Ives's "Concord Sonata"

One of Charles Ives's most well-known and largest works is his Concord Sonata (properly Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-60).  It is a towering achievement, a colossally difficult 45-minute work in 4 movements, with optional parts in movement 1 for viola and movement 4 for flute.  The four movements are named for transcendentalist thinkers and writers who lived in Concord, MA around the same time period.

This conglomeration of Concordians is a fascinating historical anomaly.  It is a marvel that so many influential, accomplished writers lived and worked in the same place at the right time, and that all o them are still remembered and frequently read now, 150+ years later.  Concord isn't even a huge place--it's a medium suburb of Boston, 20-30 minutes from the city--and yet all these influential figures lived there, and many knew each other well.

I live about 20 minutes from Concord, so this hits close to home for me.  One quick note, and a big pet peeve of mine: the town is pronounced like the word "conquered," not like the word "Concorde."  There is no wiggle room there -- this is how it has been and remains to be.  There is no variation on that.  For whatever reason, I have found that most people in the United States who are not from MA pronounce it "Concorde," and they are incorrect.  It's a lovely little town, filled with history and with many sights that link it to classic old New England -- quaint lines of brick shops, otherwise unassuming churches with very tall white steeples, etc.  Ives clearly loved the transcendentalists of the area, and he may well have loved the town as well, as he did spend so much time writing this piece that would immortalize the location in a new way.

Main Street, Concord: a classic, old New England look

Ives himself writes a great deal on the sonata in his "Essays Before a Sonata," published directly before the publication of the sonata.  I will use some selected quotations from his writings as points at which to  expound on something worth discussing.

The work seeks to, in some way, paint a picture of the transcendentalist movement and its leading figures; however, even Ives acknowledges in his "Essays Before a Sonata" the questionability of music's ability to truly depict any program.  In his words, "How far is anyone justified, be he an authority or a layman, in expressing or trying to express in terms of music (in sounds, if you like) the value of anything...which is usually expressed in terms other than music?" He goes on to ponder the ability of music to have an innate program, and doesn't find an answer -- it is a question worth asking, even without a d correct answer

Ives also defers to people's personal musical tastes: "A critic may say that a certain movement is not inspired. But that may be a matter of taste—perhaps the most inspired music sounds the least so—to the critic."  It is evident to this that Ives acknowledges that his music can provide only a small glimpse into one sider of these writes.  Despite this, the sonata sets out to depict this movement and its major figures.  I will focus on movement III, The Alcotts.

A quick little diversion: Bruce Hornsby uses the opening of The Alcotts as the intro to his song "Every Little Kiss."  Watch the first 17 seconds of the Hornsby music video and compare it to the opening of Ives's movement.  This is very direct quotation.

Ives, "The Alcotts"

Bruce Hornsby & the Range, "Every Little Kiss"

I tried looking deeper into this, seeing if I found some connection, in lyrics or some other way, from this song to the Concord Sonata, but I couldn't find one.  By my reckoning, chances are that this quotation does not contain some deeper meaning, but is simply used because it's a pleasant, mellifluous way to open the song.

The Alcotts refers to Bronson Alcott, an idealist thinker and generally well-known townsperson, and Louisa May Alcott, his daughter who wrote "Little Women." Ives writes that he sought not to evoke them as much as their home, a quaint building called "Orchard House," which he equates deeply with New England values and atmosphere.

The Alcotts' "Orchard House"

Of the house, Ives writes: "There is a commonplace beauty about 'Orchard House'—a kind of spiritual sturdiness underlying its quaint picturesqueness—a kind of common triad of the New England homestead, whose overtones tell us that there must have been something aesthetic fibered in the Puritan severity—the self-sacrificing part of the ideal—a value that seems to stir a deeper feeling, a stronger sense of being nearer some perfect truth than a Gothic cathedral or an Etruscan villa."

This "spiritual sturdiness underlying…quaint picturesqueness" is, in my opinion, exactly what Ives sees as the greatness throughout New England, and what inspired him to write so much about his beloved homeland.  He sees its people, descendants of Puritans, as hardy people who can work the land effectively but also see the beauty in it and have a spiritual closeness to it and each other.  They are at once practical and idealistic.  This idealistically practical concept can also be seen in another major aspect of the movement.  Ives writes:

"Within the house, on every side, lie remembrances of what imagination can do for the better amusement of fortunate children who have to do for themselves-much-needed lessons in these days of automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which deaden rather than stimulate the creative faculty. And there sits the little old spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony."

