According to Ives, Decoration Day "was started as a brass band
overture, but never got very far that way" -- yet it could have!
Decoration Day was completed in 1912. Ives arranged the piece for full orchestra, and it lasts about nine to ten minutes. The piece is scored for 2 flutes with optional piccolo, 2 oboes and solo English horn, 2 clarinets and optional E-flat clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 or 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum with attached cymbals, high bells or celesta, low bells, and strings. Numerous instruments are called on to play offstage, including the English horn, two solo violins and a solo viola, the high and low bells, and a trumpet imitating a military bugle.
Ives was inspired to write Decoration Day after listening to his father's marching band play on Decoration Day. The marching band would march from the Soldiers' Monument at the center of Danbury to Wooster Cemetery, and there Ives would play "Taps." The band would leave often playing Reeves's Second Regiment Connecticut National Guard March.
"Decoration Day begins with an extended meditative section, mostly for strings," symbolizing morning and "the awakening of memory." Ives has the aforementioned players separated from the orchestra play as if they are alone, in what he calls "shadow lines." The music slowly unfolds, yielding an eerie mix of major and minor keys. Ives begins to incorporate his memories of Decoration Day into his piece by transforming "Marching Through Georgia" into the mournful "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground." At this point, we are back in the cemetery where his father's marching band stops, and just as Ives played "Taps" as a boy, he writes "Taps" into Decoration Day. "Taps" is coupled with "Nearer, My God, to Thee" played by the strings. Ives uses "Taps" to pave a way from the despairing section to the elated section. "On the last note of 'Taps' the music begins to surge into a drumbeat that crescendos until with a sudden cut we are in the middle of the march back to town, and the pealing melody of 'Second Regiment.'" Ives follows this jubilation with the music from the beginning of the piece.
The score of Decoration Day was published for the first time in 1989. -- from Wikipedia (footnotes available onsite)
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas, cond. CBS-Sony, recorded in Medinah Temple, 1986
Arranged for concert band by Jonathan Elkus
"The President's Own" U.S. Marine Band, Col. Timothy W. Foley, cond. USMB, recorded in the Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall, Northern Virginia Community College, Alexandria, VA, c2003
by Ken
Yes, for over a half-century now it's been federally enshrined as Memorial Day, and for a number of reasons a good swap-out, but even when Ives wrote his Decoration Day he understood it -- like the other three holidays he musicalized from his New England memory bank -- as a memory event. (For those to whom the very idea of a "Decoration Day" comes out of nowhere, the "decoration" involved didn't involve sprucing up the den or the patio, but decorating the graves of Civil War veterans
We've already "done" Thanksgiving and Forefathers' Day, the first-composed but eventually finally-positioned movement of Ives's Holidays Symphony, four pieces he always thought suitable for individual or collective performance. And I could swear we've done Fourth of July (though the only post I've found is one that was never published), which as the "summer" installment would take its place before the concluding "fall" one. And we still haven't touched the opening "winter" entry, Washington's Birthday. But now we've got the "spring" holiday, Decoration Day front and center.
We've got some more ground to cover -- more of Ives and Decoration Day itself, and some associated Ivesiana == including, I'm thinking, the thematically related Central Park in the Dark and The Unanswered Question.
Of course we've also got to finish up our Radu Lupu remembrance with the final installment devoted to Schumann's Humoreske, which is coming along but not quite ready yet. And another project has arisen, in the form of interstitial loose ends from last week's "We're still targeting Radu Lupu's Schumann Humoreske, but first we're going to detour through some miniatures: kiddie keyboard goodies and a whirlwind of a song." If you were here, you may recall that that "Schumann piano" post wandered through the likes of Schumann's song "Widmung," the Gilbert and Sullivan duet "I have a song to sing, O!" from The Yeomen of the Guard, and the Hugo Wolf Italian Songbook comical song "Wie lange schon," with the piano postlude depicting the violin-playing of the song narrator's heaven-sent boyfriend. We've got addenda to all three, of various sorts. Coming soon.
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