Briefly, during this fourth and final movement that Ives called an “impressionistic picture” of Thoreau, a flute appears as if to figurate the poet himself, drafting him into the tribute. To Ives, Thoreau was “a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘the Symphony.’” Instead, Thoreau heard music in the forest.
“The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine his value as a composer,” Ives wrote of Thoreau. One can hear this rhythm in “Sounds,” which takes off from a perfectly-shaped short statement that could be the first line of an ode: “I love a broad margin to my life.” Here is the delicious excerpt in its entirety:
I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness.... I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. . . . For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished.
In addition to nature, Ives discovered time (and tempo) in Walden. "Throughout Walden, a text that he is always pounding out is Time,” Ives wrote, interspersing his own words with quotes from Thoreau’s:
“Time for inside work out-of-doors; preferably out-of-doors, though "you may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor house." Wherever the place-time there must be. Time to show the unnecessariness of necessities which clog up time. Time to contemplate the value of man to the universe-and of the universe to man-man's excuse for being. Time from the demands of social conventions. Time from too much labor (for some) which means too much to eat, too much to wear, too much material, too much materialism (for others). Time from the "hurry and waste of life." Time in “St. Vitus Dance”.
And Time, of course, is prone to running out. "Who has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever?" Thoreau wonders in the conclusion of Walden.
17. Essays Before A Sonata and Other Writings (Norton)
A deceased author cannot be queried, and one must either print his text exactly as he left it in the last approved version, or risk burdening the reader with the explanations and apparatuses of textual scholarship. The latter treatment would probably have annoyed Ives as it did Emerson, who speaks scornfully of the "Third state" (with the world and the soul) consisting of "the restorers of readings, the emmendators, [and] the bibliomaniacs of all degrees" scripts and the printed book.
An obviously necessary revision of the punctuation in the book could not be undertaken without looking up all the passages in quotation marks, of which there were hundreds. Even if it were decided that bolstering Ives' quotations with reference was unnecessary pedantry, there was no other way to distinguish between real quotations, paraphrases, allusions, or passages placed in quotes to express strong feeling.
—- Howard Boatwright, opening Ives’ Essays with a husky explanation of his edits to the archival manuscript
Howard Boatwright edited and compiled this version of Ives’ Essays Before A Sonata. As he notes in the introduction, the original manuscript was previously thought to have been lost and its discovery “opened the possibility for a new edition of the Essays, which in its privately printed edition of 1920 had not been deemed suitable for literal reprinting by those who had considered it. The manuscript offered the opportunity to consult with the author, as it were, in correcting various lapses which had occurred in the 1920 book.”
While sorting through Ives manuscripts, a lengthy, unpublished essay titled "The Majority" was discovered, alongside numerous versions of “Ives' other political and economic fantasies.” Boatwright mentions that the following were also found: rough drafts of well-known prefaces and program notes for Ives pieces, including the "Postface" to 114 Songs; materials relating to Ives’ one article in the sphere of speculative music theory: "Some Quarter-tone Impressions.”
Ives writing wasn’t directly concerned with music. Instead, it sketched the field of interest that inspired his music. When concerned with music, Ives wrote music. And when he used words, he did so “to provide the general philosophical support for his compositions,” writes Boatwright, since “words were the principal weapon when his idealism led him (around 1918) away from attempting to reform the musical conventions of his youth towards attacking the weaknesses of our national and international life, as he saw them.”
As he saw them, of course, acknowledges that Ives’ views tended to eschew the popular sentiment. He was cantankerous and driven by the dissonances that emerged from complex juxtapositions. What his editor calls “the language of conversation transferred to a book” also marks Ives’ musical compositions. This line comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of Montaigne: "It is the language of conversation transferred to a book."
Ives often wove the names of authors, musicians, and public figures into his prose, and Boatwright made an effort to track down the actual quotations as well as the lesser known allusions, finally settling for "a revision of the punctuation, done after collation of the book and manuscript, and the tracing of the quotations." In a sense, Ives punctuated the way he scored music.
