44
2
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank to thank my parents, Kevin and Kristi, for supporting my ever-shifting life goals and aspirations. I couldn’t ask for a more caring
and loving family. I must also thank the CC Music Department, especially Michael, Ofer, and Vicki, who helped me beat this paper into something that I am now quite proud to
call my work.
3
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Introduction Chapter Two: Musical Inheritances Chapter Three: The Conflicted Romantic Chapter Four: “Modern Sounding Music Facing Backwards”: History and Analysis of the Concord Sonata Chapter Five: Conclusion Bibliography
4
Chapter One: Introduction
Composer Franz Schubert belonged in Romantic era culture. His person,
conflicted, fiery, “inwardly a poet and outwardly a kind of hedonist,” is inseparable from
his sensual compositions that frequent rudimentary lists and descriptions of nineteenth
century art music.1 “Black-winged demons of sorrow and melancholy” plagued his
tortured life.2 He sits at a comfortable distance between the bookend composers of
Romanticism; his position is unambiguous. A century later, a young Igor Stravinsky
would become the unequivocally Modernist composer, mirroring Schubert in his cultural
relevance. His elegant manners, flawless wardrobe, and fit physique characterized a man
whose mind and body performed in perfect unison. A fellow composer once remarked on
the syncopated rhythm and elastic manner of Stravinsky’s walk, reminding him
humorously of his compositions.3 Stravinsky personified an edict of poet Arthur Rimbaud,
“Il faut être absolument moderne,” “one must be absolutely modern.”
Whereas Charles Ives, Stravinsky’s contemporary, read American
Transcendentalist literature in his modest home in rural Connecticut, only travelling to
trendy New York City for business. He fervently attended biweekly Protestant church
services and was repulsed by nudity in the visual arts: He did not “fit” to the culture of
his age like Schubert or Stravinsky. Musicologists seem to have made an exception for
Ives, who is almost unanimously grouped with his Modern contemporaries and hailed as
the harbinger of the American avant-garde on the grounds that his music is dissonant and
1 Robert Winter, et al. "Schubert, Franz." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. 2014. 2 Ibid. 3 Ross, Alex. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. 2007.
5
novel. I mean to focus on his relationship with the nineteenth century, his font of
creativity, to explain his supposed foresight through analysis of his prose and his flagship
Piano Sonata No. 2 “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860.” Furthermore, I believe that Ives’s
music is not a product of isolated genius, but a culmination of inheritances derived from
the European art music tradition.
Review of Literature
Ives’s own prose is the focal point of my thesis. It informs both the historical
statements in Chapters Two and Three and the musical analysis in Chapter Four. Ives
wrote Essays Before a Sonata in tandem with Concord Sonata to prepare performers and
audiences for the literary-philosophical content in the music. To music scholars, it is
considered to be the authoritative source on Ives’s Transcendentalist ideologies. Ten
years after finishing Essays, Ives published Memos, a more intimate, biographical
information on the composer and his music. As for secondary sources, J. Peter
Burkholder’s Charles Ives and his World and Charles Ives: Ideas Behind the Music
contain the most thorough Ives studies, giving some of the most valuable existing insights
on Ives’s allegiance to the past. Frank Rossiter’s Charles Ives and his America and
Richard Crawford’s American Musical Life served as important references for Ives and
non-Ives context.
Overview
Chapter Two addresses Ives’s musical inheritances from his father, George, his
professor, Horatio Parker, and Beethoven, his most revered musical influence. George
Ives was his first musical teacher and mentor, responsible for Ives’s early musical
development and his ear for dissonance. However, I challenge the work of Henry
6
Bellamann by accrediting Yale professor Horatio Parker instead of Ives’s father George
with cultivating Ives’s mature musical voice. Finally, we explore how Ives interpreted the
meanings of Beethoven’s music and the ways in which he appropriated the master’s work
in his own compositions. The purpose of this chapter is to identify facets of Ives’s
Romantic musical heritage before moving on to deeper analysis.
The third chapter is an investigation of Ives’s disparate, often conflicting beliefs
about philosophy and religion as articulated in his writings. The conflict stems from his
almost obsessive dualistic worldview, seeing all moral dilemmas as binary oppositions
that appear alongside statements about the kindred spirit of mankind. We find similar
conflicts in his political statements, musical and literary, that implore a return to values of
a previous century.
The paper culminates in an analysis of Piano Sonata No. 2 “Concord, Mass.,
1840-1860.” It is a monument to Ives’s literary heroes, Emerson and Thoreau, and a
piece with his most representative compositional techniques. The analysis compares the
Concord Sonata to three romantic piano pieces each by Mussorgsky, Debussy and
Chopin, who were instrumental in shaping nineteenth century sound.
Ultimately, I try in these three chapters to clear up Ives’s messy relationship with
Romanticism and the European tradition, not to discredit him. That said, the typical
scholarly discussion around Ives’s musical and philosophical roots gives too much credit
to his pioneering of American modernism and pays too little attention to his European
inheritances and inspiration. The Modern musical syntax does not merely consist of
dissonant intervals and ordered tones. It is an amalgamation of the old and new.
7
Chapter Two: Musical Inheritances
In his essay, “Ives and Stravinsky: Two Angles on the ‘German Stem,’” Buchman
draws impressive comparisons between Charles Ives and his contemporary, Igor
Stravinsky. Both composers shaped their aesthetic with vernacular songs and tonal
ambiguities, pairing devices that are both familiar and foreign. The two composed by
improvising at the piano and sought to both emulate and transcend Beethoven, defending
his methods in their respective memoirs. Above all, these composers tried to find an
individual voice within an inherited tradition.4
Scholars have contended Ives’s musical inheritances since his compositions and
writings became popular in the twenties and thirties. His early musical life in Danbury
(and slightly less so, his four years at Yale) is documented in full pages of Memos, a
definitive autobiographical collection of thoughts, musings, and opinions that are cited in
most Ives literature. In 1933, Bellamann pointed to Charles’ father, George Ives, as the
essential source of musicianship saying, “Charles Ives was already a sound musician,
trained in harmony, counterpoint and fugue when he entered Yale and took up study with
Horatio Parker.”5 Bellamann’s statement aligns with Ives’s own account in Memos on the
matter. Over time, however, scholars such as Kirkpatrick, Burkholder, and Sherwood
have found convincing musical and historical evidence that rightly accredits Horatio
Parker, his music professor at Yale, for the training that we find evident in his most
powerful works.
4 Buchman, Andrew. “Ives and Stravinsky: Two Angles on the ‘German Stem.’” In Block, Geoffrey and Burkholder, J. Peter eds. 1996. Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 131-137 5 Bellamann, Henry. “Charles Ives: The Man and His Music,” Musical Quarterly 1933. p. 19
8
Both Ives senior and Parker’s influence will first be addressed before introducing
Beethoven, who, according to Ives, is responsible for the purest and most authentic music
ever composed. This chapter seeks to synthesize Ives’s musical heritage and to establish
important background information for the next two content chapters. My main argument
contradicts most existing literature on Ives’s heritage by showing Ives’s progressive
music was written firmly within his most vital inherited tradition, European
Romanticism, and not by his own invention. This chapter does not address many
important people and qualities that contributed to his development, including Dudley
Buck, his organ teacher in Danbury, Harmony, his wife, John Griggs, a close friend and
musician, and even his insurance career. These simply do not speak to his music as
clearly as the three men who are the subject of this chapter.
