brevity. It may be an anti-sonata, but it is

not a parody.The work is designed in three movements (not indicated as such)

defined by tempo changes: Allegro Moderato; Adagio, preceded

by an Andante and followed by an echo of it; and Allegro-MarchTime/Piil Mosso, which get a varied repetition before a coda

derived from the Allegro-March, so that the movement has the

form A B A' B Coda (A"). The Allegro Moderato is based on the

B-A-C-H motive (falling semitone, rising minor third, fallingsemitone), which permeates the texture in all kinds of guises, dis-guises, inversions, and permutations. The Adagio is based on belliounds: Ives invites a secoud pianist 'or bells-celesta' to performthe chime-like topmost part, and the accompaniment is a combina-

44

tion of middle-register chords, their roots unfocused (like a bell'sunusual harmonics), and tolling bass arpeggios on fundamentalfifths and tenths. The upper bell-melody almost becomes the tuneof Big Ben (ll'estminster Chimes) but never quite achieves it; atits close, like a gramophone record winding down, it crumpleslimply to rest. Only at the end of the movement, when the pre-liminary Andante is briefly re-evoked, do we realize that it too isrelated to Westminster Chimes. Despite aspects of vagueness inharmony and melody, the movement has a strong, clear tonaldesign by virtue of a bass progression that is wholly logical ifunique: it gradually descends from g down two octaves to G,, firstin whole-tones, then in chromatic sequences related to B-A-C-H(Ex. 3t).

Ex.31Andante Adagio

[Andante]:

The accompaniment to the bell-melody of the Adagio is wortha close look. Its effect is of a rhythmically vague, improvisatorypair of ostinatos, one a middle-register oscillation of two chords(of a sort to which Schoenberg was exceptionally partial during theperiod of Erwartung), the other a three-note bass arpeggiation thatis never quite synchronized with either these chords or the bell-melody. Analysis of the arpeggios reveals that they revolve in rhyth-mic cycles of five quavers and that Ives systematically exhausts allthe possible combinations of two-plus-one quavers (z + t + z,r + 2 + 2,2 + z + t)orthree-plus-one(r + r +3, 3 + r + r,I + 3 + r) that can make up such a cycle of five (Ex. 3z).

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The Allegro-March Time/Piil Mosso movement comes closestof the three to being a joke, but an extremely subtle and complexone. The'March Time' is march-like only to a point; then, over its

f-metre'oom-pah'bass is laid awaltz rhythm t1 J-f-);i!/r and

soon the marching bass is abandoned and a different waltz rhythm

4itti.ii;TJi'J.lJ1r takes its place (Ex.33)'" This polyrhythmic and polymetric byplay is intensified in

the Pii-r Mosso section, which finds hectic right-hand ragtimerhythms in duple metre competing against a bass also derived fi"ompiano-rag style but, contradictorily, in triple metre. All these dancerhythms-march, waltzes, ragtime-are basically simple, jauntyones, but in context here everything is askew. Obviously, Ives plan-ned very carefully that it be askew, and it should not surprise us

that the pitch organization is also carefully planned' The riglit-hand 'waltz' is a chain of parallel fottr-note chords (their structurelike that of the oscillating ostinato chords in the Adagio, plus an

added upper third);the top notes of the chairr form a twelve-noteseries (Ex. 3j). The left-hand 'wtrltz', expressed in octaves, isorganized like a medieval isorthythnlic motet tenor: its 'talea' isthe repeated six-note rhythm of the second 'waltz', its 'color' a

46

O Copyright 1949, 1975, Mercury Music, hc. Used by permission.

repeating pitch-pattern which falls one note short of being anothertwelve-note series (Ex.:+).As in many early motets, talea and,color repetirions do not coincide, and thus the more or less risorous

J

organization is hidden. The whole passage, in fact, wittily defies the'mollycoddles' and 'softy ears' to make any sense of it at all. (Iveshas them in mind, however, with the last sound of the sonata, a'nice' C major triad.)

Ives knew neither Schoenberg's music nor medieval motets (atleast, not in r9o5). Thus the Three-page Sonata exemplifies wellhis extraordinarily wide-ranging musical mincl, which arrived

T'color"

47

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independently at some techniques of musical organization long for-gotten (isorhythmic motet technique) and others not yet envisioned(dodecaphony).

Ives's practice of trying out new compositional ideas concretely,in actual works, led him to write a series of short piano pieces

which he called 'studies'. Only a few of these remain in completeform. Number 9, The Anti'Abolitionist Riots in the t9jo's andr84o's (I9o8), explores multi-level planar heterophony and massive

tone clusters (as many as seven notes per hand). Number zt is

Some Southpaw Pitching!(?r9o9). The title uses the American base-

ball slang for a pitcher who is left-handed, and the piece emphas-

izes virtuoso left-hand passagework and independence from theright hand's music. The latter derives largely from.the melodies ofStephen Foster's Massa's in de Cold Ground and the hymn Antioch('Joy to the world')-one team murdered, the other jubilant?-which are closely related musically. Study No' zz (?t9o$ concen-

trates on linear counterpoint, mirrored inversions in close canon'and layered texture with each layer at a different dynamiclevel.

Related to the Three-Page Sonata in its satirical thrust and tothe piano studies in being, as subtitled, a'study . . . for ears or auraland mental exercise!!!'is the late piano work Varied Air andVariations (' r94), first published incompletely as Three Protests.

This is a set of five variations, with other material in the interstices

between them, on a theme in octaves that is indeed 'varied': ultra-chromatic, quasi-serially organized, in changing metres, and withvirtually no repeated note-durations; Ives characterized it as'theold stone wall around the orchard', a musical embodiment of the

New England stone fence, with none of the stones of exactly the

same size or shape. Verbal notes provide a scenario involving a

recital. As an introduction, a whimpering protest from the 'boxbelles' greets 'a man' when he comes onstage to perform; it is heard

again after both the bold theme and Variation t. Variation 2, amarch mirrored precisely (and dissonantly) by its inversion, evokes

a different moan of protest, which also follows Variation 3, a close,

crunching canon. For Variation 4, the 'man' decides, 'All right,Ladies (m[ale] & f[emale]), I'll play the rock line again and har-monize it nice and proper . . . I6 measures, E minor just as much as

possible!'This is greeted not by protest but by applause (C majorchords, fJfffflfJffi. The 'man' reverts to type in Variation 5,furiously combining elements of Variations z, I, and 3; and

48

so do the 'ladies', whimpering the first protest for a final time.BThe real protests in this composition are of course those of Ives

himself-against what he saw as a common confusion of beautv inmusic with'something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair';against the musical mollycoddles of the concert world; and againsr,ultimately, the universal rejection and neglect of his music. Hewent right ahead, however, with his inspired tinkering: contem-poraneous with Varied Air and Variations were Three euarter-tonePieces (tqzyq) for two pianos, one tuned a quarter-tone sharp.Ives diffidently thought of the Largo and Allegro movements as'but studies in melodic and rhythmic quarter-tone possibilities',and'Chorale'(arranged from a string piece, now lost, of r9r3-14)as 'little beside a study in quarter-tone harmony' (Memos r ro-r r).The basic idiom of the Largo is that of a number of Ives's gentlylyrical, reflective pieces, such as the songs Evening and Afterglow,enriched by the vibrant shimmer of quarter-tone chordal back-grounds. In the Allegro, which is based on materials from earlierragtime pieces for theatre orchestra, rapid alternation of the key-boards creates a sizzling, twanging music evocative of a crazybanjo. 'Chorale' borrows melodic motifs from Anterica and LaMarseillaise;the very end of the movement (Ex. :S) shows them incombination (right hand of Piano I I) and also shows the .primary'and 'secondary'quarter-tone chords (marked 'x' and 'y' in Ex. 35)which lves employs systematically in 'Chorale'. These he constructsingeniously by interlocking perfect fifths and fourths to buildsymmetrical quarter-tone complexes; the 'primary' chord has theinterval-content of7 + 7 + 7 quarter-tones, the'secondary' chord5+5+5+5.4

Two giant piano sonatas are the apogee of lves's keyboardmusic. The First Sonata is a thirty-minute work in five movements;the Second ('Concord, Mass., l84o*r86o'), even longer, is in four.Both are fiercely difficult to perform: although lves had the'Concord' Sonata (r9ro-r5) printed privately in rgzo-along withthe lengthy accompanying Essays Before a Sonata-and distributedcopies to many musicians, not until r939 was it publicly played inits entirety (by John Kirkpatrick); the First Sonata ( l gor-g) waiteduntil r949 for its first complete performance (by William Masselos).

3 It would have been characteristic of lves to keep secret a possible punning ver-sion of the title of this work: Very Darin' Variations.

a lves discusses these kinds of chords and other aspects of his thinking aboutquarter-tone music in ,Some,,Quarter-tone" Impressions'(r925), reprinted in 6ssays.

