An Introduction to America’s Music

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CHAPTER 8 | CHARLES IVES 201


Blessing” and “Sweet By and By”). Love of country and home; devotion to family
and to God—these are the communal values that music can express and sustain.
But for Ives, these songs derive their moral force not so much from their lyrics as
from their tunes. Even if their words are forgotten, Ives insists, the melodies still
“sing in my soul of the things our Fathers loved.”

IVES’S INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC


Ives’s instrumental compositions reveal many of the same traits as his vocal
works. Quotations, layering, and changes of voice abound, often leading to
jarring contrasts—quotations from Beethoven symphonies, for example, next
to fi ddle tunes and gospel hymns—and dense overlappings. In Putnam’s Camp,
Redding, Connecticut, for orchestra, Ives creates the illusion of two bands, each
playing a different piece, marching toward each other. In The Unanswered
Question a single trumpet repeatedly intones the same angular fi gure over a
string ensemble’s consonant, organlike chords while four fl utes respond with
growing agitation to the trumpet’s calls. Harmonic dissonance in Putnam’s
Camp comes to a head in a roar of cacophony, while in The Unanswered Question
clashes between layers come and go, each time yielding to the serene euphony
of the string background. In creating sounds that stretch the ears and minds
of listeners, Ives was following the lead of his intellectual heroes, Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who probed hidden unities and mysteries
of human existence.
The Concord Sonata, composed between 1904 and 1919 and printed in 1920
with the Essays before a Sonata, is the ultimate Ivesian synthesis. As Ives wrote,
it “is an attempt to present (one person’s) impression of the spirit of transcen-
dentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over
a half century ago. This is undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson
and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to refl ect a lighter
quality which is often found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne.” By honoring a
group of New Englanders in an esteemed European form, Ives declared the uni-
versality of both. By commemorating literary Americans linked to transcenden-
tal philosophy, he suggested their infl uence on his own outlook. By combining
sonata-style thematic development with quotation and layering, he proclaimed
their compatibility and his own command of the composer’s craft. By accompa-
nying his sonata with a book-length introduction, he admitted that a composer
of music like this had some explaining to do. And by having these items printed
at his own expense rather than adding them to his stock of unpublished manu-
scripts, he made a bid for public recognition as a composer.
For all its American subject matter, the Concord Sonata draws on the European
musical past in its large outlines, which resemble such monumental nineteenth-
century works as Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata. Only the last of its four
movements, “Thoreau,” breaks with the usual character of the European sonata.
Instead of taking the decisive tone of a typical fi nale, the movement begins softly,
mixes dreamy refl ection with livelier moments, and fades away at the end, with
the sound of Thoreau’s fl ute echoing over Walden Pond.
The end of the Concord Sonata suggests a prophecy Ives made a few years later
in the “Postface” to the 114 Songs. The art of music, he wrote, was progressing, not

The Unanswered
Question

the Concord Sonata

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