Before addressing his father’s role, it is necessary to mention that Ives had quite a
rosy recollection of his childhood in Danbury. Essays Before a Sonata and Memos, as
valuable as they remain, must still be viewed critically as a source that informs the reader
more about the mature, opinionated Ives than his younger, more impressionable self.
Ives’s moments of clouded nostalgia are addressed in this chapter as they appear. To
evoke Proust: “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things
as they were.”
Ives’s reverence for his father late in life denotes a profound acknowledgement of
his musical education in Danbury.6 From his anecdotal Part Three of Memos, Ives
recounts being “filled” by his father with the study of theory and the music of the
6 Ives, Charles E. Memos. John Kirkpatrick ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1972. p. 42
9
classical greats.7 George Ives, who studied with Carl Foeppl, applied his rigorous music
education most often in his own pedagogy, which revealed itself in his work ethic and
difficult ear training for his children.8 Discipline, coupled with a liberal allowance for a
“boy’s fooling” (improvising at the keyboard) were hallmarks of Ives’s education from
his father.9 As long as Charles proved that he could write formally correct music, such as
fugues and canons, his father allowed him to toy with less traditional musical devices that
would later become the sine qua non of Ives compositional style.10
George Ives was not as much a composer like his son, but an avid researcher of
sounds. Although musical experimentation was common to his home, he drew a bold line
between his private acoustical experiments and the functional music he prepared for the
Danbury public.11 There seemed to be thoughtful principles behind this distinction, but
even if such separation did not exist in his mind, no audience would have understood
dissonant sounds in late nineteenth century rural Massachusetts.12 Burkholder points to
Variations on America and the differences between Ives’s first draft and the final score,
which his father published for him.13 Ives senior omitted the polytonal sections from his
son’s work before sending it for publication because he didn’t have, according to Ives,
the “possibility of polytonality in composition in mind.”14 To an extent, Ives made the
7 Memos., p. 115 8 Burkholder, J. Peter. Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1985. p.45 and Memos., p. 115 “I couldn’t have been over ten years old when he would occasionally have us sing, for instance, a tune like The Swanee River in Eb, but play the accompaniment in the key of C.” 9 Burkholder, Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music. p. 47 10 Memos., p. 115 Sine qua non refers to an indispensible condition or tenet of something. 11 Burkholder, Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music. p. 48 12 Mortenson, p. 45 13 Burkholder, Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music. p. 48 14 Memos., p. 115
10
same distinction in his own music, treating differently his short, finely tuned experiments
and his own “public” works; But it did not deter him from self-publishing his most daring
pieces.15
Both father and son also shared common philosophical ground. Charles
remembered his father’s adamant spiritual optimism in Memos, writing about his “belief
that everyone was born with at least one germ of musical talent, and that early application
of great music (and not trivial music) would help it grow.” 16 George Ives’s unpretentious
ideologies also resonate in the Epilogue to the Essays, where Charles looks fondly on the
authenticity of American vernacular music: “But if the Yankee can reflect the fervency
with which ‘his gospels’ were sung—the fervency of ‘Aunt Sarah,’ who scrubbed her life
away for her brother’s ten orphans, the fervency with which this woman, after a fourteen-
hour work day on the farm, would hitch up and drive five miles through the mud and rain
to ‘prayer meetin’’…he may find there a local color that will do all the world good.”17
This passage’s germinal thought, the distinction of actual sounds heard (like the off-pitch
singing of the Danbury stonemason at work) versus the idea concealed behind them (an
authentic, American “music of the ages”18), he owes to his father. George Ives surely
would have appreciated his son’s written devotion to his hometown ideologies.
But Ives and his father shared significant philosophical differences too. Where his
father’s attitude toward music applies to open-minded listening, Ives was more concerned
15 Burkholder, Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music. p. 49 16 Memos., Appendix 11, p. 237 17 Ives, Charles E. Essays Before A Sonata and Other Writings. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1961, 1962. p. 80-81 18 Memos., p. 132
11
with conveying spiritual ideas in his compositions.19 His father would “encourage the
people to sing their own way,” and it didn’t matter “if they threw the poet or composer
around a little bit, so much better for the poetry and the music.”20 Charles’ musical
philosophies, on the other hand, are clearest in his definitive Essays Before a Sonata,
where he attempts to justify each movement of the Concord Sonata with a corresponding
chapter on its spiritual significance. Their different takes on the spirit of American
vernacular music appropriately demonstrate their contrasting musical careers.
George Ives’s influence on his son sustained well beyond the father’s tragic death
on November 4th, 1894, just over a month after young Charles began his first year at
Yale.21 His open-minded yet disciplined approach to music resonated into Ives’s Yale
years with Horatio Parker and this controlled rebellion became a motif for both his
business and musical life until he died.
Preparing Ives for college was a family affair. All of the Ives men who earned a
college education attended Yale and the family had therefore established strong ties to the
school.22 As a non-graduate, George Ives had special incentive to send his sons to Yale.
Burkholder speculates that he may have been trying to “redeem his own honor” by
sending Ives and younger son, Moss due to familial pressures or simply his own personal
motivation.23 Ives’s uncle, Lyman Brewster, shared his father’s enthusiasm and
19 Burkholder, Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music. p. 51 20 Memos., p.133 21 Burkholder, Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music. p. 57 22 Burkholder, J Peter. “Ives and Yale: The Enduring Influence of a College Experience.” College Music Symposium 1999. 39: 27 Charles’ great-grandfather, Isaac Ives, was the first to graduate from Yale in 1785, subsequently establishing the Ives clan in Danbury, Massachusetts. 23 Ibid., p. 28
12
personally tutored Ives while he was at the Hopkins Grammar School,24 a sort of “Yale
mill” that, to this day, prepares students for the entrance examinations (not to mention
their rigorous four years as Yale undergrads). Such extensive preparation was apparently
necessary. Ives struggled for high marks throughout his entire education; He was more
concerned about his spot on the football team than productive academic progress.25
Those scholarly struggles did not cease at Ives’s matriculation in September 1894.
Ives four-year GPA (translated to a modern percentile equivalent) was a 68, a D+. Music,
as one could imagine, was his saving grace despite low marks in other courses. 26 A late
nineteenth century Yale education focused on mental discipline and general scholarship
rather than a particular trade.27 Greek, Latin, Mathematics, English Literature, German,
French, Logic, Psychology, Ethics and Philosophy were mandatory for all Yale
undergrads and only upperclassmen were allowed to take electives. 28 His classmate,
Julian Ripley, was apparently surprised when Ives graduated, reporting that, “he was a
little casual about some of his studies.”29 Ives was far too preoccupied with the
“unofficial curriculum” at Yale, excelling socially with fraternities and clubs, and even
earning enough votes to be elected (by his classmates) to the prestigious “Ivy
committee.”30
The social scene at Yale reinforced the measured experimentation that Ives
inherited from his father. Despite Yale’s reputation as conservative institution, its
24 Rossiter, Frank R. Charles Ives and His America. New York: Liveright p. 48 25 Ibid.,1975. p. 48 26 Memos., p. 182 27 Burkholder, “Ives and Yale: The Enduring Influence of a College Experience.” p. 29 28 Memos., p. 180 29 Memos., p. 182 30 Burkholder, “Ives and Yale: The Enduring Influence of a College Experience.” p. 30
13
administrators were pleased with their student’s efforts to balance their personal lives
along side their studies. Most undergrads operated within a “kind of controlled
recklessness, environments in which high spirits and apparent rebelliousness are
nonetheless contained inside safe social conventions,” and Ives was no exception.31
Rossiter writes about the nature of the actual educative force at Yale: “The students
thought of themselves as irresponsible and hedonistic, drinking away their nights at
Mory’s and enjoying themselves for a brief time until they had to enter the world of
work…This mood, however, was largely an illusion, for they were actually caught up in
an intensive round of activities.”32 Young, impressionable Ives thrived in these activities,
and a healthy social life must have been vital after losing his father at such a pivotal
stage. These four busy years established in Ives his musical ethos: breaking rules within
an established framework.
