Last week our local classical station online feed didn't week for a couple of days. That meant I had to go elsewhere to listen to the radio before bed. I have a radio, but it makes an annoying buzzing sound with the headphones in and the connection is very sensitive and anyway---it just works better that way.
For some reason I thought I'd catch up with some Ives Symphonies. Charles Ives. It was practically the 4th of July anyhow, and what better way to be patriotic than to listen to an insurance salesman who wrote music on nights and weekends that people thought sounded awful. And he kept on writing it anyhow because, you know, individualism. Of a most rugged kind!
Actually, three of Ives' four numbered symphonies are pretty tame, tonally. They are plenty quirky, and two of them quote from a lot of hymn tunes and fiddle tunes and marches and things, but the man on the street wouldn't get TOO offended if I played him a few bars. Once in college a roommate heard me listening to the Ives Fourth and thought the guy was a nutcase. If you've never heard it imagine a sonic representation of a Jackson Pollack. The kind of art people think their six-year could create. I played him something from Ives' First, which is fairly conventional sounding and my roommate decided maybe the guy knew what he was doing after all. This is the way it is with abstract artists. They have to convince Joe Public they really could draw a straight line if they wanted to, and also a nice landscape.
Anyway, I spent four nights listening to the four numbered symphonies--a miniature Ives Festival. The first night I listened to Ives's Second. Bernstein was doing it. It was a vibrant interpretation, even if it featured a few kitchy bits. Bernstein couldn't quite get what Ives was up to even if he did have more insight into him than most of his contemporaries. This was particularly apparent the fourth night when I listened to the Third. This rendering was extremely metronomic. There was something about it that didn't breathe at all. The tempos all felt wrong: the first movement was too slow, the second was too fast, the third also too fast--but the real problem was that it didn't sound like nostalgia, it sounded like virtuosity and precision. I generally like Lenny, but he ruined my favorite Ives symphony.
Hunting around Youtube, though, you can find some interesting things. For a performance of Ives's First Symphony, I came across an orchestra in Russia. There wasn't any English translation so I don't know who exactly. But they managed to make Ives sound like Tchaikovsky. The angst was palpable. The tempos were slow, and the aching melodies, which Ives wrote in college for an assignment, were quite profound. I don't know how they found a hugely depressed Russian in the writing of a teenaged American at Yale trying to pull his conservative teacher's leg, but they did--admirably. And they really sold it, too. I was impressed. I found myself ruminating on how Ives really had stolen bits of the Russian symphonist, along with Brahms, Dvorak, and the New England School. And how a translation of a translation doesn't always get you back to where you started, and how people can really misunderstand each other, culturally, but...this was really marvelous. And really wrong. But, hey, why not?
Maybe the most useful thing was when I found the premiere broadcast of the Fourth, conducted by Stokowsky and the American Symphony, complete with twenty minutes of interviews and shmoozing about the piece and how interesting and difficult it was to put everything together in rehearsal. Then I got to see them trying to deal with the gargantuan score, and watch three conductor simultaneously conduct parts of the orchestra at different tempi. Like Ives's music, there were several layers involved here: one was appreciating the way in which the people who put the program together were trying to reach a presumably wary, and uninitiate public.
Ives will probably never be loved as a composer, which is too bad. He did write some good tunes, besides all of the fascinating ways in which he put pre-existing tunes together. I still can't get the Second symphony out of my head, and that was several days ago. Ives was an interesting man, and his music makes me nostalgic for a part of America I never really knew--at least, not entirely. We have some of it in common, though. I grew up singing some of the tunes, in a small town, and watching the marching bands, organists, and other civic music makers. I probably have an inside track.--At least an appreciation for rurality that cosmopolitan orchestral conductors don't always seem to be able to get their heads around. And maybe a sense of humor that doesn't come naturally to them either.
But a "gifted primitive?" Please, Lenny!
----
as usual, there is more to enjoy this week at pianonoise.com, including a recording of Gottschalk's "Union."
Showing posts with label Ives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ives. Show all posts
Friday, July 6, 2018
Monday, May 27, 2013
Decoration Day
It's Memorial Day in the afternoon and I've found myself alone in the house and, in an attempt to connect with the holiday, listening to a piece called "Decoration Day" by American composer Charles Ives.
Holidays can be easy to lose, sometimes. One way to do that is to be too busy all the time and just keep on working straight through them. At a gathering of graduate students working through dissertations and Medical School and the like, several students confessed they hadn't even realized that the next day was a holiday at all. One thought it was next week. Sometimes in the scramble to meet deadlines you lose contact with the society around you and every day becomes every other day, which is exactly what Holidays are supposed to counteract.
