Category: Daily Dispatch

It was on this date in 1965 that Leopold Stokowski gave the world premiere of Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 4. The performance took place at Carnegie Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra and the Schola Cantorum of New York. At the time, the work’s complex, kaleidoscopic tempos and layered, shifting meters required multiple conductors, and Stokowski enlisted the aid of David Katz and a young Jose Serebrier (pictured).

The piece was composed between 1910 and the mid-1920s. Given the source, it’s hardly surprising that the music was decades ahead of its time. The first two movements had been performed by members of the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Eugene Goossens in 1927. This was the only occasion on which Ives would hear any of the music from the Fourth Symphony performed live by an orchestra. The composer died in 1954.

Bernard Herrmann conducted an arrangement of the lovely third movement, the simplest and most conservative of the four (why, then, the need for an arrangement?), in 1933. The music as Ives wrote it was not heard until the complete performance in 1965.

The composer’s biographer, Jan Swafford, describes the work as “Ives’ climactic masterpiece.”

Stokowski recorded the symphony a few days after the premiere and led a televised studio performance, which can be seen here:

Stokey kicks off twenty minutes of spoken introductory material (including commentary from producer John McClure) at the 4:30 mark. The symphony proper begins 25 minutes in.

When’s the last time you saw anything like this on television?