Reading: The Sounds of Home
In the old Ives House in the middle of Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, among the warren of rooms smelling of beeswax and fruit, these sounds were familiar: the intimate patter of rain, the measureless pealing of thunder; the jingle of sleighs in winter, the chirr of spring peepers from streams and ponds; the clatter and clop of buggies down dusty Main Street, and the deeper rolling rumble of wagons on their way to shops and factories; from the Congregational church next door, the muffled sounds of choir and organ and the great bronze booming of the bell, and all day Sunday the sound of distant bells like intimations of a presence beyond the horizon of this moment, of this life; at holidays the brass bands marching past, the rattle and crump of fireworks, the clang of the firebell; in summer the cries of icemen and boys selling newspapers; inside the house the groaning of old floors, the antiphonal voices of a big family's comings and goings; and every day the bright rising and falling of music, cornet or piano or violin or bands or little orchestras, playing in the parlor or outside in the shed or in the barn, playing quicksteps and hymns and Beethoven and Stephen Foster.
On October 20, 1874, from the large bedroom over the south parlor rose the keening wail of newborn Charles Edward Ives, who would register the myriad sounds of home as few people have, and who would never forget them, in the intimacies of the timbres and in their deeper human resonances.
--Jan Stafford, Charles Ives: A Life With Music
Reading: The Musical Spirit of America
"Are my ears on wrong?" asked Charles Ives. "I'm the only one, with the exception of Mrs. Ives (and one or two others), who likes any of my music, except perhaps some of the older and more or less conventional things. Why do I like these things? Why do I like to work in this way and get all set up by it, while others only get upset by it and it just makes everybody else mad?"
Charles Ives was not interested in massaging the mind of the weak-eared; he did not produce soft easy entertainment. His father used to say. "You won't get a heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds." Whether to heaven or hell--and Ives went in both directions--there was no room for pretty sounds.
By breaking loose from 19th-century traditions, Ives was molding the musical spirit of America in a way that no other composer, before or since ever did. He fashioned a brand of musical nationalism that went straight as a ramrod to the sources that were within hearing distance: folksongs, anthems, hymn tunes, college songs, patriotic marches, camp songs, and more--they all mingled or bumped into each other in unexpected ways on the pages of his scores. He did not use them to created pleasant New England scenes, rather they were the raw materials of his unique musical language. He was a great American inventor--name almost any other technique beginning with "poly-" or ending in "-ism" from Schoenberg to Stockhausen and an experimental anticipation or development of it can be found in Ives. Eccentric? To be sure, but in Ives' unique attitude it all amalgamates into a new musical vision, the likes of which had never been heard in Danbury, or New England, of the rest of America.
--George Diehl, Notes on Ives 4th Symphony
Sermon:
Several months ago, Holly and I attended a concert at Carnegie Hall performed by the pianist Maurizio Pollini and the Julliard String Quartet. The main attraction, so far as we were concerned, was the performance by Pollini--some would argue the finest pianist alive today--of Chopin's Twenty-Four Preludes. That turned out to constitute the second half of the evening's program. But first, there were dues to pay.
If the names Alban Berg and Anton Webern do not strike terror into your musical heart, it's probably because you've not heard Berg's Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano or Webern's Six Bagatelles and Five Movements , both for string quartet. One reviewer of the evening's performances, who is actually a fan of Berg and Webern, described the Berg clarinet piece as filled with unusual sounds and otherworldly noises, a foray into the surreal. And the Webern compositions he characterized as difficult, one "the seminal piece of aphoristic music," the other "packed with the most musical freight per note in history." If that's true, I obviously did not take a sufficiently large suitcase, which is why I agreed with the reviewer when even he said at intermission that it was time to hit 57th Street for some air.
But then we returned to our seats, and Pollini played Chopin. It was a transcendent experience. Pollini's performance was technically brilliant, as we have come to expect from Pollini, but also as energetic as Horowitz and more emotionally intense than any reading of Chopin I have ever heard. For me, it was a memory for the ages. I have never seen an audience at Carnegie Hall so enraptured, nor a response to a performance so enthusiastic. After three encores from Pollini--all Chopin--and a five- minute standing ovation, we walked once again into the fresh air of 57th Street. What a night!
