Afterpost: Gregg Smith & Co.show us that Ives's "bells-and-whistles" version really adds a dimension to "General William Booth Enters into Heaven"

Choral masterworker Gregg Smith (1931-2016)

Archie Drake, bass; Gregg Smith Singers, Columbia Chamber Orchestra, Gregg Smith, cond. Columbia-CBS, recorded in Legion Hall, Hollywood, May 4, 1966
[NOTE: We're going to hear the performance again, with printed vocal text.]

by Ken

My original plan was just to add what follows as an "afterthought" ("Some Afterthoughts on the Performances") to the post "'Jesus came from the courthouse door': 'General William Booth Enters into Heaven' and other, variously irresistible Ives songs," with a note like this:

I'm sure you're tired of hearing about how I don't have a chance to hear audio clips in their post places until a post is posted, and even then not till I can get past the exhaustion of birthing the post. That said, a couple of thoughts.

So I thought it would be better to spin those performances out into an "afterpost."

"Jesus came from the courthouse door": "General William Booth Enters into Heaven" and other, variously irresistible Ives songs

SUNDAY NOONISH UPDATE: Internet Archive seems to have recovered from its outage, so we're back in business.
MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: For "afterthoughts" on the performances
of "General William Smith Enters into Heaven," there's now an "afterpost."

Donald Gramm (1927-1983)  [photo by Christian Steiner]

. . . (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?)

Jesus came from the courthouse door,
stretched his hands above the passing poor.
Booth saw not, but led his queer ones,
round and round, round and round and round,
[or: "round and round the mighty courthouse square,"]
and round, and round and round, and round and round . . .

-- text from the Vachel Lindsay poem
"General William Booth Enters into Heaven"

Donald Gramm, bass-baritone; Richard Cumming, piano. Desto, recorded c1964

Donald Gramm, bass-baritone; Donald Hassard, piano. From their Town Hall (New York City) recital of Feb. 24, 1976

Nathan Gunn, baritone; Kevin Murphy, piano. EMI-Warner Classics, recorded in St. Mary's Church, Highgate, London, Mar. 31-Apr. 2, 1998

'I can see him shuffling down, to the barn or to the town': Memories were always close to the heart of Ives's sense of artistic purpose

[POST CONSTRUCTION ZONE -- HARD HATS RECOMMENDED --
OKAY, SO MAYBE WE JUST GO AHEAD AND CALL THIS A POST]

Roberta Alexander and indomitable accompanist Tan Crone

IVES: "Memories":

B, Rather Sad (Adagio)
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]

-- text by the composer

Roberta Alexander, soprano; Tan Crone, piano. Etcetera, recorded in the Netherlands, released 1984
The other performances we heard "highlighted" in the last post:

Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano; Gilbert Kalish, piano. Nonesuch, released 1976

Susan Graham, mezzo-soprano; Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano. EMI-Warner Classics, recorded in the Grosser Saal of the Vienna Konzerthaus, Nov. 6-8, 2003
And these performances (which we've heard before) remind
us that this could be a nephew remembering his uncle:
Gerald Finley, bass-baritone; Julius Drake, piano. Hyperion, recorded in All Saints Church (Durham Road), East Finchley, London, Nov. 1-12, 2004

Jerry Hadley, tenor; Eric Dalheim, piano. Live performance from the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), Nov. 14, 2000

by Ken

For personal reasons it was kind of important to me to get some kind of post up, in particular one that advances toward the other end of this detour from the last detour from the previous detour and so on, which produced the post "About this Ives thing, we can do it the easy way, or the hard way; or maybe we have to do it both ways." One thing in particular nagged at me as that post was taking shape, and nagged me even worse once it was posted: that what I was describing as "the easy way" of coming to grips with the Ives legacy was represented only by those three clips of the same under-a-half-minute bit of a song-section that is itself only part of the two-part song "Memories."

I think it made for a darned fine half-minute of music, but in my head I kept hearing and yearning for the full "B" section of "Memories" -- and so here it is. In the process we have also answered the question I posed as to which of those three performances we were going to really focus on. And I hope there are folks who've been here and naturally assumed, noting that Jan DeGaetani was one of the contenders, that she would be the "winner."


LET'S BE PERFECTLY CLEAR: IN THIS GROUPING
OF PERFORMANCES, THERE WASN'T ANY "LOSER"

About this Ives thing, we can do it the easy way, or the hard way; or maybe we have to do it both ways

[MONDAY MORNING UPDATE: The post is more or less reconstructed (if you missed the earlier notice, I cleverly overwrote an essentially complete version of the post with an earlier file that contained just the opening), but I need some sleep before even attempting to read it. I should also find a link for the commentaries Ives included in the Concord score (which he had published himself, along with the volume of Essays Before a Sonata).
[MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: I've fixed some stuff and added some stuff, including a third Decoration Day recording (the Zinman). -- Ken]

(1) A taste of THE EASY WAY

Not quite half a minute from the "B" section, "Rather Sad," of Ives's song "Memories" -- from two performances we've heard and a third we haven't:


Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano; Gilbert Kalish, piano. Nonesuch, released 1976

Roberta Alexander, soprano; Tan Crone, piano. Etcetera, recorded in the Netherlands, 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

and: (2) A taste of THE HARD WAY

Jeremy Denk plays "The Alcotts," the third -- and much the user-friendliest -- movement of Ives's Concord Sonata, apparently an encore at the 92nd Street Y, New York City, Dec. 3, 2011. (Watch it here - with applause!)

by Ken

We've got to get the Ives thing back on track. It's hard, but we'll just have to will our way through it.

As suggested above, we've already heard the complete performances of Ives's two-part song "Memories" from which the first two excerpts above are drawn, and of course we're going to hear all three performances complete, along with some others, though we'll be focusing on one in particular. Can you guess which? Maybe it'll be clearer when we hear their full "B" sections. For now, I don't think much more needs to be said about this almost excruciatingly beautiful half-minute of words set to music. Through the magic of the singer's memories, in just this bit of the song, I think we can see and hear her uncle, and understand his importance to her.

So that's our taste of the "easy" part of an Ives reckoning, and when we come back to it we're going to be sampling and resampling a number of Ives songs. Of the "hard" part, I've offered, in "The Alcotts" from Ives's massive (generally in the 45-50-minute range) Concord Sonata what seems to me the most painless sample of a problem I realize I run into a lot with Ives, as happened when I stacked Central Park in the Dark on top of a couple of other short orchestral works, Decoration Day (one of the components of the Holidays Symphony, which you'll recall the composer always thought of as potentially either free-standing or composite) and The Unanswered Question.

You remember them: