Measures of Ives

I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way the ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

Wallace Stevens, Six Significant Landscapes III

The poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) and the composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) are sometimes linked: contemporaries, they lived and worked not far from each other in Connecticut and had successful careers as insurance executives. They never met, but there are deeper affinities ¹ in that both confronted the dilemma of how to reconcile universality with a vision that is distinctively American. It would not, as for instance Dvořák had recommended, be resolved musically by incorporating folk and popular elements into sophisticated compositions (even though “spot the tune” is part of the game when listening to Ives) or infusing idiomatic speech and imagery from the streets. Both men allowed their imaginations free range but imagination can only act or speak through local realities with which it collides rather than adheres; cosmic aspirations tripping over ants, as it were. What, in any case, is a distinctively American vision? With so many incoming traditions confronting each other, mingling with those of Native Americans and then evolving in relative isolation across the continent, to latch onto one tradition could be as valid as any other, as Copland realised. If Charles Ives draws on any tradition at all, then that is best described as Danbury-ism, the stories, sights and sounds associated in his mind with his Yankee home town in Connecticut.

But it would be wrong to limit the scope of Ives’s artistic vision to a small town in Connecticut:
Ives developed his own artistic and social vision and created a music that rejected, subverted, ignored much of concert life as it existed in Danbury, or anywhere else. His music was in great part about the spirit of community, yet its seemed to participate in no community anywhere. ²

When Americans rejected their allegiance to the British monarchy in 1776 they needed a new attachment, a new kind of cultural deal that was not based on the ethnic and religious loyalties of the Old World. The Declaration of Independence contains lofty aspirations that quickly proved too visionary, too idealistic and instead, what emerged in the 19th-century was a cultural narrative rooted in plain, ordinary people – “the everyday desire for the freedom to make money and pursue happiness in the here and now” ³. That new deal is a driving force behind the work of Charles Ives and those who saw and understood its quality during his lifetime, such as Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland and Lou Harrison, would all have been in agreement with this analogous assessment made by fellow composer Bernard Herrmann in the early 1930s:
The music of Charles Ives is a fundamental expression of America– the America of the transcendental period,–of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whittier. It is of New England–the New England of granite puritanism seen through a musical mind unique and extraordinary. His music reveals a brooding introspective and profoundly philosophic temperament, tempered by keen observation of man and nature. ⁴.

A bit of both, then: local colour transcended by idealism. Not in itself a revolutionary concept but beating a new and different path to everyone else. Hence the enigma, the difference and distance from anything else in music at the time, that is Ives.

In Portsmouth Baroque Choir’s programme American Choral Music, the pivotal work from ancient to modern, past to present, is Psalm 67 by Charles Ives. It’s a student work, he was only twenty years old when he wrote it, a first-year student at Yale under the Teutonic tutelage of Horatio Parker. It’s brief, lasting little over two minutes. It’s also unique in his output and yet the principle characteristics of his mature style are already in play. Ives the composer and multi-faceted persona projects himself in every phrase. I’ll take some of those characteristics and examine how they play out in the piece and end with a brief look at how they matured in his final masterpiece, Symphony no. 4.

I Dasher

Charles Ives’s school nickname was Dasher:
Ives was a good athlete. The track coach at Yale, where Ives went to college, lamented the kid’s commitment to music, for in his estimation Ives could have been a world-class sprinter. Ives played baseball throughout his youth—he captained his team at the Hopkins School—and referred to one of his earliest compositions, Variations on “America”, a notoriously challenging organ piece written when he was 17, “as much fun as playing baseball.”… Asked later in life, regarding his music, what he played, he replied: “Shortstop!” ⁵.

Ives recalled his best sporting moment as pitching (wildly) for Hopkins against Yale and beating them in April 1894. That’s not long before Psalm 67 was written.

