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.