49

'Concord' is programmatic, although in a general way only:Ives said of one movement, 'Not something that happens, but the

way something happens' (-Essays 4z). Its movements are titled'Emerson', 'Hawthorne', 'The Alcotts', and 'Thoreau', and lves

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noted in the preface to his Essay.t that it is'a group of four pieces,

called sonata for want of a more exact name, [that] is an attempt topresent (one person's) impression of the spirit of transcendentalism

ihat is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., ofover a half century ago.' The First Sonata has no movement titles(except for the second halfofone,'ln the [nn', probably because ithad had that title in an earlier chamber version), but Ives had in

mind a general scenario for the work: 'the family together in the

first and last movements, the boy sowing oats in the ragtimes

[movements 2 and 4), and the parental anxiety in the middle move-

ment' (Metnos 75n). Tlius, unlike the piano studies, the choral

6tudes, or the 'experimental' sortgs, but like some others of his

50

-3-

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,a,---=!l-:--.

tK Prono I i9 tun.d one quorter tone h gh.r lhon Pnn. :l

biggest works (e.g. the Second String Quartet and the FourthSymphony), the piano sonatas developed as lves's musical reac-tions to some of the most profound and complex experiences in hislife-to his philosophicalbackground as exemplified in the authorshe most admired, and to human relationships, particularly thoseinvolving family. This perhaps accounts in large part for thesonatas' being difficult to perform (not only technically) and diffi-cult to follow conceptually (though not viscerally), let aloneanalyse: they have the flow and flux of musing about big matters,almost in free association; they are not cast in any preconceivedmoulds, nor are they realizations of pre-compositional plans. Iveshimseli in some remarks about'Concord', characterized the senseof organic growth that pervades them:'Some of the passages nowplayed haven't been written out . . . and I don't know as I shallever write them out, as it may take away the daily pleasure of play-ing this music and seeing it grow and feeling that it is not finished.(l may always have the pleasure of not finishing it)' (Memos 79-80).And yet what ls written out, in each work, makes up a coherent,compelling cycle that deserves no 'more exact name' than 'sonata'.

One key to the coherence of the five movements of the FirstSonata is the simple, strong architecture of the whole work:rhapsodic first movement balanced by heroic finale, complementaryragtime scherzos in movements z and 4, and a central movementitself quite symmetrical(Largo, Allegro, Largo). Another key is thethematic interconnections between movements. First, third, andfifth movements work with the hymn tune Lehanon ('l was awandering sheep'), second and fourth movements with the threehymn tunes Happy Day, Bringing in the Sheaves, and I Hear ThyWelcome Voice (which are themselves inter-related); and a descend-ing three-note motifl-semitone, minor third-increasingly informsthe whole work (being heard in the ragtime movements as a jazz-rlyambiguous third, now major, now minor, over the tonic) until itsaturates the texture of the finale. The third ntovement may beheard as a rhapsodic series of developments of material from Er.reor Converse ('What a friend we have in Jesus'), but it goes beyondthat, in a cunning revelation of the relationship between the hymntune's first phrase and that of Foster's Massa'.s in cle Cold Grourul.

Hymn tunes, ragtime, Foster melodies-these may seem ult-promising raw materials for a work of such power and scope. But asIves uses them, not as mere dashes of local colour or programmaticindicators, they are audible expressions of his transcendcntalrst

5I

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conviction that 'all occupations of man's body and soul intheir diversity come from but one mind and soull' (Essays 96).This sense of the oneness of human experience, of the immanenceof an Emersonian oversoul in all things, everyday and common-place as well as highly artful, is accomplished concretely by lves

through his choice of musical materials, his perception of inter-relatedness among them, and his fusion of them into a new andconvincing synthesis. A single example will here have to suffice,

though it cannot begin to suggest the long spans over which lvesthrows his net of inter-relationships. The two scherzos are bothsubdivided. All four sub-movements are of course obviously inter-related by being suffused with ragtime rhythms; movements za, 2b('ln the Inn'), and 4b were in fact adapted from an earlier chamberset of Ragtime Pieces (tgoz-4), while 4a-rhythmically the mostcomplicated-was freshly composed for the piano sonata. All are

further inter-related by similar conclusions (indicated as 'Chorus'in za and zb), the common thematic source of which is mostobviously the refrain of the hymn tune I Hear Thy ll'elcome Voice(Ex.36a). Less obvious is another source, the'chorus' of Massa'sin de Cold Ground (Ex. 36b), although once heard in movement 3\,

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Massa's in de Cold Ground

as one of its thematic sources-even if there the song's verse, notits 'chorus', is borrowed-the connection is clearer. Example 37shows the'Chorus'of movement zb and its basis in these vernacu-lar source materials-hymn tune/Foster song for the melody andharmony, rag-like syncopation for the inner parts-and theirsublimation in a clause of considerable grandeur.

The 'Concord' Sonata has a design as strong and clear as thatof the First Sonata,and one closer to traditional sonata structure.'Emerson' is the weightiest of the movements, powerful and

52

('Oown in thc corn-lteld')

Ex.3?CHORUS

virtually orchestral in texture; it originated as a concerto or overturcwith piano. 'Hawthorne' is a scherzo that, except at two moments,

Copyright 1954 by Peer International Corporation. Uscd by pernrrssron,

rushes by in a blur;John Kirkpatrick describes it as seeming to be'pure fantasy, the images following as if helter-skelter but actuallyin a symmetrical design: phantasmagoria - nocturne - ragtime -contrasts * ragtime - nocturne - phantasmagoria'.5 'The Alcotts'functions as the relaxed slow movement of the cycle, a gentle,slightly blurred tintype portrait. 'Thoreau', on the other hand, hasno precedent in previous sonatas. Outwardly calm, inwardly in-tense, its magic is translated verbally by lves in the only explicit'programme note' of the Essays (61-il:And if there shall be a prograrl let it follow his thought on anautumn day of Indian summer at Walden-a shadow of a thought atfirst, colored by the mist and haze over the pond. . . . As the mists rise,there comes a clearer thought more traditional than the first-a medita-tion more calm. . . . He seems to move with the slow. almost monoton-ous swaying beat of this autumnal day. His meditations are

5 Preface to Ives, Symphony No. 4 (New York, 1965), p. viii.

53

interrupted only by the faint sound of the Concord bell-'tis prayer-meeting night in the village. . . . lt is darker-the poet's flute is heardout over the pond and Walden hears the swan song of that "Day"-and faintly echoes. . . . Before ending his day he looks out over theclear, crystalline water of the pond and catches a glimpse of the"shadow-thought" he saw in the morning's mist and haze. . . .

As in the First Piano Sonata, 'Concord' has thematic inter-connections between movements which integrate them forcefully.Comparable to the three-note abstract motif in the former work is

one in 'Concord' to which Ives refers as a 'human-faith melody-transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or thecynic, respectively' (Essays 4i). lt appears at the first hush in'Emerson' (Ex. 38a) and toward its last climax, as well as else-

where in the movement; peeks out through the blur of 'Hawthorne'(Ex.38b); is a principal theme of 'The Alcotts'(Ex.38c); and isplaced strategically, near the end of 'Thoreau', where 'the poet's

flute' is heard (Ex. 38d). (tves writes alternative versions of the last

Ex.sa

(a) lslowlvl -

Very fast

O Copyright 1947 by Associatcd Music Publishcrs, lnc. Used by pernrrssron.

passage, with flute and without.) This melody often precedes theappearance of another one, universally recognized: the openingmotif of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (see Ex. 38c). But that motifis af so important in the hymn tune M issionary Chant ('Ye Christianheralds') (Ex. 39a). That Ives was aware of the double associationis suggested by his characterization of the nrotif as 'the soul ofhumanity knocking at the door of the diviue mysteries' (Essa1,s

36), and he often lends something of himself to it-gives it a thirddimension-by leading rt on iuto a phrase of his own (as at the endof Ex. 38c). Yet another hymn tune, Martyn ('Jesus, lover of mysoul'), shares with the Beethoven/Missionary Chant nrotif its pitch-pattern (Ex. 39b), and Ives makes clear in 'Concord' that he hasall three soLtrces in mind by quoting them separately and integrally

-the Beethoven simply as a four-note motif without continuation,Missionary Cltant in virtually its original form (at the opening of

55

'The Alcotts'), and Martyn almost complete and in hymnbookharmonization (emerging softly out of a dramatic climax in thecentral 'contrasts' section of 'Hawthorne'). Ultimately, one per-ceives that all the thematic materials of the sonata relate to one

Ex.3g(a)

Missionary Chst

another (the 'human-faith melody' to the Beethoven/MissionaryChantlMartvn motif by the three-note upbeat with which it begins).Thus does the network of musical inter-relationships and of extra-musical associations broaden, to make for a transcendental unityin the'Concord' Sonata.

s6

O Copyright l95l by G. Schirmer, Inc. Used by permission.

