Saving Ives' Symphonies from his Fans By Kyle Gann
Symphony Magazine, May-June 2004 (Volume 55, No. 3, pp. 13-17)
The symphonies of Charles Ives are in danger of falling into a critical no-man's land. Except for the Fourth, they seem not to offer what we listen to Ives for. Ives's fans, of course, champion him for his prescient innovations: his unprecedented dissonance, tone clusters, and rhythmic complexity. The symphonies, except for the Fourth, are not marked by these qualities. In fact, Ives himself was dismissive of his first three symphonies, considering them "weak sisters" to his other music (as expressed in the kind of macho language for which he has often been criticized). The First Symphony, he wrote in his Memos, "at least the last three movements, is, if not the worst..., one of the worst..., poorest, weakest things... I've ever written." The Third Symphony, likewise, was "boiled down, or rather suppressed, technically speaking." "[N]ot until I got to work on the Fourth Symphony," he wrote, "did I feel justified in writing quite as I wanted to...."
This is a damning dismissal of some of my favorite works by their own creator. Let's first put Ives' own attitude into perspective. We don't have much record of his thoughts from the years in which he was intently composing, up until his first major heart attack [2025 correction: diabetes diagnosis] in 1918. In 1921 he published the Essays Before a Sonata along with the Concord Sonata, and soon afterward his "Postface to 114 Songs." For a few years these were ignored except when ridiculed, but at last musicians like Henry Cowell and E. Robert Schmitz began to take notice. Ives became an active member of the composing community in 1923, when Schmitz took an interest in him and he became involved with first the Franco-American Musical Society, and later Cowell's New Music Society. He assembled his Memos during the 1930s.
By this point Ives was looking back at a decade of avant-garde experimentation - the 1920s - in which his wilder innovations had started to become acceptable, his dissonances more common and not so hair-raising. To what must have been his tremendous relief, he didn't have to apologize anymore, and there were musicians around who considered him a visionary rather than a freak. The earlier Charlie Ives who improvised on the organ, played church services, studied with Horatio Parker at Yale, and wrote those first three symphonies, must have seemed like a vestige of a distant past. Maynard Solomon has infamously charged that Ives "updated" his manuscripts to seem more modern than they had been when he wrote them - a charge roundly discredited by Ives scholars. But it is true that, with Cowell, Varese, Ruggles, and other modernist friends praising his tone clusters and polyrhythms, Ives may have felt a need to distance himself from his more conservative music.
This distancing strikes me as part and parcel with Ives's knee-jerk self-effacement. For nearly 30 years he had written music that no one seemed to think was any good. Or almost no one - in truth, no less an authority than George Whitefield Chadwick, symphonist and esteemed New England Conservatory professor, had pronounced [one of] Ives' songs "almost as good as Brahms," and that while Ives was still an undergrad student! And when Ives made his compositional debut in 1902 in New York with his cantata The Celestial Country, the public reception was so negative that he quit his church job, devoted himself to the insurance business, and made no further attempt to put his music forth publicly until 1921. Or is that really what happened? Actually, the reviews from the New York Times and Musical Courier were quite respectful, almost enthusiastic, and would have provided plenty of encouragement for any young composer determined to get his music out to the public.
The thing is, Ives couldn't believe his music was any good. The problem, as psychologist Sturart Feder documented in an insightful book (Charles Ives, "My Father's Song": A Psychoanalytic Biography), was that Ives's father had been pretty much unsuccessful as Danbury, Connecticut's town bandleader, and for a young man there is a great psychological barrier in surpassing one's father's level of success. The New York reviews made it likely that Charles would have done so with his first public step. Moreover, it is a common phenomenon for children to be released from psychological competition with their parents when they reach the age at which their parents died. George Ives died at 49; Charlie reached that age in 1923 - significantly, the year he entered New York's musical life. By the time Henry Cowell and the Franco-Americans rolled into view, Charles Ives was a nervous wreck and no longer composing, but he was a psychologically freed man.
In the 1920s, Cowell, Edgard Varese, and co. praised Ives for his innovations. The pieces that Cowell picked to focus on in his biography of Ives were the song "Paracelsus," the Concord Sonata, and the Universe Symphony, three of Ives's most radical works, dissonances piled on dissonances and rhythmic layers upon layers. The performances that came were of the Fourth Symphony, Three Places in New England, the Quarter-Tone pieces for two pianos: as radical as you could get. Later, in 1947, Ives would win the Pulitzer Prize for the Third Symphony, and afterward sulk that "Prizes are for boys." In his lifetime, Ives received very little reassurance that his early, "conservative" works were any good, and seems to have abandoned them.
So let's go back to that First Symphony, written between 1896 and '98, and look at it, not through Ives' own 1930s eyes, but through more objective ones. Its indebtedness to Dvorak is beyond question. Could the second movement's oboe solo over a sustained string background be any more patent an homage to the New World Symphony, or the scherzo's trio any more sweetly Tchaikovskian? And yet, already the work is more secure, more epic, more willing to go out on a limb and find its way back, than any symphony then yet written by an American. It is not nearly as repetitious as George Bristow's symphonies, nor as timidly careful in its motivic movement-links as the Chadwick symphonies. Despite its occasional rhythmic awkwardness, and its tendency to "hog all the keys at one meal" as Parker said, when you look at it solely within the tradition of the 19th century - it's the best symphony any American had written. And it was by a college student!
