WILL HAVE TO BE "CLOSE ENOUGH" FOR NOW]
The Housatonic at Kent (Conn.) [photo by the Housatonic Valley Association]
"The Housatonic at Stockbridge [1914] was inspired by a Sunday morning walk that Mrs. Ives and I took near Stockbridge [Mass.], the summer after we were married [1908]. We walked in the meadows along the river, and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and elm trees were something that one would always remember. Robert Underwood Johnson, in his poem The Housatonic at Stockbridge, paints the scene beautifully."
-- Ives, Memos, on no. 3 of his Three Places in New England
Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, Howard Hanson, cond. Mercury, rec. 1957
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, David Zinman, cond. Argo, recorded 1994
[Note: Eventually I'll say a bit about these differently terrific performances, Hanson's pulsing with life, Zinman's exploding with musical perception.]
OR, AS AN "ART SONG" -- WITHOUT ORCHESTRA, BUT
WITH ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON'S WORDS (1921)
Contented river! In thy dreamy realm
the cloudy willow and the plumy elm:
thou beautiful! From ev'ry dreamy hill
what eye but wanders with thee at thy will.
Contented river! And yet over-shy
to mask thy beauty from the eager eye;
hast thou a thought to hide from field and town?
In some deep current of the sunlit brown.
Ah! there's a restive ripple,
and the swift red leaves
September's firstlings faster drift.
Wouldst thou away, dear stream?
Come, whisper near!
I also of much resting have a fear:
Let me tomorrow thy companion be,
by fall and shallow to the adventurous sea!
-- text by R.U.J. ("by permission," the score tells us)
Jan DeGaetani (ms); Gilbert Kalish, piano. Nonesuch, released 1976
Gerald Finley (bs-b); Julius Drake, piano. Hyperion, recorded 2004
[Note: Wow! Not that they'll top these, but we're going to hear a couple more performances of the song which I think will add to our picture of it.]
Then again, not necessarily without orchestra --
Michael Tilson Thomas incorporated the text (sung chorally!) in his 1999 live-performance recording of Three Places in New England.
San Francisco Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, MTT, cond. RCA, 1999
AS WE KNOW, MEMORIES MATTER -- A LOT -- IN IVES'S MUSIC
In that spirit, here are parts of two Ives songs we've already heard, though not in these performances (which we will be hearing in full). Are there any you like especially -- or maybe not so much?
"Rather Sad"
From the street a strain on my ear doth fall,
a tune as threadbare as that “old red shawl.”
It is tattered, it is torn,
it shows signs of being worn,
it’s the tune my Uncle hummed from early morn.
‘Twas a common little thing and kind-a sweet,
but 'twas sad and seemed to slow up both his feet.
I can see him shuffling down
to the barn or to the town,
a-hum-[drawn out]-ming. [Hums]
-- from Ives's song "Memories," text by the composer
Roberta Alexander (s); Tan Crone, piano. Etcetera, released 1984
Susan Graham (ms); Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano. EMI, recorded 2003
(Are you washed in the blood, in the blood of the Lamb?
in the blood of the Lamb, the Lamb, of the Lamb, the Lamb?)
[Adagio and with dignity]
Jesus came from the courthouse door,
stretched his hands above the passing poor.
Booth saw not, but led his queer ones
round and round the mighty courthouse square,
[or: "round and round, round and round and round"]
and round and round and round and round and round.
-- from Ives's setting of Vachel Lindsay's epic poem
"General William Booth Enters into Heaven"
[Note: For that next-to-last text line, both options, which you can see in the reproduced chunk of score, are represented below!]
Donald Gramm (bs-b); Donald Hassard, piano. Live performance, 1976
Nathan Gunn (b); Kevin Murphy, piano. EMI, recorded 1998
by Ken
This is something I don't recall ever doing before. Sometimes the musical "teaser" above the byline gets kind of long, in which case the "jump" to the post continuation is likely to come pretty quick after the proper start of the post text. However, I don't think we've ever jumped before before we got to the byline!
It's a measure of the what-way-forward? fix I've been stuck in, trying to figure out how to proceed from the posts: "A touch of Ives (featuring a bunch of questions -- not least: Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)" (June 19) and "Of those 'tunes of long ago,' Ives sings to us: 'I know not what are the words, but they sing in my soul of the things our Fathers loved'" (July 3).
YOU RECALL "THE THINGS OUR FATHERS LOVED"?
[Which we heard (July 3) sung by our "core" Ivesians]
I think there must be a place in the soulHere again are our "core" Ives singers:
all made of tunes, of tunes of long ago.
I hear the organ on the Main Street corner,
Aunt Sarah humming Gospels; summer evenings,
the village cornet band playing in the square.
The town’s Red, White and Blue,
all Red, White and Blue.
Now! Hear the songs!
I know not what are the words,
but they sing in my soul of the things our Fathers loved.
