Captain America
Captain America
Could Charles Ives save America? We can't know when no institution will let him.
This Sunday, October 20 is Charles Ives 150th birthday. Ives is the single most important composer in American classical music, and one of the handful of absolutely essential figures in America cultural history. And if you only looked at the classical music schedule in New York City this season, you would never know that.
To be absolutely, painstakingly, back breakingly fair, you can hear Ives’ music in concert this season. The Momenta Quartet’s annual Momenta Festival opens tonight (I’m reviewing it for the New York Classical Review and that will be published sometime early Saturday afternoon), and it’s centered around Ives. Each of the four concerts features some of his string quartet music in the context of related works that came before and after (this festival is an annual must-see because it’s the musicians who choose the repertoire, so you get what matters to them—and it’s also free so why aren’t you going?!).
One of the Momenta concerts is on the birthday itself, and that same afternoon Joel Sachs is playing the final two movements of the Concord Sonata and Piano Sonata No. 1 at Bargemusic. December 12 at 92NY Jeremy Denk is playing the Concord, preceded by Beethoven, Joplin, Gottschalk, Nina Simone, and Wiliam Bolcom, which for my money is the concert that will put Ives’ importance and greatness on full display.
But orchestras? Well, you’re almost entirely shit-out-of-luck. The only Ives concert at Carnegie Hall comes from Bard’s student group, The Orchestra Now, which has rented Carnegie for a November 21 performance of “The Fourth of July” from the Holidays Symphony, Central Park in the Dark, Orchestral Set No. 2, and Symphony No. 2, and also has William Sharp singing1 American songs that Ives used in the orchestral music. That’s a fine introduction to Ives’ orchestral thinking.
Other than that there’s … zilch. There’s nothing else at Carnegie, and the New York Philharmonic is not playing Ives this season. Ah well, outside of Ives’ musical achievements, it’s not like he had any connection to New York City…
To get away from my snarky parochialism and out into the country at large, in late February the Cleveland Orchestra will be playing his Orchestral Set No. 2, along with Sibelius, Saariaho, and Adès. And among the symphony orchestras in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, there’s … absolutely nothing.
Why are there orchestras in America?
This is maddening, an affront to the music these institutions are supposedly preserving, and an insult to American culture, from American ensembles that exist in no small part from grants supplied by the taxes we all pay. That’s not tendentious. One of the important things about Ives was that he was a wealthy man who knew he was part of society and put in the work and the money to try and make the world around him better, including the music world and including helping musicians survive even if he didn’t much dig their music. He is a lesson to our current breed of plutocrats who sit on the boards of arts institutions while they both extract as much wealth as possible from society and evade any obligations toward the world.
Too many prestige cultural institutions still seem to think they are meant to please people like that. The New York Philharmonic was founded in 1842 to play European symphonic music; Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, etc, creating a simulacrum of European culture for the rich and the budding bourgeoisie of America to admire and emulate. For sixty years, there was no identifiable American symphonic music; composers likes Horatio Parker, with whom Ives studied at Yale, were writing orchestra music that imitated European styles, while pioneering American sounds from Louis Moreau Gottschalk were more popular in Europe than here. If American orchestras were to truly, fundamentally emulate the European model, they would play far more American music, just as the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra plays far more German music to celebrate its culture. Yet with the ideal opportunity, in the 21st century of all times, when American music has been an extraordinary force since WWII, these American orchestras are ignoring America. In 2024 …
Ives wrote his Symphony No. 1 at Yale, under Parker, then his Symphony No. 2 a few years later. The first is a fine example of how one can write a symphony in the style of Brahms, the second is a remarkable and revolutionary work. It is beautiful, puts its American roots on full display, and as it goes along begins to gradually and forcefully reject European musical culture for American, ending with a blasting raspberry2 in the brass aimed explicitly at the snobbery of bourgeois American cultural gatekeepers. Symphony No. 2 is not quite Ives the radical experimentalist, but it is Ives planting a flag and saying, “American music begins here and now.” Can I be the only person who thinks a concert of Brahm’s Symphony No. 2 followed by Ives’ Second would be … amazing?
That would be too much for a lot of people. A lot of people don’t like Ives, especially inside classical music. I get it; Ives challenges ideas about order and form in a way that threatens standard theory and practice. There is chaos in his music, which the technicians say proves he was bad at notation, the fundamental craft of composition. There’s all the experiments—layering different musics simultaneously, spatial music, conceptual art, microtonality—that’s pure experimentation, without theory. There’s the Christianity and the irreverence, the sheer clichéd American-ness: he went to Yale, went to church, played baseball and football, was an insurance executive. Even though his catalogue includes “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven,” “Ann Street,” “The Yale-Princeton Football Game,” “Some South-Paw Pitching,” The Unanswered Question and other orchestral works, he doesn’t seem to present as a serious artist from either the traditional or experimental perspective.
