On Music

...The first complete performance was Leopold Stokowski's in 1965...

...their gusto in the wild "Fourth of July" gives the most vital reading of knotty, mature Ives I know...

...A Dixieland band was hired to play for Nixon's arrival at his hotel...

...And the old Transcendental pacifist would have been pleased at the outcome: After 15 minutes the delegates, by then numbering several hundred, had their way and the orchestra quit...

...Once he moved to New York and began his career as an insurance executive, his musical creativity and his business ability prospered consistently and, it appears, reciprocally...

...Whether extraordinary gaffe or inspired put-down, the political ambiguity here resembled the note Ives sounded at the end of the Second Symphony when he set the bugle call, reveille, against "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," and made the cadence in a dissonant blast...

...Eric Salzman in Commentary (August 1968) points out that the Ives industry is booming partly because the recording industry has brought about an incredible dissemination of shared musical experience of all kinds, shapes, times, and cultures...

...1-3 are impeccable and enthusiastic...

...2. Gould, like Farberman, pays attention to the larger textures, and the effect of additive density is again dominant...

...In terms of our previous example, the music of Lou Breese conveyed a very real vulgarity by attempting to superimpose "borrowed" pop optimism on a serious political situation...

...As they approached each other the dissonances were acute, and each man played louder so that his rivals would not put him off...

...The essential version of Three Places in New England is by Morton Gould and the Chicago Symphony (RCA Victor LSC 2959), coupled with the only recording available of Orchestral Set No...

...Although his development often seems to parallel Wallace Stevens', he is more like an urbanized Thoreau...

...The resulting polyphonic clash of pop tunes and hymns competing texturally for programmatic significance made a fine Ivesian moment...

...While Holidays is often played in part or as a suite, it is also a free kind of symphony...

...Ives' mature style is reflected in the incredible complexity of this piece with its quarter-tone piano, atonal sonority blocks, collage, poly-rhythms, etc., techniques that Ives used before Schoenberg, Stravinsky, or anyone else...

...Three symphonic works from this period remain important: His unnumbered set for symphony orchestra, the Holidays Symphony, was finished in 1913...

...Cardinal's recorded sound, incidentally, is magnificent...

...Young Charlie had a prodigious musical educaton, for his father also taught him piano, violin, cornet, counterpoint and sight reading with strict academic thoroughness...

...His only competition, Stokowski on Columbia MS 6775, takes the latter approach, which is sometimes interesting but always full of excesses...

...The Miami air was also heavy with musical irony and similarly redolent of Ives...

...The borrowing in Ives' Symphony No...

...The result is not program music in any conventional sense because, as Ives insisted in his Emersonian way, music and existence are indissolubly One...

...Ives has reproduced this collision of musical events in several ways," one of which is the combination of players into special orchestral sections "to create simultaneous masses of sound that move in different rhythms, meters, and keys...

...Though completed in 1916, it was not performed until Eugene Goosens conducted the first two movements in 1927 at Town Hall, where the audience rioted while the critics were generally sympathetic (a characteristic early response to much of Ives' music...

...The first integral set of the Four Symphonies appeared this summer on Vanguard Cardinal (VCS 100-32/34), with Harold Farberman conducting the New Philharmonia Orchestra in a warm, carefully executed, literal approach to the scores...

...the Orchestral Sets No...

...Columbia has now issued Leonard Bernstein's performance, with the New York Philharmonic, of the entire Holidays Symphony on one disc (MS 7147...

...Numerous bits of Americana, such as "Turkey in the Straw," "America the Beautiful," "Bringing in the Sheaves," alternate with snatches of Bach, Stephen Foster, Brahms and others, ultimately building to an impressive unity...

...After years of neglect, bad jokes, and periodic rediscovery, the music of Charles Ives is currently enjoying something less than a renaissance but more than a recrudescence...

...The Cowells tell us that George Ives constructed weird instruments and tuned glasses to produce quarter-tones, for which he had a passion...

...The old idealist would never have approved that dissonant gesture...

...2 for theater orchestra were completed in 1914 and 1915...

...Phillip Ramey's album notes to the contrary, there are programmatic and cyclic connections of movement and theme...