-- text by the composer
Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano; Gilbert Kalish, piano. Nonesuch, released 1976
Gerald Finley, bass-baritone; Julius Drake, piano. Hyperion, recorded in All Saints Church (Durham Road), East Finley, London, Nov. 10-12, 2004
Donald Gramm, bass-baritone; Donald Hassard, piano. From their Town Hall recital of Feb. 24, 1976
This week, note, we're noting two other notable Ivesians:
Roberta Alexander, soprano; Tan Crone, piano. Etcetera, released 1984
Susan Graham, mezzo-soprano; Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano. EMI-Warner Classics, recorded in the Grosser Saal of the Vienna Konzerthaus, Nov. 6-8, 2003
IN THIS "SILENT" TIME I'VE BEEN SERIALLY CONCOCTING,
COUNTER-CONCOCTING, AND EVEN DIS-CONCOCTING POSTS
So many of them that I've lost track of the agglomeration of files and have been going crazy trying to remember where to find already written and/or assembled pieces of those posts once a possibly viable forward path began taking shape.
What made this possibly possible was the realization that several of those pretend-posts had musical "pull-outs" -- a short orchestral piece ("The Housatonic at Stockbridge") and a couple of song fragments (from "Memories" and "General William Booth Enters into Heaven") -- that might run collectively under a working title atop one of those posts, which was something like the title of this very post, the hitch being that I had at some point deleted (or maybe superseded?) that post title and I haven't been able to properly re-create it.
Anyway, the idea was that those three musical specimens, stripped down to minimal presentation, would go into this post teaser. Even before I attempted the actual stripping down, I had an inkling that this might result in a heckuva long teaser. Meanwhile, I had already decided that one thing that wouldn't be stripped out was the song texts, even though they would still appear when we returned to the material in the body of the post. No, I decided, the words are too important. In this same "while" I decided that the three specimens really should be four, adding the "art song" version of "The Housatonic at Stockbridge," which was originally planned to be introduced in the text that would follow that beautiful photo of the Housatonic River (not at Stockbridge, alas, but at Kent, Connecticut).
SO WHY "THE HOUSATONIC AT STOCKBRIDGE"?
I'm hoping that the pulsing intimacy and sheer gorgeousness of the two song fragments make their inclusion self-explanatory, but "The Housatonic at Stockbridge" -- in either version -- possibly less so.
"The Housatonic" has the virtues of: (a) being quintessentially Ivesian in musical subject and expression, (b) being conveniently brief, and (c) taking us somewhat -- but not too deeply -- into the realm of the "difficult" Ives. Ravishing as this little gem now seems to me, for me at least it wasn't an immediate conquest. I had to ease my ears and imagination into it. But as I did, it really grew on me.
Now, about those orchestral recordings of "From the Housatonic at Stockbridge" we heard.
Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, Howard Hanson, cond. Mercury Living Presence, recorded in the Eastman Theatre, Rochester, NY, May 5, 1957
Mercury's pioneering recording of Three Places in New England conducted by the distinguished American composer Howard Hanson in 1957, with a pioneering recording of Ives's Third Symphony on the flip side of the original LP, holds up awfully well -- it pulses with life. In fact, down below we're going to sneak in the whole performance. (The Hanson Ives coupling has been reissued as a Mercury Living Presence CD that includes Hanson recordings of two other important American orchestral works: William Schuman's New England Triptych and Peter Mennin's Fifth Symphony.)
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, David Zinman, cond. Argo, recorded in Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, September 1994
As for the Zinman-Baltimore performance, so gloriously expansive and sonorous -- well, goodness gracious, listen to it while (re)reading Ives's account of his and Harmony's honeymoon view of the Housatonic --
"We walked in the meadows along the river, and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and elm trees were something that one would always remember. Robert Underwood Johnson, in his poem The Housatonic at Stockbridge, paints the scene beautifully."and tell me you can't see and hear -- even smell -- everything described.
You'll note that so far we've been dealing only with the orchestral "Housatonic at Stockbridge," the last of the Three Pieces in New England, music that stretches traditional ears only a little, so that, as I suggested, it has a particularly Ivesian way of burrowing into one's head -- or at least this listener's head. I don't think I"m alone here, though. I get the feeling, for example, that by the time David Zinman made his recording of Three Places "The Housatonic" was simply exploding in his head. (You notice how we once again have that stealth master D.Z. simply showing us, without muss or fuss, how the job is meant to be done!)
THEN IVES MADE A SONG OF "THE HOUSATONIC," WHICH
WOULD BECOME A FAVORITE AMONG IVES SONG-SINGERS
I think there's sometimes confusion on this point: that "The Housatonic at Stockbridge" began life as an orchestral piece, in 1914, and didn't become a song until 1921 -- confusion that may be enhanced by Ives's own citation of the Robert Underwood Johnson poem in connection with the vista he was trying to re-create musically.
It's not hard to appreciate why singers who explore Ives's songs usually find their way to "The Housatonic," and enterprising pianists have a grand time with Ives's keyboard simulation of the ingenious orchestral textures. We've already heard our standbys Jan DeGaetani and Gerald Finley. Let's listen to them again, and this time add Roberta Alexander and Susan Graham to the mix. I'm especially taken by the bold inventiveness of the piano-playing of Alexander's accompanist, Tan Crone, though she doesn't seem much concerned with the hush that most performers of the piece -- both orchestral and vocal -- work for.