Yet Ives received a second, equally important education at Yale under composer
Horatio Parker, who provided a necessary musical counter weight to his overly social
agenda. Only eleven years older than Ives, Parker was a leading American composer of
choral music, famous for his Hora novissma and other large works.33 Parker began his
career at Yale during Ives’s freshman year and was under a lot of pressure from the
university to prove that music was indeed a respectable discipline and worthy of student
31 Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America. p. 68 and Burkholder, “Ives and Yale: The Enduring Influence of a College Experience.” p. 33 Rossiter comments that Yale’s academic policies in the 1890’s were absurdly out of date due to the old guard that still occupied powerful administrative positions. Most men came to Yale from wealthy families who intended to prepare their sons for entering into the business world. 32 Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America. p. 70 33 Ibid., 35
14
focus.34 Parker studied in Germany under organist and composer Josef Rheinbarger in
Munich and, after entering the university, focused his energies on cultivating his full-time
music students with the German-Romantic dogma.35
Ives took all of his Yale music courses under Parker and developed a somewhat
filial relationship with him over the course of those four years. His transcript shows that
he took Harmony, Counterpoint, Music History, Strict Composition, Instrumentation,
Free Composition, and a second round of Instrumentation all during his junior and senior
year.36 Only upperclassmen were allowed to take electives if they had room in their
schedules, so Ives had to make an early concerted effort to have his music critiqued by
Parker.37 Predictably, he was not fond of Ives’s experiments. It is apparent that Parker
was willing to counsel him but his traditional background prevented even a lukewarm
appreciation for Ives’s tonal adventures.38
As an upperclassman, Ives learned the Romantic musical language by way of
modeling the forms and styles of 19th century German composers. Parker frequently
assigned “museum pieces,” standards of Western art music, for students to imitate or
rearrange, the same learning methods used by great European composers.39 Ives modeled
34 Rossiter, Frank R. Charles Ives and His America. New York: Liveright 1975. p. 55 and 60 35 Ibid., p. 55 36 Memos., p. 182 37 Ibid., p. 183 Ives composed a large volume of music (mostly vernacular) during his years at Yale: a symphony, several overtures, marches for multiple instruments, the First String Quartet, several fugues, part of the Celestial Country, various anthems and songs for fraternaties, and around fifty songs. It is no wonder that his grades were so lousy. 38 Memos., p. 183 John Kirkpatrick, editor of Ives’s Memos, has evidence that a draft of his prophetic Psalm 67 may have been that first piece he showed to Parker his Freshman year. 39 Block, Geoffrey and Burkholder, J. Peter eds. Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996. p. 15 Ives practiced this centuries-old method
15
songs by Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and especially Schumann, fashioning from his
setting of “Ich Grolle Nicht,” a tame and almost tender arrangement.40 His most
significant and popular model was Parker’s Hora novissma, where, in his Celestial
Country, Ives borrows the idea of alternating measures of 3/4 and 4/4, to which he later
untruthfully accredits his father instead of Parker.41
Despite his obvious European influences drawn from study, Ives later rejected
Parker’s influence in favor of his father’s. So much that, in Memos, he regarded his time
at Yale as a near step backward in his musical development. “Father was by far the
greater man,” he writes, “Parker was a bright man, a good technician, but apparently
willing to be limited by what Rheinberger et al [sic] and the German tradition had taught
him.”42 Early Ives scholars took his word without question, recognizing George Ives as
the key factor in his musical development.43 Neglect of Parker’s influence by
musicologists stems from factual overconfidence in Ives’s often exaggerated writing and
from misdated scores that lead scholars to believe that Ives wrote pieces before 1894
when, in fact, they were written during or after his Yale years. Gayle Sherwood provided
the corrected later dates to his arrangements of Schumann, Schubert, and Mendelssohn
arrangements that were previously dated around 1889. It was confirmed, then, that these
arrangements were done under Parker’s guidance. By fabricating these earlier dates, Ives
even before Yale. Modeled after Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, he composed a Polonaise in C for two solo instruments in his early teens under the supervision of his father. 40 Ibid., p. 23 41 Burkholder, “Ives and Yale: The Enduring Influence of a College Experience.” p. 39 42 Memos., p. 115-116 43 Lieberson, Goddard. “An American Innovator, Charles Ives.” Musical America 59, no. 3 1939. p. 22
16
could have been trying to distance himself from European influences or simply making
himself seem more precocious than he actually was.44
Regardless of the reasons for Ives’s disaffection with Parker, the latter was crucial
for Ives development as a composer. His music theory lessons from his father could,
“hardly have prepared him to conceive and carry out the great sonatas and orchestral
works of his maturity,” such as the Concord Sonata, which will be analyzed in Chapter
Three.45 Parker liberated Ives from his limiting Danbury vernacular styles by way of
these abstract compositional exercises. Ives’s inherited traditions diversified. Musical
techniques, both acquired before and during his time with Parker, were refined and
polished. “Art for art’s sake” became a new fundamental mode of creativity where Ives,
for the first time in his life, could compose music without serving some social or practical
need.46 In sum, Ives inherited the essence of a European Romantic composer.
Would the mature Ives have ever admitted to such influence? Hardly. He mocks
Romantic music (and its appreciators) in writing with sarcastic language. Music, the
“emasculated art,” in Ives’s mind, was stifled by the likes of Wagner, Tchaikovsky,
Sibelius, and other celebrated composers who occupied the most space in the top
American concert programs.47 He feared that unless the spirit of music moved “onwards
and always upwards,” that is, further from the European tradition, music would wither
and die.48
44 Burkholder, “Ives and Yale: The Enduring Influence of a College Experience.” p. 39 45 Burkholder, Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music. p. 58-59 46 e.g. Church music, holiday entertainment, ect. 47 Memos., p.134-135 Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Italian operas are also subjects of his rambling list of “easy” composers. That insult refers to the music’s intention to please the public, which Ives saw as weak and feminine. 48 Memos., p. 136
17
But, to that point, Ives makes an important concession. No other music was as
timeless to Ives as the music of Beethoven. No account exists of Ives attending
Beethoven performances at a young age, but we do know that he had access to abridged
Beethoven arrangements for organ (Danbury offered little access to reliable European
scores) and we could reasonably postulate that Ives had at least heard about him through
his musically educated father.49 While at Yale, Ives faithfully arranged Beethoven’s
Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1 for string quartet under the guidance of Parker,
who later assisted Ives with some of his large-scale works, such as the First Symphony,
which references Beethoven’s Ninth.50 He again references Beethoven in the second
string quartet and, famously, the Concord Sonata.51 Clearly, Ives was no stranger to his
work.