“While most writers use commas for grammatical clarity, to Ives they are "phrasing," in actual time, functioning like the phrasing slurs of musical notation,” Boatwright observes. “If more time is required to articulate the sibilants at the end of one word and the beginning of another, he puts a comma to indicate the necessary slight pause.”
To reduce the stressfulness of Ives’ syntax, Boatwright made the editorial decision to reduce “the use of commas in this edition … to normalcy, for the most part,” thus freely interchanging Ives’ original pause-markings (i.e.commas, semicolons, colons, and dashes) in order to “make the important clauses stand out as clearly as possible in Ives’ often very long sentences.”
No change has been made without keeping in mind one striking instance of a complete alteration in the meaning caused by the absence in the 1920 book of two commas which were present in the MS. The passages were: (Book) "And unity is too generally conceived of"; (MS) "And unity is, too, generally conceived of."
A special feature of Ives' style is his coinage of new hyphenated combinations. Unnecessary ones such as "late-spring," or "city-man" have been eliminated. But highly characteristic combinations such as "manner-over-insistence," and "image-necessity-stimulants" have been allowed to stand. A few hyphenated combinations present in the MS but not in the 1920 book have been noted.
Ives uses quotation marks for direct quotations, indirect quotations, mere echoes of another author's prose, allusion, and to indicate strong feeling, which is quite frequently sarcasm. (See the dedication of the book, in which his ironical quotation marks have been retained; those which were placed around the title of the book on the title page have been removed.)
With the feeling of most typographers strongly against excessive use of quotation marks because they make the page appear to have broken out in a rash, an attempt was made to remove some of the unnecessary ones in the Essays.
Ives was brave enough, and absorbed deeply enough in his subject to quote frequently from memory. But, whatever the reason, the fact is that scarcely a quotation in the entire book is exactly like its source. When the differences between Ives' text and the source did not involve changes in meaning, and were only single words or punctuation, the corrections have been made silently in the text, and the source given. If there was an interesting change of meaning (e.g., Thoreau: "They shall live with the license of higher beings"; Ives: "They shall love with the license of higher beings"), or if the whole quotation was drastically altered, the form in the source has been given in a note.
Amused by Boatwright’s fastidiousness, I turn back to the music.
18. Central Park in the Dark
I started with it, and I can’t help returning to this marvel of presence in Ives’ programmatic work. First performed on May 11, 1946, by chamber orchestra students from Juilliard Graduate School as conducted by Theodore Bloomfield, Central Park in the Dark is a masterpiece of layering where orchestral textures meet in the fray of the sidewalks. A haunting playground of polytonality. Ives sets the clashing orchestral sections against each other, refusing to tame them with politeness, suggesting perhaps that extraordinary difference can coexist in public park spaces. Around 3:58, one can hear the ambient strings arguing with the syncopated ragtime pianos as ruptured by a passing brass street band. The rhythms swirl as the trumpets predominate, culminating in a fantastic kerfuffle at 4:51.
19. Co-creators
"One thing I am certain of is that, if I have done anything good in music, it was first, because of my father, and second because of my wife," Ives said.
20. Premiere of Concord Sonata
[Ives] has rewritten his works so many times, adding dissonances and polyrhythms, that it is impossible to tell just at what date the works assumed the surprising form we know now.
—- Elliott Carter wrote in 1939, when reviewing the premiere of Ives Concord Sonata
According to James B. Sinclair's catalogue of Ives' works, the sonata was publicly premiered by John Kirkpatrick on November 28, 1938 in Cos Cob, Connecticut. There had been earlier performances of isolated movements and excerpts. The second performance (given in many sources as the premiere), also given by Kirkpatrick, was given at the Town Hall in New York City on January 20, 1939. Among those present was Elliott Carter, who reviewed the piece in the March–April 1939 edition of the journal Modern Music.
21. Against anxiety of influence
Ives had no truck with Bloom’s anxiety of influence. If anything, his concern was to include as many voices and textures as humanly possibly across the variants of his pieces. Few phrasings were set in stone. And many of us adore him for that. Even Classical Nerd admits: “Ives is my favorite composer.”