In the late summer of 1893 he was taken by his Uncle Lyman to the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and dashed from exhibit to exhibit, concert to concert. More on that experience below. His compositions often give the impression of being dashed off, darting from one idea to another, often at the same time. That ran the risk of looking unprofessional, that people would say “You don’t know what you’re doing, just throwing notes around”. Until the 1960s, when championed by Leonard Bernstein, Leopold Stokowski and others, and even as late as the Ives centenary in 1975, that is exactly what critics and audiences thought until they began to realise that although, as in Mahler, there are references to and flirtations with amateurism and banality, Ives knew exactly what he was doing. Take the finale of the second Symphony. Combining all the main themes of a work in a symphonic finale was commonplace at the end of the 19th-century – think Bruckner or Borodin. But whereas their themes were crafted to dovetail precisely and harmoniously, Ives throws in disparate tunes, often  that are meant to sound chaotic, just as if you are watching a parade where the sound of a band that just passed you overlaps with that of the approaching band.  Ives spins these disparate threads together, all seems chaotic until some lever in the texture is pulled to reveal an unexpected and awesome revelation. The transition from the busy, almost chaotic central section of Psalm 67 into the resumption of the chanting has a similar effect, I think, but on a much gentler scale.

II Involvement with the past

Ives never owned a radio until later in his life; he detested music that was not performed live. He liked to quote Emerson’s invocation of the ancients that said “Let us be silent, for so are the gods”. For all the rowdiness we hear in Ives it is nearly always pitched against measured serenity. The middle section of Psalm 67 looks and sounds like a crowd breaking out into shouts of joy. It is framed by the gentle bitonality of the chanted sections that seem to portray the presence of God, rather in the way Stravinsky would do in King of the Stars or like Morton Feldman’s ‘Voice of God’ chords in Rothko Chapel. That’s maybe too far-fetched for such a youthful psalm setting: Psalm 67 says more about the past than it does about some unknown future, as Ives biographer Jan Swafford noted:
Ives touched on an older native tradition in some of his Psalms. With its chanted outer sections and rhythmic, imitative centre, Psalm 67 resembles nothing so much as the “fuging tunes” of William Billings and his fellows. Colonial hymnody, displaced by the more learned work of Lowell Mason and other nineteenth-century hymnodists, survived underground in New England. Ives may have heard fuging tunes and, consciously or not, modelled some of his experimental Psalms on them ⁶

Charles’s father, George, would often have a game with his son: playing a song in one key while Charlie sang in another. George taught Charles that any harmonic combination was acceptable if you knew what you were doing with it. That’s a part of what Ives set out do with his first psalm setting, Psalm 67. But however exploratory the score may look, laid out in two keys, it nevertheless relies on the application of traditional theoretical concepts. The opening chord, which superimposes a major chord on top of its dominant minor is heard as if it were a tonic chord and variation takes the form of inverting the C major and G minor blocks by the end of the opening section, likewise when the chanting returns after the imitative counterpoint of the central section. Jan Swafford hears something else in the Psalm’s sonority:
Oddly enough, what seems partly to have guided Charlie’s ear through this new polytonal world are the close harmonies of barbershop music – like ragtime, a genre in its heyday during the 1890s. The effect of Psalm 67 resembles a sort of cosmic barbershop choir. When it slides into a cadence reminiscent of the style, it seems satisfyingly startling in a context  of mystery and worship… He never returned to its sound and there is nothing anywhere quite like it.  ⁷

The Autumn of 1894, when I am assuming Psalm 67 was written, was for Ives momentous time. In September, as the youngest professional organist in Connecticut, he got his first posting at Center Church ⁸; he got into Yale, starting music classes in October; in early November his father died, an enormous blow because son and father had fallen out over the choice of music as a career. Charles felt guilt that this could have hastened the death of the person he most revered and loved,

III Musical pioneer

On board the Mayflower in 1620 was a copy of the Ainsworth Psalter that fed into the hymnody of the early settlers, from which a homespun tradition of sacred music grew up under the leadership of William Billings whose influential credo was I think it best for every Composer to be his own Carver. This untutored tradition was suppressed in the 19th century by composers such as Lowell Mason (From Greenland’s icy mountains) in favour of the “correct and decorous” European tradition but went underground in New England and the southern “Sacred Harp” tradition. Ives rekindles the Billings credo in that he regarded singing as an extension of talking.

