The Man Who Heard the Future
YOHALEM, JOHN H.
The Man Who Heard the Future From the Steeples and the Mountans: A Study of Charles Ives By David Wooldridge Knopf. 320 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by John H. Yohalem Short-story writer In the...
...David Wooldridge, a British conductor, musicologist and, it seems, "new journalist" as well his style is swift and feisty, full of obscure tangents, psychological theorizing, opinionated interjections, ecstatic eulogy, heady thrills, and lush romance presents a biography-appreciation of Ives for the composer's centennial this year...
...Two young conductors, Eugene Goossens and Nicholas Slonimsky, presented Ives' work in New York and Paris to great critical acclaim...
...He has delved into Ives' works (no easy task), and written an engaging, informative study, one where even the digressions are fascinating...
...Born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1874, to an old New England family, Ives was the son of the town bandmaster...
...To top it off, Ives' hand is execrable...
...The composition that gives Wooldridge the title of his book depicts a primitive fire alarm system...
...In his spare time, Ives, an insurance man, became a millionaire, doing much in the process to raise the standards of a corruption-ridden industry...
...Ives had lost their tempers on seeing the music, friends had jeered...
...Ives' Hanover Square North portrays an incident immediately following the Lusitania disaster...
...There are, inevitably, errors the wrong date for the Metropolitan production of Horatio Parker's opera (a blow to Ives, who recalled it bitterly 30 years later) and "Wittenburg" for "Wittenberg...
...Indeed, painting the life of the United States in sound, especially the pristine virtues of old New England, was Ives' principle concern...
...Wooldridge is on stronger ground analyzing Ives' ethical and political philosophy, since we have the composer's own long and contortive essays and memos, not to mention the texts for his music and his textual marginalia...
...Wooldridge does not call his book a biography, and he is not a biographer that is, a calm, judicious scholar who never omits a footnote or a document...
...Rather, he is the excited kid in the back row whose hand is always up, babbling on every related question in a flood of uncontrolled enthusiasm for his subject...
...Yet, when his children were ready for college, he had to take a job as a bank clerk to pay their tuition, and the strain, it would appear, was too much for him...
...In other pieces Ives describes baseball and football games, town meetings, rivers polluted by industry, Central Park in the Dark...
...Already we have this excellent panegyric...
...Ives fans are still looking for the original manuscript, and must make do with a reconstruction...
...Second, he persuaded the youngster not to make his living in music because it would oblige him to write to please others...
...Nonetheless, Stein, like Ives, was an experimenter of entirely original cast of mind beneath a conventional surface, and like the composer was deeply committed to limning the American experience...
...The centennial should set off a blaze of new interest...
...The rhythms of his uncompleted Universe Symphony were plotted to increase in a series of prime numbers, and to interrelate in ways that foreshadowed trends of the last 20 years...
...A number of his works were attempts to set in music the ideas of Thoreau and Emerson, the moral concern of Bronson Al-cott, the historical obsession of Hawthorne, and the patriotism and self-confidence of Whitman...
...Vindication came at last after Edgar Varese founded the International Composers' Guild in 1921...
...This wallpaper design music is not as big as a natural mushy ballad...
...Ives worked on the tone row decades before Schonberg, and, what is more impressive, discarded it as pedantic and worthless...
...The book includes illustrations and an appendix on Ives recordings...
...After graduation Ives worked as a church organist, most notably with the Central Presbyterian Church in New York...
...Wooldridge denounces as apocryphal on what authority he doesn't say the tale that Ives did a jig on hearing the ovation that followed one performance...
...that her adoption of a daughter and frequent invitations to musical friends unappreciative of Ives had a castrating effect on him...
...Here Parker would appear to have skimped teaching...
...Ives heard with inner ears well in advance of any other musician in the Western world, and he composed in a vacuum: "I found I could work more naturally and with more concentration if I didn't hear much music, especially unfamiliar music...
...Ives' compositions, stripped of their terrors by the sort of sounds one has got used to in the last 50 years- in a sense, his successors paved the way for him...
...Wooldridge does not suggest it, but Whitman's poetry, not yet fashionable when Ives wrote music for it, may have appealed to the composer for a sloppiness of form, a rushing away on the tide of the creator's own ideas, that also characterized Ives in his music and his words...
...By his own account, Ives learned very little from his teacher...
...For too long, he apparently felt, conductors had peered at his scores and called them unplayable, virtuosi invited to the house by Mrs...
...On the other hand, Wooldridge does draw an apt analogy with another writer, Gertrude Stein...
...Plainly, there is need for an "Ives Edition" in the 19th-century manner...
...Wooldridge takes advantage of this situation to give us a history of 19th-century American composers trained in Europe every one And to launch one of many tirades against the blindness of educated musical opinion...
...Although he taught Charles counterpoint, insisting that the boy learn the "rules" before breaking them, George Ives was an experimenter with quarter-tones and dissonances, and accustomed his whole family to strange harmonics, making the usual in music seem prettified and dull to them...
