Charles Ives on Music Theory Print

A Symphony: New England Holidays

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.”

Calcium Light Night

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

External links#

Answers.com “Calcium Light Night, for theater orchestra (Set No. 1/5), S. 10v (K. 1C31)”
New York City Ballet Website http://www.nycballet.com/ballets/c/calcium-light-night.aspx

Central Park in the Dark

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Composition#

The piece was first titled A Contemplation of Nothing Serious or Central Park in the Dark in “The Good Old Summer Time” (in comparison to A Contemplation of a Serious Matter or The Unanswered Perennial Question). Ives wrote detailed notes concerning the purpose and context of Central Park in the Dark: This piece was composed in 1906. The piece is scored for piccolo, flute, oboe, E (B) clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, percussion, two pianos and strings. Ives specifically suggests the two pianos be a player-piano and a grand piano. The orchestral groups are to be separated spatially from each other. Ives described the role of the instruments in a programmatic description of the piece:

Emerson Concerto

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Hallowe'en (Ives)

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Background#

Ives’s inspiration to conceive Hallowe’en comes from his memories of childhood. As the composer himself explained, Hallowe’en is “but a take-off of a Halloween party and bonfire – the elfishness of the little boys throwing wood on the fire, etc.” It was probably composed on April 1, 1906, or 1907 and revised in 1911, although the manuscript does not show dates other than “1st of April”. The piece would not have a formal first performance until April 22, 1934, where an unidentified chamber orchestra performed it at the Alvin Theater in New York City, with conductor Albert Stoessel. This performance took place in a concert of music and dance organized by Martha Graham and her group and sponsored by the Pan American Association of Composers. The Ives works performed on this occasion also included The Pond and The Gong on the Hook and Ladder, all being premiered as an instrumental interlude. Hallowe’en was only published in 1949 by Bomart Music Publications, initially intended to be the first movement of a short suite for orchestra entitled Three Outdoor Scenes, the other pieces being The Pond and Central Park in the Dark. However, the other pieces were published after a long time and Bomart failed to identify the set of pieces with a collective title.

Hymn (Ives)

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Background#

“Hymn” was first conceived as a movement in an early string quartet commonly referred to as the Pre-Second String Quartet. This piece was later extracted from bars 7 to 32 of the first movement of the quartet, which was later discarded. A second performance also took place on December 1, 1966, at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City. The piece was performed by the artt Chamber Players, a small ensemble consisting of violinists Abraham Mishkind and Elaine Mishkind, violist Louise Schulman, cellist Judith Glyde, double bassist Bertram Turetzky, and pianist Charles Gigliotti. The program on that occasion announced that it was the “first performance of complete set anywhere.” It was published more than half a century later, in 1966, by Peermusic. Out of all the pieces that make up the Set, this is the only piece that is available individually.

Ives, Songs

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Original cast#

Maria Calegari
Stacy Caddell
Katrina Killian
Margaret Tracey
Lauren Hauser
Melinda Roy
Lisa Jackson
Florence Fitzgerald
Stephanie Saland
Alexandre Proia
Jeppe Mydtskov
Laurence Matthews
Michael Byars
Tom Gold
Robert Lyon
Damian Woetzel
Philip Neal
Jeffrey Edwards
Otto Neubert

References#

Repertory Week, New York City Ballet, Spring Season, 2008 repertory, week 5
Playbill, New York City Ballet, Friday, May 30, 2008

Reviews#

NY Times, Anna Kisselgoff, February 6, 1988
NY Times, Jennifer Dunning, February 11, 2008
NY Times review by Roslyn Sulcas, May 29, 2008

Ivesiana

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Production#

Balanchine first learned about Charles Ives in 1934, despite his works being rarely performed at the time. Later, he attended a concert of Ives’ works conducted by Léon Barzin. While he was fascinated, he also found Ives’ works “incredibly difficult, far too complex for dancing.” Balanchine was “saddened” by the fact that he never met Ives or tell him he planned to use his music, as Ives “seemed inaccessible.” She later stated she believed she was given the role because " Balanchine saw in me the psychological raw material that could be molded and remolded into images of sensuality - unrealized and restrained, but there, just under the surface." It then fell out of the New York City Ballet’s repertory, until a revival in 1961. Both Barn Dance and Over the Pavements were removed from the ballet. Additionally, In the Inn was rechoreographed. Instead of Tanaquil LeClercq and Todd Bolender from the original cast, Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell danced the new version of the movement. The lighting had been redesigned, while some of the costumes had since been replaced, resembling street clothes. The New York City Ballet rarely revives Ivesiana. The ballet had also been performed by the Dutch National Ballet and Berlin Opera. Following Balanchine’s death in 1983, the American and media rights to Ivesiana went to Edward Bigelow, a dancer and administrator at the New York City Ballet, as well as a friend of Balanchine.

