The second reason the “amateur” tag stuck to Ives has to do with the materiTwo questions arise. First, why did the als players have had to struggle with, the idea get around that Ives was some sort uniqueness of what they are asked to do, of primitive—as Leonard Bernstein once the apparently haphazard mingling of said, “the Grandma Moses of music”? styles, and the sometimes ragged sound of There are two main reasons for that misthe music (though there are just as many conception, one coming from Ives’s career stretches of wonderfully beautiful music choice and the other the look and sound of in a more or less traditional sense). To adhis music to musicians. Partly because of dress those hurdles in reverse order: the the advice of his father, who had failed to old-fashioned Connecticut Yankee had a make a workable living in music, and partbit of a Puritan streak ly from the experience of that recoiled from polseeing his more imagiLeonard Slatkin, a ish and glitter in his native ideas regularly fervent Ives convert, work. Though he loved laughed at, Ives decided will lead the Detroit Debussy, he once said after musical studies at that the urbane FrenchYale that he would get a Symphony Orchestra in man might have done job in the life insurance all four Ives symphonies better if he’d dug some business in New York. at Carnegie Hall in May. potatoes, got his hands By that point he was Years ago, says Slatkin, dirty. Ives believed already one of the finest “I thought that when roughness was a sign of American organists of things of his turned out authenticity, and that his generation, and had was a quality dear to studied with the leading all right, as in Three him. In one of his most organ and composition Places in New England, it famous aphorisms, Ives teachers in the counwas sort of by accident.” declared, “Beauty in try. For a few years he music is too often conkept his options open, fused with something rising in the insurance that lets the ears lie trade while at the same back in an easy chair.” time serving as organFrom his teens, rawness ist/choirmaster at Cenand strong dissonance tral Presbyterian, a big were as much a part of New York church. But his language as pretty at a certain point it all sounds. caved in on him: in that The same attitude church job he could not marked his conceppursue the kind of mution of musical style, which had to do not sic he wanted to write, full of experiments with surface similarities of sound but with with the materials of music, and make a a unity of underlying spirit. Ives had the living in the profession as it existed. To largest harmonic vocabulary of any comput it in our terms: his conceptions were poser up to his time and for long after, decades ahead of his time. To put it in his enfolding everything from the simplest terms: he “quit music” in order to pursue diatonic harmony to tone clusters and anyhis most advanced musical ideas. thing in between—all of that sometimes So as Ives rose in business, co-founding on the same page. Likewise, any kind of what became the biggest and most innomusic was sacred to him if it was earnest vative life insurance agency in the country and authentic, from a ragtime piano in a (Ives & Myrick), as a composer he retreatbarroom to the cathedral and Symphony ed to his study, working nights and weekHall. He imagined an art, as he put it, “unends at white heat to produce his most visionary music. This included the Fourth limited by the narrow names of Christian, Symphony, the Concord Sonata for piano, Pagan, Jew, or Angel! A vision higher and and the “sets” for small and large orchestra, deeper than art itself!” To Ives, music was Three Places in New England and the syman external sign of the universal human phony Holidays—both assembled from inspirit, and it was that inner spirit, not exdependently written movements. ternal style and polish, that he aimed at in Misconceptions and Challenges
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the notes he put on the page. To that end he used any sounds that would do the job. Thus the mingling of styles, the complexity, the dissonance, and the challenges to the players. I was in Chicago years ago to watch Michael Tilson Thomas and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra record the First and Fourth symphonies. I talked to the CSO’s legendary trumpet player Adolph Herseth, who always appreciated Ives even though, he said, “after playing some of those parts [including the thrilling but outlandishly difficult trumpet parts of Robert Browning Overture] I feel like a Ubangi, with my lips hanging out.” A clarinetist noted that in the first rehearsal he’d played a section at double speed and “I couldn’t tell and nobody could, it was all lost in the texture.” Most tellingly, the percussion section, having mastered terrifically difficult rhythms, came in to listen to the first playback of the tumultuous second movement (“Comedy”) of the Fourth Symphony. At the end the first comment came from a drummer: “I didn’t hear one note I played! What are we here for?” Leonard Slatkin’s answer to these perennial player complaints is to say that however busy Ives gets, to remove any part of it damages the effect. Ives, with his abiding concern with effects of space in music, might have said that what you hear depends on where you are sitting—and anyway, you can hear it, and what’s wrong with that? Unquestionably there is a divide in Ives: On one hand, he was a thoroughly trained musician; on the other hand, his long estrangement from the profession, amounting to some twenty years when he composed stacks of ambitious and innovative music largely in isolation, did affect his sense of practicality. He was never part of the concert-hall milieu, and for many years got little but hostility from professional musicians. He resorted to hiring musicians to read over his music, some of them theater pit bands at the end of the evening. He made use of those experiences, but only as his creativity was winding down did he hear anything approaching professional performances of his most ambitious work. The lack of performances is also reflected in the state of his performance materials for most of the last century. After a medical crisis in 1918, a descent into severe diabetes, and decades of invalidism with serious damage to his hearsymphony
WINTER 2013