Ives At Election Time

The iconoclastic American composer become cultural monument Charles Ives was born 150 years ago last Sunday. Ulysses S. Grant was then in the midst of his second term as president. Ives’s father George, the formative and lasting influence on his son’s musical development, led what was reputed to be the best band in the Union army during the Civil War. I don’t know if Grant ever heard George Ives’s band. If he had, the general would have perceived only noise. Grant suffered from amusia, a condition that renders musical sound garbled and grating. Perhaps this wasn’t an affliction for the military man: the cannon’s roar was music for his ears.

Many in the American musical establishment would later declare themselves similarly offended by what their healthy ears perceived as Ives’s idiosyncratic music that pursued many modernist techniques even before they were adopted by the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century: polytonality; atonality: oscillating meters or no bar-lines at all; heaps of dissonance out of which could suddenly emerge a saccharine sweet hymn. Such juxtapositions were not just modernist, but post-modernist, and long before either of those movements acquired capital Ms.

There was toughness in the father’s tuition, as when he played a church melody and had the boy sing the same tune simultaneously in another key. That against-the-grain obstreperousness characterizes much of the music that Charles Ives would go on to create until his early fifties when, in increasingly perilous health, he stopped composing and concentrated instead on curating his oeuvre and his legacy.

Yet for all this aesthetic courage, Ives did not dare to pursue music as a profession. Instead, he founded a successful insurance company, often composing on the train while commuting from his home in Danbury, Connecticut to his office in Manhattan.

He and his wife, Harmony, did not have children. His music was his progeny, which he obsessively revised, retouched, even re-dated as the years went on. He was a controlling father of his musical children. As one psychoanalytically minded musicologist suggested nearly forty years ago, Ives’s relentless curation and refashioning of his compositions were part of the way he dealt with the early loss of his own father, who died just as Ives matriculated at Yale University in 1894.

Ives kept many works in his care for decades, sending them out into the world only later to make mischief and names for themselves. Recognition eventually came, reverence too. In 1947, seven years before his death, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony no. 3. It had been composed forty years earlier.

Ives’s first piano sonata was another such cossetted creation. He spent most of the first decade of the twentieth century working on it, completing the five-movement piece by 1910. The premiere came only in 1949.

That sonata made up the entire second half of the first of a series of four concerts presented as All the Wrong Notes: Charles Ives at 150 at Barnes Hall on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York. The remaining programs will be heard over the next three weeks.

The sonata was performed by the cherished American pianist Gilbert Kalish, an unflagging proponent of Ives’s work. Before he set off on this 45-minute American odyssey, Kalish described the work as “powerful.” At eighty-nine, Kalish has lost none of his power, nerve, or nuance. “See you on the other side,” he said softly, then turned and made his way to the bench, score in hand.

Seated at the enormous ebony Steinway, Kalish began as in in dark wood. With grinding resolve he sounded out the ponderously meandering bass line, punched the jarring clusters above. The vexations threatened to become unbearable, but then uncanny melodies offered the hope of memories or brooding intimacies. Bells tolled, but for what? Perhaps a lost American idyll, a dead father. Piety alternated and overlapped with pleasure. Snatches of ragtime echoed distantly off of revival hymns. These bolstering tunes and fragments were something for the common people, the true nurturers of art, or so Ives thought. But this is tough stuff for the masses. For minutes at a time, I heard music of seething masculine angst. This barely repressed fury gave way to episodes of forlorn reverie. Amidst the bruising power come moments of serenity mixed with doubt.

This harrowing epic does not arrive at triumph. Instead, a pair of brutal sonorities dies away into whispered recollection—spare, crushingly beautifully. As throughout the piece, Kalish’s expressivity was vehemently attached to each moment yet also attentive to the emergent contours, and, in the end, all-encompassing, baffling wonder. What we saw, what we heard was an otherworldly America. I might even call it a conversion experience.

Before the intermission, the roster of hymn tunes like “What A Friend We Have in Jesus” that bob to the surface of the sonata were taught to the sparse but dedicated audience. I saw no heads nodding off, even during the most meandering stretches of the sonata.

An ungainly hillside attempt at Romanesque revival architecture, Barnes Hall was built in the late nineteenth as the Christian Student Association headquarters, an antidote to the alleged science-centric godlessness of the university. During Sunday evening’s Ives conclave that pious past shone down through a golden cross in a stained-glass window high up in one of the gables.

