Ives, Charles (1874 - 1954)

[Guest]

This composer interests me but I don't know a lot. Here's a link for one of his symphonies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvyLZDIkCpc

Any comments or insights into Ives would be appreciated.

[Hornspieler]

This composer interests me but I don't know a lot. Here's a link for one of his symphonies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvyLZDIkCpc

Any comments or insights into Ives would be appreciated.

I have heard people refer to Charles Ives as "The Father of American Music"

A rather sweeping statement IMV - but then I find that I can take his compositions or leave them.

My loss, I'm sure.

HS

[MrGongGong]

Ives was a genius
a man "before his time" if you go with that way of thinking ?

Who memorably asked 'Are my ears on wrong?'

[Richard Barrett]

Ives was a genius

Indeed. I'm not sure I'd go to his First Symphony (or for that matter his Second) for confirmation of that, however... I would tend towards things like

The Unanswered Question
Three Quarter-tone Pieces for two pianos
Piano Sonata no.2 "Concord, Mass., 1840-60"
Symphony no.4

[Serial_Apologist]

Ives was a genius
a man "before his time" if you go with that way of thinking ?

Who memorably asked 'Are my ears on wrong?'

He also said words to the effect that "A man should not allow his family to starve on his dissonances", indispensable though he felt they were to his music, and so with that in mind he set to in starting up what I believe became the largest insurance business in the States, while composing and piling up sheet music beside his work desk which would mean many years before performable versions of his scores became possible.

Ives's highly individual style allegedly came about as a consequence of his liking for such things as the military marches he heard his father leading around parade grounds, each performed autonomously from and clashing with the others, or of the phenomenon of congregations lagging behind the organist and slightly out-of-tune, and that his "dissonances" were more akin to the energies discharged in a thunderstorm than down to emotions, but this is a line of thinking with which I am in disagreement. As can be heard in his songs which take up issues of racial justice, fairness and rights alongside the everyday, his music set the utopian side of the communitarian spirit of pioneering American capitalism in its post-Civil War environmental context.

[Roehre]

A Maverick.
Educated in a strongly German romantics influenced environment, his musical roots are both that German tradition and American wind band and church music (his father being a rather famous band leader).

for the former: his 1st symphony starts like Schubert, his quoting of especially Beethoven (5th symphony) during the whole of his compositional life, his use of German texts for his songs, treatment of e.g. the string quartet show the education.

for the latter: his quotes of chorales, hymns, band music (Columbia Gem of the Ocean a special and very recognizable favourite of his) throughout his compositional output (including his 186 songs [of which 114 included in one collection]), a couple of examples:
Symphony 4: 55 quotes in approximately 35 minutes of music (also using two orchestras)
Piano trio: 2nd mvt TSIAJ [This Scherzo is a Joke]: 23 quotes (including Columbia and Ta-ra-ra-bum-de-ay)
String quartet no.2: i.a. turkey in the Straw, Columbia, Wagner Tristan, Tchaikovsky 6, Brahms 2, Beethoven 9 and Marching through Georgia.

Generally speaking is his music approachable, and repeated listening opens up the different layers.
A starting point could be
-his Variations on America (or "God save the Queen"), especially in the grandiose and hilarious orchestration of William Schuman's.
-his Holidays-symphony (=Washington's Birthday + Decoration Day + The 4th of July + Thanksgiving Day) as well as his 3 Places in New England, both describing typically American East coast moods and festivities.
-Central Park in the Dark and The Unaswered Question, nocturnal pieces of great beauty.
-his symphonies (chronologically from Schubert to mid-20C-experiments in surround sound, music coming from different sides in different colours and different tempi and rhythms)
-Piano sonata no.2 "Concord, Mass.1840-1860"
-violin sonata no.4 "children's Day at the Camp Meeting"

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

George Ives (Charles' father) was the experimenter - teaching his children to be able to sing a song in different keys from the one he played in the piano accompaniment; getting rival football team bands to compete, mplaying pieces in different keys and tempi simultaneously, and promoting a questioning attitude to life in his children. Charles himself knew how his Music sounded when he wrote it, because of this unofficial training from such a young age. He was also greatly influenced by the "Transcendentalist" wirters of the Brooke Farm (Emerson and Thoreau in particular) who believed in the sanctity of individual belief and self reliance, and the importance of the individual conscience. His father was very much the "disappointment" of his family, in that he made "nothing" of himself (he was only a Musician, for heaven's sake) and Ives received support from his aunts to attend Yale.

He was the moral force behind the Insurance firm, Ives & Myrck, which was one of the very few companies that emerged with its reputation intact after a huge scandal in which malpractice in the whole industry was exposed in the press. Ives provided its "plain dealing" ethos, but it was Myieck who manipulated some of the dodgier practices within the remit of the Law and made the Company its money.

Ives' Music contains whole worlds: moments of extraordinary texture and timbre stand side-by-side with Music that is of the most banal sentimentality; soundscapes of haunting delicacy merge into rowdy, vaudevillean comedy - if it was an aspect of the human condition, Ives insisted on its place in "Art". I find it irresistable. (Less keen on the "real man" persona that American philistinism led him to adopt increasingly in his later years as a defence against the incomprehension that the Music evoked; I prefer to remember his acts of astonishing generosity - not least to Elliott Carter.)