57

4. THE CHAMBER MUSIC

Ivrs wrote comparatively little chamber music, apart from worksfor chamber or theatre orchestra (which will be taken up in thefollowing chapter). Some fifteen compositions survive; about thesame number are incomplete or lost. The extant complete chamberworks include four sonatas for violin and piano, two string quar_tets, a piano trio, and some other pieces mostly in one movemenl.Fxcept for the quartets, virtually all of these works include piano(as do the majority of the orchestral compositions); Ives seems tohave liked the instrument as a 'binder' of some sort.

Leaving aside the so-called 'Pre-First' Violin Sonata (rggq_

1rgo3), the surviving movements of which found their way intothe other sonatas (except for one, which Ives translated inio theLargo for violin, clarinet, and piano), the four violin sonatas forma coherent group, more unilied in style and expression than anyother similar group of Ives's works. Composed between rgoz andt9t6, all are in three movements; each has a finale and at least oneother movement based on hymn tunes; and all are direct andaccessible in expressive content and without showy display ormerely 'idiomatic' writing, unless it be the perpetual-moiion,across-the-strings, cross-accented style of country fiddling whichIves introduced into the sonata medium, as in the middle move-ment of the Second Sonata (Ex. 4o).

Ex.4O

Preslo

The developments out of hymn tunes, on which almost every

movement of the sonatas is based, are among Ives's mostingenious,warm and imaginative. The Fourth Sonata ('Children's Day at the

Camp Meeting'; r9o6-?16)-actually the first to be sketched-suggests the freedom and variety with which Ives elaborates on his

source material. Its second and third movements proceed, liked'lndy's 'lstar' Variations, from obscure hinting at the source' orflorid disguise of it, to a more or less clear disclosing of it in con-clusion. A comment by Ives on the last movement of the ThirdSonata could be applicd equally well to these two in the Fourth,ancl to other movements among the sonatas; it well describes theirformal principle: 'The ft'ee fantasia is first. The working-out deve-

lops into the thentes, rather than from them' (Memos 69n). Thus,

in the third movement of the Fourth Sonata, Robert Lowry'shymn tune BeautifLtl Riler (Ex.4l) is only vaguely perceptible in

the opening bars (Ex. 4za)but clearly and completely presented in

the last ones (Ex. 4zb). The free arabesque of the second move-

I

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@ Copyright t942 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. Used bv permission'

58

ment's opening (Ex. 43), largely unbarred, reveals its basis in JesusLoves Me! only with close study: fragments of the opening phraseof the hymn's refrain (Ex. +q) appear-as in Bf, C, and Cf-before the violin enters. in C. (lts underlying G major arpeggios,and the piano's fifth-chord belorv, provide a logical springboard tofull quotatiorr of the hymn bitonally, by fifths. late in the movement.

Ex.'l!Largo

@ Copyright 1942 by Associated Music Publishers, lnc. Used by permission

Ex,4,t

Jesu6 Lwes Me!

The external design of the violin sonatas is clearly based on thetraditional group of movements contrasting in tempo and charac-ter, but the design within individual movements is not oDen togeneralization. Except for an occasional A B A' form, tradltjonalabstract shapes are not to be found; nor are pre-compositionalplans of the sort Ives worked out for a number of other composi-tions. The first movement of the Third Sonata (19r3-?r4) ii re-lated to the scherzos of the First Piano Sonata in that each of four'verses' (the last three being essentially very free variations on themotives and gestures of material in the first) ends with basically thesame 'refrain'. Prototypes of the form are common in Americanrevival hymns, with their several stanzas all ending with a commonrefrain. In some movements the very experience that inspired the

59

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music seems to have suggested its general shape. In the Second

Sonata (r9o7-ro), for example, the second movement, which func-tions as a scherzo. is called 'ln the Barn'. The reference is to Satur-day nights in the barn, and the music has all the energy, vitality,and non-stop propulsiveness-projecting constantly ahead, neverlooking back-of a square dance and its chains of 'figures'. Thethird movement, 'The Revival', opens quietly, ruminatively, almostprayerfully. then like a camp-meeting revival service increases inintensity through a series of mounting dynarnic arcs to a frenetic,shoutirig climax, cathartic and draining at the same time; the musicthen subsides quickly to a close (how quickly will depend on theperformers' feelings), exhausted and purged (Ex. +S).

The two string quartets are as dissimilar stylistically as theviolin sonatas are similar. The First Quartet, a youthful productof the Yale years (r896), is in many ways Brahmsian, while theSecond Quartet (r9o7-r3), from the period of lves's most unin-hibited and individualistic composition, is thoroughly 'lvesian'.

lves subtitled the First Quartet variously as 'A Revival Service'and 'From the Salvation Army'. Its last three movements-'Prelude', 'Offertory', and 'Postluds'-vvg1g composed (for organ ?)

for church use; the opening 'Chorale' originated as an organ fuguefor Parker's class. The fugue is scholastic, down to its ! metre,inversions, strettos, organ-like pedal points, and final augmenta-tion of the subject. The latter, and one of its countersubjects, musthave surprised Parker: they are phrases from Mason's MissionaryHymn ('From Greenland's icy mountains') and Coronation ('Allhail the pow'r of Jesus' name'), by the eighteenth-ce ntury American,Oliver Holden. lves may have chosen the particlrlar phrases be-cause of the relationship, by inversion, of a triad figure common tothem (Ex. 46) and because of a chorale-like dignity that they share,

60

'2,,-1t,i P >w& rit.graduullg bP rert sk,\|b

() Copyright l95l by G. Schirntcr, lnc. Used by pcrrlission

stemming partly from their simple, even rhythms. The texture,rhythmic character, and form of the 'Prelude' and 'postlude'derive from Brahms; less derivative is the 'Offertory', a lyricalelaboration on another hymn tune, Nettleton ('Come, thou fountof every blessing').

Ex.48

/O Copyright I96l and 1963 by Peer lnternational Corporation. Used by perrnission.

The Second String Quartet is one of lves's richest and mostoriginal works, on several counts. One is its programmatic con-ception, and the realization of it in sound. Another is its projectionof a kind of musical discourse the implications of which are stillbeing worked through by composers. A third is the musical workas a whole, one of lves's most subtly integrated, panoramicallyenvisioned, and organically achieved.

The three movements are titled 'Discussion', .Arguments', and'The Call of the Mountains'. In a note on the sketches lves wrote:'S[tring] Q[uartet] for 4 men-who converse, discuss, argue .

fight, shake hands, shut up-then walk up the mountain side toview the firmament'. The conversation and discussion, argumentand fight, and ultimate joint contemplation are reflected in amoderate-fast-moderate movement plan to which lves was partial;it fits perfectly the programme of the quartet. So too does the arcof tension, higher tension, and final relaxed sublimity that one cangeneralize out of the work.

As so often happened with lves, a specilic personal experienceled him to compose the quartet: 'After one of those KneiselQuartet concerts . . . I started a string quartet score, half mad,half in fun, and half to try out, practise, and have some fun withmaking those men fiddlers get up and do something like men,(Menos 74). This led to a radical independence among the four

6l

voices of his quartet, sometimes an apparently total unrelatednessamong them (each man acting like himself). The result is a 'per-sonalization' of the music to such a degree that it is heard almostanthropomorphically: the first violin is not simply an instrumentmaking musical sounds; it is the embodiment of a human being, as

is each of the other instruments. A later composer admittedlyinfluenced by Ives, Elliott Carter, consciously extended this con-cept of musical discourse (as have other younger composers).Carter has referred to his own works as 'auditory scenarios';lves's Second Quartet might also be so characterized.

The approach to a dramatic personification of the four instru-ments produced a quartet full of extremes of expression andidiom. One hears virtually every kind of melody, harmony,rhythm, phrase structure, plan of dynamics, scoring, and writingfor the instruments. (The tendency of the First Quartet to a textureconsistently a 4 is slightly less persistent in the Second.) The wildlyvaried materials succeed each other abruptly, sometimes violently;sometimes they literally co-exist. Alongside the most radical sortof jagged, wide-spanned, rhythmically disparate, chromatic melodyis melody of the simplest stepwise diatonicism. Triadic harmonyalternates with fourth- and fifth-chords, chromatic aggregates, andtoue clusters. Canons without any harmonic underpirtnings followpassages anchored to static harmonic-rhythmic ostinatos. 'Athe-matic' writing is set side-by-side against passages quoting pre-existent melodies in almost cinematic collage. 'Talea' and 'color'repetitions organized serially (like those analysed in the Three-Page

Sonata) jostle with diatonic-scale passagework.These extremes of variety respond to and embody, of course,

the notions of 'discussion' and 'arguments', as does the apparentlyfree stream of consciousness with which events unfold, especiallyin the first two movements. Yet the seemingly unplanned, whimsi-cal, and occasionally downright funny ordering is offset by severalcontrolling factors. One is the C that is the tonal fulcrum of move-ments t and z and stabilizes at critical points the otherwise crazygyrations of harmony and tonality, if only by momentary allusionrather than insistence. Example 47 shows several such points:(a) the beginning of movement t; (b) the end of its first section;(c) the last of a series of tune quotations, one for each instrument(here it is the cello's turn, paralleled bitonally by violin t); (d) theend of movement l; (e) the beginning of movement z;(f) one ofthat movernent's angry interruptions; and (g) the end of the second

62

movement, which prepares a cadence on C but abruptly denies it(the 'arguments' not really being resolved; Ives wrote in thesketch, 'good place to stop-not end'). Another controlling factoris the frequent appearance of associative linear techniques likemelodic inversions (see violin z and viola in Ex. 47c), intervalliccorrespondences (compare the tritone-laden beginnings of move-ments t and z in Exx. 47aand47e), imitations, fugatos, and canons,

Tempo I

Andante moderato

Allegro con fuococon luoco /oll rrcrl)

64 65

ifAndantc

@n scr.tcht

Copyright 1954 by Peer Intcrnational Corporation. Used by permission.

as in the long central section of movement z (Ex. 48). The pre-dominance of tritones and minor seconds in the theme shown inEx. 48 relates back to the first sonority of the work (Ex. 47a), thecomponent intervals of which colour both the harmony andmelody in all three movements.