Those young Christian students of yore would probably have been underwhelmed by, even contemptuous of, the strains emitted by the Ives worshippers even as they were whipped, if not to outright zeal, then at least into respectful song by the resourceful, enthusiastic leader, current Cornell undergraduate Anthony Washington and by the festival’s convener and brilliant program note annotator, the enterprising doctoral student, Ariel Mo. She accompanied the singalong not, as the longtime church musician Ives might have done, at the organ that peeked through the curtain at the back of the Barnes stage, but at a mid-19th English piano by the Broadwood firm, a recent addition to Cornell’s world-class collection of historic keyboard instruments.

The choice of instrument helped to erode oft-made claims for Ives’s supposedly isolationist American aesthetics. The Broadwood was also heard in the concert’s opening set of songs, with Cornell professor Xak Bjerken at the piano to collaborate with his colleague from Ithaca College on the next hill to the south, the Welsh-American soprano, Rachel Schutz.

Sampling the diversity of 1921 Ives’s publication, 114 Songs, this opening set ranged from the blurred nostalgias of “Down East” (with its reflexive outbreak of a hymn tune, “Nearer They God to Thee”) and “Mists,” to the European meadows of German Lieder (“Feldeinsamkeit”), back to an American river (“The Housatonic at Stockbridge” ) and a seascape (“At Sea”), and across the Atlantic again to the urban desolation of “West London,” before letting loose with the prurient humor of the raucous finale, “Circus Band.” Tucked into these travels was “1, 2, 3” — a thirty second epigram that, in a speedy triple time continually undermined by syncopation, chides a Yankee for preferring a two-step to a waltz.

Bjerken conjured shifting painterly tones from this responsive, refined piano made in 1865, the year of Cornell’s founding two weeks after the end of the Civil War. But the English instrument also met the music’s restive, sometimes bleak modernist demands and also proved ready partner for Bjerken in dishing out Ives’s flippant wit.

Singing from memory from off the cove of the Broadwood’s bent side, Schutz commanded the sensitivity, charisma, and kaleidoscopic vocal technique and range required to embody these Ivesian multiple personalities—from unhoused mother and her daughters adrift in Belgrave Square, London’s wealthiest address, to the “lady all in pink”—a devastating no-show at the travelling circus.

Every two years Ives’s birthday comes a few weeks before election day, and so it is during this his sesquicentennial. In 1921 Ives sent out a sumptuous, self-financed edition of his Concord Sonata to two hundred musicians who didn’t yet know who he was. He included in the packet a volume with a book-length essay entitled “Notes Before a Sonata.” Among aesthetic queries and utopian pronouncements comes this grandiose outpouring:

“[the genius] never will be discovered until the majority-spirit, the common-heart, the human-oversoul, the source of all great values, converts all talent into genius, all manner into substance—until the direct expression of the mind and soul of the majority, the divine right of all consciousness, social, moral, and spiritual, discloses the one true art and thus finally discovers the one true leader—even itself:—then no leaders, no politicians, no manner, will hold sway—and no more speeches will be heard.”

Now there’s a rhetorical silence we can all vote in favor of at the close of this endless election cycle.

U. S. Grant was not up for re-election in 1874. He was then whiskey-guzzling, cigar-chomping lame duck. Grant’s ear was, aside from his amusia, not a discerning one. The military man turned statesman is reputed to have said, “I know only two tunes. One is ‘Yankee Doodle.’ The other isn’t.”

Grant might have been able to pick his favorite melody—his only melody—as Ives introduced it into his orchestral piece, “Putnam’s Camp” from Three Places in New England. On the autograph score of that work the composer railed against the state of the republic: “Wanted in these you-beknighted states!. . .- more independence – more gumption – ! Less Parties and Politics. Election Day 1908 – [ William Howard ] Taft.”

What visions do we hear in Ives’s music as the November 5th looms? Apparently not slated for performance in All the Wrong Notes, the first of his 114 Songs is called “Majority” and resounds with electoral implications.

The song’s massed chords evoke the “Masses” of the text, their toil extolled as the Art of the World. Carried by the bent sonorities traipsing below, this music does not progress inexorably towards Utopia but, in spite of the final bellowing assurance that “All will be well in with the World,” pushes the boulder of Empire towards the abyss.

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest recording is Handel’s Organ Banquet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)