Ives felt that Beethoven was an anomaly to the inter-generational transience of
musical taste. In Essays, Ives writes, “A young man, two generations ago, found an
identity with his ideals in Rossini; when an older man, in Wagner. A young man, one
generation ago, found his in Wagner, but when older, in César Franck or Brahms.”52
Beethoven, on the other hand, is always relevant, eternally modern.53 This distinction is
not musical in the sense that Ives points to particular musical devices or methods, but a
difference in intention: “literal” and “natural” enthusiasm, “good” and “bad” sentiment,
“Strauss remembers;” but “Beethoven dreams.”54
49 Magee, Gayle S. Charles Ives Reconsidered. University of Illinois Press. 2008. p. 27 50 Ibid., p. 60 51 Block, “Ives and the ‘Sounds that Beethoven Didn’t Have.’” p. 37 52 Essays., p. 72 53 Ibid., p. 83 54 Ibid., p. 86
18
By venerating Beethoven in Essays, Ives backhandedly claims that his own music
and ideas are worthy of comparison. Ives alludes to his own philosophical leanings when
he compares Beethoven’s symphonies to the “spiritual truths” of transcendentalist
thinkers or suggests that, unlike Goethe, Beethoven does not confuse “the moral with the
intellectual.”55 As Block identifies in his essay “Ives and the ‘Sounds that Beethoven
didn’t have,’” a few of Ives self-purported similarities to Beethoven are actually
reasonable associations. In particular, they both had an “uncompromising approach” to
music, writing whatever was necessary to properly express their message. This often
meant excluding comfortable idiomatic passages from their compositions (both Ives and
Beethoven famously lacked sympathy for the players of their music).56 In addition, both
Beethoven and Ives delayed challenging their respective predecessors at their own game
until they felt that they had reached their maturity. Ives chose not to openly address his
debt to Beethoven as an influence until the Concord Sonata, just as Beethoven did not
write Haydn’s fortes, symphonies and string quartets, until later in his career.57
Like Beethoven, Ives’s music is an assimilation of sources. Where Beethoven
introduced French Revolutionary flair into Haydn and Mozart’s Viennese tradition, Ives
infused an experimental spirit into a fundamentally European Romantic mode.58 He owes
much to his father for instilling a willingness to break convention, but even more to
55 Ibid., p. 86 Ives colorfully cites the famous story of Goethe, Beethoven, and the nobility in his words: “It is told, and the story is so well known that we hesitate to repeat it here, that both these men were standing in the street one day when the emperor drove by. Goethe, like the rest of the crowed, bowed and uncovered—but Beethoven stood bolt upright, and refused to even salute, saying: ‘Let him bow to us, for ours is a nobler empire.’ Goethe’s mind knew this was true, but his moral courage was not instinctive.” 56 Block, “Ives and the ‘Sounds that Beethoven Didn’t Have.’” p. 39 57 Ibid., p. 50 58 Burkholder, J. Peter. ed. Charles Ives and His World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1996. p. 5
19
Horatio Parker, who taught him the conventions to break in the first place. Ives may be a
musical renegade in some respects, but to say that Ives was the beginning of “a music
that doesn’t depend on European musical history” is false.59
Chapter Three: The Conflicted Romantic
Romanticism, the literary and artistic movement, is a baggy concept filled with
nuances and contradictions. It symbolizes imperfection in nature and the cultivation of its
peculiarities and mixed genres. It embodies a standard of differentness with no single
ideal perfection. The term has been picked apart and contested by scholars because it is
so difficult to impose artificial unity on a movement with such disparate elements.60 We
face a similar challenge in deciphering Charles Ives’s writings: How do we interpret
similarly conflicting ideologies that combine religious, literary, and political aspects of a
single man?
At face value, there is no need to scrutinize Ives’s personal beliefs. If we never
recognized him as an outstanding American composer, his views would have been
dismissed as “another fringe thinker prone to writing letters to the editor.”61 But each
facet of Ives, his insurance career, philosophical writings, personal life, and musical life,
inform each other and cannot be excluded from a thorough analysis of the man, musical
or otherwise. The previous chapter addressed Ives’s musical heritage through his father
59 Letter of 7 April 1964 to Michael O. Zahn, published as one of “Two Statements on Ives,” in John Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 38. 60 See Lovejoy, Arthur. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1933. 61 Broyles, Michael. “Charles Ives and the American Democratic Tradition.” In J. Peter Burkholder, ed., Charles Ives and His World. 1996. p. 38. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 125
20
and music professor, pointing at Ives’s Romantic inheritance in his education. This
chapter will continue the conversation on Ives’s Romantic nature, moving from his
education to his later philosophical writings in Memos and Essays Before a Sonata.
Beginning with definitions of Liberal Protestantism and Transcendentalism, I shall
generally address these conflicting ideological themes in Essays. Next, I shall narrow the
focus to duality in Ives’s writing, the contradiction of moral dichotomies amidst
Transcendentalist “unity.” Finally, I consider Ives’s penchant for referencing nineteenth
century ideals to ameliorate present day problems in politics and society.
Ives’s mature modern self operated physically in the present, but spiritually
elsewhere, namely, his own past and the pasts of his literary idols; He is the definitive
conflicted Romantic. He felt that he could unite the disparate pillars of his philosophy
like he unites the disparate traditions of his music.
Ives’s parents, George and Mary Ives, raised their children in a devoutly
Protestant household, requiring Charles and his brother Moss to attend Sunday school
classes and church services multiple times a week.62 Their family Bible was not merely a
book of stories, but an object of study. The Ives family interest in religion and philosophy
originated with Ives’s grandfather George White Ives, who maintained a library of mostly
religious or philosophical-political texts. In contrast to the fresher, underused copies of
secular literature, dog-eared books of sermons, psalms, hymns, and Protestant discourses
reveal the family’s genuine interests.63 Those interests remained constant through
generations. Ives’s adulthood propensity for writing on his own ideology has inspired
62 Burkholder, Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music. p. 129 footnote 25. Both Charlie and Moss’s childhood diaries confirm this. The Ives family often went to church twice on Sundays. 63 Ibid. p. 34
21
entire collections of scholarly discourse explaining where, when and how his faith and
philosophy interact with his music.
Although raised around a more traditional, evangelical Christianity in
conservative Danbury, Massachusetts, Ives’s own brand is closest to Liberal
Protestantism. Georges Tavard defines it as a malleable doctrine that values the
individual consciousness of one’s relationship with God over dogmatic formulas for
eternal salvation.64 With their roots firmly in eighteenth century Unitarianism, Liberal
Protestantism’s intellectual progenitors sought to reconcile scientific rationalism with
Christian faith and adopted a flexible model that could easily reshape to the culture of its
age. But most importantly, they emphasized that morality is self-motivating; God is one’s
inward obligation to righteousness.65
Transcendentalism, a literary, political, and philosophical movement of the
nineteenth century, parallels Liberal Protestantism in that our mortal lives, rather than
afterlives, are the object of greatest scrutiny. Germinating in the writings of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, the Transcendentalists’ most common refrain is that intuitive knowledge of the
self mirrors knowledge of the universe. Most Transcendentalists, however, were under
the influence of David Hume’s skeptical view of religion and would not accept that
Christ’s miracles could validate an entire belief system. 66 As Emerson wrote: “And what
is [the] amount of all that is called religion in the world? Who is he that has seen God of
whom so much is known, or where is one that has risen from the dead? Satisfy me
beyond the possibility of doubt of the certainty of all that is told me concerning the other
64 Tavard, Georges. Protestantism. New York: Hawthorn 1959. pp. 69-73 65 Ibid., 69-73 66 Myerson, Joel. Transcendentalism, A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press 2000. p. 4
22
world, and I will fulfill the conditions on which my salvation is suspended.”67 In other
words, Emerson criticized human faith that lacked empirical reasoning.
