CHAPTER 8 | CHARLES IVES 197
teaching methods could also be unconventional. On the one hand, “Father knew
(and fi lled me up with) Bach and the best of the classical music, and the study
of harmony and counterpoint etc., and music history.” On the other, “He would
occasionally have us sing, for instance, a tune like The Swanee River [Foster’s ‘Old
Folks at Home’] in the key of Ef, but play the accompaniment in the key of C. This
was to stretch our ears and strengthen our musical minds, so that they could
learn to use and translate things that might be used and translated (in the art of
music) more than they had been.” Such ear-stretching schemes taught Ives that
euphony was not the only kind of harmony worth hearing; that two simultane-
ous streams of sound offered wide possibilities for focusing one’s ear; and that
even the most familiar Stephen Foster song could be defamiliarized.IVES’S SONGS
The 114 Songs is a collection of music written throughout Ives’s life as a composer,
presented in something close to reverse chronological order. As Ives declared
in a “Postface” to the work, he had “merely cleaned house” to produce it. The
variety of musical styles is enormous, from the simple consonances of the last
song, “Slow March,” the eleven-year-old composer’s memorial for a deceased pet
dog, to the massive, teeth-rattling dissonances of the opening song, “Majority,”
in Ives’s most advanced (and for some listeners, off-putting) idiom. In between
are sentimental songs, comic songs, hymns, songs in French and German, and
many songs experimental in nature and unlike anything composed before, in
the United States or any where else.
Although the contents of 114 Songs exhibit great differences in style and sub-
stance, each song is unmistakably Ivesian. Indeed, according to Ives’s musical phi-
losophy, what a composition sounds like can never refl ect more than part of the
music’s essence. “My God! What has sound got to do with music!” he bursts out in
Essays before a Sonata. This paradoxical blast was Ives’s response to the attitude that
composers should tailor their music to performers. “It will fi t the hand better this
way—it will sound better,” a violinist is supposed to have told Ives, provoking these
often-quoted words. A bit later in the same paragraph he writes: “That music must
be heard is not essential—what it sounds like may not be what it is.” Clearly, any dis-
cussion of Ives’s music must include aspects that reach beyond the realm of sound.
No single item from the 114 Songs captures the tremendous scope of Ives’s
musical vision. In “The Circus Band,” which recaptures boyhood impressions
of a circus parade down Main Street, the singer represents the awestruck young
bystander while the piano represents the band, playing a pair of Sousa-style
marches, with an intervening drum roll-off (the signal for a parade band to
begin the next march) imitated by the pianist thumping out thick handfuls of
notes. The singer and the pianist provide two separate—and sometime not fully
coordinated—musical layers, and the listener is encouraged to focus on one or the
other, or on the seemingly chance convergences between the two. “Serenity,” in
contrast, sets a nineteenth-century hymn text by John Greenleaf W hittier to an
incantatory melody accompanied by two dissonant chords that simply rock back
and forth in hushed, fragile contemplation—another example of musical layering.
“The Housatonic at Stockbridge” was inspired by a walk Ives and his wife took
along a riverbank in western Massachusetts shortly after their marriage. On that
summer Sunday morning, he recalled, “we walked in the meadows along theK George E. Ives (1845–1894),
father of Charles Ives, was a town
musician and bandmaster in
Danbury, Connecticut.“The Circus Band”“Serenity”“The Housatonic at
Stockbridge”172028_08_183-204_r3_ko.indd 197 23/01/13 10:24 AM