Charles Ives at 150: An Evolving Legacy “Once a nice young man (his musical sense having been limited by three years’ intensive study at the Boston Conservatory) said to Father, “How can you stand it to hear old John Bell (the best stone-mason in town) sing?” (as he used to at Camp Meetings). Father said, “He is a supreme musician.” The young man (nice and educated) was horrified – ”Why, he sings off the key, the wrong notes and everything – and that horrible, raucous voice – and he bellows out and hits notes no one else does – it’s awful!” Father said, “Watch him closely and reverently, look into his face and hear the music of the ages. Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds – for if you do, you may miss the music. You won’t get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds.” – Charles Ives If a sound, any sound, simultaneously intimates its origin, present and a possible future, then a whimsical reduction of the sonic conglomerates we call music might involve a state of implicative simultaneity. Each sonic artifact is the proverbial snapshot of a temporally fluid narrative. Yet, obviously and ironically, temporality resides in the way a sound moves through the air and through its sonic context, the exuberance with which a melody emerges and fades along with our morphing conception of it. Performance practice similarly negates notions of statis, even in the stillness of a moment. It abides by a series of changing norms and rules, beholden only tenuously – and to none for long – remaining open, incomplete or unfinished, according to the diverging pathways of predilection. No composer gave voice to music’s concentric and contradictory pluralities with more gusto, sensitivity and foresight than Charles Ives. It is tragic that in 2024, the implications of Ives’ music are still afforded relatively little regard. In brief, where Ives performance practice is concerned, the past near century has witnessed an understandable and increasing but often unfortunate focus on detailed precision at the expense of raucous narrative brilliance and innovation. Both approaches have their merits, but the former is now so refreshing because it is nearly forgotten. Two box sets on Sony, Charles Ives: The Anniversary Edition and Charles Ives – The Album Anthology 1945–1976, demonstrate the motion from Ives the transcendent adventurer toward Ives the bringer of sonic innovation via the spirit of dialectical reconstruction. I attempt no damning with faint praise by suggesting that both approaches are valid. They are essential. The more recent aesthetic would not exist without the astonishing work of the Charles Ives Society, represented by the tireless efforts of its president Donald Berman, Thomas Brodhead, James Sinclair, and Kyle Gann among many others. Channeled via painstaking editions, superb recordings and exemplary scholarship, their ceaseless efforts ensure that comprehension and continued enrichment of Ives’ legacy is possible for those in search of it. The Fourth Symphony edition prepared by Brodhead and Gann’s superb collection of Essays After a Sonata are cases in point, not to mention Berman’s stunning new recording of Ives’ second piano sonata, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860, on Avie and Sinclair’s equally impressive recent Naxos disc of Ives’ orchestral miniatures. It is, however, ironic that establishment of a thorough-going performing tradition pursuant to their efforts has so often placed phrases above paragraphs, or instances above the multifarious unity of purpose that is so much a part of what Ives was and continues to be, the Ives captured in every sound proffered by these two invaluable Sony anthologies. While there is some overlap, the two sets complement each other; the Ives aficionado will require both. The former, a 5-LP box, was released in 1974 to commemorate Ives’ centenary, and its importance, especially for its aural history component compiled by Vivian Perlis, cannot be overstated. This first CD issue comprises a faithful reproduction, fortunately reproducing the original’s extensive notes which include a generous helping of Ives quotations. Its companion set, vast at 22 discs but surprisingly brief on annotations, gives us the considerably rich corpus of analogue recordings from what might be called a golden age for RCA and Columbia, one in which Ives morphed from eccentric genius toward a respectability, though never quite achieving canonic status. The single essay by Kevin Sherwin in the larger anthology drives the point sadly home. His biographical material certainly encapsulates Ives and his Whitmanian vision of a music in flux, sympathetic to the “American” spirit as he understood it. Nonetheless, a portion might have moved over to make room for more recording comparisons, especially as the set contains multiple and vastly different interpretations of many pieces. After all, the