A Symphony: New England Holidays

Introduction and history#

Charles Ives got the idea to write a holiday symphony during the summer of 1905. He wanted to write each movement as if it were based on a grown man’s memory of his childhood holidays. Ives constructed these movements based on personal memories from his past, including his father, George Ives, and the town of Danbury. His father had a huge impact on Ives’s compositions, especially after he died in November 1894. Ives lived in Danbury throughout his childhood, a town which holds many of the life experiences that inspired him to compose a Holiday Symphony. New England Holidays exemplifies “multi-tonality in the reharmonization of borrowed music … and mixing of several keys.” This work is notorious for its quotations, in particular its complex overlapping of multiple sources. Without the plethora of quotation, Holiday Symphony would lose its ability to call forth memories and emotions. The first three movements of Holiday Symphony were performed in the United States and Europe in 1931 and 1932 under the direction of Nicolas Slonimsky. “The concerts created great excitement: laughter, protest, enthusiasm. Ives’s music never occupied more than a single modest spot on each pair of programs, but several important critics singled it out for serious and admiring comment.”

I. Washington’s Birthday#

Washington’s Birthday is an impressionistic piece “featuring complex harmony scored mostly for many-stranded strings.” The allegro part in the middle of the piece reflects old barn-dance tunes; “Multiple overlapping dissonant ostinatos evoke the hubbub of the crowd.” as “a solo violin plays reminiscences of the fiddle tunes, representing memories of the dance that echoes in the minds of the young folk as they head home.”

II. Decoration Day#

Decoration Day was completed in 1912. Ives arranged the piece for full orchestra, and it lasts about nine to ten minutes. The piece is scored for 2 flutes with optional piccolo, 2 oboes and solo English horn, 2 clarinets and optional E-flat clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 or 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum with attached cymbals, high bells or celesta, low bells, and strings. Numerous instruments are called on to play offstage, including the English horn, two solo violins and a solo viola, the high and low bells, and a trumpet imitating a military bugle. Ives was inspired to write Decoration Day after listening to his father’s marching band play on Decoration Day. The marching band would march from the Soldiers’ Monument at the center of Danbury to Wooster Cemetery, and there Ives would play “Taps”. The band would leave often playing Reeves’s “Second Regiment Connecticut National Guard March”. “‘Decoration Day’ begins with an extended meditative section, mostly for strings,” symbolizing morning and “the awakening of memory”. Ives has the aforementioned players separated from the orchestra play as if they are alone, in what he calls “shadow lines”. The music slowly unfolds, yielding an eerie mix of major and minor keys. Ives begins to incorporate his memories of Decoration Day into his piece by transforming “Marching Through Georgia” into the mournful “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground”. At this point, we are back in the cemetery where his father’s marching band stops, and just as Ives played “Taps” as a boy, he writes “Taps” into Decoration Day. “Taps” is coupled with “Nearer, My God, to Thee” played by the strings. Ives uses “Taps” to pave a way from the despairing section to the elated section. “On the last note of ‘Taps’ the music begins to surge into a drumbeat that crescendos until with a sudden cut we are in the middle of the march back to town, and the pealing melody of ‘Second Regiment’”. Ives follows this jubilation with the music from the beginning of the piece. The score of Decoration Day was published for the first time in 1989.

III. The Fourth of July#

The Fourth of July was completely scored for full orchestra in the summer of 1912. The piece lasts six to seven minutes, and is scored for two flutes, one or two piccolos, an optional two or three fifes, two oboes, two or three clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets and a cornet, three trombones and tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum and cymbals, xylophone, 2 players on different pitches of bells, piano, and strings, including three solo “extra” violins. Ives wrote The Fourth of July intending it to exemplify the excitement a boy feels during the Fourth of July celebrations and the freedom felt on that special day. He begins the piece with strings entering quietly; the sound and rhythmic intensity amplify steadily. This segues into the parade-like material of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean”, followed by fireworks, simulated by Ives’s sketch of “The General Slocum”. The movement ends peacefully with the imagery of falling sparks, signaling the end of the Fourth of July. It was thought to be one of Ives’s most challenging pieces; the overlapping of an abundance of quotations creates heightened dissonance. More quotations that can be found within The Fourth of July are “Yankee Doodle”, “Dixie”, “Battle Cry of Freedom”, Henry Clay Work’s “Marching Through Georgia”, “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, “Sailor’s Hornpipe”, “Battle Cry of Freedom”, The White Cockade, “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!"， “The Girl I Left Behind Me”, “Hail, Columbia”, “Garryowen”, “The Irish Washerwoman”, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”, John Stafford Smith’s tune for “The Star-Spangled Banner”, Vincenzo Bellini’s “Katty Darling” (a contrafact on Bellini’s “Vaga Luna”), and Henry Clay Work’s “Kingdom Coming”.

IV. Thanksgiving and Forefathers’ Day#

Thanksgiving and Forefathers’ Day was the first movement in Holiday Symphony to be written. Ives started writing it as two organ pieces, a prelude and a postlude, in 1887 for a Thanksgiving church service; this is one of the reasons why it seems so conservative compared to the other three movements. He finished arranging Thanksgiving and Forefathers’ Day in 1904 as one orchestral movement. The piece is scored for 2 or 3 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 or 3 clarinets, 2 or 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 or 5 horns, 3 or 4 trumpets, 3 or 4 trombones and tuba, timpani, 2 or 3 players on different pitches of bells, 1 or 2 players on different pitches of chimes, celeste, piano and strings, as well as an offstage choir, and an optional offstage band of 4 horns, trombone, and contrabassoon. “The middle section has a folklike simplicity and grace that Ives rarely allowed himself in orchestral music.” Ives tried to incorporate Puritan qualities into the music. Major and minor chords a step apart were meant to “represent the sternness and strength and austerity of the Puritan character.” The piece also contains “a scythe or reaping harvest theme which is a kind of off-beat, off-key counterpoint.”

References#

• Burkholder, Peter J. Charles Ives and His World. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
• Burkholder, Peter J. Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music. London: Yale University Press, 1985.
• Cowell, Henry, and Sidney Cowell. Charles Ives and His Music. NY: Oxford University Press, 1955.
• Henderson, Clayton Wilson. Quotation as a Style Element in the Music of Charles Ives. Michigan: University Microfilms, Inc, 1970.
• Ives, Charles. Memos. NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1974.
• Swafford, Jan. Charles Ives: A Life with Music. NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996.

External links#

*“Keeping Score: Ives Holidays Symphony”, multimedia website produced by the San Francisco Symphony