Allegro

Copyright 1954 by Peer lnternational Corporation. Used by permission.

Yet another factor, less controlling than'unravelling'-the mostimportant thread in the fabric of the quartet as a whole-is an ideafirst presented in passing as an insignificant descending whole-tonescale (movement I, bars 9-to). This idea makes other non-thematicappearances increasingly often, and it even binds together appar-ently unrelated tune-quotations from Brahms's Double Concerto,Marching Through Georgia, Hail! Columhia (in the first move-ment); andThe Star-Spanglecl Banner and the'Ode to Joy'themeof Beethoven's Ninth (in the second). As the third movement be-gins, the motif has crystallized into a descendirrg three-note figure:we hear it in a fragment of Nettleton (bars 9-ro) and finally inMason's Bethany (see Ex. 3). Bethany, first presented clearly inbars 56ff, in fact turns out to be the goal of the entire quartet:discussion and arguments have given way to joint contemplationof the firmament. and the hymn tune's second strain, interlocked

66

l

with Westminster Chimes (violin r), is heard in a splendid epi-phany (Ex.+q).Violin z breathes sympathetically below; the violarocks tranquilly; and the cello strides with relaxed majesty througha descending ostinato (its whole-tone scale bringing the work fullcircle back to the first hidden appearance of the Bethany motifnear the opening of the first movement).

Er.,t9

Copyright 1954 by Peer lnternational Corporation. Uscd by pcrrlission.

Besides the violin sonatas and the quartets, Ives's chambermusic works are mostly rather brief pieces with, however, varyingspecific gravities. A number are overtly humorous in intent, andsome are of the sort lves described as being 'started as kinds [of]studies, or rather trying out sounds, beats, etc., usually by what iscalled politely "improvisation on the keyboard" ' (Memos 6r). Thelongest is a three-movement Trio for violin, cello, and piano(tgo+-S). Its first movement is an explicit instance of Ives's 'layer-

67

ing'technique: bars r*27 offer a duet for piano and cello. the cellofunctioning as the bass; bars z8-52 offer a different duet, for violinand piano; in bars 5z*8o the two previous duets are laid one on theother. In retrospect the movement is recalled as a somewhat wittytour de force, for neither duet has seemed lacking in substance andyet the two work well together. The Trio's scherzo is titled 'Tsiaj',which may need explanation, standing for'This scherzo is a joke';on one of the sketches, lves labelled the movement'Medley on theCampus Fence', referring to the welter of popular, patriotic, andstudent songs quoted in it in ludicrous profusion.

Related in spirit to the scherzo of the Trio is that of A Set of jShort Pieces (?r9o8).1 Scored for string quartet, it is a brief tri-partite piece, plus three final dissonant eight-note chords ('as threecheers'). Deceptively simple and amusing, it is actually full ofknotty polyrhythms; in his manuscript sketch Ives referred to themiddle section (Ex. 5o) as 'practice for String Q't in holding yourown!' The kind of 'mensuration canon' technique it embodies isfound even earlier in lves, not in the wilfully playful spirit of thestring scherzo but with rather more exalted aims, in From the

Steeples and the Mountains (r9or-?z), for trumpet, trombone, andfour sets of eight bells each. This is a music of planes within planes:the brass duo forms one plane, against a backdrop of bells; buteach set of bells is treated also as a sub-plane. The brass melodiesare angular, asymmetrical, and chromatic, and their relationshipis elusive as they keep slipping in and out of canons with each

other. Each of the bell melodies begins with scales, then shifts tochange-ringing patterns, then to jangling diads, finally to hard-struck triads-all diatonic but in different keys (Bells I and 4 in C,Bells z in D[, Bells 3 in B). They are differentiated rhythmically as

well: they begin together but soon go out of phase, like a mensura-tion canon, as each begins a new pattern of even notes at a slightlydifferent moment, in a carefully notated process of gradual accelera-tion (the patterns are, successively, in notes of the following values:

) ). J .h ) .l and .l ) and deceleration (by a reverse process).

The dynamic plan of both brasses' and bells' planes is a steadyr lves liked the term 'set' for a group of pieces put together, yet not a dance suite

or a symphony or sonata cycle. Perhaps it had a connotation of informality andplainness that appealed to him, and there is a hint that 'symphony', at least, con-noted for him a 'nice' conservatism in his remark that 'the First Orchestral Set [is]called Three Plat'es in New England (though betbre it had the nice name of NewEngland Symphony)' (Memos 83). See also his remarks concerning New EnglandHolidays, quoted on p. 84 below.

68

crescendo until the final pealing chords, which are then allowed tofade naturally to extinction. Ives suggested a general programmefor the work in a note at the end of the score: 'From the Steeples-the Bells-then the Rocks on the Mountains begin to shout!'

Er.50Slw ,ol,out 66 ' "

@) Copyright 1958 by Peer International Corporation. Used by permission.

Given adequate sets of bells (the ideal would be church bellssounding from different belfries), the planned tumult and organizedconfusion of this work is overrvhelming; latent in it is the kind ofvision that would ultimately lead Ives to plot the 'representationof the eternal pulse & planetary motion of the earth & universe'in his sketches for (Jniverse Synphony.

'Organized confusion' well describes yet another chamber work:Hallowe'en (r9o6), for string quartet, piano, and optional drum.In lves's day (and still, to some degree) Hallowe'en was a night forleaping bonfires, pranks and practical jokes, 'tricks or treats'-achildren's-party night. This was the sense that Ives sought to con-vey in this tiny work (r4 bars plus a 4-bar coda). It is to be played

69

l-several times, each time by a different combination of instruments,each time faster and louder ('keeping up with the bonfire'), untilthe last go-around, when all players are to join in 'as fast as pos-

sible without disabling any player or instrument'. The 'conl'usion'of the piece is created by the four strings, each of which plays even,

rushing scales in a different major key (violin t in C, violin z in B,

viola in D[, and cello in D), compounded by the piano's dissonantcluster-chords, of increasingly irregular durations, directions, androot-progression s. The'organ i zation'

-hardly pe rcept i bl e but sur-

prisingly rigorous--lves described as 'canonic, not only in tones,but in phrases, accents, arid duratiolts or spaces' (Mentos 9t). Hisreference is to the double caltons of the strings-violin I/viola ar,d

violin z/cello-which can better be shown as in Ex.5l thandescribed irr words (numbers added to the phrases show theirlengths in semiquavers).

Used by permission of the publishers, Boelke-Bomart, Inc , Hillsdale, New York. [Copyright 19491

70

Written in the same year as Halloy,e'en are two other briefchamber works that fall into lves's category of 'kinds of studies . . .

trying out sounds, beats, etc.'They are both titled Largo Risoluto;No. r is a rhythmic study, 'as to the law of diminishing returns',No. z a study in simultaneous multiple dynamic levels and whathappens when, upon repetition, the dynamics of the various partsare switched around. (At the end of one manuscript score of No. zis a suggestive title: 'A Shadow made-A Silhouette'.) Both Largosare scored for string quartet and piano, as is In re con moto et al(r9t3), which Ives described as 'studies in rhythm, time, duration,space, pulse, metre, accent, together and in various ways'. All theWay Round and Back (t9o6), for bugle, clarinet, violin, bells, andpiano four-hands, is 'but a trying to take off, in sounds andrhythms, a very common thing in a back lot [baseball game]-afoul ball-and the base runner on 3rd has to go all the way backto rst' (Memos 6z).

