Bringing in the Sheaves: A Sesquicentennial Charles E. Ives Harvest from Bard College to Berlin
From New York to Berlin, a swell of tribute to America's greatest twentieth-century composer
Ives Orchestral works with source songs performed at Bard College Olin Hall November 16, 2024
Charles Ives from Bard College to Berlin
TŌN (The Orchestra Now) with Choir
Leon Botstein, Conductor
William Sharp, baritone
Donald Berman, piano
J. Peter Burkholder, host
James Bagwell, Choir Director
The Fourth of July from the Holidays Symphony (1914-1918, revised 1931)
Central Park in the Dark (1909, revised 1936)
Orchestral Set No. 2 (assembled ca. 1919)
An Elegy to Our Forefathers
The Rockstrewn Hills Join in the People’s Outdoor Meeting
From Hanover Square North at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose
Symphony No. 2 (ca. 1902-1909)
Andante moderato
Allegro molto (con spirito)
Adagio cantabile
Lento maestoso
Allegro molto vivace
Berliner Philharmonie: Charles Ives, Symphony No. 4, September 8, 2012 live broadcast
with Ingo Metzmacher
Berliner Philharmonie: Charles Ives, Symphony No. 4, September 7, 2024 live broadcast
with Jonathan Nott
***
I was seventeen or eighteen when I discovered Charles Ives. I saw a televised broadcast of Scherzo: Over the Pavements, a wild chamber ragtime essay on permutations of duple and triple aspects of rhythm, meter, and form. In 1965 I was lucky to hear one of the first performances of his Symphony No. 4 (“Fourth Symphony”) at Carnegie Hall with the great Leopold Stokowski. I became hooked. Ives was second to J.S. Bach in my listening and score study.
Ives is now, we can safely say, esteemed as America’s greatest composer, but his reputation was frequently drubbed by both modernist and European-trained American composers. For example, the teenage Elliott Carter was impressed by his visits to Mr. Ives at his Gramercy Park apartment, but later in life became critical of the old man’s unwieldy dissonant approach.
Partly to blame was Ives himself who insisted that dissonance as such was a sort of listener-disciplining, akin to a deep tissue massage. Ives commented in his scores how a noisy passage could help “stretch your ears” and disparaged “sissies” who didn’t have the grit for his music.
It really wasn’t until the historic first performance of the Fourth Symphony in 1965, over a decade after the composer’s death, that serious musicians perceived the transcendental beauty and the other-worldly soundworld that ached with human striving, the heart of community, life, faith, and a belief in the eternal. Ives recognized that the last movement of the Fourth was the greatest music he ever wrote. A work that offers a touch of that movement was heard this afternoon at Bard: the final movement of Orchestral Set No. 2, “From Hanover Square North at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose.” We hear the twinkling of light bells, the gathering of a rhythmic momentum, dark and light hues, and a shiver of collective tragedy. Just as “Bethany” (“Nearer, My God, to Thee”) pervades the last grand movement of the Fourth Symphony, the hymn “In the Sweet By and By” is sung at the end of “From Hanover Square.” It is a tune was purportedly sung by New York commuters at Hanover Square, NYC, on the fateful day of May 7, 1915, when the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine.
Like Ives, J.S. Bach’s musical output incorporates many hymns, or “chorales,” that were known to every congregant in his Lutheran community. Indeed, the hundreds of such chorales form the basis of many of his cantatas, oratorio movements, and organ works. For the modern listener, not being able to pick out these melodies or the words that convey their emotive “meaning” doesn’t dissuade one from enjoying the piece. However, one loses the hidden message imparted by the tune’s appearance and method of treatment in Bach’s music.
In the Connecticut environ that nurtured Ives’ musical growth, his church congregation thoroughly knew the many American and English hymns which would ultimately infuse Ives’ music. Indeed, as a teenage organ virtuoso, Ives had mastered these pieces. Organist Ives and organist Bach are drawn to a closer perspective by their use of worshipful communicative melodies that spoke to listeners. Ives, however, incorporated a wider range of music: folk and popular tunes; college songs; material from other classical composers; and ragtime.
The Fourth of July
As one might expect, and as Ives scholar J. Peter Burckholder noted at the concert, this short tone poem evokes the soundscape of a New England celebration of patriotism and community. First, “Columbia Gem of the Ocean” appears, and, in tow, “Battle Cry of Freedom” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Constructed on a C major ground bass, the timely tunes appear in a complex central texture of dissonant string counterpoint. A paroxysm of marching bands, the clamor of celebrants, and the explosion of fireworks concludes the vivid tone painting.
Central Park in the Dark
This poem suggests the transcendental coalescence and the hum of life in nighttime New York amid vignettes of human activity. The fragments, seemingly disparate, amass and “gather to a greatness” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would say. Fire engines, hymns, raucous ragtime, all bathed and throbbing in the cradle of the lower strings, come together in the “great melting pot.”