Well-meaning interference in American music came by way of Dvořák who was in America with his family from September 1892 through to February 1895. Evidently unaware of the dilemmas of American composers and the racism of his host country, his recommendation to them was that “inspiration for truly national music might be derived from the Negro melodies or Indian chants”, i.e. the kind of material woven into his 9th Symphony ‘From the New World’, notwithstanding that most of that symphony had been sketched out ahead of his American visit. Dvořák left a “highly productive turbulence in his wake”: Edward MacDowell and Horatio Parker were glad to see the back of him: Masquerading in the so-called nationalism of Negro clothes cut in Bohemia will not help us…. So-called Russian, Bohemian, or any other purely national music has no place in art… The vital element of music – personality – stands alone ⁹

Dashing around the Chicago exhibition in 1893, Ives might have gained a sense of where audience preferences lay. Much expense was lavished by the exhibition’s organisers on cultured music – a commission from Amy Beach, an appearance by Dvořák, etc.-  but ragtime, Sousa marches and popular songs (forbears of Tin Pan Alley) proved a much bigger draw.The song After the Ball was played by Sousa’s band at the end of every day during the Exhibition. It became the theme song of the fair and the first million-seller. Lusty and louche numbers like Ta-ra-ra Boom de-ay and Streets of Cairo also stuck, the latter finding its way into an Ives string quartet movement. ¹⁰ Meanwhile, a contingent of black musicians, including a young cornetist Scott Joplin, leveraged a bawdyhouse accompaniment into a national craze, Joplin, within the decade, being crowned the “King of Ragtime” and ragtime going on to sweep the whole world, paving the way for the later blues, jazz and rock ’n’ roll crazes. Theodore Thomas, founder and first conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conceded that “all this rough royalty could draw the multitudes he had laboured his entire career, with only modest results, to capture for refined music”.

Ives drew on his university professor Horatio Parker’s ideals that were influenced by the Wagnerian vision of the artist-priest blazing his own trail, adhering to the faith that music can accomplish something of profound moral and spiritual value, and so be a vehicle of human evolution and redemption. ¹¹. But he also drew, more deeply, on his own Puritan and Yankee heritage that distanced him from the European movements stirring in the 1890s. In that way he can be seen as the pioneer of a tradition of experimentation in America that lead to a more intensive exploration of musical resources by Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles. Edgard Varèse, Harry Partch and John Cage. Tonality, for instance, was seen by Ives as one resource among many that could be employed in a composition, the integration of harmony and rhythm playing a subsidiary role. Freed from mutual dependence, rhythm in Ives can be notoriously difficult whereas harmonies can approach a folkish simplicity. “The horizontal splitting of musical entities which have within them an independent harmonic and contrapuntal life suggests a parallel with Stravinsky’s multi-layered textures ¹² and relates to later developments in the music of Elliott Carter [a champion of Ives] and Michael Tippett” ¹³. You already see and hear that splitting of harmony and rhythm at work in the brief central section of Psalm 67.

A lot was being said about Ives as pioneer in my student days at Exeter University that coincided with the Ives centenary: the university chamber orchestra, for example, performed his Third Symphony a work that had attracted the attention of Mahler during his time as conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Mahler had, I believe, planned to perform the symphony back in Europe but he died before that could be brought about. That affinity is interesting because Mahler must have recognised a kindred approach to composition whereby a symphonic work may include many different musical styles. Ives, like Mahler, avoided making a distinction between popular and refined music and, from his father, Ives learned to respect any musical manifestation that was earnest and authentic. “Listen to a stonemason bawling a hymn”, George told his son, “but don’t pay too much attention to the sound or you’ll miss the music”. When Ives found his musical destiny, it would be to unite the common and the exalted, the great European genres with the everyday voices of Americans. For Ives, intent on elevating ordinary utterance to cosmic significance, this was also a cruel lesson. The ordinary people and their speech from which he derived his music routinely rejected it or made fun of it. Only after the 1960s did the value and message of Ives’ extraordinary music begin to cut through. The première of his Fourth Symphony was as late as 1965! How he would have relished knowing that that BBC Music Magazine recently ranked Ives in second place, behind Copland, in its list of the twenty greatest American composers!

I wonder what Ives would have made of the post-1950 generations of composers who resolutely stitched harmony and rhythm back together in a musical fashion directed by religious simplicity. Ives abandoned sacred music in 1902: I suspect his reaction would be “Goddam simplicity!”.