Baseball games and Hallowe'en parties, described in terms ofstudies in sounds and rhythms and of canons? Such unlikely con-junctions lead to a conclusion for this chapter, which has alternatedconstantly between discussion of compositional technique andextra-musical matters, of abstract designs and collage-like tune-quotations, and between objective analysis and subjective descrip-tion. Such dichotomies are inherent in lves's music, and also in histhought about it. He made this clear in some remarks aboutHallou,e'en:

The . . . lrttle piece is but a take-off of a Halloween party and bonfire. . . it may not be a good joke, [but] the joke of it is: if it isn't a joke, itisn't anything. [Yet] in spite of the subject matter, this was one of themost carefully worked out (technically speaking), and one of the bestpieces (from the standpoint of workmanship) that I've ever done. . . .I happened to get exactly the effect I had in mind, which is the only([or] at least an important) function of good workmanship, (Memosgo-r)

As we have seen, Ives often had very concrete subject matter inmind for a work. One of his major achievements was to bring tobear on that subject matter a highly original musical imaginationand to translate it into cogent soundscapes-in part along tradi-tional lines but in larger part not-through'good workmanship'.The nature of the workmanship is sometimes difficult to perceive-indeed, some have claimed it to be lacking-since both its goals and

7I

the materials and musical events being 'worked' are apt to beradically uncommon, some without precedent. As Ives said, 'lnpicturing the excitement, sounds and songs across the [football]field and grandstand, you could not do it with a nice fugue in C'(Memos 4o).

7273

5. THE, ORCHE,STRAL MUSIC

Llrs his songs, Ives's music for orchestra covers the entire spanof his composing life. About thirty orchestral works survjve incomplete form; approximately the same number are incomplete orlost. They are scored for two kinds of ensembles, small and larse:theatre or chamber orchestra and full symphony orchestra.

Ives engagingly explained the background of his 'theatreorchestra' ensembles and their motley character:

The make-up of the average theatre orchestra of some years ago, in thetowns and smaller cities, in this part of the country, was neither arbitrarynor a matter of machinery. It depended somewhat on what players andinstruments happened to be around. Its size would run from four orfive to fifteen or twenty, and the four or five often had to do the job oftwenty without getting put out. . . . Its scores were subject to make-shifts, and were often written with that in mind. There were usually oneor two treble Wood-Wind, a Trombone, a Cornet, sometimes a Saxo-phone, Strings, Piano and a Drum-often an octave of High Bells[glockenspiel or 'orchestra bells'] or a Xylophone. The pianist usuallyled-his head or any unemployed limb acting as a kind of lctusorgan.r

Writing out of this background (which he knew well from boyhoodin Danbury and from the times when he was occasional pianist inthe Hyperion Theater Orchestra in New Haven and later in NewYork theatres), Ives first composed 'popular entertainment' pieces:marches like Holiday Quickstep (r887) and the hilariously paro-distic'Country Band' March (r9o3)-an American equivalent ofMozart's Musical Joke-or ragtimes like the group of four RagtimePieces (r9oz-$. He made a sole venture into incidental music withOverture and March:'r776', composed in r9o3 for a play that wasnever produced. Later, in the decade between r906 and r9r6, theredeveloped out of the theatre-orchestra background some of his

1 Notes by the composer in the original New Music edition of the Set for Theatreor Chamber Orchestra (San Francisco, r93z), p. [241.

nr()st cxtraordinary works. Together, all these compositions coverlr lrugc rangc of concept, content, and technique; what they havein common is an instrumentation that varies from piece to pieceand moreover is apt to be flexible within single pieces. On the onehand lves seems to have chosen the instrumentation for each workwholly in terms of its expressive aims. as if there were no suchthing as a 'standard' chamber-orchestra instrumentation (and infact there was not). On the other hand he often offers alternateclioices of instrumcntation for individual parts, sLlggests omissionsof notes if cloLrbling instruments shor-rlcl be insufilcient, or cues thenotes of one iustrument in the part of another shoulcl the ensemblelack the complcment 'ideally' called for. Such options so cheer-fully offered, so foreign to the music of lves's contempolaries ,renrind us of similar oncs mentioned carlier': 'ossia' pos-sibiliticsfor eitltcr singer trr piurrist irt somc songs. altclnirlivc scol'irrgs irr

some choral works, the passa-ee in 'Thoreau' to be playecl eitherwith or without flutc aclcled to the pianofortc, repetitions of pas-sages in the violin sonatas to be nracJe at thc performe rs'discretion.Although never a composer of self-conscious 'Cebrauchsmusik'(not evcn the term had yet been coined), lves clearly allowed forpractical expediency and the exigencies of informal music-making;important to this attitLlde was his experience of town bands andtheatre orchestras and tireir make-up: ad hoc, not foreordainedand immutable; dependent on the players and instruments that'happened to be around'.

This open-mindedness extends even to the medium of a numberof compositions whicl-r we may grollp together as 'songs with orwithout voices' like those mentioned in Chapter z: The Pontl, TheRainhon', the Sel ./br Theotre or Chantbcr Orchestra, and severalother theatre-orchestra scts in various states of completencss.Some of the individual movernents were born as songs for voiceand piano, then translated into theatre-orchestla pieces; evL-n nroreof them went in the opposite direction, from theatre-orchestrapieces to songs. The Pord (19o6) began life on the fence, so tospeak, as art orchestral work for flute (or one violin in harmonics),two harps (with celesta or high bells replacing one if desired),piano, and strings-plus a principal melodic part, with text butmarked as for voice or trumpet or basset horn. (Adapted in tgztfor r t4 Songs, it was indexed there by Ives under a different title,Remembrance.) Similarly,The Rainbov, (rgt+) has a leading canta-bile part, with a text, for either basset horn or voice.

74

Ives clearly viewed the musical work as malleable, to be realizedby the performing forces at hand; and he willingly deferred to theperformers without insisting on sovereign control. In this kind ofattitude, prophetic of the stance of a John Cage, Ives stands at thehead of a new view of the relationship between composer and per-former, the lattcr bcing allowed a considerably greater measrrre offreedom (or responsibility, to look at it from the other direction)than had been traditional in Western music. One might say thatIves viewed his works not as musical objects but as the stuff ofpotential experiences to be shaped and realized varioLrsly by per-formcrs and listcners.

ll'the con-rpositions jLrst cited excrnplify this l'lexibility in choiccsof instrumentation ancl mediurn. a work likc thc scherzo Ot,er thePayenrettt:; (r9o(r -13) excmplilies it irr lolnal irspects as wcll. Itsinstrumentation is that of a snrall thclrtl-c orche stnr rvithout striugs:clarinet, bassoon (or saxophonc), trumpet, piano, and percussicln;piccolo and three trombones rnay be adcled optir:nully. lts fornr issectional and virtually symmetrical: A B C cadenza B'C'A'.However, the caclenza at the centre of thc piece need not bc played:the manuscript reads,'To play or not to play'l lf played, to beplayed as not a nice one-but EVENLY, Precise and unmusical aspossiblel' Over the Pavarnen l.r had its inception in one of those real-life situations that so ft'equently led Ives into radical mLrsicaltransmutations: 'ln the e:rrly morniug, the sounds of peoplc goingto and fro, alldifferent steps . . . the horses, fast trot, canter, some-times slowing up into a walk . . . an occasional trolley throwing allrhythm out' (Memos 6z). All these different rhythms, beats, timegoing on together are presented in a score with a staggeringlycomplex texture;the work is one of lves's most extreme examplesof rhythmic counterpoint. But his initial reaction to the soundsmingling'over the pavements', one ol interested and amused obser-vation, is projected through perky ragtime syncopes arrd jazzy bluenotes, and ultimately an air-clearing, ironic concession to thestruggling players-an ending that finds them all together in anoom-pah, oom-pah vamp on a simple C major chord.

Two of the three movements of the Tlrcatre Orche.stra Sel (r9o6-tt) have been cited earlier, but in transformations:'ln the Cage'in its song version and'ln the Inn'in its reincarnation as one of theragtimes of the First Piano Sonata. (Actually, as mentioned, theset's 'ln the Inn' was a second stage itself, derived from one of theRagtime Pieces.) The third movement is 'ln the Night', a song

75

without voice (having a solo part with text but, according to thecomposer's note, one not to be sung). So many alternative instru-mentations are offered that it would be tedious to list them-although, wrote lves in his notes for the published score, 'What-ever the arrangement of players and instruments, the Solo part

[for English horn, clarinet, French horn, or trombone, dependingon the size of the orchestra] should be clearly heard'. The sinuous,lazy curve of this principal melody (Ex. 5z) is notated rhythmicallyin minute detail, mostly in 1Tnl:i1 and subdivisions thereof.The aim, however, is not one of finicky exactitude but the opposite

-a sense of ruminative freedom-and Ives suggests that the 7:6rhythm (rn Zlq time) need not be observed too literally, so long as

the phrases do not coincide with the basic beats.