Symphony No. 2
It was fortuitous for Ives that his second symphony was championed by Leonard Bernstein at Carnegie Hall in the early 1950s. The work, while steeped in language of Dvořák and Brahms, draws from “chorales” of Americana, and aerates the decided European style with American folk tunes, marches, fragments of college songs, gospel music, and assorted shards of musical marginalia too numerous to list. [1]
Maestro Botstein certainly knew the score. However, one couldn’t help thinking that the performance induced a holographic effect on this music. The multidimensional musical space seemed at times reduced to a two-dimensions: all detail was present, but without a certain requisite affective dimension. He vividly revealed the melodies, colors, harmonies, and dynamics, but frequently seemed too metronomic and rigid. It may be that those of us familiar with Leonard Bernstein’s old interpretation are used to the tempo liberties Bernstein took. For example, in the lovely meno allegro of the last movement, Ives’ indications are really twice as fast as that of Bernstein’s interpretation. However, Ives’ extremely spare score directives leave much room for performance elasticity, and particularly in this passage, a dwelling tenderness would be appreciated.
What made this evening very special was the performance of songs and hymns referenced in the orchestral selections. Baritone William Sharp and pianist Donald Berman, both veteran Ives interpreters were splendid. Also, musicologist and Ives specialist J. Peter Burkholder hosted the event and illuminated the background of each work concisely, devoid of any academic ramble.
***
Berlin Philharmonic – Charles Ives, Symphony No. 4
September 8, 2012
Ingo Metzmacher, conductor
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, solo piano
In 2012 the Berlin performed the Fourth Symphony using the new Critical Performance Edition of the score by Thomas Brodhead (2011), a new edition that has greatly clarified Ives’ intentions and ushered in a new era of Fourth Symphony performances. The original edition of 1965 is rife with inconsistencies, and Brodhead has spent years ironing things out. The conductor for this Berlin performance was Ingo Metzmacher with Mr. Aimard as the solo pianist. Maestro Metzmacher did not seem to require an additional conductor (as the edition suggests), but he appropriated the second oboist to deal with the complex dual (and dueling) orchestra division in the second movement, termed, ironically, a “Comedy.” In this performance, probably for the first time, the chorus in the last movement sung the words to “Bethany,” which are usually intoned wordlessly.
Berlin Philharmonic – Charles Ives, Symphony No. 4
September 7, 2024
Jonathan Nott, conductor
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, solo piano
On September 7, 2024, Jonathan Nott, an English born conductor active in Germany, performed the work again in Berlin. It was quite a different interpretation and, in some ways, the most luminous and limpid interpretation yet. He was assisted by Gregor Mayrhofer who became co-conductor; in the multimetric second movement, “Comedy,” both conductors got quite a workout. The movement was inspired by Nathanial Hawthorne’s short story, “The Celestial Railroad,” a comic riff on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. In Hawthorne’s telling, rail travel is the fashionable conveyance to the Celestial City. Passengers on a rather baleful ride with a clangorous engine even get a chance to ridicule the passing pilgrims trudging along on the traditional path. Maestro Nott, who is a newcomer to Ives, delivered a performance that seemed more spacious and emotive than Mr. Metzmacher’s. The ondes Martenot was used for Ives’ prescribed “ether organ” (an instrument devised by Leon Theremin in the 1920s). Bells stretching over octaves were used rather than synthesized. The quarter-tone piano was a real one and not electronic. The final movement, certainly one of Ives’ most affecting creations, left one silently pondering the beyond and the immutability of time’s inexorable path.
Perhaps it is appropriate to cite Igor Stravinsky's words about the symphony's last movement
Commentary Magazine, September 1966, “Music in the Statistical Age”
“But the last movement of the fourth is an astonishing achievement. The in clusiveness which” is at the root of Ives's genius (“all things in their variety,” as he quoted Emerson) reaches saturation point in these seemingly free-for-all pages; “seemingly” because while this or that tune may suddenly burst out for no other apparent reason than joie de vivre, it is inextricable in the skein of the composition. But I will say no more. I know too little of this fascinating composer who was exploring the 1960's during the heyday of Strauss and Debussy. Poly-tonality; atonality; tone clusters; tone rows; multiple orchestras; a rhythmic vocabulary which maintains a lead on the avant-garde even now; micro-intervals; perspectivistic effects; chance; statistical composition; permutation; add-a-part, practical-joke, and improvisatory music: these were Ives's discoveries a half-century ago as he quietly set about devouring the contemporary cake before the rest of us even found a seat at the same table."
[1] For a list of Ives’ works with sources of musical quotations, click here for James Sinclair’s definitive account.
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