CB Ives
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM. Today’s programme centres
on the American composer Charles Ives’ extraordinary First Symphony.
Revised twice, in 1900 and In 1902, this charming and powerful piece was completed when Ives was only 24 and a student at Yale University. A tall, athletic young man who took a full part in team-sports and Fraternity musical activities, he was
a great companion, at times ebullient, most often thoughtful, humorous rather than
witty, and popular with everyone but music-tutors. He was already a
noted local musician, an excellent organist –
“He was all over the thing!” - who wrote for his instrument but also for choir or, as was
a popular form of church music at the time, a quartet of soloists. He composed parlour-songs, organ- and choral pieces, rag -pieces and student-songs. He was a superb
pianist and capable of hearing at least 6 different rhythms at once and of playing three, and if he could parody most forms of music off the top of his head, he was unafraid of using harmonies, modulations and tonal procedures that were 30 years ahead of their
time in their daring and that may have seemed mad. He had been taught music by his father, the Danbury town-musician, George Ives, a remarkable figure who, during the
Civil War and at the age of 17, had been made the youngest bandmaster in the Union Army. The 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery Band,
which he had helped found, had performed for Lincoln in the company of General Grant, who had remarked there and then that he knew only two tunes; one of them was Yankee Doodle, and the other wasn’t. Stories of George were legion.
He led the town band, wrote arrangements of and fantasias based onpopular tunes, was known to enjoy trying to represent the resonance of bells or lightning on the piano;
devised a microtonal piano and taught his boys, Charles and Moss, not only to play and sing at the conventional instrument, but also to play and sing in 2 different keys simultaneously! Charles always held his father up as his musical hero,
if his musical hero wasn’t Brahms!
For George, there was music in everything. Music was quite literally life, life, music.
Let’s hear Charles’ song from 1900, setting Shelley, Rough Wind; the first of two songs in which he employed the first subject of his 1st Symphony. Do not adjust your set because it breaks off in a rush; there’s no formal coda; we are in Ivesland.
How effective this tiny song should have been if one in a sequence or cycle of songs, throwing emphasis on what came next. He himself applauded it for ending in two different keys. Rough Wind, by Charles Ives.
Track 1 Rough Wind, Charles Ives (1.00min)
George Ives also taught his son the theory of composition as represented
in a manual by a noted scholar, Jadasohn. This was to be unfortunate, as when Charlie arrived at Yale, he found that the textbook that underpinned the course was…yes…
Jadasohn… Teach his grandmother to suck eggs, he must have thought. There was a great difference to being taught from a dull textbook by his respected and brilliantly eccentric father and sitting in tutorials with a nationally-established composer to whom that dull
textbook appeared holy writ. Horatio William
Parker, the thirty-something professor of
music theory, soon inured him to
captious reactions to his exercises and
a University career of average marks.
In fact, in his musical studies -
as part of a degree in
General Arts - Ives never gained a
mark higher than B-minus. “In
future, don’t bring anything else like
this to a tutorial.”
Sadly, Ives’ father died suddenly from
a stroke within weeks of the
commencement of those studies.
Charles, aged 20, felt marooned, alone.
Here is the second song based
on the First Symphony first subject.
Written in 1901, the
longer, through-composed setting is of
a dark and terse poem by
Arthur Symons, On Judge’s Walk, which
concludes,
“That night we walked beneath the trees,
Alone, beneath the trees;
There was some word we could not say
Half uttered in the breeze.
Alone, beneath the trees;
There was some word we could not say
Half uttered in the breeze.
That night on Judges' Walk we said
No word of all we had to say;
But now there shall be no word said
Before the Judge's Day.”
No word of all we had to say;
But now there shall be no word said
Before the Judge's Day.”
The end of the song is
as in Rough Wind.
Track 2 On Judge’s Walk, Ives
Judge’s Day! The Symphony formed Ives’
graduating submission, minus its first movement.
Why was the first movement not
submitted? - Because, as it happened, Professor
Parker regarded it as heterodox. First,
he insisted that Ives go away
and write a new opening movement.
Anyone who knows artistic instinct and
the grip that material and its
working out have on a composer,
writer or poet should have known
that this would be tantamount to
giving someone a bucket without a
bottom and telling him to draw
20 gallons from the well. Parker
didn’t regard Ives as a creative
artist as Ives was his student.
Ives reported that he couldn’t do
as he had been asked. Parker
smiled and requested he at least
end the thing in D Minor,
the tonic; at the time, it
didn’t!
The open-ended construction of the
first subject was one commanding fault.