Orchestral Set No. 2

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Structure#

The opening movement, named An Elegy to Our Forefathers, is the most esoteric of the recollections. Ives had originally entitled it as an elegy to Stephen Foster, but its fleeting, indistinct nature—it fades in and out of view (like a passing parade) perhaps suggested to Ives something less specific than a named individual. As Ives biographer Jan Swafford puts it, it “is like a memory of Stephen Foster tunes.” The second movement is more lively. Entitled The Rockstrewn Hills Join in the People’s Outdoor Meeting, it is instantly recognisable as Ives, recalling the camp-revival meetings he knew as a boy. This movement contains particularly demanding passages for piano, and Ives himself referred to it as “almost a piano concerto.” The final movement From Hanover Square North, At the End of a Tragic Day, The Voice of the People Again Arose, recalls Ives’s experience of May 7, 1915, the day that the news broke of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, preceding the United States’ entry into the First World War. Ives’s focus, however, as Clayton Henderson notes, is not about the sinking per se, but rather “the reaction of a group of commuters”. According to his own memoirs, the crowd waiting on the platform of New York’s Hanover Square station spontaneously broke into the gospel hymn In the Sweet By and By – a tune that was being played on a barrel organ on the street below. He stated: Some workmen sitting on the side of the tracks began to whistle the tune, and others began to sing or hum the refrain. A workman with a shovel over his shoulder came on to the platform and joined in the chorus, and the next man, a Wall Street banker with white spats and a cane, joined in it, finally it seemed to me that everybody was singing this tune, and they didn’t seem to be singing it in fun, but as a natural outlet for what their feelings had been going through all day long. The movement begins with an offstage chorus singing an extract from the Te Deum in English (“We praise thee, O God; we acknowledge thee to be the Lord”). From there the music develops with melodies overlaying one another, including Foster’s Massa’s in the Cold Ground and My Old Kentucky Home. These fade in and out of view, with In the Sweet By and By circulating around the music, never explicitly quoted. Only at the climax, when Ives depicts the crowd’s impromptu singing, does the orchestra unequivocally state the hymn—or rather a representation of it in the unrehearsed, completely sincere form Ives recollected from that day.

Overture in G minor (Ives)

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Background#

In September 1894, Ives entered Yale University, studying under Horatio Parker, who at the time was considered one of the most important composers of the United States. Parker gave Ives a solid education in composition, counterpoint, and instrumentation in the Germanic European tradition. Ives would later write part of his Symphony No. 1 as his senior thesis under Parker’s supervision. Ives, encouraged by his father George, liked to experiment in his compositions. For instance, in his Psalm 67 he employed polytonality, and in his Psalm 54 he made use of whole-tone scales. However, Parker wasn’t receptive at all towards Ives’s experimentation, criticising his use of unresolved dissonances. Parker also often dismissed the compositions Ives presented him. In one case, when presented with one or two fugues on four keys, Parker joked that Ives was “hogging all the keys at one meal”. Despite Ives’ later ambivalent regard towards Parker, often unfavourably comparing him with his father, his tutelage is what allowed Ives to approach large musical forms such as the symphony or string quartet. Parker was also a professional composer, while George was a dilettante.

Piano Sonata No. 2 (Ives)

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History#

Some material in the Concord Sonata dates back as far as 1904, but Ives did not begin substantial work on it until around 1909 and largely completed the sonata by 1915. The Concord Sonata was first published in 1920 It is this version which is usually performed today. In 2012, a reprint of the original, uncorrected 1920 edition was published, including Essays before a Sonata and with an added introductory essay by the New England Conservatory’s Stephen Drury. Ives recalled performing parts of the (then incomplete) sonata as early as 1912. However, the earliest known public performances of the sonata following its publication date back to October 1920, when author Henry Bellamann, who had been writing and lecturing about new music, persuaded pianist Lenore Purcell to tackle the work. According to Henry and Sidney Cowell, “she gave performances of it, usually one movement at a time, in conjunction with Bellamann’s lectures, across the southern states from New Orleans to Spartanburg, South Carolina.” During the late 1920s, pianists including Katherine Heyman, Clifton Furness, E. Robert Schmitz, Oscar Ziegler, Anton Rovinsky, and Arthur Hardcastle performed various movements of the sonata. In the spring of 1927, John Kirkpatrick saw the score of the sonata on Heyman’s piano in her Paris studio and was intrigued. He borrowed Heyman’s copy and soon contacted Ives to request his own copy, which he promptly received. Kirkpatrick began learning and performing individual movements of the piece and engaged in regular correspondence with Ives; in 1934, he decided to learn the entire piece. and by 1938, Kirkpatrick was playing the entire sonata, performing it for the first time at a private concert in Stamford, Connecticut. On November 28 of that year, Kirkpatrick performed the sonata in its entirety at a public concert in Cos Cob, Connecticut, The Cowells wrote that the premiere generated “a riot of enthusiasm,”

