Ives during the election – CounterPunch.org

Ives during the election

Opening of Charles Ives’ song “Majority” (1921)

Iconoclasm-turned-cultural-monument American composer Charles Ives was born 150 years ago last Sunday. Ulysses S. Grant was then in the middle of his second term as president. Ives’ father, George, a formative and lasting influence on his son’s musical development, led what was reputed to be the finest band in the Union Army during the Civil War. I don’t know if Grant ever heard George Ives’ band. If he did, the general would only hear noise. Grant suffered from amusia, a condition that makes music sound distorted and jarring. Perhaps this was no suffering to the soldier: the roar of the cannon was music to his ears.

Many in the American music establishment later declared themselves similarly offended by what their sane ears perceived as Ives’ idiosyncratic music, which followed many modernist techniques even before they were adopted by the European avant-garde of the early 20th century : polytonality; atonality: oscillating meters or no bar lines; heaps of dissonance from which a saccharine sweet anthem might suddenly emerge. Such juxtapositions were not only modernist, but also post-modernist, and long before either movement gained capital from Ms.

She was harsh in teaching the father, like when he would sing a church song and make the boy sing the same song in a different key at the same time. That contrarian obstreperism characterized much of the music that Charles Ives continued to create until his early fifties, when, in increasingly dangerous health, he stopped composing and concentrated instead on on the curatorship of his work and legacy.

However, with 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, Conn., to his office in Manhattan.

He and his wife, Harmony, had no children. His music was his lineage, which he obsessively revised, retouched, even redid as the years passed. He was a controlling father to his musician children. As one psychoanalytic musicologist suggested nearly forty years ago, Ives’s relentless cleaning and reshaping of his compositions was part of how he dealt with the early loss of his own father, who died just as Ives enrolled at Yale University in 1894.

Ives kept many works under his care for decades, sending them out into the world only later to make a name for himself. Finally came recognition, and reverence. 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 similar creation. He spent most of the first decade of the 20th century working on it, completing the five-movement piece by 1910. It did not premiere until 1949.

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

The sonata was performed by the beloved American pianist Gilbert Kalish, a staunch supporter of Ives’ work. Before embarking on this 45-minute American odyssey, Kalish described the work as “powerful.” At eighty-nine, Kalish has lost none of his strength, nerve or nuance. “See you on the other side,” he said quietly, then turned and headed for the bench, score in hand.

Seated next to the enormous ebony Steinway, Kalish began as dark wood. With grinding determination, he pulled out the powerfully snaking bass line, struck the shocking clusters above. The troubles threatened to become unbearable, but then the strange melodies offered the hope of memories or disturbing intimacies. The bells rang, but for what? Maybe a lost American idyll, a dead father. Piety alternated and overlapped with pleasure. Snippets of ragtime echoed far from the wake-up hymns. These bracing melodies and bits were something for the common people, the true cultivators of the art, or so Ives believed. But these are heavy things for the masses. A few minutes later, I heard music of male angst. This barely repressed rage gave way to episodes of hopeless reverie. Amidst the power of bruising come moments of serenity mixed with doubt.

This horrendous epic falls short of triumph. Instead, a pair of brutal sonorities fade into a whispered memory—spare, crushingly beautiful. As throughout the piece, Kalish’s expressiveness was vehemently attached to each moment, but also attentive to emerging contours, and ultimately an all-encompassing, stunning wonder. What I saw, what I heard was an America of another world. I might even call it a conversion experience.

Before intermission, the list of hymn tunes like “What A Friend We Have in Jesus” swirling on the surface of the sonata were played to the sparse but dedicated audience. I didn’t see any heads moving away, even in the most meandering portions of the sonata.

An ungainly attempt at Romanesque Revival architecture, Barnes Hall was built in the late 19th century as the headquarters of the Christian Student Association, an antidote to the university’s supposed science-centered godlessness. During Sunday night’s Ives conclave, that godly past shone through a golden cross in a stained glass window high up in one of the gables.

Those young Christian students of old would probably have been disappointed, even contemptuous of the strains issued by Ives’s worshipers even as they were whipped, if not into outright zeal, then at least into reverent song by the resourceful, enthusiastic, current leader. Cornell student Anthony Washington and festival convener and brilliant program note annotator, enterprising Ph.D. student Ariel Mo. She accompanied the song no, as the old church musician Ives might have done, to the organ peeping through the back curtain. from the Barnes stage, but in the mid-19s^th Broadwood English piano, a recent addition to Cornell’s world-class lineup collection of historical keyboard instruments.

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

Sampling the diversity of Ives’s 1921 publication, 114 songsthis opening set ranged from the hazy nostalgias of “Down East” (with its reflexive outburst of a hymn tune, “Nearer They God to Thee”) and “Mists,” to the European meadows of Germany. songs (“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 unleashed with the itch. the humor of the raucous finale, “Circus Band.” On these trips it was “1, 2, 3″—a thirty-second epigram that, in a fast triple time continually undermined by syncopation, berates a Yankee for preferring the two-step waltz.

Bjerken conjured shifting pictorial tones from this responsive and refined piano, made in 1865, the year Cornell was founded, two weeks after the end of the Civil War. But the English instrument also met the music’s restless, sometimes bleak modernist demands, and also proved the ready partner for Bjerken to spread his flippant Ives wit.

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

Every two years, Ives’ birthday comes a few weeks before Election Day, so he’s on this sesquicentennial. In 1921, Ives sent a lavish, self-financed edition of his Concord Sonata to two hundred musicians who still didn’t know who he was. He included a book-length essay volume entitled “Notes before a Sonata” in the package. Among the aesthetic questions and utopian declarations is this grand outpouring:

“(genius) will never be discovered until the majority spirit, the common heart, the human supersoul, the source of all great values, transforms every talent into genius, every kind into substance—to the direct expression of mind. and the soul of the majority, the divine right of all consciousness, social, moral, and spiritual, reveals the one true art, and so discovers at last the one true ruler—even himself:—then no leader, no politician, no kind, shall hold it sways – and no more speeches will be heard.”

Now there is a rhetorical silence we can all vote for at the end of this endless election cycle.

US Grant was not running for re-election in 1874. He was then a lame duck who drank whiskey and peddled cigars. Grant’s ear, apart from his amusement, was not a discerning one. The military-turned-statesman is reputed to have said: “I only know two songs. One is “Yankee Doodle.” The other is not.”

Grant could have chosen his favorite song—his only song—as Ives introduced it to his orchestral piece, “Putnam’s Camp” in Three places in New England. On the autograph score of that work, the composer criticized the state of the republic: “You want in these states of knights!. . .- more independence – more comfort – ! Fewer parties and politics. Election Day 1908 – ( William Howard ) Taft.”

What visions we hear in Ives’s music as November 5th^th wars? Apparently not scheduled for performance in All wrong gradesthe first of him 114 songs it’s called “Majority” and it rings with electoral implications.

The song’s mass chords evoke the “Mases” of the text, their toil praised as the Art of the World. Carried by the bent sonorities that head below, this music does not progress inexorably towards Utopia, but, despite the final assurance that “All will be well in the world”, pushes the rock of Empire into the abyss.