Ives - Piano Marches (sample pages)

CHARLES E. IVES

Piano Marches Shorter Works for Piano, Vol. 1

Ives Society Critical Edition Edited by Donald Berman and Kenneth Singleton

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This edition has the approval of The Charles Ives Society, Inc., which is furthering and supporting the preparation of critical editions, both new and revised, of the music of Charles Ives. The work of the Society has been made possible by grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a generous bequest from the late Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond.

Contents PREFACE by Donald Berman ..................................................................... iii March No. 1 for Piano, with “Year of Jubilee” ..............................................1 March No. 2 for Piano, with “Son of a Gambolier” .......................................6 March No. 3 for Piano, with “Omega Lambda Chi” ....................................10 March No. 5 for Piano, with “Annie Lisle” .................................................14 March No. 6 for Piano, with “Here’s to Good Old Yale” ............................17 March in G and C for Piano, with “See the Conquering Hero Comes” .......22 March for Piano: The Circus Band ..............................................................26 APPENDIX ..................................................................................................29 Burlesque Exercise in C [II] (S. 422) March No. 6 (transcribed by Gary Chapman from Ives’s recording) DESCRIPTION OF SOURCES and CRITICAL COMMENTARY ...........34

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PREFACE Marches with college tunes in the trio against the original themes went better . . . would get students in the audience whistling and beating time (sometimes) to the off-key and off-time tunes . . . it made the music stronger and better . . . it shows what the ears can handle.

—Ives, Memos p. 40-41 (1931-32) I don't know a son of a gun Who wouldn’t be willing to run To see a parade come marching down the line.

Perhaps I’m what you’d call a patriot, But one thing's certain, whether I am or not!

I love a parade —Ted Koehler/Harold Arlen (1931) ***

The piano marches of Charles Ives (1874-1954) were composed between 1894 and 1899. They represent a significant output from Ives’s early years. This collection is their first published edition.

In 1894, Ives began his studies at Yale. He had serious musical inclinations and a desire to be socially successful. The march genre offered him a natural way to combine these aspirations. His father, George Edward Ives (1845-1894), was a bandmaster for the Union army at age seventeen. Young Charlie was schooled in the cornet, piano, and drums, famously experimenting on the lowest keys of the piano to mimic the sound of marching drums.

Ives’s earliest surviving song is “Slow March,” composed at age thirteen or fourteen when the family dog died. (See Henry and Sidney Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music, Oxford University Press, 1955). The memorial dirge borrowed from Handel’s “Dead March” from the oratorio Saul. That same year, the march Holiday Quickstep was composed, possibly first for band in an earlier version, then arranged for theater orchestra for a performance at Taylor’s Opera House and apparently for organ, and again for the “young people’s orchestra” of the Methodist Sunday School in Danbury, Connecticut.

In Ives’s freshman college year his father passed away. George Ives’s musical example would flourish vibrantly and deeply through his son. Marches were a way to express his musical DNA through patriotic tunes embedded with college songs, while participating in communal music-making. Ives’s friends and musical colleagues reveled in the resulting romps.

Marches were popularized as concert music by contemporary masters of the form, including David Wallis Reeves (1838-1900) and John Philip Sousa (1854-1932). Their marches were memorable for irrepressibly catchy tunes and tempi that slipped easily between the noble and the raucous. Often in a rapid clipped 6/8 tempo, many were called “quicksteps.” As Jonathan Elkus writes in the monograph “Charles Ives and the American Band Tradition” (Raddan and Sons, Exeter, 1974): Reeves—with his 110 marches—fairly standardized the form and proportion of the quickstep and initiated some of its most important characteristics, like the woodwind obbligato, tenorbass countermelody, and bugle and drum corps effects.

Ives captured these elements in settings that lent themselves to flexible instrumentation, from piano solo to pickup theater orchestra to marching band.

Ives composed at least a dozen individually distinct marches, including seven for piano (see table below). Two of the marches were later adapted for voice and piano (“A Son of a Gambolier” and “The Circus Band”). Others were orchestrated later, such as March No. 5 (as March “Intercollegiate”).

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Ives would return to the genre of the march time after time as a mature composer. In the major symphonic works, Ives quoted climactically Reeves’s Second Regiment Connecticut National Guard March in “Decoration Day” from A Symphony: New England Holidays. In the Fourth Symphony one can hear “Marching Through Georgia” among other galloping tunes. In Three Places in New England, the first movement, “The ‘St. Gaudens’ in Boston Common,” memorializes “Col. Shaw and his Regiment,” the all black 54th Massachusetts. Ives referred to it (especially in its piano version) as his “Black March.” The piano piece The Celestial Railroad and song “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” are other notable examples of Ives’s incorporation of march music—original and borrowed tunes—in larger scale works.

In addition to fashioning future instrumentations for the marches and adapting march music within the fabric of abstract and programmatic works, Ives continued to develop the innovations in structure he first manifested in these early pieces. What started as clever inventions became core Ivesian methodology in great works to come. The marches began as high-spirited amusements; they evolved into an essential component of Ives’s musical panoply.

Ives’s primary innovation in his marches was to enfold popular tunes into their rhythmic skein. For melodic material he used bawdy drinking songs such as “Bingo” (“Here’s to good old Yale, drink it down, drink it down”) and sentimental airs like “Annie Lisle” (“Pure as the forest lily/Never thought of guile/Had its home within the bosom/of sweet Annie Lisle”). Borrowing tunes for the marches was not unique in itself. It followed the mid-19th century march tradition of incorporating vernacular melodies. Rather, how he treated this convention is significant. Peter Burkholder writes in All Made of Tunes (Yale University Press, 1995): In the marches for piano, the tune appears either in the bass or in the topmost melody, guaranteeing its prominence. When it is on top, as in the march strains based on “That Old Cabin Upon the Hill” [March No. 1] and “Here’s to Good Old Yale” (“Bingo”) [March No. 6], the tune is in long notes, in the style of a cantus firmus, with each measure of the march corresponding to one beat in the tune’s original meter. In the versions for orchestra or band, the tune is usually stated in octaves in the middle of the texture by prominent instruments such as trombone and cornet; in the band march “Omega Lambda Chi,” the tune is in octaves in the bass line. Wherever the borrowed tune is, it does not permeate the texture; the other parts do not imitate or develop motives from the tune, which stands out as a foreign element against its accompaniment.

In most instances the tune appears with a countermelody . . . [In March No. 1, March No. 6, and “Son of a Gambolier”] Ives introduces the “countermelody” before the tune it accompanies. In effect, the borrowed tune appears as a countermelody to Ives’s original theme, although Ives’s theme was conceived as a counterpoint to the given melody . . . This procedure of presenting a tune’s countermelody before the tune itself is not original with Ives, but it appears to have no precedent in the march repertoire . . . Whatever its origins, the anticipation of the borrowed tune by its countermelody became typical of Ives’s later settings. It is a key part of cumulative settings with countermelodies, where the countermelody always appears before the theme itself.

The marches upend the listener’s expectations by unfolding themes in these clever combinations. As Burkholder lays out, Ives often playfully delays and anticipates the full unfurling of his main themes. The marches are early models for Ives’s innovation of cumulative form (Burkholder’s term wherein a piece “develops motives from a borrowed theme . . . and often presents important countermelodies over the course of the movement before the theme itself is presented in full, with its countermelodies, for the first time at the end”).

The marches are also the seeds for other ingenious manipulations of musical forms to come. The third, final section of his Three-Page Sonata (ca. 1910−11) starts bracingly with a dissonant marching bass line that holds firm against expanding and contracting layers of three, four, and six pulses in the upper registers, juxtaposed with sections of ragtime riffs, all headed toward a final unabashed C-major triumph. In the substantial piano piece Study No. 20: March (ca.1917−19) Ives expands the meter and polytonality of the typical march form of four distinct sections.

Written in palindromic arch form (ABCDEDCBA), highly contrapuntal outer sections progress seamlessly from one to the next. Polyrhythms and metrical games evoke a cacophony of marchers coming and going. The music propels headlong toward an amusingly consonant trio that starts as a sparely voiced F-major chord vamp until it splinters into a quodlibet smash-up of popular American songs.

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This spirit of vernacular music permeates Ives’s marches, and they beg for interpretive license. Though square in foundation—three-or four-part binary forms—historical performance practice and Ives’s own recorded performances suggest a spontaneous approach to playing them. It wouldn't be unusual for march interpreters of the day to change tempi, add registral heft through octave doublings, or improvise transitional material. One can hear Ives’s own improvisations on March No. 6 on Ives Plays Ives (Composer Recordings Inc., 1999/New World Records, 2006).

Here, he experiments with drum cadences (the patterns drummers play between instrumental sections) and with the “roll-offs” signaling new melodic entrances. Other devices inherent to the marching band tradition include changes of key, da capo repeats of the opening section, treble note roulades, and the “stinger” (the accented second beats of final bars that emphatically close the piece).

The familiar tunes, imaginative bass lines, and discursive countermelodies place the marches among Ives’s most freewheeling pieces. Their interplay between idiomatic band music and fresh invention take the nineteenth-century march genre and move it toward twentieth-century ragtime, dixieland, and jazz. Ives’s climactic final strains point toward his later symphonic apotheoses.

Notes on Individual Marches March No. 1 for Piano, with “Year of Jubilee”, S. 109 (ca. 1894−95) March No. 1 was originally sketched for piano solo with the title “March or Two Step No. 1 in F and B.” Later, Ives adapted the march for “Standard Orchestra” for performance at the Danbury Fair. The march freely paraphrases the popular Southern tune “Year of Jubilee.” Added to the second strain is the countermelody “That Old Cabin Upon the Hill,” highlighting a melodic nugget originally set to the words “where I ever long to be,” which resembles the phrase “Should auld acquaintance be forgot” in “Auld Lang Syne.”

March No. 2 for Piano, with “Son of a Gambolier”, S. 110 (1895) Ives adapted the 1873 popular tune “The Song of a Gambolier” for March No. 2. As humorous as the drinking song is (“I’m a rambling wretch of poverty, from Tippery town I came!”), the collegiate Ives would, nevertheless, prove to subscribe deeply to the ditty’s reveled cry, “I am bound to get my livelihood or lay me down and die.” (After college, he pursued a successful insurance career on Wall Street instead of a full-time career in music).

This edition of the march was realized by adapting the published song version of “A Son of a Gambolier” according to patches Ives left in sketches toward a solo piano version. After a rousing fanfare, the tune is first stated in the bass and gradually moves higher in register, becoming more rambunctious. The final section of the song version indicates playing that is to emulate “Kazoo Chorus, flutes, fiddles and flageolets,” later adding, “piccolos, ocarinas, and fifes.” From the busy score, one gets a glimpse of Ives’s powers as a pianist who could draw instrumental legions out of the piano.

March No. 3 for Piano, with “Omega Lambda Chi”, S. 111 (1895–96) According to Kelley’s Yale: A History (Yale University Press, 1974), Omega Lambda Chi was a fictitious fraternity created by Yale upperclassmen in the 1880s. Freshmen were pledged to a nonexistent society in hopes that they would buy the upperclassmen cigars and drinks. By Ives’s freshman year in 1895 the name “Omega Lambda Chi” applied to a spring evening of campus pranks. Students paraded (sometimes with a band) singing, shooting firecrackers, and cheering along the buildings of the Old Campus. Climaxing the rough-and-tumble evening was the “Pass of Thermopolae.” In this brutal affair, the freshman class ran the gantlet through the large stone Phelps Gateway while receiving whacks from upperclassmen. By 1900, the “Omega Lambda Chi” event had become too rowdy and was outlawed by the faculty.