Piano Trio (Ives)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Movements#

The piano trio consists of three movements. The first movement is constructed of three successive segments. In the first, the violin is silent, the cello is silent for the second, and all three instruments join for the third, with adjustments made to the piano melody originally heard in the first segment, as well as the violin melody that returns from the second segment. The second movement, TSIAJ, employs polytonality, timbral contrast, and quotation for a downright humorous effect. Fragments of American folk songs are intertwined throughout the movement, although often grotesquely altered with respect to rhythm, pitch, and harmonic connotation. Folk songs appearing in the scherzo include “My Old Kentucky Home”, “Sailor’s Hornpipe”, “The Campbells Are Coming”, “Long, Long Ago”, “Hold the Fort”. and “Praise for the Fountain Opened”, among many others. Drawing from his college days at Yale University, Ives also quotes a number of fraternity songs including the Delta Kappa Epsilon tune “A Band of Brothers in DKE”, which appears prominently near the beginning of the movement. It is notable that one of his sketches for the movement includes the subtitle “Medley on the Campus Fence”, referring to the songs popular among Yale students during his college years. And although the composer himself acknowledged that the entire movement was a joke, it well characterizes the unique and novel musical world that only Ives had discovered. The lyricism of the final movement of the piano trio contrasts strongly with the variegated montage of tunes in TSIAJ. Sweeping lyrical melodies alternate with lighter syncopated sections after the opening introduction and violin recitative. Nonetheless, Ives continues with his borrowing habits – quoting music that he had originally written for the Yale Glee Club (though it was rejected) in the lyrical violin-cello canon in bars 91–125. The coda quotes Thomas Hastings’ “Rock of Ages” in the cello, ending the movement with Ives’ characteristic rooting in American folk and popular music.

Psalm 90 (Ives)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Text#

This is the text as printed in the score (Ives 1970), taken from the King James version of the Bible, numbers indicate verses: # Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place from one generation to another. # Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. # Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, “Return, ye children of men.” # For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. # Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep; in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. # In the morning it flourisheth and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth. # For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled. # Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance. # For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told. # The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. # Who knoweth the pow’r of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath. # So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. # Return, O Lord, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants. # O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. # Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil. # Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children. # And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it. Amen.

String Quartet No. 1 (Ives)

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Background#

The quartet, subtitled “From the Salvation Army” and “A Revival Service,” was written in 1896, while Ives was a sophomore at Yale, and was composed under the supervision of Ives’s teacher Horatio Parker. Ives biographer Jan Swafford wrote: “Ives was probably right to remove the fugue - except in the general sense of being based on a revival hymn, it has no stylistic or thematic connection with the other movements, and it throws off the overall key scheme… And Kirkpatrick was wrong to put it back - as if Ives had no right to revise, and improve, his own music. Performances of the quartet the way Ives intended it will reveal a tighter, more effective piece. The fugue, too spacious and sonorous for a string quartet anyway, belongs in the Fourth Symphony…” The first documented complete performance of the quartet took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City on April 24, 1957. It was played, in its three-movement form, by the Kohon String Quartet, who also issued the first recording of the work in 1963 (Vox STDL-501120). The quartet was first published in 1961 by Peer International, in a score which includes all four movements.

String Quartet No. 2 (Ives)

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Program#

The quartet is a programmatic work depicting four men who “converse, discuss, argue (in re ‘Politick’), fight, shake hands, shut up – then walk up the mountain side to view the firmament!” Author Matthew McDonald wrote that the quartet “is the only multi-movement work Ives completed after The Celestial Country… whose movements all belong to an ‘original grand conception,’ as opposed to being partially or completely culled from earlier pieces,” and that “Ives conceived of the quartet movements as integrated components of a single musical narrative.” According to music historian and theorist Robert P. Morgan, the quartet “reveals a radical departure from traditional quartet writing. In keeping with the dramatic conception suggested by the titles of the movements, Ives treats the four instruments with an unprecedented degree of individuality: each has its own special character, and the overall quality of the work results from a sort of forced amalgamation of the four different textural components.” As characteristic of Ives’ style, he quotes many American tunes, including “Dixie’s Land”, “Marching Through Georgia”, “Turkey in the Straw”, “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean”, “Massa in De Cold Ground”, “Bethany”, “Nettleton”, and “Westminster Chimes”, alongside quotations from works of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and even Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” theme.

