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Learning
to Love A Cranky Composer
An
unprecedented award highlights the celebration of a Yale man who
did much to revolutionize music while maintaining a "day job"
running an insurance company.
by
Peter Hawes
March 1998
Peter
Hawes reported on the centennial of the birth of Paul Hindemith,
a distinguished member of the Music School faculty, in the October
1995 issue.
To musicians
and scholars, Charles Edward Ives,
who graduated from Yale College a century ago this spring, has long
been considered one of this country's major cultural figures. He
won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1947, and was called America's
"first really great composer" by no less an authority than Leonard
Bernstein. But even Ives knew his work was hard going for the average
listener, and he sometimes seemed to enjoy inflicting the pain.
"A man takes unpleasant chances when he puts my music in front of
an audience," he once said.
In recent
years, however, the audience for Ives's work has been growing steadily.
A dozen major books about him have been published since 1969, and
in January the American Academy of Arts and Letters, using money
generated by royalties from performances of Ives's music, announced
the creation of the largest cash prize ever designated specifically
for an American composer, the so-called Ives Living. The award provides
$225,000 in three annual installments so that the recipient can
concentrate full-time on composing, something Ives himself was not
able to do. Happily for Yale, the first Ives Living went to Martin
Bresnick, 51, a professor of composition at the School of Music.
More is yet to come, however. Adding to the Academy's recognition
of this highly unorthodox composer, Ives loyalists are preparing
a major celebration of his legacy on the occasion of his Yale centennial.
"People get very passionate about Ives -- the complicated personality,
the sense of mystery that surrounds him, the music that goes in
so many directions," says Vivian Perlis, founder of the Oral History
Project at the Yale School of Music. "There's so much to learn and
experience, you never feel there's an ending."
Ives's
total musical output -- nine major orchestral works, two string
quartets, four violin sonatas, three piano sonatas, and about 185
songs -- is not overwhelming on the great scale, but it represents
an extraordinary range of musical expression as well as experimentation.
He incorporated multiple rhythms and dissonance well before Gustav
Mahler, Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg did. He used fragments
from American folk tunes, marches, hymns, jazz, and ragtime in his
works before Aaron Copland and George Gershwin turned to such sources.
As a result, he influenced or inspired not only Schoenberg and Copland,
but Bernstein, Henry Cowell, Elliott Carter, and hundreds of other
classical, jazz, rock, and even "new age" composers, among them
Bruce Hornsby, Bobby McFerrin, and Paul Winter. These remarkable
achievements loom even larger when set against the fact that Ives
was primarily a weekend composer, spending his weekdays as the founding
executive of what became in the 1920s the nation's most successful
life insurance agency.
The Yale
celebration of the Ives legacy began under the late music professor
and pianist John Kirkpatrick, and has been carried forward by James
Sinclair, currently a visiting professor at the School of Music.
Sinclair, a conductor who has recorded 22 Ives works (more than
anyone else) and who recently finished a 1,000-page catalog of Ives's
music, is organizing the spring event, which will take place April
3 to 5 in New Haven. It will include lectures, panel discussions,
and performances of Ives's music. The selections will include works
written during Ives's Yale years and performed by students from
the Yale School of Music and the undergraduate music department,
as well as by Sinclair's professional Orchestra New England.
The
music that has been chosen for the celebration will be markedly
sedate, featuring some of Ives's more accessible, Romantic-style
compositions. This is in marked contrast to Ives's public image
for most of this century, which has been that of a cranky old man
who wrote music that was considered to be sloppily scored, difficult
for even the best musicians to play, and horribly dissonant to most
listeners' ears. Maryann Root, executive director of the Danbury
Scott-Fanton Museum and Historical Society, which maintains the
home where Ives was born, in 1874, said that in Ives' hometown,
"people concede that he was a very important figure, but if you
ask them to listen to his music, that's another story."
Ives's
music was rejected far more than it was appreciated during the composer's
lifetime, a fact that frustrated and embittered him. While dissonant
or confusing to many people, Ives considered his music a pure depiction
of the vicissitudes of the community gatherings of his youth, an
expression of the beauty of nature, and a statement of a lofty ideal
about the unity of humankind through art. He was terminally frustrated
that people didn't "get it."
In his
later years Ives would call people who couldn't tolerate his music
"soft-eared sissies," yet he also sympathized with their situation.
He once quit a prestigious job as a church organist in New York,
later explaining, "To a body of people who come together to worship -- how far has a man a right to do what he wants, if he knows that
by doing so he is interfering with the state of mind of the listeners
. A congregation has some rights."