The melody is projected against a vibrant, palpitating back-ground (Ex. 53a)-a line of warmly luminous colour against a darkwash**in a paradigm of an orchestral texture lves was particularlyfond of. The background 'vibrates' through the interplay of fiveplanes of rhythmic ostinatos and near-ostinatos so planned as

hardly ever to coincide, either with each other or with the phrases

of the melody. These ostinatos are shown, in greatly simplifiedabstraction, in Ex. 53b, The harmonic plan of the movement is

statically tonal, centered on D[, but with BI chords replacing thedominant (one tone high) and E major chords replacing tlie sub-dominant (one tone low), a choice made not arbitrarily but becauseof the tones of the Df triad shared by the other two. These rela-tions are preserved in the principal melody (in E) and two otherswhich sneak in around it and succeed it to the end of the movement

-the 'Down in the cornfield' phrase of Foster's Masss's in de Cold

Ground (Bf , in high bells) and the hymn tune Et,entide ('Abide withme') (Df, in solo cello).

lves's most frequently performed orchestral work,(Jnanswered Question ('A Cosmic Landscape'), is usually

76

Thepro-

[the nighl, ond it rii-gs tf*dropsnof

Copyright Merion Music, lnc. Used by permission.

Adagio molto (abot so= j or I t

High

Bells

Low

9ffibcem$rs.

tlmsolo(uel

77

;

l1

It

tI

tl.'1

\l

grammed as an independent piece, and with a full symphoniccomplement of strings (plus its solo woodwinds and single trum-pet). But it is related to the theatre-orchestra tradition (third andfourth flutes replaceable by oboe and clarinet, the solo trumpet byan English horn, oboe, or clarinet; the woodwinds not to play theirnotated rhythms strictly but freely, 'in somewhat of an impromptuw&y'), and it was conceived along with Central Park in the Dark as

one of a complementary pair of 'contemplations'. Their originaltitles were: I.'A Contemplation of a Serious Matter' or'TheUnanswered Perennial Question' and ll. 'A Contemplation ofNothing Serious' or 'Central Park in the Dark in the Good OldSummertime'. Both works date from t9o6 and, as Ives's titles sug-

gest, are related as opposites.lnThe Unansw'ered Question a whollydiatonic and mostly triadic wash of strings is background for an

atonal, chromatic foreground of winds; in Central Park a chroma-tic, atonal string background is set behind tuneful 'popular' mate-rial in solo wind and brass instruments, percussion, and twopianos. The metaphysical programme of The Unansu'ered Question

-the strings representing 'the silence of the druids', the trumpetasking 'the perennial question of existence', and the flutes ('Fight-ing Answerers') attempting to find a satisfactory response-isopposed to Central Park's terrestrial, urban 'picture-in-sounds of . . .

happenings that men would hear some thirty or so years ago (before

the combustion engine and radio monopolized the earth and air),when sitting on a bench in Central Park on a hot summer night'.2

The two works have in common an unprecedented, visionaryrealization of space and time in music. Each suspends multiple,discrete musics in a delicate balance. ln The Unanswered Questionthere are three such musics: the strings' gauzy backdrop of con-tinuous slow-motion pastel harmonies, to be played offstage; thetrumpet's disturbingly repetitive atonal interjections, unsynchron-ized with the strings; and the woodwinds' increasingly accelerated,agitated, and raucous responses to the trumpet (Ex. S+). ln CentralPark there are basically two musics: the background string music,turning slowly in spirals through a ten-bar phrase (Ex. SS) statedten times, always 'molto adagio', always ppp; against this, a cumu-lative appearance 'onstage' of popular musicians-each enteringinstrument seeming to try to upstage those already there-in a

steady crescendo, accelerando, and growing density to a saturation2 Notes by the composer in the published scores of The Unanswered Question

(New York, t953), p. 3,and Central Park in the Dark (Hillsdale, tSZf), p. [:l].

78

of the musical space in a shouting climax, after which the stringscontinue imperturbably: 'again the darkness is heard-an echoover the pond-and we walk home', reads lves's note in the score.

Ex.54,Alletretto

Trump€t(or Engl Hom

or Oboe,or Clarioet )

Viol. I

Viol ll

Copyright 1953 by Southern Music Publishing Co., Inc. Used by permission.

Both works are famous as precursors of the 'stereophonic' andcollage techniques of such composers as Stockhausen, Berio, Cage,Carter, and Brant. But perhaps even more radical than theseaspects (which, after all, had been foreshadowed in the collage-likesimultaneous dance orchestras of Don Giovanniand the spatiallydetermined polychoral works of Giovanni Gabrieli and OrazioBenevoli) is Ives's achievement of a new relationship between timeand music. This has to do mainly with the elimination of a sense ofbeat or pulse-the even 'measuring' cf time-that had been com-mon to all Western music for centuries. The string music of TheUnanswered Question is notated in even f bars, but it is so disposedrhythmically that a pulse is imperceptible: it moves very, veryslowly; it has no symmetries or predictabilities of phrase shapes;one part's phrases do not coincide with those of any other. InCentral Park the string music, spiralling in a more dynamic seriesof curves than those of The (Jnansy,ered Que,rtion (but still very

moltoliL;,c"t30

79

slowly), rrcvcrthcless does not 'measure' time, because of the irra-tiorrll, asynrmctrical lengths of the phrases and notes. The ten-barsptrr is divided into four segments (see the bass part in Ex. 55) buttlrc division is one of an unpredictable 2 + 3 + 3 + z bars; the

Violin I

Vidin ll

Violo

Ccllo

Boss

€e

Used by permission ofthe publishers, Boelke-Bonrart, Inc., Hillsdale, New York. [Copyright 1973]

harmonic structure confirms the division (but also the unpre-dictability) by shifting from augmented triads (bars r-z) to fourth-chords (bars 3-5) to chords built of alternating augmented fourthsand perfect fifths (bars 6-8) to fifth-chords (bars g-ro). Within thelarge span smaller phrases shape themselves, but no two are of thesame length, and gruppetti (3i4,5:4) wash away any pulse. Schoen-berg spoke of his 'emancipation of the dissonance'. By analogy, wemight say that Ives'emancipated rhythm'from its ancient ties to

80

metre and pulse. In fact, in the string music of Two Contemplatiottsas at times in others of lves's mature works, 'time' in the usualmusical sense does not exist; the only time-sense is of the chrono-logical continuum, and the music simply unrolls in it-like ascroll in space, at once plastic and concrete.

Ives's principal works for large orchestra are four numberedsymphonies, the group of four pieces first called HolidaysSymphony, the Robert Browning Overture, two three-movement'sets' (and a third unfinished), and a sketched but never completedUniverse Symphony.

Earliest of these are the first three symphonies. The First (com-pleted r898) is a remarkably competent graduation exercise, writ-ten at Yale in a traditional but not old-fashioned manner underHoratio Parker's guidance (and strictures); it shows both an influ-ence and a mastery of Brahms's and Dvoriik's symphonic styles.The Second (r9oo-z) is a more liberated cycle-an accurate termconsidering the inter-movement thematic links and a coda rework-ing material from earlier movements together with some from thelast. lt is 'Americanized' by extensive use of popular, patriotic, andhymn tunes but is uneven and discursive, a kind of symphoniccounterpart to The Celestial Country and relating to Ives's orches-tral works of r9o6 and later much as Verkkirte Nac'ht relates to theFive Pieces Jbr Orchestra and later works of Schoenberg.3 In theThird Symphony (19o4) Ives approached the medium more freshlyand independently. The scoring is lighter (single woodwinds, twohorns, one trombone, and strings, with bells ad lib. at the very end),the texture leaner and more contrapuntal, the rhythmic shapesmore supple and subtle. Derived from earlier chamber pieces madefor church use, the symphony is subtitled 'The Camp Meeting' andits themes are largely based on hymn tunes. One of tltese, Wood-worth ('Just as I am, without one plea') (Ex. 56), is used in all threemovements, not merely 'quoted' but developed integrally (Ex. Sf);

-8 The most startling sound in lves's Second is the magnificent eleven-note squawk

of its final chord, but this was a replacement for the original F major tonic Chordswhich was made by Ives in preparing the symphony for publication early in thet95os. In a review of the first performance (zz February r95 r ) Henry Cowell reportedIves as saying that such a discordant blast was'a formula for signifying the very endof the very last dance [of an evening]: the players played any old note, good andloud, for the last chord'(Musical Quarrerly, xxxvii (r95r), pp.39g-4o2). -

81

along with Azmon, similarly elaborated upon, it contributes to the

broad hymnic dignity of the outer movements, which flank a live-lier middle one titled 'Children's Day'.

Woodworth

t\.l

I.t

I

Inns(r)

IM

I

il

B2

@ Copyright 1947, 1964, by ,A,sseciated Music Publishers, tnc. Used by pernrission.

