Charles Ives and His World

Rating:
Summary: "[...] only an inventor knows how to borrow."
Review: Beginning in 1990, Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY) has held an annual music festival celebrating the music and related cultural/aesthetic background of composers, with the festival "proceedings" published as a Festschrift volume. The consideration for a composer being celebrated would seem to be that the composer's works represent a measurable break with "the past," in terms of musical aesthetic. Only one of these composers has been American. It is fitting that this American should be Charles Ives. This volume is from the 1996 festival for the music and life of Ives. It nicely summarizes why it is that Ives was important to the development of a uniquely American musical aesthetic, and how that aesthetic was closely tied with the man's life in other respects.

The volume is in four unequal parts: Part I, ESSAYS (five in-depth pieces covering key aspects of Ives the composer, philospher and businessman and ethicist, filling nearly half the book), and briefer Parts II, III and IV, providing, respectively, LETTERS (to and from Ives), REVIEWS (of music and performances), and PROFILES (of Ives during his lifetime).

The essays cover distinct aspects but have some overarching themes:

[1.] Consistently (and persistently), Ives composed in four styles: American popular music, Protestant church music, "art" music in the European classical sense, and experimental music, frequently combining two or more of these styles in a work. Ives did not "progress" from the simple to the complex (as had earlier been put forth, before musicologists and critics could achieve perspective on his output), but always had each of these in his "composers' toolbox"; even at the end of his composing career, he remained grounded in European "art" music, and continued to call upon the vernacular music of his childhood while at the same time his music grew in depth and profundity of expression.

[2.] Ives's use of vernacular music, as nostalgia and as "writing music about music," and his creating a naturalistic sound stage by adding aural perspective to his scoring, were unique for their time, although they found application in the contemporaneous works of Gustav Mahler, quite by accident.

[3.] We cannot separate the composer from the philospher and/or the businessman without risk of arriving at an incomplete picture and failing to understand the music that is the principal surviving entity of his life's work. The fullest, most accurate picture emerges only when it becomes clear by what route his philosophical leanings reached their fullest flower, affecting both his musical and business lives, and how the fullest flower didn't really arrive until he redirected his business efforts and ethics, and married, with his wife providing the "quiet space" and the gentle encouragement for this fulfillment.

[4.] Ives developed a new musical aesthetic that was revolutionary in its break from the past, as represented by the example of Beethoven. It was his connection with the philosophy of Emerson, and resonances with Emerson's writings, that led him to this aesthetic, which reached its zenith in his monumental Concord Sonata.

Another theme, not an essay but clear from a complete read of the book, is that Ives - because he was a "private, spare-time" composer - was significantly ahead of his time and not really "discovered" and understood until years after his composing ceased. Most of his works were substantially completed prior to 1915, but performances and recognition were to wait another fifteen years or more, until the rest of the music world caught up to him, and early assessments of his works were badly flawed.

There is no better example of the initial misunderstanding of Ives's music and the time lag "until appreciation" than his Concord Sonata for solo piano, now properly considered one of the greatest 20th century keyboard works and the topic of both a major essay and a large portion of the critical reviews in this bood. A few paragraphs about the breadth and depth of commentary on this work can serve to represent the overall quality of the book.

Completed in 1915, the Concord didn't receive its premiere until a quarter-century later, in a landmark 1939 Town Hall/NY performance. In the meantime (in 1920), Ives self-published the sonata, as well as a companion volume, "Essays Before a Sonata," rationalizing his aesthetic for the work.

David Michael Hertz's essay ("Ives's Concord Sonata and the Texture of Music") makes clear that this was a revolutionary - and difficult - work because of the new ground it broke. Despite "borrowing" identifiable themes from Beethoven and vernacular music, and stylistic devices from Liszt, Chopin, Scriabin and Debussy (leading to my review title), the Concord represented a departure from the past not because it used and subsumed these materials but because of how the materials are organized and developed from the fragmentary to the complete (an aesthetic that Hertz calls "cumulative form"): it is only at the end of each movement of the work that a full statement of the thematic materials emerges, a reversal of the ordinary course of events in composing.

The reviews covering the period from Ives's publication of the Concord up to the work's premiere, performed by John Kirkpatrick, are almost universally dismissive; the score was incomprehensible to critics and fellow composers). It was only with Kirkpatrick's successful premiere of the Concord (an effort that took twelve years of study on his part) that composers and critics began to accept this work for the masterpiece that it is.

The rest of the volume is "of a piece" with this Concord Sonata example. This is a splendid critical overview of Ives, a fresh view, if you like, of "Ives reconsidered, after the dust has settled."

Those interested in a more "linear" biographical account of the life and works of Ives are recommended to read Jan Swafford's splendid "Charles Ives: A Life with Music" (also 1996).

Rating:
Summary: A "must read"
Review: For anyone interested in the life of Ives, in addition to his music, this book is a "must read." It is enlightening in it's approach to his personal life - which is so obvious in his music. There is an equitable blend of personal and musical background information by many notable composers, friends and business associates. The book has just enough photography to support context, not that Ives was a camera hog.

I had the opportunity and priveledge to attend the Bard Music Festival for performances of some of my favorite Ives pieces. It was fantastic.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Ives legacy and especially to any student of composition.

Rating:
Summary: A "must read"
Review: For anyone interested in the life of Ives, in addition to his music, this book is a "must read." It is enlightening in it's approach to his personal life - which is so obvious in his music. There is an equitable blend of personal and musical background information by many notable composers, friends and business associates. The book has just enough photography to support context, not that Ives was a camera hog.

I had the opportunity and priveledge to attend the Bard Music Festival for performances of some of my favorite Ives pieces. It was fantastic.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Ives legacy and especially to any student of composition.