It was so tonally vagrant, running
with swift smoothness through a shocking
8 keys, that Professor Parker had
dismissed the remainder on sight. To
the modern ear, however, the almost
experimental persistence and actual formal control
that lie behind its waywardness are
magnificent – what a paragraph! Also, similar
interesting means of swift modulation into
the unexpected are used time and
again in the symphony as a
whole. The first subject seems almost
to dissolve into a second group, several
fragments of theme grown from elements
of its neat accompaniment, perhaps. All
these fragments have some future significance.
A fragrant, faintly nervous fragment becomes
Akin to a Mahlerian tune of
childhood, filled with something like childlike
hope or wonder, characterized by high
woodwind; usually, it comes tailed by
soft, remote string chords… Another steps
out, nifty in turns that end
on unexpected notes as if drawn in.
The exposition ends with a fugato
that is not the beginning of
the development! There is a repeat!
The piece is marked simply “Allegro”,
But its slow, quiet moments are as
striking for their hypnotic fascination, their
fantasy. The development is dominated by
extraordinary, remote quiet and slowness, anticipating
a similar process in the first
movement of Vaughan Williams’ London Symphony by
well over a decade. There is
a particularly beautiful treatment of the
Mahlerian fragment for flute, but the
Matter of the rest might be
harmonized bass-lines or tiny fragments
of fragments of accompaniment! One doesn’t
care; the passage is of an
order of transcendency that feels as
an out-of-the body experience may.
Argument continues with sudden zeal by
Setting up the recapitulation with swirls
Of some power. Back comes
The first subject, this time with urgent,
Pizzicato accompaniment. There is little that
Seems literal restatement, and still some
working out, particularly of the first
subject. When hard-toned trombones enter
Schubertianly with another part of it
One feels the close is on
the way; it is such a
good effect that it is repeated; moreover,
who would foretell the just
conclusion of the movement as a
whole? It is like the sudden,
flaming outrightness of the Dvorak of
the Seventh Symphony – and worthy of
Dvorak, or of his and Ives’
possible mutual influence, Schubert. Rough Wind
or Judge’s Walk, indeed. Like the
Schubertian trombones, it is built on
subsidiary material, one of those fragments
in profusion that proves how good
an idea it is in transformation.
In another form of slowness, hear
the baleful woodwind, strings and brass
antiphons at the close – how bold
and dramatically effective they are, the
woodwind and strings in weak registers
and discord seem voices of imploring
humanity, the brass callously or maliciously crushing
them. In D Minor… The thematic
material has occurred before, in quite
another spirit.
Track 3: 1st Symphony, l Allegro
Ives had mastered not only symphonic
construction but also orchestration. He might
be expected to know town-band
instruments, brass and woodwind, but his
scoring for strings is equally assured,
well-balanced and sensitive to detail.
This symphony is staggering for its
harmonic and tonal subtlety, its counterpoint
and melodic resource. It is comparable
with any great composer’s First Symphony.
The daring of its qualities is
also extraordinary – at times, the proliferation
of detail is such that academicism
is really no more than an
expedient veneer – life teems underneath it
as individual instruments move as individuals.
At other times, the heart of
a quite beautifully ardent young man
burns – how else could the very
modern lyricism of the slow movement
be as it is, other than
that Ives felt as his fellow-
man feels if honest and unafraid
of having his loving confidence flung
back in his face? In this
connection, it’s hard not to weep
for the young Charles, who possibly
believed that people could but reward
him for his achievement of such
sounds within a cogent design. Yes,
the Adagio molto sostenuto begins with
a nod to Dvorak, a lyrical
theme given to the cor-anglais,
but this is the first true
New World Symphony to be written
by an American. In any case,
the thematic material and its reserveless
full up-surge are Ives’ own.
His use of the sections of
the orchestra is that of an
old hand who knows unerringly the
potentialities of his instruments and how
their sounds can be blended or
contrasted. In 1910, Ives was
given the opportunity to hear three
of the four movements of the
symphony played-through under the conductor
Walter Damrosch; still later on, he
remembered with disgust that Damrosch remarked
as he conducted that the slow
movement’s material, with its “nice” chords,
was charming! Not surprizing, really; charming
isn’t the word. If Ives
intended to express his grief and
loneliness after his father’s death, the
vacuum inside him, as he himself
described it, he went further: this
is music of universal meaning, a
love-song to life itself, and
courage. Overwhelmingly powerful in its occasionally
vibrato songfulness, its lovely solos, mounting
climaxes and moments of quiet pathos,
it is a slow movement such
as Mahler – or Dvorak – should have
been proud to compose. Also, doesn’t
it suggest that Ives might have
named his fee as a film-
-composer in the middle of the
20th Century, the mid-1970s
and even nowadays? The shape of
the piece is perfectly-judged.
Track 4: ll Adagio Molto Sostenuto
One of the anti-modernists’ gibes
used to be, “Can Picasso draw?
