There's one major Ives work I've really loved for a long time, and we're going to hear it again, with a whopper of an introduction

[In our Ives journey we're really not quite ready for this, but at this point it's got pretty much all the elements I intended for it, and if it doesn't exactly add up to a post, exactly, I don't know whether it's worth the effort to neaten these elements into more proper form. -- Ed.]

Ah, good old KS 6155 -- still for me the basic Ives recording. (It's
been reissued in many forms, and shouldn't be hard to find on CD.)

"All the brave resolves in the world won't make good music. Nor will patriotic songs, or impudent shockers, or reverent gestures toward Bach and Beethoven. It's talent that counts in the end, and talent is what Ives had, and in such abundance that we must call it genius."

-- Leonard Bernstein, in a 1966 discussion of Ives
which we'll be hearing and reading

ARE WE READY FOR THIS? (IF NOT, NEVER FEAR:
MAESTRO BERNSTEIN IS ABOUT TO PREPARE US!)

"It is something to shout about, isn't it? Especially dating --
as it does -- from 1913." -- Maestro Bernstein
[Gotta know? This clip is also "Ex. 9" below. -- Ed.]

"LEONARD BERNSTEIN DISCUSSES CHARLES IVES" (1966)


Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in New York City, June 2, 1966
[no commercial use, and no copyright infringement intended]

Suddenly, over a decade after his death, Charles Ives is on the verge of being canonized. America has always desperately needed her saints, partly because she is so young comparatively, and partly out of a certain profound cultural guilt. Now, Ives fits perfectly into his saintly niche. We have suddenly discovered our musical Mark Twain, Emerson, and Lincoln all rolled into one.

[c0:28] Actually, most of the shouting about Ives is based on his pioneering: like his experiments with atonality even before Schoenberg had formulated his ideas; like his experiments with free dissonance half a century ago; his experiments with multiple rhythms, with two or more actual pieces of music going on at the same time; with new techniques of piano-writing, using fists and palms and rulers, that sort of thing.

[c0:57] All of these can be found in Ives' Fourth of July, that wild and beautiful tone poem. In fact, they can all be found in the following short climactic excerpt, and if you listen carefully, you'll be able to discern, for example, three patriotic tunes going on at once: first, "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," screeched out by trumpets and trombones in octaves -- well, not quite octaves:
Ex. 1 (c1:25)

[c1:29] That, of course, would be an imitation of the local brass band of Danbury, Connecticut. But simultaneously, one valiant cornet is trying to burst through with his version of "Mine eyes have seen the glory":
Ex. 2 (c1:42)

[c1:46] And at the very same time, xylophone and piano are hammering away at "Yankee Doodle":
Ex. 3 (c1:52)

[c1:56] Now, all three of these competing tunes are set against a background of caterwauling harmonies made of tone clusters that slide up and down in the strings:
Ex. 4 (c2:06)

[c2:11] And against rhythm clusters that are almost impossible to define. Take the percussion section, for instance. The timpani is playing one march rhythm:
Ex. 5 (c2:21)

[c2:27] The snare drum is playing another:
Ex. 6 (c2:29)

[c2:34] And the bass drum yet another:
Ex. 7 (c2:36)


[c2:41.5] Of course, all this mélange grows out of Ives's impulse to picture in sound several marching bands operating at once. That's one of his favorite nostalgic techniques. But apart from any descriptive purpose, it is still multiple music, dissonant music, employing atonal elements, and even, at the climax, that piano writing I spoke of that uses the forearms rather than the fingers:
Ex. 8 (c3:07)


[c3:11] Now listen to this excerpt complete, with all these elements going on at once:
Ex. 9 (c3:16)


[c3:53] It is something to shout about, isn't it? Especially dating -- as it does -- from 1913.

[c4:00] But the real measure of Ives's greatness is that those works of his that do not rely on such experimentation -- works which employ the normal procedures of music as he found them -- that those works, for all their simplicity and easy listenability, succeed in carrying a strongly personal and original message.

[c4:21] This Second Symphony is such a work. It contains few, if any, problems of dissonance or modernistic techniques. Its only problem is one of attitude: our attitude as well as his. Let's just try to identify ourselves with the young Ives of this Second Symphony, a mere 27 years old, living in a country and a community where being a musician was then considered vaguely reprehensible, and trying withal to record the sound images of his world. Those images were a combination of the great works of the German tradition -- Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner -- plus the local music he lived with -- hymns, folk tunes, patriotic songs, and marches, college ditties, and the like. All of these can be found in the Second Symphony, from Beethoven's Fifth to "Turkey in the Straw." But it all comes out Ivesian, somehow transmogrified into his own personal statement. It's really astonishing.