(Side note: the piano Ives mentions here probably never existed.  Kyle Gann discusses his research on this very topic in his blog here: PostClassic, 9/23/12)

First, this certainly shows that the concerns of the present are often the same as the concerns of the past. Just as we as a society worry about our youth's culture of instantly gratifying, overly accessible entertainment every second, so did Ives worry about youth's "automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment." Second, this brings about a meaning behind a central facet of the composition: it quotes the opening of Beethoven 5, over and over and over again. This is linked to the glorification of music as an artistically worthwhile manner of entertainment in the Alcotts' home. Ives also says of the Alcotts that "The power of repetition was to them a natural means of illustration," which I see as a direct reasoning for the insistent repetition of the Beethoven 5 quotes.

This movement is also the only one in the sonata that is consonant and easily viewed as pretty, more often than not, possibly even bordering on the sort of music that Ives said "lets the ears lie back in an easy-chair." I see this as connected to his thought that "Miss Alcott is fond of working her story around, so that she can better rub in a moral precept—and the moral sometimes browbeats the story."  The movement is excessively pretty, to evoke Alcott's excessively morally driven works.

I personally have a closer connection to "The Alcotts" in its form as transcribed for wind ensemble by Richard Thurston.

Thurston's transcription of "The Alcotts," as performed by the Oregon Wind Ensemble

I have been fortunate enough the have performed this twice, once in high school and once in undergrad, and I think it is a beautiful and effective transcription of the piano work (though I don't love the performance in this video--too much bombast, not intimate enough).  In fact, it was through performing this in high school that I then did some research on it and discovered that it was a part of a larger work, and that was when I heard bits and pieces of the Concord Sonata for the first time.  Before that, I knew Ives only for "Variations on America," "Country Band March," and a couple more of his fun pieces, so this was my first exposure to the more mature side that characterizes most of his compositions.  (Fun fact: that was the only time I have ever performed on celeste, so I actually played a keyboard instrument in the band transcription of a work for keyboard instrument.)

I discuss this because there is an orchestration of the entire sonata by Henry Brant (for orchestra).  Having heard a highly effective expansion of one movement to a larger ensemble, I would love to hear the entire sonata played by a large ensemble, especially if it is orchestrated as well as Kyle Gann writes (PostClassic, 9/12/07).  This seems to me to be a highly worthwhile endeavor.

Ives: Insurance and Invention

Before I dive into the meat of my first blog post, some introductory information would be helpful.  My name is Keegan Sheehy, and I am in the final year working toward my undergraduate degree at Ithaca College, B.M. Percussion Performance with a Concentration in Music Theory.  I am setting out to write this blog as part of a class in the American Avant Garde.  While this blog is technically assigned, I couldn't be happier to write it.  I adore the topic; I have spent a great deal of time pondering unconventional art formlessly in the past, so it will be fantastic to give it structure through a class and through writing about it bit by bit, over the course of this semester.  Time to begin!

First, a quick recap of my thoughts on the first major class discussion.  I had never before considered the difference between the terms "Avant garde" and "experimental," and after reading Michael Nyman's article "Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond," and a class discussion, my general conclusion is this: both avant garde and experimental music fall largely outside the norm of "classical" music.  Where they differ is in intention -- avant garde music has a specifically intended outcome, whereas experimental music has some element of unpredictability of performance, where not every part of the outcome is known even to the composer.  (One quick note I've realized from this: using these definition, the music I tend to program on concerts is often avant garde, but the music I tend to compose or put together with friends for fun is usually experimental.)

Additionally, the avant garde tradition generally references the music of the norm while breaking free from it, while in contrast, experimental music often makes no reference to any other music, and exists in its own weird little vacuum.

The first composer focuses of this class are Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles.  Both are from New England, so as a New Englander myself, I feel a little regional pride over this.

Charles Ives was born in Connecticut in 1874, and died there in 1954.  By the end of his lifetime, he had become known as the first uniquely American composer -- unique in that he did not simply build upon the Western European tradition, but blazed his own trail.  This trail was often markedly American, as he tended to incorporate American folk tunes, patriotic songs, and more into much of his work.

Ives

It is also worth noting that Ives's day job throughout his life was as an insurance salesman, and in that field, he was at least as important an innovator as he was to the musical world. Perhaps this is a frightful omen of what is to come: if the first composer we look at (and one of the most well-known to today's classical community) never made a living exclusively through music, then perhaps this is indicative of what is to come when looking at the rest of the century's avant garde composers.

Last year, I wrote a term paper for Mark Radice's Class "The Symphony" on the topic of movement 2 of Ives's Three Places in New England.  I'll quote my own paper here briefly:

"According to Connecticut composer Charles Ives (1874—1954), one day during his childhood, his father found him attempting to play the rhythms of cornet band drummers, using only a piano.  Instead of instructing him on how to play either piano or drums properly, his father, a musician, said to him ‘It’s all right to do that, if you know what you’re doing.' (Henry and Sidney Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music)  As Charles grew up, these words would become a guiding mantra for his compositions.  He was, above all, a unique composer who never deviated from his convictions and unconventional musical tastes, and did so with a well developed and intelligent approach."