...As the fragments develop a life of their own—which is what happens so strikingly in the extensive and labyrinthine borrowings of the Fourth Symphony—one tends to be less conscious of their source outside the composition and more aware of their immediate structural goal...

...A few players wavered, but both bands held together and got past each other successfully, the sounds of their cheerful discord fading out in the distance...

...The Fourth Symphony, Ives' greatest work, is filled with such collisions and calls for two orchestras (one offstage), a chorus, organ, three pianos, a percussion group?all stationed variously about the stage and hall—and three conductors to keep things together...

...At the same time the piece retains an abundant freedom of interpretation, both through the composer's specific improvisational instructions to the players and through his deliberate working out of chance rhythmic interactions...

...1 (Three Places in New England) and No...

...Eugene Ormandy on Columbia favors the selective, thematic approach...

...The effect of a less clearly articulated structure would tend either toward excessive wit or vulgarity, twin pitfalls for any art that relies heavily on borrowings...

...That is, you sense what Ives calls on another level Transcendence...

...then the music flows on, incorporating the new quote in a structure of its own or playing it off against a previously established one...

...Bernstein and the Philharmonic are powerful and sensitive throughout...

...The result was his First Symphony, a graduation thesis of model 19th century German style, all of it well composed, some of it quite beautiful...

...In terms of literature, parts of The Waste Land provide so many "witty" literary echoes that the overtones themselves begin to jangle...

...The two bands started at opposite ends of town and were assigned pieces in different meters and keys...

...This movement, which Ives predicted, has helped prepare many an ear for the characteristic clash and blend of his musical "events...

...Immediately the house band of Lou Breese attempted to overwhelm them with breezy numbers like "This Will Be the Start of Something Big," "A Lot of Livin' to Do," and of course "Happy Days Are Here Again...

...Farberman uses Gunther Schuller's revised score and this further distinguishes the two versions...

...He became his own man with the Second Symphony (1901), the most popular of the four owing to its texture of quotation and allusion...

...He felt that all the sounds had a certain consistency of behavior and so, instead of reproducing the single melody line that was the technical intention, he reproduced what actually went on...

...He arrived at Yale in 1894 to study with Horatio Parker, whose Bruckner-Brahms-Dvorak classicism Ives set himself to assimilate...

...His father George, musical eccentric and local bandmaster, once arranged a parade of bands, down the main street to support the teams at a baseball game...

...When his car appeared, a group of young enthusiasts sang lustily "Nixon's the One," while the band accompanied with "Didn't He Ramble," the traditional up-tempo part of the New Orleans funeral march for black people...

...Ives wrote an enormous quantity of music before 1917 but little thereafter...

...and played Handel, Bach, and Beethoven chamber music on combinations of brass, woodwinds, strings, and organ...

...The shifting harmonics of the Third, or hymn-tune, Symphony (1904) reproduce in a very personal way the effects of the mass singing in camp meetings which powerfully impressed Ives in his youth...

...Thus Ives manages such effects as montage...

...This coherence, and the technical mastery that produced it, save the piece...

...2 first produces the typical shock of recognition, tempered perhaps with ironic amusement or merely the sense of a dual context...

...assembled a group of singers ("the humanophone"), each of whom would utter his own single note when called upon...

...In its desire to exploit the Ives market, Columbia has impressed the same 1964 recording of Three Places on the backs of three otherwise different discs...

...4 more controversial, since Farberman tends to emphasize the density of certain Ives "collisions," rather than highlight details...

...that of No...

...The performances of Symphonies No...

...In the one full-length study available, Charles Ives and His Music (Oxford University Press, 1955), Henry and Sidney Cowell show how polyphonic confrontations like the one the Democrats had at Chicago fascinated the young Ives growing up in Danbury, Connecticut during the 1880s...

...After the majority Vietnam plank was approved and the convention adjourned for the day, the New York peace delegates began to sing "We Shall Overcome" and, later, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic...

...The hymn-tunes are there, but transformed as if by a multitude of voices (many of them tuneless, sharp or flat) praising the Lord...

...In painting, pop art has often sinned both ways...

...The resolute drive for experimentation and discovery was Charles' legacy from his father...