...When a respected Boston critic, Philip Nathan Hale, objected strenuously sound unheard to the impression Europeans would get from the concerts, Ives was now self-confident enough to enjoy the plaint, and to write doggerel about "Auntie Philip...
...Under the stress of these years Ives all but ceased to compose...
...At 33, Ives married a minister's daughter, a beautiful, sympathetic, intelligent music-lover with the musical and American name Harmony Twichell...
...the words are impassioned when the content is nothing of the kind...
...Still, like many blustering men, he had a streak of extreme sensitivity and would occasionally wonder whether other people were right, whether something might be wrong with his ears...
...Ives won the Pulitzer prize in 1947 for a symphony he had composed 30 years before And his reaction was almost sarcastic...
...Others were dashed off on spare scraps, usually the backs of older compositions...
...He died at age 49...
...His tunes turn up often in Charles Ives' works...
...She lived to perform the supreme duty of a composer's wife preservation of the manuscripts and encouragement of performances after her husband's death...
...The copyright holders, he reports, are so uninterested in the works that they rent them expensively and in ancient, ill-copied editions...
...The composer badmouthed the Kaiser in the margins of the piece and subsequently volunteered for military service, but he had a heart attack shortly before he was supposed to take his physical...
...Ives disliked the little he knew of her work and she may never have heard any of his...
...Something in this calculated, diagram, design way may have a place in music...
...Ives preferred to bang out on the piano what he heard in his head...
...his most elaborate scores for full orchestra are those comprising the set of New England Holidays...
...Through this organization Ives made friends with Carl Ruggles and Henry Cowell...
...His father, while studying in New York as a youth, had once helped the sodden Stephen Foster out of a gutter and back to his rooming house...
...Wooldridge also concedes what many critics contend, that much of Ives' music is downright ill-made...
...Foster later died in the gutter, but was always revered in the Ives household as the greatest American composer of his time...
...His practical influence on his son was twofold...
...This sort of thing dates quickly, but then Wooldridge, bless the man, regards recordings as perversions of the musical experience anyway...
...In addition, Gustav Mahler, who carried off the only copy of the Third Symphony to Germany, died during rehearsals...
...he was the Leif Erikson of the new musical continent "discovered" by Schonberg and Stravinsky—now enjoy a good deal of currency if not precisely broad popularity...
...After the War he was bitter when the United States Senate rejected the League of Nations...
...His employers, despite what they may have thought of his choral psalms and organ preludes, allowed Ives to present his own music, and he succeeded in winning a few admirers...
...Although amusing, it frequently intrudes on the material, producing the impression that the story is happening somewhere else...
...Somewhat more unfortunate is Wooldridge's wild and woolly style...
...Young Ives studied at Yale with Horatio Parker, then one of the white hopes of American music, now totally forgotten...
...And whatever one may think of the quality of the music, it's certainly an interesting life...
...but it's an artificial process without strength, though it ma" sound busy & noisy...
...Yet these are minor matters, and one comes away from this book entertained, bemused and curious to hear a good chunk of the Ives oeuvre conducted, if possible, by David Wooldridge...
...Reviewed by John H. Yohalem Short-story writer In the years before World War I, Charles Ives was music's Cassandra: He foresaw nearly every major trend music was to follow in the first half of the century, and he experimented in unheard-of directions later explored by Schonberg, Stravinsky and Cage, among others...
...Wooldridge draws a number of unsupported inferences about Harmony: that her inability to bear children may have been the blow to Ives' ego which led him to stop composing and even resulted in his heart condition...
...Ives was devoted all his life to the morality and independent stance of the New England Tran-scendentalists, particularly in their finest hour, the time of the Abolitionist movement...
...At the end of his life he was too ill to attend performances of his works and didn't seem to like the broadcasts...
...Eager to innovate himself, George felt constrained by his public, and performed mostly popular pieces and classics...
...The present condition of the manuscripts, to judge from Wool-dridge's description, is an outrage...
...Ives freely characterized such persons of conservative taste as "old ladies" and "seedy goddam lilies...
...As for the music, it moves in ways and involves things barely conceivable at the time it was written...
...As with Schonberg, however, Ives never got the wide, explosive response he imagined would ultimately be his once audiences had conquered the minor hurdles between hearing the old way and hearing his way...
...Oh for just one big strong chord not tied to any key," Charles lamented during a Beethoven concert long afterward...
...Parker, in turn, did not think much of his student's innovations: Hearing Ives described as a composer of songs 20 years later, he couldn't believe it was the same person...
...When he died in 1954, he left his papers in chaos and many manuscripts are lost...
...Hymns and patriotic airs-"Bringing in the Sheaves," "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," "Taps" pop up throughout the music for a phrase or two...
...that her prudishness drove him to become foul-mouthed...
...George Ives was something of a celebrity throughout the region, much in demand for concerts and holiday musicales...
...We know for certain only that she loved both Ives and his music and did not have children...
Vol. 57 • July 1974 • No. 14
