CHAPTER 8 | CHARLES IVES 199
musical customs and forms, academic knowledge, and even sound itself. For Ives,
the difference between music and sound, substance and manner, lay in attitude.
Substance was a matter of putting your whole soul into the making of music,
regardless of talent or skill. To say that hymns were sung “like the rocks were
grown” was to suggest that the singers’ feelings were so deeply grounded in belief
and nature that they approached the geological. Hymns tapping such emotional
depth could hardly be trivial, no matter what the professors said.
Ives quoted melodies to suggest the inner convictions that give perfor-
mances substance in the fi rst place. “The Things Our Fathers Loved” (LG 8.3),
a song from 1917 to which Ives added the subtitle “and the greatest of these was
Liberty,” weaves together several quotations to conjure up a spiritual realm of
music, “a place in the soul all made of tunes,” as Ives’s own lyrics have it. (Ives
often set his own texts to music.) Those tunes range from Stephen Foster’s
“My Old Kentucky Home” and George F. Root’s “Battle Cry of Freedom” to
Paul Dresser’s 1897 popular song “On the Banks of the Wabash,” the hymn tune
Nettleton (“Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”), and the gospel hymn “Sweet
By and By.” Ives combines these tunes in a through-composed form, in which the
music constantly changes to suit the mood of the words, as opposed to strophic
or verse-and-chorus forms based on repetition. He also alters the tunes in vari-
ous ways. For example, the song opens with a quotation of “My Old Kentucky
Home,” but the fi rst few melodic intervals are inverted, or sung “upside down,”
beginning with a descending line where Foster’s song has a rising one. Ives also
expands or contracts intervals, sometimes causing the melody to veer off key in
surprising ways, as at the end of the same quotation, at the words “all made of
tunes,” where the last two notes are a half-step higher than they would be in a
more literal quotation—perhaps an evocation of John Bell’s impassioned voice.
The piano, during this opening quotation of “My Old Kentucky Home,” sup-
ports the singer with simple, conventional chords in the left hand, while the
right hand plays a variant of the singer’s melody two beats behind the singer and
in a different key, something like the way George Ives taught Charlie to “stretch
his ears” with another Foster tune, “Old Folks at Home.” And when the words
allude to the “village cornet band,”
the piano comes in with “The Battle
Cry of Freedom” one beat ahead of
the proper place (according to the
written music’s bar lines), while
the voice comes in one beat too
late. The result evokes the off-kilter
but spirited playing of an amateur
town band.
Even more important than the
tunes, Ives’s words imply, are the
values they reinforce. Ives chooses
to quote a patriotic song (“The
Battle Cry of Freedom”), two songs
about specifi c places (“My Old Ken-
tucky Home” and “On the Banks
of the Wabash”), and two religious
songs (“Come Thou Fount of EveryLG 8.3Charles Ives on Music versus Sound
O
ne of Ives’s best-known stories reveals his distinction between
substance and manner. A young man is questioning George
Ives:“How can you stand it to hear old John Bell (the best stonemason
in town) sing?” Father said, “He is a supreme musician.” The young
man (nice and educated) was horrifi ed—“Why he sings off the
key, the wrong notes and everything—and that horrible, raucous
voice—and he bellows out and hits notes no one else does—it’s
awful!” Father said, “Watch him closely and reverently, look
into his face and hear the music of the ages. Don’t pay too much
attention to the sounds—for if you do, you may miss the music.”In their own words
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