With the birthday of Connecticut cranky Yankee, Charles Ives, the autumn of my content deepens, as golden leaves find parallel in the Golden Age of American music and a run of composer birthdays that stretch clear into early December (Howard Hanson, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Irving Fine, Morton Gould, etc.). As a radio programmer of so many years, I am sensitive to these types of patterns!
Ives, born on this date in 1874, was the first of our modern giants, and his influence has been the furthest reaching. While piling up acorns in the insurance business, he had the freedom to pursue his idiosyncratic muse. He composed in the evenings, on weekends, and on holidays, creating works of all stripes, tonalities, and quasi-tonalities, even atonality, navigating with remarkable certainty for some 30 years. And he did so in the relative isolation of a prophet, with very few performances to affirm his chosen course.
Ives retired in 1930, which allowed him to devote himself wholeheartedly to music. Ironically, by then, he found he was no longer able to compose. His wife recalled a day in 1927 when he came downstairs with tears in his eyes and confessed that everything sounded wrong to him. After that, he labored mostly at revision and publication.
By the time his works finally began to gain recognition, it had already been 20 years since he had stopped composing. At the time of his death, in 1954, he was still widely misunderstood and much of his music remained unperformed. Nevertheless, he had some important champions. He was a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1947, for his Symphony No. 3, “The Camp Meeting,” a work he had written in 1904. His reaction? “Prizes are for boys, and I’m all grown up.” He gave away the prize money, half of it to Lou Harrison, who had conducted the belated premiere.
Even in the 1960s, the world was still grappling with Ives. In 1965, Leopold Stokowski gave the first performance of the Symphony No. 4. 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. The performance took place at Carnegie Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra and the Schola Cantorum of New York.
The piece was composed between 1910 and the mid-1920s. 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 performed live by an orchestra. (He 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 Stokowski’s complete performance.
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:
Stoky 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?
Marveling at how out of step with musical convention his own compositions could be, Ives once famously remarked, “Are my ears on wrong?” Musicians are still scrambling to address this “unanswered question.”
Happy birthday, Charles Ives!
Ives’ “Hallowe’en” for string quartet and piano – watch out for that big drum!
Leonard Bernstein on the Symphony No. 2:
My preferred recording of the symphony, so beautiful (though not always entirely accurate, in regard to Ives’ intentions), with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in 1958:
The Yale-Princeton Football Game:
Ives sings!