22. Nature as companion and teacher
If he will take her as a companion and teacher, and not as a duty or a creed, she will give him greater thrills and teach him greater truths than man can give or teach-she will reveal mysteries that mankind has long concealed. It was the soul of Nature, not natural history, that Thoreau was after. A naturalists mind is one predominantly scientific, more interested in the relation of a flower to other flowers than its relation to any philosophy or anyone's philosophy. A transcendent love of Nature and writing […] doesn't necessarily make a naturalist.
It would seem that, although thorough in observation […] and with a keen perception of the specific, a naturalist—-inherently—-was exactly what Thoreau was not. He seems rather to let Nature put him under her microscope than to hold her under his. He was too fond of Nature to practice vivisection upon her. He would have found that painful, "for was he not a part with her?" But he had this trait of a naturalist, which is usually foreign to poets, even great ones: he observed acutely even things that did not particularly interest him— a useful natural gift rather than a virtue. The study of Nature may tend to make one dogmatic but the love of Nature surely does not.
—- Charles Ives on Thoreau’s Nature
23. Aside on Aeolian harps
For this poet, one of the most sanguine objects that traverses the span of transcendentalisms is the Aeolian harp.
"He thought the best of music was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of the telegraph wire," Emerson said of his “beautiful enemy,” Henry David Thoreau. Ives quotes Emerson on "the polyphonies and harmonies that come to us through his [Thoreau’s] poetry." Of course, the lyre bears an an ancient association with poetry and Orphism, but Ives’ takes Thoreau's writing as poetry for more immediate reasons, namely, genre-porousness and fluidity characterized Emersonian transcendentalism as well as Ives’ own compositional strategies.
Transcendentalists never refused the existence of poems as such. In his Collected Essays, for example, Emerson framed each essay with a poem that he did not bother to explicate within the text. The poems perch above the doorway of his prose like levitating address markers. What seems blurred is the idea of the lineated poem as a holier form than the prose.
Let’s go back to how Ives’ gets seduced by Thoreau’s fascination with the Aeolian sounds of the telegraph wire in Walden. In Thoreau’s words:
"… like an Aeolian harp, which I immediately suspected to proceed from the cord of the telegraph vibrating in the just awakening morning wind, and applying my ear to one of the posts I was convinced that it was so. It was the telegraph harp singing its message through the country, its message sent not by men, but by Gods."
At one point in “Sounds,” Thoreau mourns the vanishment of background hum. “Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever,” he admits, while feeling his way towards a soundscape of place, and doing what many of us do when wandering through a city to map its soundscape for a poem. Sounds tell time; they are life’s beat, its rhythm-track. Wistfully, Thoreau even goes so far as to naturalize the city sounds from within the woods, writing: “Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness.” This natural melody of the bells is also likened to a harp when Thoreau adds, “at a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept.”
Perhaps the most resonant, vibe-heavy line is the one that follows: “All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.” (italics mine) Human eyes and ears fondle the things carried to us across a great distance. Thoreau’s sentiment calls to mind the musical marking, lontano (from Italian word meaning “at or from a great distance”) often used to describe something intended to be played extremely quietly or very distantly offstage. For example, György Ligeti's 1967 piece, lontano, crafts an ethereal, orchestral dreamscape from tone clusters, shifting colors, and dissolving images.
But faraway sounds are distracting me from Thoreau’s universal lyre, and the relationship it suggests between sound and place, a relationship secured by local acoustics and the conditions by which sound is shaped when moving into different areas. “The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it,” Thoreau wrote, stressing that the echo “is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.”
24. Variations on America
It is easy to understand the doubts of audiences, befuddled by under-rehearsed and under-enthused orchestral performances of Ives's work. It is harder to forgive this neglect in professional musicians. Not long ago, I was in a car with a distinguished British cellist who admitted he knew just one Ives piece: the cheeky satire "Variations on America." When I mentioned the anniversary, he said that Ives was "cute," but that was it. This condescending opinion, offered in near-perfect ignorance, made me want to dump every last ounce of British tea into the nearest harbor.
—- Jeremy Denk, “At 15o, Charles Ives Still Reflects Darkness and Hope” (New York Times)