This march probably was written during Ives’s Christmas vacation in 1895 and completed on his return to school. The tune “Omega Lambda Chi” is loosely derived from “Sailing, Sailing” (“Sailing, sailing over the bounding main”). The parody lyrics reported by Owen Johnson in his Stover at Yale are: “Chi Rho Omega Lambda Chi! | We meet tonight to celebrate | The Omega Lambda Chi!” March No. 5 for Piano, with “Annie Lisle”, S. 112 (ca. 1895−96) March No. 5 was later orchestrated as March “Intercollegiate” for performance by a local band at the Danbury Fair.

With a nod to the folk origins of the Gaelic air “Annie Lisle,” the work begins in a lilting 6/8 meter in D major. After presenting the main tune in the bass, the piece modulates toward a high-kicking Trio and blaring Finale.

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March No. 6 for Piano, with “Here’s to Good Old Yale”, S. 113 (1896) Ives wrote three manuscript versions of March No. 6 for piano. This edition uses the mostly complete second ink score as its basis. Forty years later, still engaged with the piece, Ives performed an improvised variant (based on the third version, without the “Here’s to Good Old Yale” tune) during his recording session of 24 April 1943. His freewheeling recorded performance is notable for its smashes in the lower register that capture the sound of drum corps. A transcription of Ives’s recorded performance appears in the Appendix. It can be inserted as a trio and variations.

After an opening fanfare, Ives takes the quick notes of the quoted tune, “Here’s to Good Old Yale,” and spreads them out while a busier countermelody strides underneath. The march, marked “Presto Galop” (in its third version), quickly moves through episodes in different keys, with a detour into F-sharp minor reminiscent of the Russian dance-inspired variation of the organ work Variations on “America.” In Ives’s recorded performance, the closing roulade is irresistible.

Also in the Appendix is an urtext rendering of Ives’s Burlesque Exercise in C [II] (S. 422) which appears on the title page of the source for this edition (f4756) and can make an interesting “coda” to a performance of March No. 6.

March in G and C for Piano, with “See the Conquering Hero Comes”, S. 114 (ca. 1896−97) “See the Conquering Hero” begins with a bumptious treatment of the eponymous Handel chorus from Judas Maccabeus and proceeds merrily from there. At the foot of the manuscript is another version of Ives’s Burlesque Exercise in C [II] (S. 422), which is included here as an ossia coda to the march. It is marked: “Gay at Reilly again!!

After HGS [Hopkins Grammar School, Ives’s prep school] game 1893 (f4747).” Taken together, the quickstep tunes, drum corps interlude, madcap trio, and burlesque coda collectively exude the triumphant celebration of victory.

March for Piano: The Circus Band, S. 115 (ca. 1898−99) One of Ives’s most often performed songs, “The Circus Band” began as a piano march. Ives later added his own words to the march and the song version became part of the set “Five Street Songs” for the publication of 114 Songs. (“Where is the lady all in pink? / Last year she waved to me I think”). The march’s tune is original, and notable for its playful syncopation and mock grandiosity.

—Donald Berman

Ives’s Marches Title Holiday Quickstep March No. 1 “Year of Jubilee” March No. 2 “Son of a Gambolier” March No. 3 “Omega Lambda Chi” March No. 3 in F & C March No. 3 “My Old Kentucky Home” March No. 4 in F & C March No. 5 March No. 6 “Here’s to Good Old Yale” March in G & C “See the Conquering Hero Comes” March: The Circus Band “County Band” March

Piano lost organ vers. (S. 689) S. 109 S. 110 S. 111 – – lost (S. 682) S. 112 “Annie Lisle” S. 113 (3 versions & Ives’s recording) S. 114

Band lost (S. 662) possible lost vers.

– S. 53 – – – S. 54 “Intercollegiate” lost (S. 643?)

Orchestra S. 28 lost (S. 642) S. 29 – S. 30 S. 31 inc. (S. 32) – lost (S. 643?)

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S. 115 –

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S. 33/v1 S. 36

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