Ives fits definitely into the realm of the avant garde.  His works fall far outside the norm of the day, as his compositional era (1900-1920s) was a time when most classical music was tonal, even if obscurely so, and not nearly as rhythmically or contrapuntally complex as his.  In addition, his music is specifically composed, with a largely known outcome, and did not hold much of an experimental nature.  It was in many ways the result of his own experiments, but by the time he put pen to paper, he was no longer experimenting, and knew what outcome would occur.

One of Ives's most well-known works is his three-movement orchestra work Three Places in New England. Its three movements depicts three places: The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common (monument in honor of the 54th Massachusetts regiment, first all-black regiment in the United States), Putnam's Camp in Redding, CT, and The Housatonic at Stockbridge. All three movements make widespread use of quotations of folk tunes and patriotic songs. The first movement depicts a long, somber march, and is largely chromatic and often atonal, especially given its time (1911-1914).

54th Massachusetts Regiment Memorial

Movement two depicts the story of a boy at an Independence Day celebration at an old Revolutionary War encampment site, who goes exploring and sees a Revolutionary War scene play out before him, after which he returns to the celebration. It functions as a collage of quotations throughout. Using a wide variety of borrowed material, with each quotation rapidly shifting into another, results in no one source’s being too heavily emphasized, so that the effect is of a general atmosphere, time period, and place, instead of the effect of a single borrowed melody. Individually, one of these familiar melodies could hold any of a variety of connotations; however, as a large assembly of tunes, these serve to place the listener in the proper setting—America, in the good old days of public celebrations set to patriotic tunes. These melodies are largely American folk songs, patriotic songs, and popular tunes of the day, and include “The British Grenadiers,” “Reveille,” “The Liberty Bell March,” “Semper Fidelis,” “Marching Through Georgia,” “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Yankee Doodle,” “Hail! Columbia,” and more.

Movement three depicts a scene of quiet contemplation along the Housatonic River in Stockbridge, MA, while hymns sing out over the water from a church across the river. This scene is largely dichotomous, juxtaposing quiet pensiveness with faraway hymnsong.

The Housatonic River in Stockbridge, MA

As is evident through these three movements, Ives loves mixing together different ideas (often all familiar to the audience) in the same place for different unique resultant effects.  This style, especially as it exists in movement two, can be seen in a much more compact form in Ives's song "The Things Our Fathers Loved."  Listen closely, and you should hear bits of melodies from MANY different well-known songs.  Each is in a different key, and it may be from the beginning, middle, or end of the melody, but as often as every 3 or 4 notes, the music flows into a new quotation.

Ives, "The Things Our Fathers Loved"

This is a small, concentrated example of the collage technique Ives used pervasively in movement two, and often in movements one and three of Three Places.

Another important American composer of the time is Carl Ruggles (1876-1971).

Ruggles

Ruggles, along with Ives and three others, belonged to a group of composers known as the American Five.  This name references The Five, a group of late 19th-century Russian composers.  The American Five all wrote in the realm of the avant garde shortly after the turn of the 20th century.

Ruggles's music is idiomatic and fiercely his own, as he never studied the work of other composers, and  wrote so methodically and carefully that his output was glacially slow.  Once he found his compositional style that would stick around until the end of his life, he only composed around ten pieces total, spanning forty years from 1918 to 1958.  His music is dissonantly contrapuntal, and uses a general, non-serial technique of avoiding pitch class repetition within 8 notes.

Ruggles's best-known work is Sun-Treader (1926-31), a 15-minute piece for orchestra. Upon listening to it, I noted that it seemed to ebb and flow, to push forward then subside, repeatedly.  Wikipedia tells me that I was right on the money: "Another distinctive feature of Sun-Treader is the presence of "waves", both in dynamics and pitch. Pitches will start low, then rise up to a climax, then descend again. Within the ascent (and descent) there are small descents (and ascents) leading to a self-similar (fractal) overall structure."  This ebb and flow occurs in dynamics, tempi, rhythmic density, dissonant complexity, pitch, and more.

Like Ives, Ruggles falls squarely into the avant garde tradition, nowhere near experimentalism. Also like Ives, his music is not much like anyone else's, even that of his friends and admired colleagues -- it is distinctly his own. Also like Ives, Ruggles occasionally did not make all his money from composing, but in his case, his day job was often still in the music field, such as teaching violin.

These two composers of the American Five set the scene for our first class discussion of specific pieces. I look forward to seeing whether they set the scene in a larger way for what is to come in the course.