More than that - it has great tunes. The opening theme modulates impetuously, but with a smoothness that Brahms or Mahler could have hardly surpassed. For all that Ives may have already had his sights set on a more radical musical universe, it does not follow that he looked down his nose on the First Symphony as he was writing it. In fact, in that quote from the Memos, the ellipses stand for editorial comments added afterward: "if not the worst (No), one of the worst (No), poorest, weakest things (No) I've ever written." He couldn't dismiss the First Symphony that starkly, and changed his mind. I believe, from 30 years of listening to it, that that symphony was sincerely written. It sounds felt. And I think that if Ives had died in 1900, we would still be sprucing up that piece and listening to it with considerably less sense of boring duty than we bring to Chadwick's self-conscious Brahms imitations.
On to the Second Symphony (1897-1902). The five-movement form is new - Mahler extended several symphonies to more than four movements, but Ives couldn't have known those works, and had no model for a five-movement symphony beyond Berlioz's Fantastique, hardly a congenial work for him. Perhaps Ives' use of familiar American tunes was, again, a response to Dvorak, who, serving as the director of New York's National Conservatory of Music, had urged American composers to base their music on folk songs. As, in 1893, he was finishing his own "New World" Symphony supposedly based on Negro themes, Dvorak made a statement to the New York Herald that "I am now satisfied... that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies.... There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source." American composers took up sides on the question, with Amy Beach in Boston articulating the point of view that most Northern composers would feel more comfortable with Scotch and Irish melodies rather than Negro ones they hadn't grown up with.
Let's say that Ives knowingly took Dvorak's advice, at least as to the advisability of American tunes. If so, he certainly gave it his own twist. Threaded through otherwise Brahmsian textures are no Negro spirituals as such, but "Turkey in the Straw," "Massa's in de Cold, Cold Ground," "Bringing in the Sheaves," and of course snippets of "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean" leading to a thrilling grand climax on the whole tune. Meanwhile, the counterpoint is lively and by-the-book correct, while the key changes are as colorful and unexpected as Strauss or Debussy. One could ungenerously call it a dog's breakfast of mismatched techniques were the results not so convincingly energetic.
Here Ives comes closer to the stream of consciousness that will be a leading characteristic of his work, though still within an episodic format possibly suggested by Dvorak's last two symphonies. For the first time in Ives' orchestra music it's as though other tunes are creeping into the composer's consciousness as he's working, and he's deliberately not filtering them out - the phrase from Brahms' Third that worms its way into the second movement is especially revealing. Bursting with rhythm, the work has the air of a rambunctious teenager forced into formal attire for a solemn banquet but who, though capable of gallantry and sentiment, ultimately can't repress his highjinks and mischievous good humor. Even the late Ives seems to have had a soft spot for the piece.
Now let's turn to the "to some extent boiled down, or rather suppressed" Third Symphony, written 1901-4. "Suppressed" is unjust, but "boiled down" - that's a good term. The Third Symphony is Ives's music boiled down to its essence, not needing marching bands, tone clusters, quarter-tones, or other devices that were technically new. What's left is an amazing stream of consciousness, all the more original because it has no programmatic motivation (this symphony supposedly depicts, or tries to capture the atmosphere of, a camp meeting, but not in any narrative way). Here is a free association so lacking in abruptness that it is more like the process of everyday thought than anything else he ever wrote.
The openings of the first and third movements modulate breathlessly, chord by chord, and without a motivating theme - or rather, we don't know yet that what we're hearing will turn out to be the theme. We start in the key of B-flat. But the second chord is C major, the third G major, and the climactic fourth a misspelled B-natural major, and we're already way out in left field. This leaping yet smoothly-voiced progression keeps coming back, and by the time it's recapitulated, forming a background for a pitch-stretched version of "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" in the flute, it doesn't even surprise us anymore: it sounds nostalgic. Ives turns many of classical music's traditional devices - fugue, countersubject, pivot-note modulation - to subversive purposes, and proves himself as shrewd a neoclassicist as Stravinsky.
But with this difference: where Stravinsky pokes fun at classical conventions and twists them to create surprise, Ives' continuity is smoother and more psychological, as though the tune is turning on its pivot notes to go into the keys it wants to go into. And Ives makes this work perfectly because he honed it over and over on the organ. The "Camp Meeting" Symphony evolved from a (now lost) set of three organ preludes from around the turn of the century. Who knows how many times Charlie played those preludes to himself, trying out more and more distant modulations, hearing things in "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" and "Just As I Am" that no one had ever heard before? The Third Symphony has its amazing technical aspects, but it does not feel like an experiment, because Ives had played through those chord changes over and over, doodling away at the organ.