The Transcendentalist
Maybe it’s easier to grasp Ives from a literary and philosophical standpoint, a possible explanation for why, in my own experience, people who listen to things like prog-rock and free jazz are attracted to Ives, while the mainstream of music in general, and classical music in particular, ranges from distaste to hatred.
Ives was a product of the Transcendental tradition, which is the first major intellectual statement of a specifically American cultural thinking. This is explicit in Ives writing and music, not just the Concord with its movements named after important Transcendentalists. Because it’s music, what you get with the sonata and Symphony No. 4 is the spiritual side, Christianity and a universalism influenced by Eastern religion and philosophy, Emerson’s “Great Over-Soul.” Behind this is the point that Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman presented that being American meant inventing your own tradition, unbound by European nationalist cultural ideas. America is the place for invention and reinvention, the American artist has no obligation to any traditions except those they choose (think of the vast differences yet great Americanness of Ives, Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, and John Cage). An insurance executive can write music that has never been surpassed in both its humanity and experimentation.
Ives is the first great iconoclast in American music. That is a tough row to hoe in classical music, where hierarchies of institutions, academic and professional credentials, and conservatory/graduate school training rule. Those hierarchies are so pervasive in cultural society that it’s hard to appreciate how atavistic they are, how they are the opposite of American invention/reinvention (not to mention how the board model, with rich people supervising simply because they have a lot of money).
The Reason for our Discontents
Maybe this seems like sour grapes because I don’t get to hear this great music live. Sure, call it that. But let me point out that once again we have to go to the polls to decide to vote against (or maybe for) fascism. Fucking fascism, again! Fuck! And we have been plagued by this for almost ten fucking years because the institutions in American political society—journalism, governments, the courts—that we’re supposed to admire and respect as essential to society do not have the intelligence and moral and ethical courage to do their jobs, to actually preserve society in the face of nihilism, atavism, and violence. When faced with American vitality and resilience and the promise of the future or decadent fascism, institutions have opted out, they have either tried to remove themselves from the conversation, or put up an acceptable facade over the fascism. So give me my sour grapes, and if you don’t mind, grow your own.
This boils down to what America is, and why Ives is as American as can be and a lodestar for this country’s culture. America is a set of values for organizing political society, anyone who embraces these is an American. The decadent European idea that our home-grown fascists and their media networks love is that people who share ethnic roots, geography, language, and religion are the only ones who belong. One the one hand there is the actual history of a polyglot, multicultural essence and foundation of America (the first European language spoken here was Spanish) and the abstraction of that which was codified, no matter how imperfectly, in the Constitution, on the other is white Christianist, intellectually and morally inbred monoculture and state controlled violence. They have blood and soil, we have communities of spirit and values. The fascists have Puccini, but Beethoven would have been right at home in America. We have jazz, baseball, film noir, hard boiled detective fiction and pulp, and Ives. If only the people running the orchestras could see this.
Further Reading and Listening
The essential Ives works are the Concord Sonata, the orchestral music, and some of the many, many songs:
There’s many good Concords, but I think the best is Marc-André Hamelin’s second recording on Hyperion.
For the orchestral music (and some great, live singing with Thomas Hampson), it’s Michael Tilson Thomas. Some of the Seattle Symphony Ives recordings are superb, but MTT is in a league of his own.
Naxos has a multi-disc collection of all the vocal music, but for a single disc, the only choice is Jan de Gaetani and Gil Kalish.
(Sony is rereleasing a lot of historic recordings in an anthology that I’m eagerly awaiting, but I can’t offer any critical perspective on it yet as it’s unclear when it’s actually going to be released, and I’m still awaiting a reviewer’s copy.)
For reading, Jan Swafford’s biography of Ives is the best for the general reader, and Kyle Gann’s tremendous and original study of the Concord Sonata is one of the best analyses of a composition you’ll ever read.
Ives lives. Good listening to all.
I’ve done this in graduate school and with Hilary Hahn playing the violin sonatas at The Stone; singing things like “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean” gets you much, much deeper into what Ives was doing when you hear the music.
Ives aimed this at his imaginary enemy, Rollo, his idea of typical hidebound taste.
Good post. In a distantly related topic: I was also struck by how the Bud Powell centenary last month was almost entirely ignored.