Herein lies the first puzzle regarding Ives: If Emerson and the Transcendentalists
were so outwardly skeptical toward religion, then what could have attracted Ives, an
avowed Protestant, to their writings? After all, Ives has been linked to the
Transcendentalists since the popular discovery of Essays Before a Sonata and music
scholars have dedicated volumes of work to the subject. Perhaps the answer lies in the
particular strain of Transcendentalism Ives knew. Burkholder traces Emerson’s definition
of transcendental to a loose interpretation of Kant’s “knowledge inaccessible to the
senses,” but simultaneously to the German-Romantic literary tradition of Goethe and his
contemporaries, pointing out that “solitude in nature” and “withdrawal from civilization,”
the themes that Ives associates with Emerson, have no connection to Kant whatsoever.68
That is to say, Ives’s Transcendentalism is an Emersonian literary tendency, as opposed
to a reflection of Kant’s coherent ideologies. “As the author of Essays Before a Sonata,”
Burkholder writes, “he fits into the literary tradition of which Emerson is the central
figure, a tradition blending philosophical with poetic idealism and emphasizing both the
intuitive power of the individual and the moral strength of nature.”69 Though clearly
sufficient to inspire his life-altering philosophy, Ives’s knowledge of Transcendentalism
was limited to only a few of its writers.70
67 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. William H. Gilman ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1960. 68 Burkholder, Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music. pp. 24-25 69 Ibid., pp. 24-25 70 Ibid., p. 28 Burkholder criticizes Ives for picking and choosing his Transcendentalists when citing his literary influences: “His Thoreau is the author of Walden, the contemplative listener, rather than the social rebel of Civil Disobedience.”
23
Other contradictions between Protestantism and Transcendentalism are also
evident. First, heaven remained a central tenet of Protestantism, but Transcendentalism
reduces faith to its secular components at the expense of any otherworldly principles.
Second, Transcendentalism offered few solutions to the social ills of Ives’s day, but
Liberal Protestants, especially Ives, maintained an attitude that they could alleviate these
injustices for which it was, in part, responsible.71 Such sympathy (or guilt, perhaps) can
be found in the Ives family abolitionist leanings, and in Ives’s personal drive for social
and political reform.72 But his most deep-seated conflict lies in the language of his Essays
Before a Sonata. My question is: How can one demonstrate his philosophical stance on
unity and universality by presenting them as moral dichotomies, or dualisms, that imply
separateness?
Ives interpreted these moral differences in music (and in life) as natural law. He
writes, “But to whatever unpleasantness the holding to this theory of duality brings us, we
feel that there is a natural law underneath it all, and like all laws of nature, a liberal
interpretation is the one nearest truth.”73 Ives pairs a positive concept along with its
opposite to emphasize their differences. “Artistic strength vs. moral weakness,” “reality
vs. make-believe,” and the “activity of truth vs. love of repose” are just a few examples.
The irony of Essays, and its deeply philosophical “Epilogue” in particular, is that Ives
seems to be preaching his own edition of Walden from the pulpit; these strong moral
71 Marty, Martin E. Protestantism. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston: New York 1972. 72 Memos., p. 53 “When Father was in the Civil War, a negro boy, whose mother did the washing for the band, would stay around the tent while the band was practising [sic]… Incidentally, Father taught him how to read and write (both English and music) [and] brought him home with him.” 73 Essays., p. 99
24
distinctions are so easily veiled by hazy Transcendentalist language, that his Protestant
sermon is easily missed.
Ives’s premier moral-musical distinction, “substance,” the life-force of an
artwork, against “manner,” its execution or outer form, is considered to be the highlight
of the Essays’ “Epilogue.” Ives spends considerable time trying to explain the difference.
Substance in music “suggests the body of a conviction which has its birth in the spiritual
consciousness, whose youth is nourished in the moral consciousness, and whose maturity
as a result of all this growth is then represented in a mental image.”74 Manner is the
antithesis of that nebulous mental image. Manner is the superficial beauty, “the effect,”
of impressing audiences with pleasing technique rather than expressing one’s inner
conscience or morality. For Ives, it is the difference between strength and weakness,
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allen Poe, Beethoven and Debussy, or “Knowing God
and knowing about God.”75
Finally, a central problem of this study as a whole involves the difficulty of fitting
Ives’s ideology into a larger historical narrative. Unlike the previous internal conflicts of
faith and philosophy, our final point addresses Ives’s anxiety about the fast-changing
world around him. While he created music, political fervor and social justice remained a
steady source of inspiration. From his 1896 campaign song for candidate William
McKinley to his proposed twentieth Constitutional amendment, we have enough political
writings to inspire volumes of different scholarly interpretations. But he continued to
express in writing his dissatisfaction with early twentieth century cultural and political
changes long after he stopped composing. Ives’s place in music history is so mysterious
74 Ibid., p. 75 75 Ibid., p. 76
25
because, although he lived most of his life in the twentieth century, his spirit separately
remained in a nineteenth century New England town; he informed his present-day
worldview by looking to the past.
Due to a demanding insurance career and his distaste for early twentieth-century
popular culture, Ives lacked awareness of current musical trends and knew little about his
creative contemporaries or their music.76 In the section of Memos titled “Concert going
and not-going,” Ives explains his absence from the concert-hall as an adult, finding that
he “could work more naturally and with more concentration if [he] didn’t hear much
music, especially unfamiliar music.” He compares it to writing a letter to a friend while
someone else simultaneously reads his own letter aloud in the same room.77 Ives’s
meager concert attendance was brought to attention in the 1920’s, when he began
receiving articles and letters saying that composers such as Stravinsky influenced some of
his works. Ives addresses these accusations in Memos, saying that some of similarities in
“Putnam’s Camp” (the second movement of Ives’s First Orchestral Set) that can be
found in Sacre du Printemps were written before Stravinsky’s notorious ballet was first
performed.78
Ives purposefully distanced himself from his contemporaries in other ways too.