Amongst my favourite works by Ives:

The Unanswered Question
Central Park in the Dark
the Fourth Symphony
the Concord Piano Sonata (with Flute and Viola)
the Holidays Symphony

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Interesting that Richard Barrett, Roehre and myself include so many of the same works in our "lists". Here's the composer himself playing the Alcotts movement of his Concord Sonata:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXHjeSamzno

[Dave2002]

I used to like a rather short piece which was at the end of one of my LPs of Ives Symphonies. I think it was "Halloween" - http://open.spotify.com/track/4SK70u9hruLAKbiZHusbsu My LP had the Philharmonia conducted by Harold Farberman, and I had to look at ebay to find the details. A few other conductors have done this rather short piece, but I really liked Farberman's version. Some of the other versions make it sound too tuneful, and it's quite fun when the mad drum comes in towards the end. Perhaps I wouldn't like Farberman's rendition now - but years ago I thought it was really "pleasantly quirky"!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Bernstein conducted the premiere (fifty years after it was written) of the Second Symphony. "Eyewitness" accounts describe the composer (a frail old man at the time, unable to attend the concert, he listened to the broadcast) as either dancing a jig in glee, or spitting in the fire in disgust. Bernstein (as was his wont) revised history somewhat in his accounts of Ives - but then Ives wasn't above this, himself: his manuscripts suggest that many of his Musical innovations and "predictions" were added to the scores decades after the work was originally written. This youTube video of Bernstein introducing the Second Symphony is enjoyable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MMkP3aZIxw

[Serial_Apologist]

The Robert Browning Overture was the first Ives work I heard, in a broadcast somewhere around 1967; I couldn't believe what I was hearing. The visionary opening still raises hairs on the back of my neck. How anyone back then thought of him as some sort of "primitive" is beyond me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsCVXDH2T9U

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The Robert Browning Overture was the first Ives work I heard, in a broadcast somewhere around 1967; I couldn't believe what I was hearing. The visionary opening still raises hairs on the back of my neck. How anyone back then thought of him as some sort of "primitive" is beyond me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsCVXDH2T9U

- no more "primitive" than the quotations and contrapuntal "voices" of The Waste Land. (The Fourth Symphony often strikes me as Berio's Sinfonia, fifty years avant la lettre.)

[Richard Barrett]

Interesting that Richard Barrett, Roehre and myself include so many of the same works in our "lists".

Indeed. I would have included Central Park as well if I'd remembered, and the "Sets" for orchestras of various sizes which I used to have on a fascinating LP ("Calcium Light Night") conducted by Gunther Schuller.

[Bryn]

Bernstein conducted the premiere (fifty years after it was written) of the Second Symphony. "Eyewitness" accounts describe the composer (a frail old man at the time, unable to attend the concert, he listened to the broadcast) as either dancing a jig in glee, or spitting in the fire in disgust. Bernstein (as was his wont) revised history somewhat in his accounts of Ives - but then Ives wasn't above this, himself: his manuscripts suggest that many of his Musical innovations and "predictions" were added to the scores decades after the work was originally written. This youTube video of Bernstein introducing the Second Symphony is enjoyable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MMkP3aZIxw

I know that many endorse Bernstein's revision of Ives's note duration for the final chord of the 2nd, but for me it was a crass error on Bernstein's part. Laying it on with a trowel just ruins the effect for me.

For a basic set of recordings of the main orchestral works I think that of the 5 Symphonies, etc. under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas is worth considering. It's not currently in the Sony catalogue but can be found at a reasonable price, new or used, at amazon.co.uk with ASIN, B0000793Y1.

Naxos offers a range of Ives recordings including the Sets for Orchestra, the Songs, Symphonies 1, 2 and 3, the String Quartets, the Violin Sonatas, etc., often in critical editions.

There are also a couple of realisations of Ives's planned Universe Symphony. That by Larry Austin, of which there are two recordings available on CD, has rather more Austin than Ives to it (to me ears, anyway). That by Johnny Reinhard claims to be pretty much pure Ives in origin, but sounds rather too much like an experimental sketch (again, to my ears). David G. Porter, who made the realisation of the Emerson Concerto recorded for Naxos, has also made a version of the Universe Symphony. I would very much hope that Naxos gets that, and also the Critical Edition of 4th Symphony, onto CD.

Very much to be recommended is reading Ives's Essay's before a Sonata. My own favourite recording of the 2nd (Concord, Mass., 1840–60) Piano Sonata is the first made by Marc André Hamelin, amazon.co.uk ASIN: B0000030EK.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I know that many endorse Bernstein's revision of Ives's note duration for the final chord of the 2nd, but for me it was a crass error on Bernstein's part. Laying it on with a trowel just ruins the effect for me.

Yes - like someone nudging you in the ribs after telling you a joke and demanding "gedditt?" The source of the last chord of the Symphony was the tradition of the fiddlers at a barn dance ending the evening with a very short chord containing any note except the Tonic, as if leaving everything unresolved until the next dance. (IIRC, the dissonance is one of Ives' later ideas - originally it was a straightforward tonic, again, marked staccato - but it's an inspired ending to such a good-humoured, generous work.)