Well, can he?” implying that modern
art proceeds from a self-perceived
incapacity in meeting the challenge of
traditional techniques and disciplines. If as
an example of Picasso’s conventional studies
was to hand, they might reply,
“Yes, well, why doesn’t he do things like that,
instead of the rubbish I’ve seen?
Ives, like Picasso could indeed draw –
that is, in his case, write
conventional music; achieve the
expected thing, yet, like Picasso, do
so while stamping his hallmark on
what he composed in any pre-
-existing style. His send-ups, or
as he called them, “take-offs” prove
this amply, but to hear his
early works is perhaps to hear
an Ives as true and wonderful.
His early songs and First Symphony
were pure genius; original, vibrant,
moving – filled with the life and
soul of a sensitive, compassionate and
giving person who happened to possess
the one ear in New England
made for where he lived and
when, and a spirit big enough
to encompass both hard study and
a composition-technique most musicians can
only dream of possessing. The aesthetic,
the idiom, of the times was
always made his own. Ives seems
to have loved music and amateur
music-making of most kinds – that
is, music and music-making that
proceeded from love of music as
an entity and as an activity.
If the scherzo with trio is
the most conventional of the movements,
it is also unique – Dvorak meets
Bruckner, whose music Ives could not
have known: and Dvorak would not
have written a fugato for a
scherzo-theme – canons were the closest
that he came to that. The
fugato-theme should have convinced his
teachers that Ives could write a
fugato while standing on his head.
His counterpoint, thanks to his father’s
method of tuition rather than the
manual, was as easy as tapping
out only four different beats at
once. Ives’ counterpoint throughout the
Symphony is as it is because
of his incredible sense of rhythm;
many of the faster parts of
the music prove this. Strict but
also anodyne counterpoint was taught at
Yale under Parker. Continuation that is
consistent where strict counterpoint ceases to
be the music’s texture is equally
as important as being able to
construct strict counterpoint in the first
place. Ives’ Scherzo with Trio, marked
Scherzo: Vivace, should have been recognized
for the achievement of quick-witted,
well-co-ordinated tactics that it was.
How different Ives’ career might have
been if he had attended not
Yale, but the New York Conservatory,
and if Dvorak had been his
professor! Like the slow movement, the
scherzo with trio ends quietly and
abruptly: ho, for the finale!
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| Ives' home in CT |
Track 5: lll Scherzo: Vivace
The finale’s reprising of the opening
theme and theme of the slow
movement in its latter stages reflects
the influence of Dvorak, and other
Romantics, but is done as well
as anyone could do it, without
longeurs or excessive contrivance. The build-
-up to these passages and the
Close is both patient and exhaustive,
With several looks and hints backward.
The motifs and basic themes are
vivid and their working-out skilful.
Perhaps the most memorable is the
one that begins with a Wagnerian
upward flourish of the most blaring –
but is tailed swiftly by a
thoroughly Yankee resolution: it is impossible
To believe that there is no
dry humour in this, but it
is a cogent feature relatable to
other themes, the sockdologer, as Twain
might have called it: the American
inflection occurs near the movement’s outset
against the background of the main
theme. The harum scarumness of the
finale as a whole and in
conclusion might be seen as portraying
happy memories of some red- letter
day in Danby, Ives’ home-town,
or at Yale. Nearly a quarter
of an hour long, it gives
an impression of scurrying by. Later,
or in secret, unfettered by University,
such musical characterization surfaced without pretence
of academic veneer or ‘correctness’.
All in all, this effort has
to be worth at least a
B. Or possibly an A surrounded
by stars, an A such as
Tchaikovsky awarded the student Rachmaninov! The
March-Scherzo of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony
Of 1893 boasts string
rushes such as appear before young
Ives’ lengthy but fizzing coda. There
is something of the exhilaration – and
tonal caprice - of Tchaikovsky’s Ukrainian or
Little Russian Symphony about it all,
too.
Track 6 : Allegro Molto
During his four years at Yale,
Ives wrote no fewer than 80
separate pieces in many different forms.
The first symphony is a beautiful
work of art, very different from
Ives’ later works in the genre –
but not in the least inferior;
it is the work of talent
that is assured and accomplished: he
went on growing, evolving and anticipating
musical developments by a quarter of
a century or more, largely unregarded
and asked if he really had
to make such ugly sounds
or if he had any musical
training… He earned his living in
business and got older and spikier!
“What has sound got
to do with music?” Was the
out would come an intemperate remark
on the emasculated nature of all
fashionable concert-music! In truth, every
such experience of contempt for his
deeply and scientifically musical nature hurt
him dreadfully. Now, you’ll know why!
This was Classical Break, on Somer
Valley FM, and I’m Rupert
Kirkham. Today’s script was researched and
written by Mike Burrows. We hope
you enjoyed it and will tune
in again soon. Goodbye!
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