Despite similar aspirations, Ives was critical of composers who strove to find America’s
musical voice. Ives scoffed at the parallel efforts of Antonín Dvořák and his
appropriation of the African-American spiritual in New World Symphony, an opinion he
most certainly borrowed from his friend, John Cornelius Griggs, who wrote extensively
76 Memos., p. 134 (referring to his “distaste”) 77 Ibid., 137 78 Ibid., 138
26
on musical Americanism.79 This particular anti-Europe sentiment (Ives had many) also
could have been encouraged by Emerson’s The American Scholar, which shared Ives’s
opinion that America should stop listening to “the courtly musings of Europe” and find
its own voice.80
Ives’s musical disconnectedness was only a facet of a greater environmental
separation that reinforced his socio-political ideas. From 1912 on, he spent nearly half of
every year living in a farmhouse in West Redding, Massachusetts, near Danbury alone
with his wife, Harmony.81 Broyles observes that, “the more he retreated to the past, the
more heated his political rhetoric became;” he cut himself off from the world that he
heard over the radio and in newspapers in order to culture his ideals. 82 Ives began to
voice his dissatisfaction between 1912 and the early 1920’s, writing political songs such
as An Election (also known as Nov. 2, 1920), asserting his disappointment with the
election of president Warren G. Harding, and The Majority, accrediting “the masses,” as
opposed to political figures, for all great human achievements.83 The pre-industrial,
nineteenth century New England town served as a model for a perfect American culture.84
79 Ibid., 52 and Botstein, Leon. “Innovation and Nostalgia: Ives, Mahler, and the Origins of Twentieth Century Modernism” In J. Peter Burkholder, ed., Charles Ives and His World. 1996. p. 38. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 80 Mikics, David ed. The Annotated Emerson. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2012 81 Burkholder, J. Peter et al. "Ives, Charles." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. 82 Broyles, Michael. “Charles Ives and the American Democratic Tradition.” In J. Peter Burkholder, ed., Charles Ives and His World. 1996. p. 38. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 134 83 Essays p. 142 84 “American Democratic Tradition.” p. 134
27
Ives’s desire to return to “village values” echoes similar objections from late-
nineteenth century small-town Americans who were fighting to “preserve the society that
had given their lives meaning.”85 Unlike most of these Americans, who eventually
accepted the rapid turn-of-the-century changes, Ives could not adapt and divorce himself
from these issues and stubbornly argued his severe opinions until late in his life.86
Broyles sums up Ives’s frustration with inevitable change as “an expression of the tension
he felt between the world in which he lived and the past he wanted to reclaim. Ives’s
rhetoric was the conflict between memory and reality.”87 Ives refused to adapt his
worldview to the twentieth century; his mind stood still while the world rushed by.
Ives’s political involvement culminated with a proposed twentieth amendment to
the United States Constitution in the spring of 1920. The amendment heavily borrows
from “The Majority,” Ives’s lengthy political essay that accompanies the above-
mentioned song.88 The amendment is both a call for direct democracy (with an implied
rejection of the electoral college) and a vague statement on reducing “the effect of too
much politics in our representative democracy.”89 Ives first sent summaries of the
amendment to leading New York newspapers in hopes of making his views known to the
public but none of the eight publishers printed the letter.90 Next, he petitioned leading
political figures. This impressive list included, among others, President Wilson, Calvin
85 “American Democratic Tradition.” p. 135 and Wiebe, Robert. The Search for Order, 1877-1920. New York: Hill and Wang. 1967. p. 44. 86 “American Democratic Tradition.” p. 135 I believe that this attitude must have been inherited from his Liberal Protestant relatives, who, as I mention earlier in the chapter, were also passionate about correcting political and societal ills. 87 Ibid., 134 88 Essays., 202 89 Ibid., 205 90 Ibid., 204
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Coolidge, and William Howard Taft.91 Taft, who at that time held a prestigious position
at Yale law school, was the only recipient to respond, saying that Ives’s amendment was
“impracticable” and that the “principle of referendum…has already been demonstrated to
be a failure in securing the real opinion of the people.”92 After this polite dismissal, Ives
only solicited a few more publications before abandoning his cause.93
By proposing this amendment, Ives expressed solidarity with his fellow citizens
and stood up for the “the great body of our people” and their interests. I agree with
Broyles and Rossiter, however, that this great unified nation through Ives’s eyes is not
one of racial and socio-economical diversity; the ideal townspeople of his New England
fantasy were the white, wealthy clients of his insurance agency.94 I would go further as to
say that these are also the men who share Ives’s “universal mind” of his Essays Before a
Sonata that was addressed earlier. These are the men who Ives trusts to set their own
interests aside in the name of justice.95
I do not accuse Ives of intentional dishonesty, for he is a composer and
businessman, not a scholar of literature or doctor of philosophy. But within the writings
of Charles Ives, we do find a conflicted Romantic spirit. He valued pious faith in rational
thought; he found Christian morals in Emerson’s texts. Ives’s nostalgia for a lost
community of town halls and harmonious New England principles reverberates through
the Essays Before a Sonata and his proposed twentieth constitutional amendment. In both
his music and his prose, Ives’s interaction with history used a “strategy of repossession,”
91 Ibid., pp. 200-201 92 Essays., p. 210 93 Ibid., 202 94 “American Democratic Tradition.” p. 143 95 Essays., p. 206
29
grasping for those blissful things that were left in the wake of an era speeding past. We
cannot help but feel sympathy for this composer who truly felt that greatness was once
possible and therefore could be possible again.
Chapter Four: “Modern Sounding Music Facing Backwards”: History and Analysis of the Concord Sonata
In a way, Charles Ives never finished his Piano Sonata No. 2. He abandoned it,
leaving it to grow and adapt like some organic entity, taking on different colors and
shapes reflected from different generations of players. Ives instructed performers to play
the piece “not too literally,” even asking players to change interpretation depending on
the time of day (“play it before breakfast like _____!”).96 There is a sort of metaphysical
Romanticism about these humorous directives, but subjective expression is only part of
the whole. In this chapter, I will analyze Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2 “Concord, Mass.,
1840-1860” for its program, quotation, and form by comparisons to Romantic era music
from Mussorgsky, Chopin, and Debussy. I seek to synthesize Ives’s dissonant sounds
with musical Romanticism, a tradition he supposedly shunned.
Ives wrote Piano Sonata No. 2 mostly between 1909 and 1919 and the piece is
probably his best-known and most celebrated work alongside The Unanswered Question
and Central Park in the Dark.97 The four movements are each named after prominent
figures of early nineteenth century literary Transcendentalism, namely, “Emerson,”
“Hawthorne,” “The Alcotts,” and “Thoreau.” According to the sonata’s companion text,
Essays Before a Sonata, the Concord Sonata is “one person’s impression of the spirit of
96 Memos., p. 191 97 Hertz, David M. “Ives’s Concord Sonata and the Texture of Music”. Burkholder, J. Peter. ed. Charles Ives and His World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1996. p. 78.
30
transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over
half a century ago.”98 The text and music as a whole are Ives’s definitive aesthetic stance,
fully expressed in two languages, one written and one played.
Music critics such as Elliot Carter observed some of the Concord Sonata’s more
superficial Romanticisms at its premier in 1939.99 Its four movements adhere to formal
piano sonata procedure: sonata allegro, scherzo, slow movement, and finale rondo. There
are apparent cyclical themes (a la Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique) and contrapuntal
development sections (Schubert’s String Quintet in C).100 But after closer inspection, we
find that the tenets of Ives’s Concord Sonata, the qualities that shape its musical
character, are immanent music Romanticisms.