IV. Ivesian

Ives thought and composed in paradoxes, all founded on those in his own life: a young organ prodigy who practiced hard but would rather be out playing baseball, a socialistically inclined businessman who got rich in the insurance industry, an individualist who exalted community, a fierce democrat who sometimes wrote fiercely challenging music, a Romantic idealist who conceived a music of the future that was at one with life itself and something that people do for the benefit of other people.

He felt that business was more open to change than music. In the 1920s, no longer composing, Ives summarised his business outlook and how it related to music:
My business experience revealed life to me in many respects that otherwise I might have missed. In it one sees tragedy, nobility, meanness, high aims, low aims, brave hopes, faint hopes, great ideals, no ideals, and one is able to watch these work inevitable destiny. And it has seemed to me that the finer sides of these traits were not only in the majority but in the ascendancy… It is my impression that there is more open-mindedness and willingness to examine carefully the premises underlying a new or unfamiliar thing, in the world of business than in the world of music… I have experienced a great fulness of life in business. The fabric of existence weaves itself whole. You cannot set an art off in the corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality and substance. There can be nothing exclusive about a substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of experience of life and thinking about life and giving life. My work in music helped my business and work in business helped my music.

Charles the.man of business (originator of inheritance planning) was universally known on Wall Street and could be spotted a mile away because of of the Danbury hat. Under that hat he’d be working out music in his head as he walked, composing during train commutes.

 

V Endings

‘Dasher’ was slowed up by two medical incidents in 1906 and 1918 that his family and biographer Jan Swafford attributed to heart attacks but others have explained as burn-out. Whatever the explanation, the flow of compositions slowed down considerably after 1918 and stopped completely in 1926. As his wife Harmony related to biographer John Kirkpatrick, Charles “came downstairs one day and with tears in his eyes said he couldn’t seem to compose any more – nothing would go well, nothing sounded right”.

What certainly would not sound right in the mature works of Ives is a final cadence. Even in the early Psalm 67 there is no Amen cadence, nor even a doxology. In free rhythm it concludes with a re-emphasis of the C major/ G minor sonority. The first Symphony, partly a graduation work at Yale, is under the influence of Dvořák and Tchaikovsky and so does admit conventional cadential endings, but the five movements of the Second (1907) mostly segue and although the original version of the finale closed on a unison tonic, Ives revised it in the 1930s replacing the cadence with a tag that compresses Reveille and Columbia, Gem of the Ocean ending with a “terrific discord” that invokes the “formula for signifying the very end of the last dance of all: the players played any old note, good and loud, for the last chord”: Mozart’s musical joke taken to a new height of hilarity.

These variable, often inconclusive substitutions for final cadences, like so many unanswered questions, characterise the work that most consider to be Ives’s crowning achievement, his Symphony No. 4:
The Fourth Symphony, in the writer’s opinion, isone of the greatest symphonies ever penned. It is the great American symphony that our critics and conductors have cried out for, and yet the symphony has remained unperformed except for an excerpt played at the Pro Musica some years ago. The prelude is derived from the silence of a Sabbath hour when the soul, beset and weary of earthly vexations, turns toward the infinite with questions of the ultimate meaning of existence. The succeeding movements are the diverse answers. The fugue is an expression of the reaction of life into formalism and ritualism. The scherzo, in which the easy, and the worldly, progress through life with the trials of the Pilgrims in their journey through the swamps and the country. The finale is an apotheosis of the preceding content in terms that have to do with the reality of existence and its religious experience.” ¹⁴

An arrangement of the Symphony’s third movement ‘Fugue’ was conducted by Herrmann in New York on May 10, 1933, but Ives’s version was not performed until the integral première of the entire Symphony in 1965 conducted by Leopold Stokowski (see the ‘playlist’ below). It was given its first UK performance the following year at the Proms under Malcolm Sargent with assistance from Gunther Schuller. That Proim also featured Holst’s The Planets. I was in the BBC Symphony Chorus for the Symphony’s third Proms performance on July 25th 1985, Sir John Pritchard assisted by Simon Joly and Raymond Holden. The Planets was again the companion work. The two works, begun at roughly the same time, go together well and as with The Planets, the chorus has only a bit part, in the opening and closing movements, together with a spatially-separated ensemble of 5 violins and harp additional to the full orchestra. The last movement employs a spatially-separated group of percussion that opens and closes the movement, the last bar fading out to a single, quiet bass drum tap, the loneliest sound in all music and perhaps the only truthful response to the question asked by the chorus in Movement 1: Watchman, aught of joy or hope?