83

Second movemenl

Allcgro

Allegro

Bassoon

Horn IinF

I

Violins

U

Cello

;

t\1,,n\'(

IIr ' '*ii

t':,'.1

tl

Between the Third Symphony and the completion of the Fourth,Ives wrote four other works of symphonic dimensions. First was

New England Holidays (I9o4-13)-'Holiday Symphony-but notcalled Sym as lst theme is not in C and znd [not in] G', wrote lveswith characteristic anti-establishment sassiness on one sketch. Thisis an American 'Four Seasons' as reflected in national holidays:'Washington's Birthday' (winter), 'Decoration Day' (spring), 'TheFourth of July' (summer), and 'Thanksgiving' (autumn). These are

nostalgic pieces'based on something of the memory that a man has

of his boyhood holidays' (Memos 95), which partially explainstheir being filled with bald tune-quotations, not so much developedas coming to mind, some half-recalled or even mis-remembered,asingly or in fantastic juxtapositions or superimpositions, as in abarn dance section of 'Washington's Birthday' (Ex. 58) which findsTurkey in the Straw (flute) crazlly out of step (and key) with The

lVhite Cockade (violin), or the climax of 'The Fourth of July',

8x.58

Allegro

O Copyright 1937, l9&, by Associated Music Publishen, Inc. Used by permission'

where wildly off-key and off-rhythm versions of Katy Darling, TheBattle Hymn oJ'the Republic (both its verse, 'Mine eyes have seen

the glory of the coming of the Lord', and its refrain, 'Glory, glory,Hallelujah !'), Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, and Yankee Doodle

a This is not to imply that none has structural significance. Regarding'The Fourthof July', for instance, Dennis Marshall has pointed out in a perceptive article on'Charles lves's Quotations: Manner or Substance?', Perspectives oJ New Music, vi(rq68), pp. 45-56, that Columbia, the Gem oJ the Ocean 'serves as a structural frame-work for the entire movement in much the same way that a Lutheran chorale melodywould serve as the formal model and motivic source for a cantata movement or anorgan chorale prelude of J. S. Bach',

84

Allegro con spirito

are only part of the festive pandemonium (Ex. 59). .Decoration

Day'prcrjects a remarkable balance between the boisterous joyous-ness of children at a street parade (with two bands playing different

Ex.6S

Piccolo

Flute

Trumpei

Coftt(c,

ff

o copyright 1932, 1959, by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. Used by pefmission.

marches simultaneously) and reverence; one sensitive and touch-ing moment in the piece (which for lves concerned the holidaydedicated to the dead of the Civil War) finds the slow bugle-callTaps accompanied by Mason's Bethany.

The twenty-minute-long Robert Browning Overture (r9o8-rz),the only one of a projected series of orchestral movements on 'Menof Literature' completed by lves, is scored for a large conventionalorchestra but, in the noisy sections, with the strings divided into asmany as thirteen parts. lt is a work of violent sectional contrasts:a slow, germinating introduction; a ferocious, dense-texturedAllegro with a wide-intervalled treble march melody in nine-noteparallel chords superimposed on a faster marching bass (theirtempos are in the ratict z:3); a tender, tranquil set of Adagio varia-tions somewhat Mahleresque in character; a literal repeat of theAllegro; and a fast fugal coda leading to a furious finale-which,however, is cut off abruptly, leaving a momentary echo of theAdagio vibrating in the air. The sense of 'toughness' projected inthe Allegro arises partly from the higher-pitched march's chroma-tic scales with frequent octave-displacements (minor ninths ormajor sevenths replacing semitones) opposing the steady tramp ofthe lower-pitched, faster march (Ex. 6o).

Three Places in New England (r9o8-?r4)-the First OrchestralSet-is in three movements, in lves's preferred slow-fast-slowmovement order, as is the Second Orchestral Set (r9o9, r9r5). The

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former is more often played, perhaps because it was first publishedin a small-orchestra revision made by Ives in tgzg, perhaps becauseits three movements are more sharply etched and contrasting than

with a riverside revery, 'The Housatonic at Stockbridge', in whichmurmuring waters, swelling then ebbing, and mists in the rivervalley are evoked in meandering chromatic swirls, with 'cloudsounds' circling above them, while a gently curving, freely develop-ing melody spins itself out in the middle of the texture. This

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melody, later adapted to a text by Robert Underwood Johnson forII4 Songs, is a remarkable arabesque, a testament to Ives asmelodist-so free and unforced and inevitable one is hardly awareof the recurrences in it of the opening phrase of Missionary Chant.

The Second Orchestral Set also begins with a moody slow move-ment, 'An Elegy to Our Forefathers'. Originally titled'An Elegy toStephen Foster' and worked on at the same time as the 'BlackMarch' of Three Places, it has a similar character. All the sharpedges of a march are softened, however, by off-beat and off-metrerhythmic groupings which dissolve both beat and metre, an effectall the more astonishing since the movement is based on a per-sistent brief ostinato throughout: Dh Bh Dt ( : 'l'm coming', fromFoster's Old Black Joe). Fragments of several Foster songs providethe thematic material; they too are blurred rhythmically andmelodically so that their separate identities melt into one anotherin a soft haze. The second movement, 'The Rockstrewn Hills Joinin the People's Outdoor Meeting', is one of lves's revival-hymn/ragtime movements, with a crackling piano part that brings it tothe brink of concertodom. and a final 'Chorus' adaoted froni the

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those of the Second Set. The first movemeut, inspired by a bas-relief by Augustus Saint-Gaudens celebrating a Negro regiment inthe Civil War, is a brooding'Black March' (as Ives often called it)with extremely subtle interplay between themes out of Foster's O/dBlack Joe and two Civil War songs, George Root's Battle Cry o.fFreedom and Henry Clay Work's Marching Through Georgia. Asshown in Ex.6t, for instance, Ives finds a common denominator('w' in the example) between the phrase 'l'm coming' of Foster'ssong and '[Hur]rah! Hurrah!' in Work's; combines this with therefrain ('The Union forever, Hurrah boys, Hurrah!') of Root'ssong ('x'); derives an ostinato bass ('y'') from a motive shared bythe two Civil War songs ('y,'); and underscores the whole complexwith a traditional military band's drumbeat ('z'). The second move-ment, 'Putnam's Camp', is a boy's fantasies as he surveys aRevolutionary War memorial at an old campsite; it combines thegay, brassy music of a Fourth of July picnic (with the mixups andmistakes of the vrllage band in music adapted from'Country Band'March and'r776') and the boy's hallucinatory vision of ghostlymilitary musicians. In the middle section, the marcl-t beat of Ex. 6t('z') goes along at two diff-erent speeds in the proportion - . ).in a famous instance of Ivesian polytempo. Three Places concludes

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Ragtime Pieces for theatre orchestra (the same one found in thescherzos of the First Piano Sonata).5

The last movement of the Second Set is the most boldly con-ceived of the three, one of lves's most amazing transliterationsinto music of the experience of a reallife incident. The title, 'FromHanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice ofthe People Again Arose', is not very helpful in understanding whatgenerated the piece and what it is about; lves's account in hisMemos (gz*i is more so:

The morning paper on the breakfast table gave the news of the sinkingof the Lusitania [7 May IgI5]. . . . Leaving the office [that afternoon], Itook the Third Avenue "L" [train] at Hanover Square Station. . . .

While waiting there, a hand-organ or hurdy-gurdy was playing in thestreet below. Some workmen sitting on the side of the tracks began towhistle the tune, and others began to sing or hum the refrain . . . andfinally it seemed to me that everybody was singing this tune. . . . Therewas a feeling of dignity through all this. . . . It was (only) the refrain ofan old Gospel hymn . . . In the Sweet Bye and Bye.

The scoring of the movement is complex: two orchestras are calledfor, one a 'Distant Choir' of two violins, viola, French horn, harp,piano, chimes, and basses, plus unison voices briefly at the begin-ning of the movement. Eventually this distant choir is submergedbeneath or absorbed into the main orchestra, a normal symphonicensemble but with accordions, solo piano, organ, and rich per-cussion group. The gist of the piece is like lves's description of theincident that sparked it: a long, slow, increasing collaboration ofseparate individuals (but all of one mind) gathering force andpower-not with outward excitement or agitation but inner fervourand dignity-to a radiant, climactic moment of exaltation. Al-though by this point (Ex. 62, pp. 9o-r) the musical texture has

become phenomenally rich in independent melodic-rhythmicvoices, the thematic materials of the movement have been veryfew, essentially two: the opening vocal intonation of the Te Deumchanted as a canticle ('We praise Thee, O God; we acknowledgeThee to be the Lord . . .') and the gospel hymn tune Sweet By-and-,By ('There's a land that is fairer than day'), which eventually takes

5 For his recording of the Second Set, Leopold Stokowski either misinterpreted therubric 'Chorus' (: refrain) as calling for voices or simply could not resist addingthem (wordlessly) at this grand climax. (Ives might not have disapproved.)

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over entirely, having absorbed from the intonation its atmosphereof timelessness and universality (certainly seeming to have doneso). The force and richness of the climax subsist not only in thesaturated texture and the almost irresistibly evangelistic music ofthe 'Chorus' of the hymn tune (cf. Trumpet 3 vs. AccordionChorus in Ex. 6z) but in the harmonic saturation as well. There isno mistaking the F major triumph, but it is strongly coloured byD major and Ff major/minor material as well, in a startling con-junction (for which, however, lves has prepared from the veryopening of the movement). There is perhaps no more spine-tingling moment in Ives's works than this one.