new Ives collector most likely will spring for the expertly annotated anniversary set, from which the above quotation from Ives’ Memos was taken. The seasoned collector is presumably well-steeped in the composer’s lore, its historiographical praises and pitfalls, not to mention the back-dating controversy also represented in the anniversary edition’s interview segment and in no need of further rehearsal here. All quibbling aside, and to pilfer from Marshal McLuhan, the music is the message. The recordings under discussion bear witness to the genesis of performing traditions commensurate with those long established for other composers. Beethoven’s fifth symphony had its first waxing in 1913, when Ives was barely even performed. So, as the 1960s brought Ives into the stereo era, Beethovenian visions as disparate as Furtwangler’s, Toscanini’s, and Leibowitz’s were already being absorbed as Leopold Stokowski and Leonard Bernstein began their Ives advocacy. We’ve really only had six decades of continua along which to establish performing traditions of Ives’ music. In recent years, his works for smaller forces have fared best, their performance standards doubtless influenced by the recordings in these compilations. While completely different, Donald Berman’s new reading of the Concord sonata owes a debt to those of his teacher, John Kirkpatrick, whose two versions are an object lesson in rhapsodic restraint and the most astonishing attention to detail in gradation. Like Helmut Walcha’s two collections of Bach’s organ works, Kirkpatrick travels a road from unbuttoned classicism to a more mature and nuanced virtuosity in which obvious motivic analysis still serves spontaneity. Contrast is a major force behind his 1945 recording, while connective tissue determines much of the momentum in his 1968 version. The “Hawthorn” movement’s opening minutes demonstrate the disparity. In the stereo remake, Kirkpatrick makes the swirl of runs and arpeggios a more obvious home for the melodic motives they support, motives swinging in and out of focus and often lingering, just shy of facile recognition. Kirkpatrick’s two recordings exist at points along – and in some ways define – a performance practice continuum that leads to Marc-Andree Hamelin’s two magnificent renderings and to Berman’s Unknown Ives compilations, models of pianistic scholarship. Seen in this luminescence of gradual exposure, Berman’s new Concord is as much a culmination, a crowning achievement, as the sonata itself, clearly visible as the unified motivic tapestry unfurls in a work that still defies interpretive closure. Nowhere is the piece’s open-endedness better represented than by Ives playing his own music, a generous selection of which graces the fourth disc of the Anniversary compendium. These are, in many ways, superior transfers to those on CRI, a much more complete compilation unfortunately subject to an overuse of noise reduction. Listen to “The Alcotts” movement, the only one Ives recorded complete, to hear how each phrase opens up to the next and how broken chords reveal the motives nested within them. The sonata’s unified structure won’t reveal itself on first hearing, or on the 20th or the 100th. Berman’s nearly half-century odyssey is only now reaching something akin to a point of rest, and that unity in diversity so integral to the sonata is Ives in microcosm. Ives’ songs, many self-published, function similarly, fragments of life’s irresolvable circuities set to text. The conjoining of chromatically swooping wish-fulfilling melody and harmonic elusiveness in “Like a Sick Eagle” embodies Ives’ evolving approach to relationships of tonal center and microtone, and, should the need still exist, puts to rest any intimation that Ives was merely emulating overtly Romantic musical proclivities. Even putting aside the inter-note microtonal motions that some singers emphasize more than others, the song’s framework is a study in ambiguous resolution, stretched tonality based on allusion rather than being grounded in any particular system. Greg Smith conducts the original version, for voice and chamber orchestra, on disc 14 of the album collection, complete with microtonally inflected strings and sung with impeccable pitch and requisite profundity by Adrienne Albert. The texts’ cosmic vision of struggle and of vistas lost are enhanced by the way each note transitions to the next, worlds within worlds captured in each pinnacle and steep of a vocal delivery as devoid of sentimentality as it is imbued with mystery. Not a hint of vibrato clouds the spotless vision of this now-thankfully resuscitated document, so different from Susan Graham and Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s justly lauded but more traditionally European rendition. Closer in spirit might be Susan Narucki’s versions, though vibrato is abundant, and, surprisingly, Julia Sophie Wagner’s recording with the