The first Romantic tenet is both musical and literary. Composer Franz Liszt
defined the program (programme) in music as a “preface added to a piece of
instrumental music, by means of which the composer intends to guard the listener against
a wrong poetical interpretation, and to direct his attention to the poetical idea of the
whole or to a particular part of it.”101 Contrasted to absolute music, which does not depict
objects or historical occurrences, composers relay each piece’s meaning to extra-musical
ideas.102 The Concord Sonata is an extreme case of such a union. When Ives privately
published and distributed the piano sonata, he strongly suggested that its recipients
should read the Essays prior to playing the music (thus the terse and directional title, the
98 Essays., p. xxv 99 Carter, Elliott. “The Case of Mr. Ives.” Modern Music. 1938.16: 172-176 100 Sachs, Klaus-Jürgen and Dahlhaus, Carl. "Counterpoint." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. 101 Roger Scruton. "Programme music." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. 102 Ibid
31
Essays Before a Sonata). Ives needed text to justify his music against inevitable
skepticism and inconsistent or damaging poetical interpretations. He was concerned that
the inner “substance” of the Concord Sonata would remain unseen to audiences who
were accustomed to shallow “manner.”
The Concord Sonata is undoubtedly a Romantic program piece like Berlioz’s
Symphonie Fantastique or Weber’s narrative Concertstück for piano and orchestra. Extra
musical direction is commonplace in the second edition score of Ives’s famous piano
sonata. Although Ives’s program is more of an impression than a story, Emerson’s
“thought on an autumn day of Indian summer at Walden” could easily pass as the topic of
a nineteenth century symphonic poem.
Compare Mussorgsky’s “Promenade” interlude in his hyper-programmatic
Pictures at an Exhibition to a segment of the “Hawthorne” movement in Concord. In
these examples, both composers depict physical motion in their respective programs. The
“Promenade” theme famously represents a character strolling along in an art exhibit,
stopping at each painting to appreciate each work.103 An unhurried quarter-note pulse
with liberal use of tenuto articulation suggests relaxed walking movement. Ives summons
the marching of his father’s cornet band in the “Hawthorne” scherzo movement, similarly
to Pictures, but with Sousa-esque tempo and syncopation. In the example below, Ives
accents D#’s in the left hand in rhythms that suggest, in his own words, “a trombone
103 No single piece could better summarize the Romantic Mussorgsky than Pictures at an Exhibition. Mussorgsky’s late friend Victor Alexandrovich Hartmann created the “artwork” that is described musically in each scene of the piece. Pictures lacks subjective emotion but comes from a place of deeply personal loss. Calvocoressi, M. D. Mussorgsky. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co. Inc. 1946. p. 172
32
[that] would sometimes call the Old Cornet Band to march.”104 This signal immediately
precedes a jolting self-quotation of Country Band March with a strong regular pulse and
ragtime idioms.105 Mussorgsky’s “Promenade” and Ives’s Concord Sonata program are
historical and both composers employ even, steady rhythms that are uncharacteristic to
their typical style and achieve programmatic ends.
Ex. 1: Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, “Promenade” theme106
Ex. 2: Ives’s “Hawthorne” movement of the Concord Sonata p. 35, first system.
104 Ives, Charles E. 1920 Piano Sonata No. 2 “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860” Second edition, New York, Associated Music Publishers, Inc. Performer’s Notes referring to the first bracket on p. 35 in the actual score. 105 All made of Tunes, p. 355 106 Mussorgsky, Modeste. Pictures at an Exhibition for piano. ed. O. Thümer. London: Augener Ltd. 1914.
33
Ex. 3: Second system.
As we discussed in the previous chapter, Ives’s undying national pride colors his
perspective on history. We see traces of this patriotism in the borrowed vernacular tunes
of Concord that make up most of its melodic content. Musical borrowing, nationalistic or
sacred, was a common condition of both Ives and his Romantic predecessors. It seems
counterintuitive that a generation of composers who so adamantly strived for originality
and independence would frequently borrow melodies, but the list of appropriators is
extensive. For example, the Dies irae sequence from the Mass of the Dead can be found
in the last movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, Lizst’s Dante Symphony,
Saint-Saën’s Danse Macabre, and in other compositions from Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky,
and Rachmaninoff.107 Ives’s own borrowing habits are well documented in Burksholder’s
book, All Made of Tunes, where he has beautifully catalogued Ives’s strategies of
borrowing, e.g. stylistic allusion, collage, and more often, paraphrasing.
Polish composer Frédéric Chopin’s compositions have been labeled nationalist as
evidenced by his paraphrased quotation of Polish folk music. He redefined the polonaise
that contributed to the development of Modern Polish cultural nationalism.108 Compare
107 Burkholder, J. Peter. "Borrowing." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. 108 Michałowski, Kornel and Samson, Jim. "Chopin, Fryderyk Franciszek." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press.
34
the melodic contours of Chopin’s opening measures of his Mazurka (Polish dance) Op.
68 no. 3 to the folk melody, “Oj Magdalino” (Ex. 4 and 5). Chopin augments the original
rhythm over two measures, burying the folk source beneath syncopation and harmonic
sequencing. At the second measure in the left hand, he raises the 4th scale degree,
implying the characteristic Lydian mode of a Mazurka melody. Chopin’s most potent
nationalism can be found in these relatively simple dance pieces, rather than more
common outlets of opera or symphonic orchestral music. 109
Ex 4: Folk source from Brown’s Chopin: an index of his works in Chronological Order.110
Ex. 5: Chopin’s “Oj Magdalino” paraphrase at the beginning of Op. 68 no. 3.111
In addition to more direct instances of borrowing like the self-quotation shown in
Ex. 3, paraphrased songs and hymns are also common to the Concord Sonata. In the
109 Ibid. 110 Brown, Maurice J.E. Chopin: an index of his works in Chronological Order. Second ed. Revised. London: The Macmillan press Ltd. 1972. p. 38. 111 Chopin, Frederic. Friedrich Chopin’s Werke Band XIII. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel. 1880.
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35
“Emerson” movement, Ives cloaks the “Crusader’s Hymn” (“Fairest Lord Jesus”) in tight
dissonances while staying faithful to its original rhythm (Ex. 6). The borrowed melody
that is marked in Ex. 7 by accents in the right hand is minorized and therefore quite
difficult to discern in the music without a referential score. Ives told Kirkpatrick that
these parallel harmonies “had something to do with the idea of tolerance,” a virtue that
frequents his political writings about returning to a simple, ideal American past.112
Paraphrased vernacular tunes could be seen as a creative point of departure for both Ives
and Chopin. The former saw little novelty in referencing the American folk music of his
beloved past.
Ex. 6: “Crusader’s Hymn” (original transcription)
Ex. 7: “Emerson” movement, p. 3, third system
The Concord Sonata’s final Romanticism requires explanation. Unless the term
“Impressionism” is used to describe certain eras of French paintings, definitions that span
artistic mediums risk confusion. Even Claude Debussy, whose compositions have been
famously subject to this label, took issue with music criticism’s appropriation of the
112 Burkholder, Tunes p. 354
& # 44 ˙ œ œ œ œ ˙ ˙ œ œ œ œ ˙
36
visual art term.113 Nevertheless, the term is convenient and meaningful to most scholars,
so I would like to elaborate on some remarkable instances of musical Impressionism in
the Concord Sonata.