Ives's last two large-orchestra works, the Fourth Symphony andUniverse Symphony, are in the line of the two piano sonatas, theSecond String Quartet, The Unansrered Question, and 'FromHanover Square North' in embodying in music thoughts and feel-ings and convictions about fundamental human issues. Ives'sexpanding vision of a music that would be 'a part of the greatorganic flow, onwards and always upwards' (Memos r36) and thatwould develop 'possibilities inconceivable now-a language sotranscendent that its heights and depths will be common to allmankind' (Essays 8) found its most complete expression in theFourth Symphony, which occupied him off and on between r9o9and I916. It might have found even more surpassing expression inUniverse, at which he worked from r9r5 to r9z8 (having firstimagined it in lgrr), but Universe never got much beyond thepreliminary stages: some forty-four pages of sketches remain;others, perhaps many, are lost.

The Fourth Symphony is lves's mightiest complete work. lt isnot so long as The Celestial Country or either of the piano sonatas,but it seems longer, partly because of the sheer weight of the per-formance forces required, partly because of its more completestylistic synthesis, partly because it is a giant vessel into which theenergies, ideas, and gestures of earlier works flowed. (ln fact, nofewer than fifteen prior works by Ives lay behind it and contributedspecifics to it.) Like virtually every instrumental piece by lves, itarose out of so-called extra-musical ideas; it has a 'programme'.But the programme is ultra-general and open to different readings,just as the music invites different listenings (not just re-hearings).For a performance of two movements in t927, notes were writtenby lves's friend Henry Bellamann, certainly from informationsupplied by the composer:

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This symphony . . . consists of four movements,-a prelude, a majesticfugue, a third movement in comedy vein, and a finale of transcendentspiritual content. [The order of the second and third movements waslater reversed.] The aesthetic program of the work is . . . the searchingquestions of What? and Why? which the spirit of man asks of life.This is particularly the sense of the prelude. The three succeeding move-ments are the diverse answers in which existence replies. . . . The fugue. . . is an expression of the reaction of life into formalism and ritualism.The succeeding movement [now the second] . . . is a comedy in the sense

that Hawthorne's Celestial Railroad is a comedy.u

The first movement, 'maestoso' and briei is tentative andpromissory, like the hymn (Mason's Watchman) with which achorus enters halfway through it : 'Watchman, tell us of the night,/What the signs of pronrise are:/Traveller, o'er yon mountain'sheight,/See that Glory-beaming star!' Many other hymn-tunefragments are interwoven in the music, most consistently Mason'sBethany. Nostalgic hymn-tune passages also figure in the second,'comedy' movement, but they are constantly being over-ridden byboisterous marches, ragtime, square-dance tunes, and patrioticditties in phantasmagoric profusion. The stately fugue of the thirdmovement is an orchestration, with some non-scholastic after-thoughts, of the 'Chorale' of the First String Quartet, but also withr6- and 32-foot organ pedal coloration that brings the symphonymovement into relationship with the (lost) original organ version.The last movement, even more complex texturally than the second(but a tapestry of murmurs rather than shouts), calls on all theforces that have appeared variously in the preceding movements:the 'normal' orchestra (but with solo piano and voices) of the firstmovement, and its'distant choir'of a few strings and harp; thevery large orchestra of the second movement, with its pianos bothorchestral and solo and its frequent divrsi string parts; and theadded organ of the third movement. All these are augmented in thefourth by a 'battery unit' of drums, cymbal, and gong whichinitiates the movement with a hushed and mysteriously intricate,anti-metric ostinato that never ceases, is wholly independent of theother music that develops around it, and fades away only after therest of the ensemble (with humming voices) has concluded thesymphony. The 'other music' around the battery unit is a gradually

8 Quoted in John Kirkpatrick's preface to lves's Symphony No. 4 (New York,r965), p. viii.

92

swelling complex of developlllcnts. lrrairrly on hymn tunes pre-viously heard, to a smiling, t.anc;uil rrrur.clr. and finally a transien-dent reworking of the ideas that closc thc Second String euartet,with Bethony haloed by the distant choir.

To Bellamann's notes on the symphony lvcs lrrltlcd a word: .The

last movement is an apotheosis of the preccclirg colltcnt, in termsthat have something to do with the reality of'cxistcncc ancl itsreligious experience' (Memos 66). This remark is interestinc in thatit implies a different way of listening to the symphony ihan doBellamann's. Bellamann suggests the first movement as prelude tothe following three (t --> z, 3, 4); Ives suggests the last as'apotheosis' of the first three (r,2,3<- 4). And one may listento the symphony as two pairs of movements, the prelude leading tothe 'comedy', the fugue to the finale. Such varied possibilities forexperiencing the Fourth Symphony, no one more .correct' thananother, are also available in-indeed, built into-other aspects ofit besides that of gross form: tonal, timbral, textural, melodic.rhythmic.z In his'Conductor's Note' for the New Music edition ofthe second movement (ryzg),lves wrote an especially provocativestatement along these lines:

As the eye, in looking at a view, may focus on the sky, clouds or distantoutlines, yet sense the color and form of the foreground, and then, bybringing the eye to the foreground, sense the distant outlines and coloi.so, in some similar way can the listener choose to arrange in his mindthe relation of the rhythmic, harmonic and other material. In otherwords, in music the ear may play a role similar to the eye in the aboveinstance.8

He was after musical perspective and multi-dimensionality: .As

the distant hills in a landscape, row upon row, grow gradually intothe horizon, so there may be something corresponding to this inthe presentation of music. Music seems too often all foreground'.This multi-dimensionality of the Fourth Symphony is found inothers of Ives's compositions, as we have noted, but to a lesserdegree; here it is realized to the fullest.

Ives's plans for Universe Symphony suggest he would have car-ried even further such notions of multi-dimensionality. The scope

? As demonstrated brilliantly in William Brooks, .Unity and Diversity in Charleslves' Fourth Symphony', Yearbook for Inter-American Musical Researih, x (1974),which deals with the first movement only.

8 Reprinted in Ives's 'Conductor's Note', Symphony No. 4 (New york 1965),p. 12.

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of the work conceptually was enormous: it was to be'a presenta-tion and contemplation in tones . . . of the mysterious creation ofthe earth and firmament, the evolution of all life in nature, inhumanity, to the Divine', as realized by a 'conclave' of groups ofinstruments or separate orchestras, each to have its own music, allgoing'around their own orbit, fcoming] to meet each other onlywhere their circles eclipse' (Memos r63, ro7-8). Some five to four-teen of these groups of instruments, lower-pitched, were to repre-sent the earth; four or five, higher-pitched, were to represent theheavens; a percussion orchestra representing'the pulse ofthe uni-verse's life beat' was to underlie all. Ives had started such a work inr9r5, imagining it should be played twice,'first when the listenerfocusses his ears on the lower or earth music, and the next time on theupper or Heaven music' (Mentos lo6). For more than a decade he

continued to make chordal and rhythmic diagrams, and more fullyrealized sketches, toward it and Universe; when dictating hisMemosin ry32 he thought to enlarge the original piece or'put itinto the Universe Symphony, to which it is related'. At the sametime, recognizing that he would probably not finish either, he madethe ultimate offer of 'multi-dimensionality'-of lvesian inclusive-ness, humility, and generosity. In a gesture probably unprecedentedamong composers, he suggested (Memos ro8) that others mightlike to complete his IJniverse Symphony: 'l am just referring to theabove [compositional details] because, in case I don't get to finish-ing this, somebody might like to work out the idea'.

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SELECTIVE BI BLIO(; I{N I'I IY

Cowell, Henry, and Sidney Cowcll. ('hurlc,s lyc,t turtl IIi:; lllu.sit'.New York, t955; revised r9(r9.

Hitchcock, H. Wiley, and Vivian Pcrlis (ctls.). Art lycs ('t'lt,lryutiotr:Papers and Panels o.f tlrc Iyc.s CentL,rtrriul Ii'.ttivrtl-('ortft,rt,n<'a,r 974. Urbana, 1977.

Ives, Charles. Essays Be.fbre a Sonata, 'l'hc Mrt.jorit-y' antt OtherWritings, ed. Howard Boatwright. New York, t96t, t962.

lves, Charles. Mentos, ed. John Kirkpatrick. New York, rg7z.Kirkpatrick, John. A Temporat'y Minteographcd Catalogue of the

Music Manuscripts and relatetl nmterials of Charles Ecltyard1yes. New Haven, r96o; reprinted r973.

Perlis, Vivian. Charles lves Rementbered. New Haven, rg74.Rossiter, Frank R. Charles lves and His Anrcrica. New York, rgTS.Warren, Richard. Charles E. Ircs: Discography. New llaven, tgTz.