sympathetic Steffen Schleiermacher’s pianism delightfully foregrounded. The song can take it all, responding flexibly as needed. Taken together, Ives’ two string quartets demonstrate his transition from studenthood to maturity. While the first borrows from his own previous organ works and portends the extent to which pre-existing tunes would form the weave of his compositional fabric, the second swims in a transcendently clear pool of pantonal and multi-rhythmic cohesion, confrontational and achingly beautiful by turn. As with so many other pieces in the album collection, we are given two versions of the second. The earlier is the now-classic Juilliard Quartet recording, somehow simultaneously teeming with energy and objectively detailed, complementing Kirkpatrick’s second Concord sonata. Their version of the first quartet eschews the Romanticism the Emerson Quartet would later bring to it, but it bristles with the fervor of youth, pushing at its own tonal boundaries as the buildup toward the F-major chord at 2:04 occurs. When required, Juilliard can certainly muster transcendence; one need only take the mountain walk and stargaze, as the second quartet’s final movement dictates. The high-powered and tremoloed recession at 5:08, so similar to the winds’ final salvo in The Unanswered Question, is a magical moment in one of Ives’ thornier compositions. The Cleveland Quartet’s performances may be better recorded, but there is already a hint of the attention to individual detail over form that would eventually typify quite a lot of Ives performance, especially in the orchestral realm. Their second quartet, coupled with Barber’s sole quartet, is well worth hearing, especially to experience the strands of the “argument” movement. Again, the performances now reissued have born significant fruit. A particularly fine recent recording from the Escher Quartet on BIS pulls together the best elements proffered by Juilliard and Cleveland in readings chock full of power but adhering nicely to formal delineation, especially during that final-movement climax (5:40) during which the music doesn’t so much fade as simply stop, leaving room for the mountainous landscape to reassert itself. Ives’ second quartet’s polyrhythmic grandeur has its direct analogue in the orchestral pieces, which, along with the mighty Concord, exemplify these compilations at their most exciting and trail-blazing best. We are treated to Gunther Schuller conducting an entirely different version of “Like a Sick Eagle” as part of Set No. 1 for theatre orchestra. His is something of an apocalyptic vision, building to a terrifying climax as it moves forward. By contrast, the humor of James Sinclair’s album Old Songs Deranged: Music for Theater Orchestra now makes a more than welcome return to the catalog. Has “Country Band March” ever been performed with more idiomatic vigor and snark? Here is Ives the antiquated patriot clawing at boundaries while nostalgia always bubbles to the surface. The anniversary edition affords an opportunity to hear Ives early choral work, The Celestial Country, again exquisitely recorded and conducted by Greg Smith leading his Singers and the Columbia Chamber Ensemble. The afore-mentioned products of early Ives documentation, often presented as fragments in the anniversary collection and complete in the album anthology, still tingle the spine as they unfold. The low strings and piano inaugurating Stokowski’s fourth symphony traversal thrill and foreshadow as they always did, rushing headlong toward the brass entrances that prefigure similar thrusts and parries in the second movement, immediately anticipating the gently ominous sonorities played by microtonal strings. Yes, the score recorded by the American Symphony Orchestra in 1965 is now obsolete, but the recorded sound has held remarkably well. After the final movement’s cyclical peaks and valleys, the choral entrance is so warm, so beautifully present, that more recent versions, wonderful in their own way, suffer from a strange sense of detailed detachment. Witness Andrew Davis and the Melbourne Symphony, captured in vivid digital sound but completely lacking Stokowski’s wise sense of occasion. It may be the analogue recording, or the passionate intensity of repainting Ives’ vast and multihued canvas in the acoustic domain, but to these ears, no subsequent recording touches it, excepting perhaps John Adams’ glorious 1999 version with Ensemble Modern and, better recorded, Ludovic Morlot’s wonderfully detailed version of the new critical edition, the Seattle Symphony on superb form. There are too many important titles reissued here to catalog them. The Ives enthusiast will spend hours in rediscovery but also find gems a-plenty, like the version of the second violin sonata performed in 1950 by the still underappreciated duo of Patricia Travers and pianist Otto Herz. The flights of fancy they bring to each episode