Or, if you are a musician like me, a holiday like Christmas, one of the few that haven't gotten lost to me along the way into middle age--no longer a child and without children, many customs and traditions lie buried in my pysche gathering dust until?--even a holiday like Christmas, which can't be ignored, becomes, instead of a commemoration of something, an obstacle course of obligation. Gigs, concerts, rehearsals--once I loved Christmas; now I have to try very hard not to loathe it. Along the way there are usually just enough beautiful moments to keep the embers alive for another year.
But holidays are the ways society marks things, together. They are designed to make us stop our routines and reflect on whatever it is that needs to be remembered. The rhythms of the year, perhaps, or the significant events of the past that our culture considers important. Founding moments, pivotal moments, or cherished national myths about freedom and sacrifice.
So on this holiday, which even more obviously than most is about memory, I listened to a piece of music which was also designed to make a connection, to prevent it from being lost; to, as Ives put it, recollect "boyhood holidays." Ives spent a lot of time during his adult years trying to preserve those boyhood memories in music. Unfortunately, I can't legally post a recording of this piece, for full orchestra and still under copyright, so for the first Monday I can remember, instead of a piece of music I play for you you'll get merely a description of the music.
It's called "Decoration Day" and became the second movement from the "Holidays" Symphony. Decoration Day is the original name for Memorial Day, and it was meant to remember the soldiers who died on both sides of the Civil War. Ives begins the piece with a fog of string sound, interlarded, as so often in Ives, with bits of hymn tunes, Civil War tunes, and other songs familiar to the people of New England around the turn to the 20th century.
If you are not familiar with Ives, the music may strike you as very bizarre, even as not music. What is there to hang on to here? As a sonic act of recollection, there is no easily recognizable and hummable tune: instead, there are bits of multiple tunes, often sown together in unpredictable ways, as if, in the act of remembering the one, the narrator was suddenly reminded of something else, and jumped to it. Often different instruments remember different tunes at the same time and form a tapestry of many things going at once. This is the way the mind actually works, and it is shockingly disorganized, in contrast to the well-ordered, sanitized musical plot you are used to.
But for an Ives piece, this is one of the easier pieces to get your ears around on the first pass. The harmonies aren't that shocking, and the textures aren't that thick. Instead, much of the early part of the piece is a sad, unending melody. You won't be able to remember it, but it is still beautiful in its melancholy, and simply put and heartfelt.
What might have made this section more effective would have been recognition of tunes. Studying Ives in graduate school I found that I had a closer connection with him than my colleagues. It is one thing to point out that oh yes, there is the hymn tune called "Azmon" here, and "Erie" over there, and quite another to have sung the tunes, to know them, to have them part of your tradition. Ives and I both grew up in small town America and were singing the same hymns as boys in church a century apart. (What does that tell you?) However, either because my ears aren't that sharp today, or he is using a different set of tunes, they aren't stinging my ears in the same familiar way. But I have to say that when a bit of "Hail, Columbia" floated by about six minutes in I was nearly overcome with the tragedy of our now 150 year past Civil War. This was followed by a quite haunting haze of strings with a trumpet slowing blowing "taps" in the background. Ives' remembrance of the familiar cemetery remembrance that marks the holiday is followed by an abrupt transition that at made my hair stand on end with the first rumbling, ineffable chords. It sounded as if those dead were rising from their graves and made me think of the passage in Ezekiel, "Man, can these bones live again?"
But it turned out only to be the start of the parade down Main Street, complete with blaring trombones and enthusiastic percussion. After "the boys get going" as the composer describes a similar burst of enthusiasm in another piece (and there are many moments in Ives like it) the fog returns in a short coda and the somber, important act of remembrance, of solemnity, concludes the work.
Listening to Ives is unlike listening to any other composer. It may be, for most of us, an alien experience, since the music is of different stuff than we are used to. It is more psychological than melodious, it is unpredictable, and it is propelled by a love of the experiment and of "trying things out." It is sad that it is behind such a wall of unfamiliarity, though--a wall of our own insistence, I should point out--, because what Ives wants to do is share his experience, more specifically and more dramatically than most, and if you can hear it, there is much to hear. But like Decoration Day itself, it may not be easy. What is it all about? What is behind it all? It is buried in our history, our traditions, receding into a time when America was a very different place, and yet not so different, buried in those cemetary plots under the green lawns and the processions of white stones marking the place where lie the silenced voices that could tell you so much about this day and its meaning.but are no more. But Ives can tell you something about it...if you can hear it.
Holidays can be easy to lose, sometimes. One way to do that is to be too busy all the time and just keep on working straight through them. At a gathering of graduate students working through dissertations and Medical School and the like, several students confessed they hadn't even realized that the next day was a holiday at all. One thought it was next week. Sometimes in the scramble to meet deadlines you lose contact with the society around you and every day becomes every other day, which is exactly what Holidays are supposed to counteract.
