Music: Shadow and Substance in Ives

When Charles Ives died fifteen years ago, at the age of eighty, he was the center of a flourishing fan club which had already been growing for some years, I had assumed that his lifework was too fragile a structure to support anything as cumbersome as the Ives cult as we now have it. No one could have been more mistaken. The cult has grown, and so has the demand for Ives’s music, The current issue of the Schwann Long Playing Record Catalog lists more than fifty titles, many of them in several readings. All of the symphonies, all of the violin sonatas, both quartets, all of the piano music, and representative examples of the choral and orchestral music are available. Still waiting for thorough treatment is his vast song literature.

Ives Recordings of special value

Since Ives himself was an iconoclast and the enemy of accepted opinion, it is an irony that his reputation was in large measure created, and is now being protected, by a goon-squad of academicians who confuse his originality with greatness, and to whom the suggestion that this greatness is not uniform throughout his canon comes as an insupportable affront. The literary critic Richard Freedman once wrote that “Ives was our best some would say only -composer.” A provocative remark. Now, Mr. Freedman is a professor of English at Simmons (Allege, and how this position gives him the cachet to lay down the law with this authority and assurance I don’t know, bill since his is a typical observation, it would be good to knew what Freedman means by “best.”

“Original,”"great,” “important”? These are useful words, but they are not interchangeable and must be handled with care. Ives was an original: an innovator, a man of large imagination, but also an eccentric, a crank, a loner. As the pianist John Kirkpatrick points out, Ives’s musical testament is, in effect, his diary. It is tire figure that comes through as compelling. I o apply the term “great" to the music is to introduce a battery of conceptions, incest of them tied to virtuosity and top-level professionalism, that simply don’t work for Ives. The man was an amateur.

“Amateur” is another loaded word; but Ives is to Mozart what Grandma Moses is to Fragonard. This should he perfectly obvious. Is it all that painful to see it spelled out? If Ives had not clung so desperately to his amateur status, he would very likely have been as polite and nearly forgotten as his older contemporaries Edward Mac Dowell and Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. Part of his crankiness and surely all of Itis celebrated experiments in sonority, rhythm, and tonal relationships depended on a freedom from professional commitments.

In fairness, it should he pointed out that not all of the major figures in the arts in the United States have been technical virtuosos. Emily Dickinson, for instance, made do very well with simple rhyme schemes and a very primitive metrical system. As for Melville, he seems to have had a great deal of trouble making words do what he wanted them to do—witness the incredibly messed-up condition in which he left Billy Budd. In Ives, where the technique is often quite complicated, part of the fascination is in watching the man struggle with his materials.

Ives said some dreadful things about sound. In one essay, he claimed that any one of his several admittedly unsingable songs had a right to a life of its own on the page, and again he asked, “My God! What has sound got to do with music?” One would think that a musician with such strong reservations about the importance of sound would have done better to go into another line of work—and Ives did this too, when he went into the insurance business with such great success. When he was writing music (and he stopped in 1923), the manuscripts were going directly to the trunk, where they stayed. A composer who was not accustomed to hearing his own work performed might very well feel freer about what he wrote than a man working against a deadline. At the same time, a composer inexperienced at hearing his own music—especially the orchestral stuff—could he expected to be either shy or rambunctious itt a haphazard way, as Ives was in his orchestra scores.

The result is that, taken piece by piece and out of the context of the life which, as Kirkpatrick suggests, makes it all meaningful, Ives’s music falls into three categories, which are not chronological and not necessarily consistent within a single work:

1. Pieces within the framework of the musical tradition as Ives knew it. One of these, the song “Charlie Rutlage,” is completely successful. The Third Symphony, which look the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 (though it had been written several decades earlier), is more characteristic because it is flawed by shabby orchestration, much as the First Piano Sonata is damaged by cloying fin de siècle parlor harmony. Many of the best pieces in this category are the choral works.

2. The jeux d’esprit. Ives’s jokes are often coarse and usually grow out of raising hell with familiar tunes—motives from Beethoven in the Concord Sonata, “Shall We Gather at the River?" in the Fourth Violin Sonata and elsewhere, “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean" in the Second Symphony and countless f other pieces. This is good-tempered music. It’s one thing not to like it and another not to get it. What’s not to like?

3. Experimental works. Quite early on, in his light music, Ives achieved otherwise unobtainable effects by writing in two keys at once, as Bach had done (seriously) in the opening chorus of the St. Matthew Passion and as Mozart had done in A Musical Joke. Stravinsky used this device in Petrourhka, and because Ives had used it earlier, there is a suggestion that Ives’s crystal ball was an unusually bright one. There are also pieces in which Ives, by using the twelve tones of the chromatic scale in an arbitrary sequence, anticipates serial and note-row composition (as Chopin did in the E major etude), and in which his rhythmic and metrical structures look forward to Bartók or backward to Gregorian chant, depending on which way you are facing. Since these innovations and what followed them in the work of other composers have so long ago been assimilated into the common experience, nobody but a historian with an eye to the calendar has the emotional equipment to deal with their significance as Ives himself would have felt them. For the ordinary listener, Ives at his wildest tends to sound like; MacDowell with a lot of wrong notes.

In point of style, Ives lived off the land, which is why he sounds so much like a man of his time: American, pre-World War I. William Austin, in his book Music in the Twentieth Century, develops the ingenious theory (supported by quotations from the composer’s essays) that Ives was concerned with “substance" rather than what he called “manner.”High style, in tact, could deafen him to the substance of music. He wrote:

In fact, it would be easy to damn Ives entirely on the basis of his irresponsible essays, without taking the precaution of listening to his music. But, as Austin says, “Without the prose, much of the music fails to make any clear effect.” Austin goes on to say:

One’s acceptance of Ives and his work depends, largely, on the ability to make a judgment in which the sound of sound does not count.