The symphony that gets counted along with the Concord Sonata, Three Places in New England, and the Second String Quartet as one of Ives' radically forward-looking works is the Fourth. It is an amazing work: the two halves of the orchestra splitting up in the second movement, one surging ahead while the other stays at tempo, is an stunning effect, and the slow dying away over a descending ostinato in the final movement is sublime. I love the work. That said, as gorgeous as the third movement fugue is, it was borrowed from the First String Quartet which he had written in the 19th century. The uproarious parts of the second movement were orchestrated (effectively, with wonderful touches added) from the Hawthorne movement of the Concord Sonata. The piece doesn't exhibit the unity of the Third Symphony, doesn't seem all cut from the same cloth. The conception is a cross between Beethoven's Ninth - the contrast of philosophies of life represented by individual movements - and the Concord Sonata. The symphony is stirring, each performance justifiably a major event. But by 1916, when Ives seems to have completed it, his capacity for turning out new works was beginning to fail, and the mismatch of movements shows it.
The other Ives works that might be considered symphonies include Three Places in New England (originally called New England Symphony), the individual pieces of the Holidays Symphony (Fourth of July et al), and the questionably unfinished Universe Symphony. Three Places in New England is doubtless the Ives orchestral work that has won the most secure place in the repertoire, and with good reason - it is a perfectly formed symphony in the slow/fast/slow mode of Ives' Third, plus all the tempo clashes, dissonances, polytonalities, and rhythmic complexities that Ives let loose with when not inhibited. The Holidays Symphony is, as Ives seemed to recognize, more of a suite: even if Fourth of July is something of a scherzo and Thanksgiving a profound choral finale, each has a very self-contained form, satisfying in itself.
The Universe Symphony is more controversial. Considered unfinished and unfinishable in Ives' lifetime, it was only a legend until Larry Austin borrowed the materials to make his own "completed" version. In 1996, however, New York microtonal bassoonist Johnny Reinhard looked through the sketches and decided that, if you could read Ives' cryptic symbols, the Universe was finished. Indomitably, Reinhard put together a New York performance through his American Festival of Microtonal Music of a 75-minute, three-movement work. It was one of those moments when someone outside the field noticed what everyone else had missed and found a solution that the recognized experts had despaired of. Nevertheless, it did not result in an acknowledged masterpiece. The opening Prelude is 30 minutes of rather tedious percussion beats, and the remainder of the work - atonal, thorny, and relentlessly contrapuntal - is austerely abstract, with little of Ives' charm.
What the Universe and Third symphonies prove is that there is no one-to-one correlation (in either direction) between Ives-at-his-most-radical and Ives-at-his-best. He may have felt freest when throwing around tone clusters and 5-against-4's, but no one ever claimed that discipline isn't a bad thing for a composer. The late composer Morton Feldman used to issue his students an assignment that went, "Write a piece that goes against everything you believe" - and found that some of them produced their best music under that imposition. Ives' early symphonies may have similarly gone against what he believed, but that didn't injure them. The pressure to write with an audience and living, closed-minded performers in mind brought out good things in Ives, if not the only good things he had to offer.
Perhaps more important, recognition that Ives was a master of melodic and harmonic continuity may defuse some of the pointless controversy over the extent to which he was "first" to do everything. Yes, Ives' Third is "suppressed, technically speaking." But who ever thought that the technical side of music was the important part? Who thinks the Jupiter Symphony is a great piece because of its invertible counterpoint? Who believes that hemiola is what makes the Schumann Third great, or that the contrapuntal superimopsition of two themes is the ultimate point of Bruckner's Fifth? And yet when it comes to Ives, suddenly we get all musicological, and his greatness is entirely credited to a pack of musical card tricks no one had thought of before. And Ives, in the Memos, nods his head in agreement! Ergo, if you cast doubt on those card tricks - prove that some of the dissonance was added later, that maybe the complexity wasn't complex as early as someone said (none of which has been proven) - then the whole Ives edifice comes tumbling down.
It's baloney. Ives' great works are great for the same reason that Beethoven's and Wagner's and Brahms' are great: because they are conceived all of a piece, because they are deeply human, because their melodic and harmonic and rhythmic variety all revolves and balances around a common center that points us to convincing emotional, perhaps spiritual experience and satisfies us psychologically. And in this respect, the first three symphonies are not subordinate to the more radical works. The Ives who knew how to motivate a key change melodically is already there in the First Symphony, even if he hasn't quite found his legs. Ives was the first dazzlingly avant-garde American composer, but that's more symptom of his greatness than cause.
Let an army of malevolent musicologists scouring those manuscripts at Yale for dubious dates be ever so successful, they can't take away Ives' stream of musical consciousness, his ability to pour his thoughts, memories, emotions onto the page unmediated, to hold you spellbound like a rapt conversationalist who can hardly get his quotations, allusions, and free associations out fast enough. Neither Ives' greatness, originality, nor beauty awaits certification by the musicologists. And it is as much there in his music that is mislabelled "conservative" (even by himself!) as it is in his most spectacular effects.
- Kyle Gann, a composer, is chair of the music department at Bard College, music critic for the Village Voice since 1986, and the author of The Music of Conlon Nancarrow and American Music in the Twentieth Century. He has written a piano arrangement of Ives' Third Symphony.