2015-09-28 05:14:50
Musicians hail Charles Ives as an innovator, thanks to his revolutionary use of harmony and rhythm, as well as music’s other ingredients. But don’t focus on that if you’re a newcomer to his works. Begin instead with this: Ives’ music celebrates being American.
As a precocious teenaged organist, Ives composed a set of variations on “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” and he said his concluding burst of fancy footwork on the organ pedals was “almost as much fun as playing baseball.” He went on to evoke the sights, sounds and aspirations of late 19th-century America repeatedly in his works: tone paintings of a Massachusetts river veiled in mists and of a Yale-Princeton football game; a piano sonata paying tribute to transcendentalist authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; and orchestral depictions of Fourth of July celebrations and Memorial Day salutes.
Ives discovered music through his father, George Ives, who had been theU. S. Army’s youngest bandmaster during the Civil War. Growing up in small-town Connecticut, the youngster watched and listened as George conducted local bands and directed the music in summertime church revivals.
“Father, who led the singing, often with his cornet…would always encourage the people to sing their own way,” Ives recalled. The elder Ives whipped up the congregations so much that the fervor would drive their voices’ pitch higher than the key in which they began. Rather than try to hold them down, he had a special cornet built that could also slip upward in pitch. When someone criticized a local stonemason’s off-key singing, George Ives declared the man a “supreme musician:” “Look into his face and hear the music of the ages,” George said. “Don’t pay too much attention to the sound—for if you do, you may miss the music. You won’t get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds.”
Those words resonated with Charles. He gave them a patriotic spin in the rootin’-tootin’ finish of his Symphony No. 2, where the trombones sing out the anthem “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” at the tops of their lungs as the rest of the orchestra adds its own rowdiness. But most of the symphony stays well within the bounds of tonality and other traditions.
“Why tonality as such should be thrown out for good, I can’t see,” Ives wrote. “Why it should always be present, I can’t see. It depends, it seems to me, a good deal—as clothes depend on the thermometer—on what one is trying to do.”
In his Symphony No. 2, Ives evoked the small-town life of his day. His Symphony No. 3, which continues the Houston Symphony’s Ives cycle next season, looked back to those summertime revival meetings. And his later works, including his epic Symphony No. 4, drew on a view of Americans’ lives he gained as an adult. Ives made a fortune as a partner in a New York insurance agency, where his humanitarian ideals inspired his employees, and his customers’ experiences opened his eyes.
“My business experience revealed life to me in many aspects that I might otherwise have missed,” Ives said. “In it one sees tragedy, nobility, meanness, high aims, low aims, brave hopes, faint hopes, great ideals, no ideals.” His music benefited. “The fabric of existence weaves itself whole,” concluded Ives. “You cannot set an art off in the corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality and substance. … It comes directly out of the heart of experience of life and thinking about life and living life.”
©New Leaf Publishing. View All Articles.