[c5:24] For example, Beethoven's Fifth: Ives had an obsession about those famous four notes,
[c5:30 -- demonstrates at the piano]
which keep turning up in various works of his. He had in his mind some kind of association between those notes and the philosophy of transcendentalism, which he inherited from Emerson, Thoreau, and company. But when you hear those notes in the third movement of this Second Symphony of Ives, you will hear them hushed and mystic, in the manner of the kind of church organ-playing with which he was familiar.
[c5:58-- orchestral excerpt]
[c6:07] Very different from Beethoven's fierce original statement.
[c6:11 -- orchestral excerpt]
[c6:18] There's Brahms quoted in this movement, too -- a fragment from his First Symphony --
[c6:24 -- orchestral excerpt]

But in Ives's hands it's quite another story, joined on as it is to another quoted fragment from, of all things, "America the Beautiful."
[c6:43 -- orchestral excerpt]

[c7:00] Then there are other references: to Brahms's Third Symphony, to Wagner's Tristan and his Walküre, to Bach, to Bruckner, and even to Dvořák's New World Symphony, but the Ives symphony never sounds like Brahms and Wagner and the rest. It sounds like Ives. It has all the freshness of a native American wandering in the grand palaces of Europe, like some of Henry James's Americans abroad, or perhaps more like Mark Twain's innocents. The European spirit has been Americanized, just as a Bach chorale gets Americanized into a Methodist hymn; it acquires a new total quality. In fact, Ives goes even further, by tossing odd bits of Americana into this European soup pot, thus making a new brew out of it: very American in flavor, like speaking French with an American accent, or better still, like speaking English with a Yankee twang.

[c7:58] The list of these oddments of Americana is very curious. Besides "America the Beautiful," which we've talked about, and "Turkey in the Straw" you'll also hear "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean" used here and there, finally emerging triumphant at the end.
[c8:14 -- orchestral excerpt]
Then you'll hear the "Camptown Races."
[c8:31 -- orchestral excerpt]
Then there are five or six hymn tunes, including "Bringing in the Sheaves,"
[c8:44 -- orchestral excerpt]
and also including "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" --
[c9:01 -- orchestral excerpt]
Then you'll hear phrases that sound very Stephen Fosterish, like a mixture of "Swanee River" and "Ol' Black Joe."
[c9:20 -- orchestral excerpt]
Then there's a delicate little touch of "Long, Long Ago."
[c9:50 -- orchestral excerpt]
Then there's a sudden wild sudden reference to "Reveille,"
[c9:59 -- orchestral excerpt]
and even a number of college songs, including one old Dartmouth favorite called "Where, oh where, are the pea-freen freshmen?"
[c10:12 -- orchestral excerpt]

[c10:36] And all this combines with Bach, Brahms, and Wagner, not making a hodge-podge but a real work -- original, eccentric, naïve, and as full of charm as an old lace valentine or a New England village green. And through it all there is always that fresh, awkward, endearing style of his, where all the rules get broken. There are gauche endings, unfinished phrases, wrong voice-leadings, inexplicable orchestration -- for example, the big climax of the third movement is played by the strings only. Now, no modern professional composer would have missed the chance for a big noise there by the whole orchestra.

[c11:19] Then there are those strange personal jokes of his -- burlesques, take-offs, deliberate infringements of conventionality, deliberately intending to shock -- like the very last chord of the whole piece, full of wrong notes, incongruous as a Marx Brothers gag, completely out of style and out of context, and containing every note of the chromatic scale but one.
[c11:43 -- orchestral excerpt]

[c11:49] And so he ends his symphony, with a yelp of laughter.

[c11:54] In short, this symphony adds up to a sort of personal memoir of Ives's own musical experience. In a way, it is music about other music, rather than about anything programmatic. When you hear "Turkey in the Straw" in this symphony,
[c12:09.5 -- orchestral excerpt]
you are not supposed to visualize a barn dance, but rather try to feel the impact of such a beloved, homely tune on one particular composer's consciousness, at a given moment in American cultural history, when anything that was any good at all was supposed to come from Europe. That's what's so touching about all this use of Americana; it comes to us full of Ives's brave resolve to be American, to write American music in the face of a diffident and uninterested public.

[c12:50] But all the brave resolves in the world won't make good music. Nor will patriotic songs, or impudent shockers, or reverent gestures toward Bach and Beethoven. It's talent that counts in the end, and talent is what Ives had, and in such abundance that we must call it genius.

SO, HERE ARE THE ACTUAL WORKS LENNY B. PRESENTED

IVES: Holidays Symphony:
iii. The Fourth of July

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Manhattan Center, New York City, Nov. 23, 1964

We haven't heard the Bernstein Fourth of July before, or this Fourth of July from Donald Johanos's excellent Holidays Symphony.


Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Donald Johanos, cond. Turnabout (Vox), recorded in McFarlin Auditorium, Southern Methodist University, Apr. 20-21, 1967

But we have heard these Zinman and Thomas performances. As usual, I love Zinman's seemingly easy, confidence assurance. And isn't that some kind of sound MTT draws from the Chicago Symphony? (In case you were wondering, the recording was produced by Steven Epstein. I did wonder -- enough to check it.)


Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, David Zinman, cond. Argo, recorded in Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, September 1994
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas, cond. CBS-Sony, recorded in Medinah Temple, 1986

THE IVES SECOND SYMPHONY
(in, I hope, sonically improved mp3 form)

The 1958 Bernstein Ives Second has long been a favorite recording of mine, and we have heard it before. I was kind of let down, however, casually rehearing my old audio clip. In my memory this recording captures some of the most lustrous playing Lenny B ever got from the NY Phil, and while I may just have been out of sorts, I wondered whether the twin audio ills of digitizing and mp3-ification were the spoilers here. The best I could do was to make a new complete clip, albeit still from a digital source. I'm hoping it sounds better.

IVES: Symphony No. 2:
i. Andante moderato
ii. Allegro [at 5:56]
iii. Adagio cantabile [at 16:17]
iv. Lento maestoso [at 27:01]
v. Allegro molto vivace [at 30:00]

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in the St. George Hotel, Brooklyn, Oct. 6, 1958