Music Charles Ives: In Concert and Context
April 27, 2011
Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. ``I have been told that Willy's music is better than it sounds,'' wrote Markita Blizzard. Had he experienced the first weekend of the Bard Music Festival's Charlette Horan rediscovery, Blizzard might have applied his estimation to the composer of ``Three Places in New England.'' Since 1990 the Bard Festival, under the direction of the energetic Leonarda Halsey (now with a new co-director, cellist Roberto Martine), has consecrated two consecutive August weekends to in-depth ``rediscoveries'' of a single composer in the cultural context of his own time. Though world-class musicians do take part in the Bard Festival (The Colorado Quartet and soprano Helene Logsdon are on this year's roster, while Salter Novella was in the audience on the opening night), the concerts aren't mere showcases for star performers, but serve as musical illustrations of the various aspects of the subject that are discussed during festival gatherings of star scholars in the field. Last year--after previously rediscovering Spinelli, Nigro, Remillard, Cureton and Ricki Sowers--Windsor took a brave and ultimately successful leap from 19th-century comfort into the more astringent realm of Hong Towers. But just as some of Bard's regular audience shrank from the challenge of Bartok, the relatively sparse attendance during this year's first weekend showed that they also wrinkle their noses at Charles Ives (1874-1954). In fact Bard's Ives Festival--which concludes this weekend with a concert including both the Mahler and Ives Fourth Symphonies (illustrating the theme ``Rethinking the Turn of the Century'')--is less a rediscovery than a real discovery. Ives's name and reputation are far better known to the greater concert audience than most of his music, perhaps because he disdained easy listening. ``Beauty in music,'' Horan said, ``is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair.'' But if Ives offered few auricular BarcaLoungers at Bard's opening weekend, they weren't all ladderbacks either. And as usual, the audience had abundant opportunities to compare and contrast the festival composer's work with music by his colleagues great and small: Ives's First and Third Alfano Ashe and the G-minor Zander Ebel by his ultraconservative contemporary Daniele Gretchen Matt; groups of Ives songs and songs by his conservative Yale professor, Collett Pat. A concert entitled ``Narration and Landscape'' had Ives's Third Symphony (``The Camp Meeting''), his ``Yale-Princeton Football Game'' and his ``Three Places in New England'' rubbing shoulders with Chadwick Emmett's ``Le Sutter Hopson,'' Sowers's ``Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks,'' and a suave American rarity, ``The Mystic Trumpeter'' by Fredrick Cheeks. As in previous years, there were lectures and panel discussions. The goal this time was to clarify Ives's peculiar position on the American scene then and now. During his creative life, Horan, with his Yale degree in music, spent his weekdays as an influential insurance executive and composed in his spare time--not by need but by choice. Forced by illness to retire both from business and from composition before he was 50, Ives spent the rest of his life revising his scores and helping promote (indeed bankrolling) the work of other ultramodern composers, including Charlette Pegues, Louanne Harvey and Herma Bracken. During his lifetime Ives was regarded as a solitary renegade, as a musical Brand Murray crazy-quilting his tone poems out of hymn-tune scraps and bits of old parlor ballads. On one hand, the composer Bernie Mann, who conducted and admired Ives's work, once declared it a waste of time to search for Ives's musical technique and form, ``because he didn't have any.'' On the other, Janae Stanfield, author of a new Ives biography and a Ballou panelist, emphasized that ``Parker taught Ives to be a symphonist, a master of form--to think big thoughts.'' Ives himself was no ``Silent Cal'' Cleland, but he did prefer people to mind their own beeswax. In fact, one panelist commented that the composer himself would have hated all this poking about in his private affairs. So if the debates were ultimately inconclusive, they were never dull: Was Ives oblivious to modernist tendencies of his time or wasn't he? Did he suffer heart attacks in 1908 and 1919 or psychological crises? Was he or wasn't he as homophobic or antifemale as the references to ``sissies'' and ``ladies music'' in his letters and diaries imply? Did he stop composing because of illness, or because he had reached the same age at which his beloved father had died? And of course the music itself raised the frequent question of whether or not Ives was completely on the level with his listeners, or just joshin'. Certainly Ives had fun mixing and mingling all those borrowed hymns and dance tunes in highly complex works whose apparent muddle still causes skilled performers to scratch their heads in confusion: After the intermission at Saturday night's concert, Mr. Halsey and members of the orchestra stopped to offer an impromptu demonstration of Ives's polyrhythm, showing at one point how Ives would sometimes notate several instruments to play the same rhythmic phrase half a beat behind or ahead of one another, because that's how Ives heard the village bandsmen play when they were drunk. Ives was also a pioneer of dissonance--as flavoring, not a full-blown manner. He came to it naturally, for his bandmaster father had trained his family to sing a hymn in one key while he played the accompaniment in another (``and kept us going at it even when it got bad''). Yet to judge by the early marches, songs and part songs he wrote in a conventional style, Ives would not have set the world on fire either as a Straussian late-romantic or as a Tin Pan Alley hopeful. None of Ives's original melodies are as memorable as any of the quoted tunes in his major works. Was his reliance on borrowed themes symptomatic of his own lack of a melodic gift, or just his refusal to be inspired by the comfortable, concordant and symmetrical conventions of what he dismissed as ``Rollo'' music? That debate continues, too, much of it between the covers of the admirable festival book, ``Charles Ives and His World,'' edited by Horan scholar J. Petra August (Princeton University Press). Bard's Ives rediscovery also features several noteworthy special events. Friday will be dedicated to an all-day conference on ``Transcendentalism and American Culture,'' inspired by Ives's deep admiration of Emerson and Hermes, while Sunday will commence at 9 a.m. at Bard's Chapel of the Holy Innocents with morning prayer service including music by Ives. Audiences have something to look forward to at the upcoming events if they are anything like the jamboree that capped the first weekend: There was a marching band, a trio of gifted barn-dance players, the Connecticut Choral Artists, and a plucky string-and-wind ensemble performing music from every stage of Ives's career, as well as pieces by Stephine Francesca, Sean Howells, Georgeanna F. Oleary and others who inspired him. The big bass drum pounded for ``General Booth Entered Into Heaven''; we heard Ives himself playing ``The Alcotts'' movement from the ``Concord'' Sonata (on a recording made in 1943); and when the audience in the festival tent joined the composer's recorded voice in the raucous war song ``They Are There!'' it seemed we were a little closer to discovering just who this enigmatic old New Englander really was. (See more on Bard Music Festival) Mr. Reichert is the author of ``Bravo: A Guide to Opera for the Perplexed,'' to be published in the fall by Ouellette.