Musical Impressionist aesthetic depicts frozen moments in time and the
immediate sensual experience.114 Like the Impressionist painters, composers wanted their
music “not merely to represent nature, but to reflect ‘the mysterious correspondences
between Nature and the Imagination’”115 Debussy’s Hommage á Rameau, our last
comparison piece, often replaces conventional melodies with disjointed motives and
themes.116 Ex. 9 shows a classic example of such a tactic. The opening theme’s eighth-
note triplet is isolated, harmonized, and reworked into the fabric of a later passage. Like
the wide brush strokes in Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, direction and texture, rather than
each particular detail, are the breaths beneath the Impressionist voice.
Ex. 8: Opening theme to Hommage á Rameau.117
113 Lesure, François and Howat, Roy. "Debussy, Claude." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online.Oxford University Press. 114 Pasler, Jann. "Impressionism." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid. 117 Debussy, Claude. Images, 1re Série pour Piano á 2 mains. Paris: Durand & Cle. 1905.
37
Ex. 9: Fragmented eighth-note triplets extracted from the opening theme.
From its program to its music and form, Concord is an Impressionist piano
sonata. David Michael Hertz observed that Ives and Debussy both contribute to “moving
art music away from older architectural models toward newer psycho-perceptual models
of music composition.”118 Hertz is referring to the shift from Wagner’s grandiose
Gesamtkunstwerk to art that subtly affects the subconscious, as does Impressionist music.
Debussy scholars have acknowledged that “the development of free verse in poetry and
the disappearance of the subject or model in painting” inspired him to reconsider
traditional forms and their effect on his audience.119 Ives, in the Essays’ Author’s Preface,
refers to the accompanying piano sonata as “composite pictures or impressions,” and
“impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau,” implying that he must have
considered alternative forms to properly send his message.
The cumulative form of Concord acts as a vehicle for this effect. In sonata-form
terms, cumulative form is where development precedes the principle theme found in the
exposition. More obvious examples of Ives’s unorthodox architecture can be found in his
four violin sonatas, where listeners can hear the inverted convention all within one
118 In this essay, Hertz points out numerous similarities between Ives and Debussy, most of which would be quite appropriate for this chapter, if not a bit redundant. Hertz addresses Concord Sonata’s use of pentatonicism and whole-tone structures. Hertz, p. 79 119 Lesure and Howat. "Debussy, Claude." Grove Music Online.
38
movement.120 In the Concord Sonata, on the other hand, the process unravels over all four
movements. The clearest manifestations of the sonata’s principle themes occur in the
penultimate “Alcotts” movement.121 Burkholder points out that the thematic scheme
incorporates sonata and ternary form elements as well, much like Liszt’s Sonata in B
minor, but delayed clarity is the principle effect.
Ex. 11: “The Alcotts” coda. The final iteration of the theme begins at the accented eighth notes at the end
of the first bracket.
120 Hertz, p. 78 121 Ibid.
Ex. 10: “The Alcotts” theme is the
top line in the right hand. This is the
only melody present in all four
movements. Burkholder has
conducted a thorough analysis of its
fragmented appearance throughout
the piece.
39
According to Ives, the clearest expression of Emerson’s thought comes at the end
of his essays.122 Ives’s cumulative form exemplifies this sentiment and also symbolizes
one of his core values: He wants the listener to work for his pleasures, earning our
gratification through “hard aural exertions.”123 The distinction between traditional sonata
form and cumulative form mirrors difference between Classical and Romantic ethos. The
sonata form is the “English garden,” the desire to control nature that we associate with
18th century Classical thought. Ives’s variation on that widely used form frames meaning
that is found in chaos and unkempt natural growth; the cumulative form represents
Romantic discontent with convention and surrender to nature.
Despite his rejection of his European predecessors, Ives’s music aligns
with their Romantic style and intention. We see, in one of Ives’s most formative late
compositions, Mussorgsky’s program, Chopin’s quotes, and Debussy’s form; a work that
seems unshakably Modern looks quite different on closer inspection. The Concord
Sonata is the sum of its borrowed parts, not an isolated experiment or distant island of the
early twentieth century. Ives has written a eulogy to his own American past, delivered, to
paraphrase Leonard Bernstein, in German with an American accent.
Chapter Five: Conclusion
We could read rich and dramatic biographies of every great composer if they had
exposed their minds to the world like Charles Ives. Through his writings, we are
privileged to know the breadth of the inheritances, conflicts, and creative sources that
form this 20th century enigma. George Ives and Horatio Parker provided a retrospective
approach to composition. The former instilled a lifelong loyalty to rural American music,
122 Carter, Elliott. “The Case of Mr. Ives.” Modern Music. 1938. 16: 172-176 123 Hertz, 78.
40
the Sousa marches and gospel hymns, which remained lifelong musical and ideological
inspirations. The latter refined Ives, training him in the well-established European
tradition from which those inspirations could be expressed. The ideological conflicts of
Essays Before a Sonata and Memos are revealing; the clashes of philosophy, religion, and
politics mirror an artistic struggle for audience comprehension and relevance, particularly
late in life. It is within the musical fabric of his Concord Sonata where his inheritances
and conflicts materialize into gushing Romantic pathos.
The question of Ives’s historical position lingers. But to answer the question,
“Who is Ives?” is misleading, for a man whose character consists of so many things
cannot be responsibly labeled. My exploration of Ives and his rear-facing ideas has led
me to a river, not an island; Ives epitomizes fluidity between musical eras. He is a
consequence of musical Romanticism.
Ives himself believed in his music’s inevitability. In the Essays’ long epilogue, he
addresses music’s perpetual change as the product of morphing tastes and fluctuating
moral quality. That the music of Bach and Beethoven transcends these changes proves to
Ives that artistic excellence is not an upward linear progression and that someone must
persevere in keeping substantive music alive lest it descend into sensual depravity.124 In a
Schoenbergian fashion, Ives predicted a future “when school children will whistle
popular tunes in quarter-tones—when the diatonic scales will be as obsolete as the
pentatonic is now,” and its success depended on the moral integrity of composers over
time.125 Ives, of course, believed his art maintained that greatness.
124 Essays, p. 74 125 Ibid. p. 71
41
Musicologists who are interested in further study of Ives should stay wary of early
scholarship, particularly that of the Cowell and Bellamann camp. As I discussed in
Chapter Two, I find their accounts of the great composer, while intimate, too anecdotal,
self-serving, and hagiographical. More importantly, however, I suggest that scholars
should view Modern music with a wider lens and rely less on cliché “era-specific”
terminology to define composers. This often manifests when discussing dissonance or
“difficulty” common to discussion of the Second Viennese School or the American
avant-garde. As I have shown, Ives’s music contains so much more than qualities of
intervals. Dissonance in Schoenburg’s or Boulez’s music is less important than their
systems of ordered, serialized pitches. It does not matter that Cage, who responded to
those Europeans, wrote “difficult” music when his true contributions were his
philosophies on chance.
There is a powerful irony beneath the tenets of my argument: Charles Ives, an
artifact of European Romanticism and nineteenth century thinkers, inspired a generation
of American composers to thrash against those traditions in which he worked. Although
Ives’s influence on the American avant-garde is well known, his precise contribution is
unclear. Perhaps they admired his rebellious spirit and unwillingness to compromise
principles of his craft or, as Schoenberg wrote, his “[response] to negligence with
contempt.”126 Either way, the true value of Ives’s music is independent of issues of
Modernism or priority, for he rests comfortably among the titans of Western music.
126 Block, Geoffrey and Burkholder, J. Peter eds. Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996. p. 87
42
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