Charles Ives (1874-1954): 14-18/10/24

[Serial_Apologist]

Our first for this great musical visionary and philanthropist!
(Born 150 years ago)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0023nw6

My favourite Ives quote: "My chords don't have to resolve, if they don't want to"!

[gurnemanz]

My favourite Ives quote: "My chords don't have to resolve, if they don't want to"!

He answered the question.

[Serial_Apologist]

He answered the question.

[smittims]

I'm looking forward to this series. I hope we'll be introduced to some lesser-known aspects of this interesting composer. I think he's a good candidate for this programme since his life was interfused with the music he wrote more than with some other composers.

[richardfinegold]

I'm looking forward to this series. I hope we'll be introduced to some lesser-known aspects of this interesting composer. I think he's a good candidate for this programme since his life was interfused with the music he wrote more than with some other composers.

Agreed. I was on an Ives exploration a few months back and I also find his biography interesting

[Serial_Apologist]

I have to say, being no Ives expert, that from the works cited in next week's Radio Times there will be a wider coverage than the usual suspects like Three Places in New England.

[Maclintick]

Agreed. I was on an Ives exploration a few months back and I also find his biography interesting

RFG, Is this the Stuart Feder biog in CUP's Musical Lives series ? I have Vivian Perlis' Charles Ives Remembered - An Oral History which is, as the title suggests, delightfully anecdotal and paints a vivid picture of his life and times, but lacks musical analysis.

[Serial_Apologist]

RFG, Is this the Stuart Feder biog in CUP's Musical Lives series ? I have Vivian Perlis' Charles Ives Remembered - An Oral History which is, as the title suggests, delightfully anecdotal and paints a vivid picture of his life and times, but lacks musical analysis.

Hmm - too much like COTW these days, although one always hesitates before prejudging.

[Maclintick]

Hmm - too much like COTW these days, although one always hesitates before prejudging.

I'm unsure of how much hardcore musical analysis has ever been the province of COTW, as it would be pretty indigestible radio in the context. Not so, of course, for the much-missed Discovering Music, which has presumably been discontinued because it can't be fitted into one of the currently-fashionable formats.

[Serial_Apologist]

I'm unsure of how much hardcore musical analysis has ever been the province of COTW, as it would be pretty indigestible radio in the context. Not so, of course, for the much-missed Discovering Music, which has presumably been discontinued because it can't be fitted into one of the currently-fashionable formats.

It would indeed! One wouldn't be expecting "hardcore" musical analysis in the sense of wanting it on COTW in any case. It is possible to talk about musical idiom without going into bar-by-bar analytical, or even movement-by-movement comparison in any case, just observations regarding for instance idiomatic advances (reflective of the composer's changes of circumstances, creative thinking, or the music sounding different from or similar to X). Sometimes the programme presenter will do this, ie "Listeners may note a few echoes of Debussy coming into the music at this point in her output". That sort of thing.

[richardfinegold]

RFG, Is this the Stuart Feder biog in CUP's Musical Lives series ? I have Vivian Perlis' Charles Ives Remembered - An Oral History which is, as the title suggests, delightfully anecdotal and paints a vivid picture of his life and times, but lacks musical analysis.

I read it so long ago that I couldn’t remember the name of the author but that sounds right. I had borrowed it from a library

[AuntDaisy]

I wonder how Kate Molleson's version compares with Donald Macleod's 2004 anniversary COTW (I think the musically trimmed "podcast" is available here)?

[smittims]

Perhaps too early to say.Inevitably Kate is dealing more with family life at this stage,e.g the influence of his father. Later in the week it might change as she moves on to the third and fourth symphonies and his view of the world at that time.

I've always been struck by the story of the broadcast of the third, a once-in-a-blue-moon event , for which Ives and his wife had to borrow their cook's radio. Although a wealthy man due to his 'day job' he apparenty didn't own a radio.

[Serial_Apologist]

Perhaps too early to say.Inevitably Kate is dealing more with family life at this stage,e.g the influence of his father. Later in the week it might change as she moves on to the third and fourth symphonies and his view of the world at that time.

I would maintain that a lot more could have been said about the idiom of Ives's earliest known works we heard yesterday. Ives is one of those composers who in the past has been presented almost as if his innovations sprang from nowhere fully formed from the outset. The confrontational modulatory restlessness to be found in the Ragtime Dance No 1 seemed related to the "surprise" factor in some earlier Russian composers' music, notably Mussorgsky, as well as the predominating harmonic structure based on parallel moving unresolved chords in the very effective setting of Psalm 67, which had affinities with Satie of the Rosicrucian period - none of which was drawn attention to. I dare say literature exists which reveals how familiar Ives was with other composers' work? I was impressed by the First Symphony, in which, it is true, Dvorak's New World and Tchaikovsky's Pathétique were mentioned as influences; but it was as a work largely composed in a largely orthodox idiom that one could best detect influences of the time that showed Ives to be fully capable of writing music conforming to academically respectable standards of the time, almost as if defiance of his critics.

[smittims]

Quite so. I don't want to be picky, and I realise that with limited time points have to be made quickly, but I did feel Kate caricatured Horatio Parker unfairly, and I detected a trace of that old-fashioned view of Ives as a happy-go-lucky iconoclastic hillbilly, where in fact he had a phenomenally acute ear and knew exactly what he was doing.