while maintaining a glorious grip on the whole is remarkable, especially given recent tendencies to emphasize rhapsodic bait and switch over form. It is also a privilege to compare Jose Serebrier’s 1974 Fourth Symphony, with the London Philharmonic, as he assisted on Stokowski’s recording. Serebrier’s melding of formal constraint and attention to allusion, expertly captured, exposure might be heard as a middle ground between Stokowski’s bold innovation and Christoph von Dohnányi’s poetically cohesive but somewhat timidly inclusive rendering of two decades later. Despite, or beyond, so much discovery and reacquaintance, it was neither palpable excitement nor bold innovation that brought home, in an instant, the continued importance of these repackaged historical recordings. Beyond the myriad quotations, near-quotations, and half-reminiscences, a random bit of transgenerational dialogue elucidated why these albums should never go out of print. A moment in Bernstein’s seminal take on A Symphony: New England Holidays that brought the whole into focus, just as the first movement, “Decoration Day,” wends its way toward a sleepy conclusion. After the bleak February evening is transformed into a rollicking barn dance, after that particularly fantastical episode is reabsorbed, “Good Night Ladies” is reharmonized and the string tunes nearly resurface, what sounds like an English horn comes to the fore. It’s played in an older style, certainly archaic by 1960s standards, strident and replete with vibrato, warm and rich against the backdrop of that winter reminiscence summed up in the strings glacially rendered tunes from times of yore. There it was, an instant of synchronicity, an unplanned juxtaposition conflating the new and old in a way that certainly would have resonated with Ives. His work conjoins the progressive and the Puritan, sacred and profane, bridging youthful exuberance via the wistfulness of nostalgia attested by so many on the anniversary edition’s interview disc. As the movement fades, as that sound of a bygone playing tradition fades into obscurity, tone and center converge with an uneasy but ineluctable coexistence. As much as any grand polytonal climax or rhythmic joust, it is the aching simplicity of such moments that has made these recordings such a joy to experience in tandem. Listening outward from that pivotal occurrence, from the clashing simultaneities of old and new, exposes Ives’ work as the amalgamation of contradictory traditions from which it has too frequently been reduced. It’s insightful, rude, gentle, and learned vocabularies, so often refreshingly problematic, grind against each other like the life they illuminate. Ives, the athlete, the church organist, the businessman, and family man was, in many ways, subservient to Ives the teacher, and he was as hard on himself as any taskmaster would have the right to be. Just listen as he grumbles and cusses his way through some of the most energizing performances his work is ever likely to receive. He belts and warbles the two completed takes of “They Are There” bolstered by injections of street-corner loutishness and just a shade of intellectual elitism. The poor and at least partially misguided Boston Conservatory student would do well to listen to more than just the sounds. That masterful mixture, the jostling and jarring events eschewing strict temporality whose components many have borrowed in part but never as a whole, brings every one of his utterances to life. If a fugue beyond gorgeous and an earth-shakingly comic scherzo make restless companions as they center a symphony, speaking separate languages drawn from fragments of the same existence, so be it. His is a syntax of rough-hewn extremes, only ragged at the edges because designed that way, those barbs and brambles masking sound of the deepest sublimity as penetrating as it is transient. Vast reservoirs of formal and structural cohesion are plentiful and continuously supplied. Through it all resounds an optimism so strong, a sense of the communal individual so pervasive and a vision so infectious that once seen, it can’t be dismissed any more easily than these recordings can be relegated to the histories they defined. Ives’ music is both historical set piece and prophecy, which I would call timeless if I had his courage. I can do no better than to echo his evocation of Emerson’s creative genius in the first chapter of Essays Before a Sonata: “We see him standing on a summit, at the door of the infinite where many men do not care to climb, peering into the mysteries of life, contemplating the eternities, hurling back whatever he discovers there, - now, thunderbolts for us to grasp, if we can, and translate – now placing quietly, even tenderly, in our hands, things that we may see without effort – if we won’t see them, so much the worse for us.”
© 2024 Marc Medwin
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