What I realized midway through the Chopin, however, was that Pollini knew exactly what he was doing when he set the evening's program. One reason why the audience responded so deeply to the intricate rhythms and subtle harmonic textures of Chopin was that we had spent an hour listening to Berg and Webern. Our ears were no longer attuned to the usual tonal conventions and sated by familiar rhythmic expectations. The listening was hard work, at least for me. But after an hour of not knowing what was coming, we had actually started to pay attention to the music.
Charles Ives wanted to accomplish precisely the same goal. He wanted to help people listen to music in a different way. Since most audiences were accustomed to listening to music in concert halls, Ives tried to teach them to listen for music as they sat in their homes and walked along the streets. Since most people thought real music came from European composers, Ives' compositions quoted the music of America.
Ives' Fourth Symphony, for example, considered by many to be his best, picks up tunes from quintessentially American songs like The Red, White, and Blue; In the Sweet By and By; Columbia, The Gem of the Ocean; Beulah Land; Long, Long Ago; Turkey in the Straw; and From Greenland's Icy Mountains; among others. If music is about life, Ives seems to say, then this is your music, because this is your life. It may not always be pretty and sweet, but it's always real because it's always yours--yours as an individual and yours as an American.
But to get people to listen to music in this way, Ives first had to break some of the old musical rules. And he did, experimenting with dissonances and rhythms long before Schoenberg and Stravinsky ever put pencil to paper. But Ives' musical genius, like the political genius of this new nation, was to redefine the center of gravity toward which music moved. The focus of Ives' music was the experience of the listener, not mainly the imagination of the composer or the skill of the performer. This focus on the individual was a perspective Ives gained principally from the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, the leading lights in the transcendentalist movement.
Put succinctly, the transcendentalists believed in three things: the divinity of nature, the worth of the individual person, and the capacity of each person to know the truth directly. Emerson put it this way in his essay titled "Nature": "Why should not we [as individuals] also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past?I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing, I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."
Emerson applied this principle to the relationship between Americans and their European forebears, in a way that foreshadows Ives' music: "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds." And, Ives would later add in his unique way, we will listen to our own music.
But whether in music or in life generally, the focus on individual experience can be risky. Life is not always harmonic and melodious. But if what we want to hear is the music of real life--our lives, for example--then we must take what comes. Thoreau said, in a passage that we sometimes use as a responsive reading: "I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it."
Ives' music, like all great art, demands something tough of the audience, but offers something vital in return. The hard part is not the listening; it is paying attention to the individual and communal experiences with which the music invites us to grapple. Put another way, if a piece of music that purports to address itself to real life is not deeply challenging, then it's probably not very good music. Music is not good because it's difficult, it's difficult because it's good.
Ives music is both difficult and powerful for the same reason. His ears are tuned to the key of life, to the political dissonance of a fledgling nation, to the emotional hubbub of the hearth and home, to rhythms of Main Street and the tunes of the village square. For Ives, those were the verities that mattered most. As his biographer says, "Ives believed. He believed in love, he believed in wisdom, he believed in spiritual and moral progress, he believed in Godand he believed in music." Listening to music, if we can learn to pay attention, is one of the best ways to listen to life.
Closing Words:
[Ives'] work sounds peculiar to many people, and that is all right. He probably will always sound that way to listeners and musicians who ask for elegance and clarity of sound, because Ives did not care much about those things Ives flayed the settled, the standard, the predictable. He will forever be the maverick, the great exception. More than any other artist on his level, he reminds us that greatness is not merely a matter of polish but of spirit, of substance rather than manner. He will remain a challenge to all of us and a threat to some.
From the sophisticated academic to the woman and man on the street, from the pop culture fan to the audience in the concert hall, from top to bottom, Ives is distant from us. Yet, paradoxically, he has never been more relevant In his music and his life, Ives embodied a genuine pluralism, a wholeness beneath diversity, that in itself is a beacon for democracy and its art. In spirit he handed us a baton and calls on us to carry it further.
Whenever we reach beyond the trivial present, whenever we attempt to go beyond ourselves, Ives is there cheering us on, pointing upward and beyond To the degree that our culture can rediscover a little belief in ourselves and our potential, and in the potential of art and music, we should remember and honor Charles Ives. More than anything, Ives wanted to arouse the innate grandeur and spirituality of the human community.
--Jan Stafford, Charles Ives: A Life with Music Copyright AllSouls 2000.