198 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I
river, and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist
had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks
and elm trees were something that one would always remember.” The hymn
tune being sung that morning, Ives recalled, was Dorrnance, by Isaac Wood-
bury, a younger contemporary of Lowell Mason, and the singer’s melody quotes
that tune while the piano quietly fl ows along in an unrelated tonality—two tonal-
ities, in fact, one in the lower register and a contrasting one in the upper. Here
is yet another example of layering, to which is added a sense of multiple voices
speaking through the music, the human voice of the singer and the voices of
nature in the piano’s complex texture.
Because Dorrnance was part of the experience that inspired “The Housa-
tonic at Stockbridge,” Ives’s quotation of it is understandable. On one hand,
his use of a hymn tune connects his music back through the ages to Bach and
beyond, even to the origins of the European classical tradition in the late Mid-
dle Ages. But on the other hand, the example points to a larger question: Why
did Ives, composing in the classical sphere, repeatedly quote melodies from the
American popular and traditional spheres? Part of the answer lies in the spiri-
tual power he felt came from the quotations. Believing that the purest-hearted
performers were plain folks, singing and playing in the course of their everyday
lives, Ives often quoted melodies that they loved and sang in their own way—
including hymn tunes that most trained musicians scorned. His teacher at Yale,
Horatio Parker, for example, said of “Sweet By and By” and similar gospel hymns:
“I believe no lower level can be found than that of the... sickly sentimental
hymn tune.” Ives, in response, distinguished between such tunes as they existed
on the page and as they were sung, writing of Parker (or someone like him) that
“his opinion is based on something he’d probably never heard, seen or experi-
enced. He knows little of how these things sounded.... It was the way this music
was sung that made them big or little.”
As a boy, Ives had heard these melodies at outdoor camp meetings:The farmers, their families and fi eld hands, for miles around, would come
afoot or in their farm wagons. I remember how the great waves of sound
used to come through the trees—when things like Beulah Land... Nearer My
God to Thee . . . In the Sweet Bye and Bye [sic], and the like were sung by thou-
sands of “let out” souls. . . . Father, who led the singing, sometimes with his
cornet or his voice, sometimes with both voice and arms, and sometimes
in the quieter hymns with a French horn or violin, would always encour-
age the people to sing their own way.Ives’s experience of communal singing, not written music, inspired these
melodic quotations. He found in the spontaneity and freedom of such singing
the spiritual power he came to call “substance.” Ives explained:
It wasn’t the music that did it, and it wasn’t the words that did it, and it
wasn’t the sounds (whatever they were—transcendent, peculiar, bad, some
beautifully unmusical)—but they were sung “like the rocks were grown.”
The singers weren’t all singers, but they knew what they were doing—it all
came from something felt, way down and way up.
W hile he never defi ned “substance” in so many words, Ives did offer many
examples of “manner,” the label under which he grouped technical skill, standardIves’s quotationssubstance and manner172028_08_183-204_r3_ko.indd 198 23/01/13 10:24 AM