Or, if you are a musician like me, a holiday like Christmas, one of the few that haven't gotten lost to me along the way into middle age--no longer a child and without children, many customs and traditions lie buried in my pysche gathering dust until?--even a holiday like Christmas, which can't be ignored, becomes, instead of a commemoration of something, an obstacle course of obligation. Gigs, concerts, rehearsals--once I loved Christmas; now I have to try very hard not to loathe it. Along the way there are usually just enough beautiful moments to keep the embers alive for another year.
But holidays are the ways society marks things, together. They are designed to make us stop our routines and reflect on whatever it is that needs to be remembered. The rhythms of the year, perhaps, or the significant events of the past that our culture considers important. Founding moments, pivotal moments, or cherished national myths about freedom and sacrifice.
So on this holiday, which even more obviously than most is about memory, I listened to a piece of music which was also designed to make a connection, to prevent it from being lost; to, as Ives put it, recollect "boyhood holidays." Ives spent a lot of time during his adult years trying to preserve those boyhood memories in music. Unfortunately, I can't legally post a recording of this piece, for full orchestra and still under copyright, so for the first Monday I can remember, instead of a piece of music I play for you you'll get merely a description of the music.
It's called "Decoration Day" and became the second movement from the "Holidays" Symphony. Decoration Day is the original name for Memorial Day, and it was meant to remember the soldiers who died on both sides of the Civil War. Ives begins the piece with a fog of string sound, interlarded, as so often in Ives, with bits of hymn tunes, Civil War tunes, and other songs familiar to the people of New England around the turn to the 20th century.
If you are not familiar with Ives, the music may strike you as very bizarre, even as not music. What is there to hang on to here? As a sonic act of recollection, there is no easily recognizable and hummable tune: instead, there are bits of multiple tunes, often sown together in unpredictable ways, as if, in the act of remembering the one, the narrator was suddenly reminded of something else, and jumped to it. Often different instruments remember different tunes at the same time and form a tapestry of many things going at once. This is the way the mind actually works, and it is shockingly disorganized, in contrast to the well-ordered, sanitized musical plot you are used to.
But for an Ives piece, this is one of the easier pieces to get your ears around on the first pass. The harmonies aren't that shocking, and the textures aren't that thick. Instead, much of the early part of the piece is a sad, unending melody. You won't be able to remember it, but it is still beautiful in its melancholy, and simply put and heartfelt.
What might have made this section more effective would have been recognition of tunes. Studying Ives in graduate school I found that I had a closer connection with him than my colleagues. It is one thing to point out that oh yes, there is the hymn tune called "Azmon" here, and "Erie" over there, and quite another to have sung the tunes, to know them, to have them part of your tradition. Ives and I both grew up in small town America and were singing the same hymns as boys in church a century apart. (What does that tell you?) However, either because my ears aren't that sharp today, or he is using a different set of tunes, they aren't stinging my ears in the same familiar way. But I have to say that when a bit of "Hail, Columbia" floated by about six minutes in I was nearly overcome with the tragedy of our now 150 year past Civil War. This was followed by a quite haunting haze of strings with a trumpet slowing blowing "taps" in the background. Ives' remembrance of the familiar cemetery remembrance that marks the holiday is followed by an abrupt transition that at made my hair stand on end with the first rumbling, ineffable chords. It sounded as if those dead were rising from their graves and made me think of the passage in Ezekiel, "Man, can these bones live again?"
But it turned out only to be the start of the parade down Main Street, complete with blaring trombones and enthusiastic percussion. After "the boys get going" as the composer describes a similar burst of enthusiasm in another piece (and there are many moments in Ives like it) the fog returns in a short coda and the somber, important act of remembrance, of solemnity, concludes the work.
Listening to Ives is unlike listening to any other composer. It may be, for most of us, an alien experience, since the music is of different stuff than we are used to. It is more psychological than melodious, it is unpredictable, and it is propelled by a love of the experiment and of "trying things out." It is sad that it is behind such a wall of unfamiliarity, though--a wall of our own insistence, I should point out--, because what Ives wants to do is share his experience, more specifically and more dramatically than most, and if you can hear it, there is much to hear. But like Decoration Day itself, it may not be easy. What is it all about? What is behind it all? It is buried in our history, our traditions, receding into a time when America was a very different place, and yet not so different, buried in those cemetary plots under the green lawns and the processions of white stones marking the place where lie the silenced voices that could tell you so much about this day and its meaning.but are no more. But Ives can tell you something about it...if you can hear it.
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