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:

IVES: Decoration Day (No. 2 of the New England Holidays Symphony)

[An interesting assortment of recordings, I think, and as so often happens, David Zinman's seems to me the most interesting. (Decoration Day is covered in Wikipedia's article on the Holidays Symphony.)]

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, David Zinman, cond. Argo, recorded in Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, September 1994
Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Donald Johanos, cond. Turnabout (Vox), recorded in McFarlin Auditorium, Southern Methodist University, Apr. 20-21, 1967

Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas, cond. CBS-Sony, recorded in Medinah Temple, 1986

IVES: Central Park in the Dark

[Wikipedia has a useful article on Central Park in the Dark.]

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. DG, recorded in Symphony Hall, February 1976

Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Litton, cond. Hyperion, recorded in Eugene McDermott Concert Hall, Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, Jan. 12-15, 2006

IVES: The Unanswered Question

[I thought it would be interesting to pair Lenny B's recordings, from such different points in his life and career. I think he loved the piece, not least the very idea of The Unanswered Question. (He appropriated the title for the six-lecture series of Norton Lectures he gave at Harvard in 1973, into which he poured so much of himself in time, effort, and energy.) FWIW, he thought he knew what Ives's unanswered question was: Whither music? Do we agree? (Again, Wikipedia has a useful article on the piece.)]

William Vacchiano, trumpet; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Manhattan Center, Apr. 17, 1964

[Philip Smith, trumpet?]; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live in Avery Fisher Hall, Nov. 22, 1988


SO WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?

They all start great, right? And they end well too, right? But I've had to own up that, long before they end, I've pretty well lost the thread. It happens even in a piece as compact as "The Alcotts," in a performance as sympathetic as Jeremy Denk's. At the start it sounds like mygosh, we're gonna hear something special, and then, well, my ears are marking time till they're able to reconnect.

Now, I described "The Alcotts" as "the most painless sample" of my experience of Ives "the hard way." Why don't we try an, er, less painless sample: the second movement of the Concord Sonata, a collection of four tributes to, or musical renderings or impressions (or something) of the New England transcendentalists Ives took such pride in thinking of as his spiritual forebears. The first and much the longest of these subjects is "Emerson," the last "Thoreau," and between "Emerson" and "The Alcotts" comes "Hawthorne."

Now Ives is careful to caution us that we're not going to get a "comprehensive conception of Hawthorne," which "either in words or music, must have for its basic theme something that has to do with the influence of sin upon the conscience -- something more than the Puritan conscience, but something which is permeated by it." He invokes a phrase from Hazlitt, "the moral power of imagination": "Hawthorne would try to spiritualize a guilty conscience. He would sing of the relentlessness of guilt, the inheritance of guilt, the shadow of guilt darkening innocent posterity."

Sounds like it could be interesting, don't you think? However --

This fundamental part of Hawthorne is not attempted in our music . . . which is but an 'extended fragment' trying to suggest some of his wilder, fantastical adventures, into the half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal realms. . . . .

He goes on to offer a whole series of Hawthorne-story images, which I should probably quote, and maybe will when we come to listen to the whole of Concord (which, yes, we're going to do). For now, though, let's just listen for his musical evocations of "fantastical adventures, into the half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal realms."

IVES: Second Piano Sonata, "Concord, Mass., 1840-60":
ii. Hawthorne

"An 'extended fragment' trying to suggest some of [Hawthorne's]
wilder, fantastical adventures, into the half-childlike,
half-fairylike phantasmal realms" (Ives)

John Kirkpatrick, piano. Columbia-CBS, recorded in New York City, Mar. 28-29, 1968

No, for the most part I'm still not getting it. And again, I don't think our performer is the problem. Our pianist, John Kirkpatrick (1905-1991), is a figure of almost incalculable importance to the Ives story, in a wide range of roles, both during the composer's lifetime and for decades after -- roles we'll have to talk about when the time comes. In the first instance he was invaluable to Ives as a performer, someone who was actually interested in getting out and presenting Ives's music to the musical public.

What we've heard is from JK's stereo remake of the Concord Sonata, nearly a quarter-century after his landmark first recording, made in 1945 (a pretty audacious undertaking by Columbia Masterworks), which is of almost incalculable importance in the Ives timeline. According to present plan, we're going to hear the 1945 version in its entirety -- when we get there.

[NOTE: If you want a head start on the Concord Sonata, I know no better place to turn than Kyle Gann's article for the Charles Ives Society "Following the Concord Sonata." Gann's preoccupation with the piece has produced a book-length study, Charles Ives's Concord: Essays After a Sonata (plainly referencing Ives's own Essays Before a Sonata; University of Illinois Press, 2017).]

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