According
to Sinclair, one of the most important reasons for Ives's failure
to catch on with a wider audience during his lifetime (he died in
1954), may be the way his music greeted the public -- his later
and more dissonant pieces were performed first, his earlier, more
traditional Romantic-style works last. "No other composer in current
history has been exposed backwards in his output," Sinclair says.
But Ives didn't make things any easier for his listeners. When publishing
a collection of 114 songs in 1922, he put one of his most brutally
atonal pieces first. He later said he did this because he felt "mean
enough to want to give all the 'old girls' [by which he meant anyone
of either gender "emasculated" enough to not appreciate his music]
another ride . it would keep them from turning any more pages."
In the footnotes to the same collection, Ives says several songs
have "little or no
musical value . It is asked . that they be not sung, at least
in public, or given to students except as examples of what not to
sing."
An abrasive
image of Ives survived for decades until the early 1970s, when critical
editions of his music were published by the Charles Ives Society.
The transformation was aided by books by John Kirkpatrick and Perlis,
as well as a celebration of the centennial of Ives's birth. Taken
together, they made Ives's music better known to performers and
exposed a deeper, more human side of the man. "That's when people
stopped living the Ives legend and saw him as an educated, philosophical
composer of real craft," Sinclair says.
Ives
was born on October 20, 1874, one of two sons of George Ives, a
member of a wealthy family that had made its fortune in banking
and railroads in and around Danbury. George had been a bandleader
in the Union army, and while after the Civil War he made perfunctory
gestures at a career in the family business, he was really driven
by a love of music. He played the cornet, composed a little and
toured the country with minstrel shows. But he was best known as
a local impresario -- leading at least two orchestras and several
bands in a city that in the late 1800s was teeming with musical
activity.
A
bit odd and often ridiculed for his eccentricity, George had a strong
influence on his son. The elder Ives was a musical experimenter
who tried to mimic on his piano the sound of out-of-tune bells ringing
in a nearby church. He once marched two brass bands past one another
on a town green -- each playing a different tune in a different
rhythm and a different key.
Ives
lore has it that one of George's choir members, a stonemason named
John Bell, disturbed fellow singers and audience members with his
off-key voice. Counseled George: "Don't pay too much attention to
the sounds -- for if you do, you may miss the music." The father's
use of off-key singing, parodies of drunken horn players falling
off the beat, offstage performers enlarging a sense of space, and
the presence of several songs chaotically under way at the same
time later became hallmarks of Charles's compositions.
Painfully
shy from an early age, Charles was at first ashamed of his interest
in music, which was then considered a strictly feminine pasttime.
Nonetheless, he became an accomplished pianist, composing his first
songs at the age of 11 and playing the organ in Danbury-area churches
at 14. By the time he entered Yale as a 19-year-old freshman, in
1894, Ives had written many songs, including "Psalm 67," one of
his earliest experiments in polytonal music.
Ives
graduated from Yale with the equivalent of a D+ average. He fared
well in music classes, but clashed with his teacher, Horatio Parker,
whom Ives never forgave for his musical conservatism. During his
Yale years Ives wrote his First Symphony, a string quartet, dozens
of songs and choral works, studies that became the nucleus of later
symphonies, and a number of musical experiments.
One of
the more intriguing of those experiments was "Yale-Princeton Football
Game," a two-minute piece written in 1897. The composition is embellished
with wedge-shaped note patterns that purportedly represent the formation
that started Yale's winning drive. It also carries a zig-zag trumpet
line symbolizing a 55-yard touchdown run; piccolo trills mimicking
the referee's whistle; and trombone flourishes meant to portray
the sound of the crowd. (In Sinclair's 1991 recording of this piece,
one of the 50 kazoo players called for by the composer was then-Yale
football coach Carm Cozza.)
Musical
stunts like this endeared Ives to his Yale classmates, and he became
one of the more popular students on campus. He was tapped for Wolf's
Head and was elected chairman of the Ivy Committee.
After
graduation, Ives moved to New York and took a job as an assistant
in the actuarial department of the Mutual Life Insurance Company,
maintaining his interest in music by composing in his spare time
and working as a church organist. His health began to deteriorate
in 1905, and in 1906, at the age of 32, he had the first of three
heart attacks.
Undeterred,
Ives in 1907 opened his own life insurance company with a partner,
Julian Myrick. After one false start, it rapidly grew to become
the largest insurance agency in the country, boasting more than
$48 million in premiums in 1929. According to Jan Swafford, author
of a biography of Ives (Charles Ives: A Life with Music, Norton),
Ives made some $20.5 million (in 1991 dollars) during the first
half of his insurance career, giving him the freedom to compose
music his way. (Ives's independence was apparently an inspiration
to Schoenberg, who left a note on his dresser when he died, reading,
"There is a great man in this country who solved the problem of
how to be true to oneself. His name is Charles Ives.")
Fortunate
in business, Ives was also lucky in love, marrying (in 1908) Harmony
Twichell, the daughter of Rev. Joseph Twichell, a close friend of
Samuel Clemens and a 30-year member of the Yale Corporation. Harmony
Ives was a poet and registered nurse who inspired, encouraged, and
cared for Ives. She also wrote poems, several of which the composer
set to music. Said her husband: "One thing I am certain of is that,
if I have done anything good in music, it was, first, because of
my father, and second, because of my wife." Many critics agree,
noting that some of Ives's most personal, passionate, and powerful
pieces -- including his Third Symphony, much of the Fourth, the
Holidays Symphony and an orchestral set called Three Places
in New England -- were composed during the early years of his marriage.
The Holidays
Symphony includes a barn dance that typifies Ives's attempts to
capture in his music the sounds, feelings, and even the sights of
common events from his childhood. The dance is built on multiple
rhythms and quotations from reels, jigs, and waltzes, some played
simultaneously. "In some parts of the hall a group would be dancing
a polka, while in another a waltz, with perhaps a quadrille or lancers
going on in the middle," said Ives, recalling the kind of experience
that inspired the barn dance. "Some of the players in the band would,
in an impromptu way, pick up with the polka, and some with the waltz
or march . Sometimes the change in tempo and mixed rhythms would
be caused by a fiddler who . was getting a little sleepy."
Juggling
his business, his music, and a growing interest in national affairs
and politics (he successfully lobbied for the creation of $50 "baby
bonds" when the U.S. entered the Great War, and campaigned for an
amendment to the Constitution calling for a referendum-based democracy),
Ives saw his health continue to deteriorate, and in 1918 he had
a second heart attack.
But his
energy was hardly affected. After a mixture of successes and failures,
in 1920 and 1921 Ives sent hundreds of copies of his Second Piano
Sonata, Concord, Mass., 1840-60, and an accompanying book, Essays
Before a Sonata, to musicians,
critics, and libraries around the country. While much of the reaction
was negative, the material fell into the sympathetic and interested
hands of a number of musicians in the emerging avant-garde movements
in this country and in Europe.
The successes
grew throughout the 1920s. A South Carolina pianist toured a lecture-recital
of the Concord Sonata; two songs and the Second Violin Sonata premiered
in New York; and two movements of the Fourth Symphony were performed
to outstanding reviews.
In 1926,
however, Ives abruptly gave up composing. Financially secure, he
quit the insurance business three years later, and spent the last
28 years of his life overseeing performances of his work, dictating
biographical notes to a secretary, reworking old compositions, and
battling illness. He suffered another heart attack in 1938.
While
audiences still often fled concerts of Ives's music, critics had
begun to take him seriously in the 1920s, and the interest grew
in the 1930s. His reputation was bolstered by the premiere of Three
Places in New England in 1931; by Copland's performance of
seven songs in 1932; and by Kirkpatrick's New York premiere of the
Concord Sonata in 1939. Of the Concord, one of the nation's most
influential critics wrote: "This sonata is exceptionally great music -- it is, indeed, the greatest music composed by an American, and
the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication."
Ives's
Third Symphony had its premiere in New York in 1946, drawing -- in what was becoming a familiar pattern -- mixed public response,
but raves from the critics; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music
a year later. In 1951, Leonard Bernstein conducted the premier of
Ives's Second Symphony, and in 1953 premiered the First. Ives died
of a stroke the following year, leaving his most ambitious orchestral
work, the Universe Symphony, unfinished.
According
to his notes on a sketch of the Universe Symphony, Ives was "striving
to . paint the creation, the mysterious beginnings of all things
known through God and man, to trace with tonal imprints the vastness,
the evolution of all life, in nature, of humanity from the great
roots of life to the spiritual eternities, from the great inknown
to the great unknown." Ives envisioned the work being performed
by multiple orchestras located in valleys, on hillsides and mountains,
with the music mimicking "the eternal pulse . the planetary motion
of the earth . the soaring lines of mountains and cliffs . deep
ravines, sharp jagged edges of rock." While Ives probably knew the
Universe Symphony could never be performed, his efforts to compose
it shed light on the magnificent yet naive idealism that drove him.
In fact, as Ives reached the end of his life, he wrote,"The future
of music may not lie entirely with music itself," and he looked
forward to the day "when it will develop possibilities inconceivable
now -- a language so transcendent that its heights and depths will
be common to all mankind."  |
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