[Afterthought: After rehearing the DeGaetani-Kalish performance (see below), I might say something similar about Gilbert Kalish's vibrantly nuanced playing -- and I love that too. It can be fantastic when a pianist works for the kind of hush we kind of expect in the orchestral "Housatonic," but that's not the only way to go. -- Ed.]
IVES: "The Housatonic at Stockbridge" (song version, 1921)
Contented river! In thy dreamy realm
the cloudy willow and the plumy elm:
thou beautiful! From ev'ry dreamy hill
what eye but wanders with thee at thy will.
Contented river! And yet over-shy
to mask thy beauty from the eager eye;
hast thou a thought to hide from field and town?
In some deep current of the sunlit brown.
Ah! there's a restive ripple,
and the swift red leaves
September's firstlings faster drift.
Wouldst thou away, dear stream?
Come, whisper near!
I also of much resting have a fear:
Let me tomorrow thy companion be,
by fall and shallow to the adventurous sea!
-- text by Robert Underwood Johnson ("by permission")
Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano; Gilbert Kalish, piano. Nonesuch, published 1976
Gerald Finley, bass-baritone; Julius Drake, piano. Hyperion, recorded in All Saints Church (Durham Road), East Finley, London, Nov. 10-12, 2004
Roberta Alexander, soprano; Tan Crone, piano. Etcetera, released 1984
Susan Graham, mezzo-soprano; Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano. EMI-Warner Classics, recorded in the Grosser Saal of the Vienna Konzerthaus, Nov. 6-8, 2003
ANY PREFERENCE BETWEEN THE ORCHESTRAL AND "ART SONG" VERSIONS OF "THE HOUSATONIC AT STOCKBRIDGE"?
No reason why we necessarily should have a preference, but it so happens that I do. The orchestral version seems to me a four-minute miracle in its musical re-creation of that honeymoon walk the Iveses took, which the song version tends to reduce to sung melody plus keyboard effects.
AFTERTHOUGHT: FOR A CHANGE, THE JOKE'S ON MEYou may recall that we've already heard a hybrid "Housatonic" devised by Michael Tilson Thomas for his 1999 San Francisco Symphony performance of Three Places in New England, where he brought the orchestral set to a conclusion with a choral performance of the Underwood text of "The Housatonic at Stockbridge" overlaying the original orchestral part. It's an interesting compromise, I think, at least for a while. The choral rendering has a very different effect from a solo-voice performance. Where the latter reduces the song to a soloist-plus-accompanist situation, MTT's chorus is more like part of the texture of the whole, and of course we don't lose the orchestral part. Of course, after a while MTT's chorus becomes overwhelming and most of the point of the piece seems to me squandered.
All that said about my preference, I've just listened again to the DeGaetani-Kalish and Finley-Drake performances, and my goodness! And so different from each other -- the former distinctly chill in perspective, the latter giving off warmth not least in the glowing half-voice singing.
This, by the way, is another example of why these posts tend not to make sense to me -- if they're ever going to make any sense to me -- until the audio clips are "live," which in the current blog format doesn't happen till the post is published. -- Ed.
The San Francisco Three Places was MTT's second recording of the set. It might be fun to listen to the two "Housatonic"s serially.
The standard orchestral version:
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas, cond. DG, recorded in Symphony Hall, January 1970
MTT's chorus-and-orchestra version:
San Francisco Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas, cond. RCA, recorded live in Davies Symphony Hall, Sept. 30-Oct. 3, 1999
SHOULD WE TAKE TIME TO LISTEN TO ALL OF THE
THREE PLACES IN NEW ENGLAND? I THINK SO!
IVES: Three Places in New England:
i. The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common
(Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment)
ii. Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut
iii. The Housatonic at Stockbridge
[i. at 0:01; ii. at 9:14; iii. at 15:35] Ensemble intercontemporain, Matthias Pintscher, cond. Live performance from the Cité de la Musique, Paris, Sept. 29, 2016
[i. at 0:01; ii. at 9:06; iii. at 15:15] Cleveland Orchestra, Christoph von Dohnányi, cond. Decca, recorded in Severance Hall, June 1993
[i. at 0:01; ii. at 8:54; iii. at 14:35] Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, Howard Hanson, cond. Mercury Living Presence, recorded in the Eastman Theatre, Rochester, NY, May 5, 1957
HMM, WE HAVEN'T GOTTEN TO THOSE TWO SONG FRAGMENTS
And I do want to talk a little about the performances of "Memories" and "General William Booth Enters into Heaven." For that matter, we've still got some other Ives songs I meant to include. So perhaps this is best left to a supplementary post. We've still got some other songs to get to.
And there's more yet to be done on Ives. I want to revisit my favorite Ives work, the Second Symphony, bringing in Leonard Bernstein to talk to us (literally!) about the composer. And eventually I want to venture into a genuinely difficult Ives work, the Concord Sonata.
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