If you know what’s coming in the Symphony’s second movement, labelled “Comedy”, then performing in a row of singers behind 131 instrumentalists, including a solo piano and another piano for four hands, feels like standing on the edge of a precipice, or watching a storm system approach. Ives bases this “Comedy” movement on Hawthorne’s story The Celestial Railroad, itself a trope on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. As such, the “Comedy” movement is a composition of the 1920s, and may represent one of Ives’s last orchestral endeavors. It is his most extreme essay in overlapping thematic material. The tutti pages come in great waves, receding occasionally to reveal tranquil textures and melodic flashbacks. At the end of the movement it’s as if all the energy has been exhausted and it just stops with a bell and piano note still trying to make themselves heard against the still resonating fff orchestral tutti. “In one page, he stacks up a roaring brass-band march, “turkey in the straw”, “The Irish Washerwoman”, a piano whose right hand is atonal and left hand ragtime, and assigns everyone else wildcat tunes in sundry rhythms and keys, all of it adding up to a pandemonium like nothing else ever heard in the genteel confines of the concert hall” ¹⁵ For all that, the work comes across as the last expansive romantic symphony. Being a part of that Proms performance, all eyes on Sir John Pritchard who, if overwhelmed by the response to his steady beat did no show it, remains one of my most memorable experiences.

I also now hear Comedy as a musical representation of the life and times of Charles Ives as preserved in his composition studio, its faithful recreation beautifully explained in a video recored in situ by Jan Swafford and James Sinclair for the Charles Ives Society. There is the intense involvement with the past (especially that of his father), his piano surrounded by pictures of revered composers, notably Brahms (four portraits) and César Franck, a bookcase full of titles about philosophy, science and biographies of composers, especially Beethoven.

Ives cut a lonely figure in the music world during his lifetime but as the legacy of his extraordinary music is explored more fully and performed more skilfully, his champions and admirers have increased. Michael Tilson Thomas performed and recorded definitive interpretations of his symphonic works throughout his career; John Adams composed a musical memoir My father knew Charles Ives in 2003; Gustavo Dudamel recorded the complete symphonies with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2020; Jeremy Denk celebrated Ives’ 150th anniversary with an album of both Piano Sonatas and the four Violin Sonatas with Stefan Jackiw. To coincide with that anniversary album, Jeremy Denk updated the Ives literature with a candid essay for the The New York Times: ¹⁶
He had no shortage of grand visions, whether for music or for his quite successful insurance business. He conceived influential strategies of estate planning and formulas for coverage. He dreamed that music would evolve into “a language, so transcendent, that its heights and depths will be common to all mankind.” (This didn’t pan out, unless you count Taylor Swift.) And, in the first two decades of the 20th century, he dreamed up a radically original American musical voice — an enviable triumph that came bundled with failure. It was a voice many people didn’t want to hear, and still don’t….His music is not ready to package or post on Instagram. But there is knowledge in it. Copland’s music has a cleanness, a belief that all the parts must function. It implies an optimism that America might solve its issues with a lyrical barn-raising or spiritual-singing or cattle-rustling. Ives is optimistic, too, but always messy. His music suggests America will just have to muddle through, and wrestle with its own failure. Maybe that makes him hard to take. But at this moment, Ives seems to be more right than ever, more essential, more alive. His best advice — advice we could all use — is to open your ears.

Portsmouth Baroque Choir is tackling Ives for the first time. It has also been a rare opportunity for me too, and harking back to my previous encounters with Ives in the 1980s with the BBC Symphony Chorus and New London Chamber Choir, especially that thrilling Proms performance of Symphony No. 4, what I now hear is a masterpiece that encapsulates and transcends the Ivesian vision for which Psalm 97 was an early, tentative, preparatory step.

I urge you to sample the short playlist provided. Better still, come and hear the choir sing Ives in Chichester on July 4th.

Playlist

Psalm 67
Marcus Creed and SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart (album includes all other nine psalm settings by Ives).

Symphony no. 4

Televised studio performance recorded shortly after the World Premiere conducted in 1965 by Stokowski including a talk by the conductor and others before the complete performance.

Michael Tilson Thomas, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 1991.