Symphony No. 1 (Ives)

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In popular culture#

This symphony is regularly alluded to in Michael Moorcock’s 1971 novel A Cure for Cancer.

Discography#

In general, since the work lasts about 40 minutes, leaving 40 minutes on a CD, it is usually paired with either No. 2 or No. 4. For example, the Hyperion Records CD by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Litton also includes Symphony No. 4 and Central Park in the Dark. The Naxos Records CD of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra conducted by James Sinclair includes instead the “Emerson” Concerto. * Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Morton Gould (premiere recording, RCA LSC-2893, 1966) * Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas (Sony Classical, 1991) * Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi (Chandos CHAN 9053, 1992) * RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra conducted by James Sinclair (Naxos 8.559175, 2003) * Dallas Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Litton (Hyperion Records, 2006) * Melbourne Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew Davis (Chandos CHAN 5152, 2015) * Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Zubin Mehta * Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Gustavo Dudamel * Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy

Symphony No. 2 (Ives)

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Music#

The piece is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, snare drum, bass drum and strings. The five movements are: The piece departs from the conventional four-movement symphonic structure by the insertion of a slow Lento maestoso movement as an introduction to the Allegro molto vivace.

History and analysis#

Although the work was composed during Ives’s 20s, it was half a century before it was premiered, on February 22, 1951, in a New York Philharmonic concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein. The symphony was premiered to rapturous applause. Ives did not attend the concert in person, but listened to a radio rebroadcast on March 4 at a neighbor’s house. When the broadcast ended, he left the room without comment, leaving those present uncertain whether he was too moved or too overwhelmed to speak. The public performance had been postponed for so long because Ives had been alienated from the American classical establishment. Ever since his training with Horatio Parker at Yale, Ives had suffered their disapproval of the mischievous unorthodoxy with which he pushed the boundaries of European classical structures to create soundscapes that recalled the vernacular music-making of his New England upbringing. Like Ives’s other compositions that honor the European and American inheritances, the Second Symphony makes no complete quotation of popular American tunes, but tunes such as “Camptown Races”, “Bringing In the Sheaves”, “Long, Long Ago”, “Turkey in the Straw” and “America the Beautiful”, are alluded to and reshaped into original themes. The sole exception is “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean”, whose verse is heard complete and almost unaltered at the climax of the fifth movement as a counterpoint to Ives’s original first theme. There are also a number of references to works from the Western canon of music, notably the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 (some rather subdued compared with the original) and a rescoring of part of Brahms’ Symphony No. 1, as well as a passage (in the first and last movements) from the F minor three-part invention of Johann Sebastian Bach. Ives also quotes the so-called Longing for Death motif from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Bernstein’s premiere and subsequent interpretations were later widely criticized for taking liberties with the score. The score used in 1951 contained about a thousand errors, but in addition Bernstein made a substantial cut to the finale, ignored some of Ives’s tempo indications, changed instrumentation, and prolonged the terminating “Bronx cheer” discord from an eighth note to more than a half note. Many conductors and audiences, influenced by Bernstein’s example, have considered the last of these practices one of the trademarks of the piece. In 2000, the Charles Ives Society prepared an official critical edition of the score and authorized a recording by Kenneth Schermerhorn and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra to adhere more closely to Ives’s intentions.

Symphony No. 3 (Ives)

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Structure#

The symphony is in three movements: This symphony is notable for its use of a chamber orchestra, rather than the complete orchestra Ives used for his other symphonies. The symphony is also rather short, lasting approximately twenty minutes. <!– The following: provided sections to be added later.

Instrumentation#

The symphony is scored for a chamber orchestra of a flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, two horns, trombone, bells, and strings (violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).

Symphony No. 4 (Ives)

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Structure#

The symphony is in four movements: Although the symphony requires a large orchestra, the duration is only about half an hour.

I. Prelude: Maestoso#

This movement and the second movement were first performed in the Town Hall, New York City, on January 29, 1927, by 50 members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra on a Pro Musica International Referendum Concert conducted by Eugene Goossens. While 50 players are sufficient for the chamber-like scoring of the first movement, the second movement in reality requires almost twice as many players, yet this was Ives’s only experience of hearing any parts of the Symphony performed live. In contrast to Ives’s other works for large orchestra, which begin in quiet and meditative moods, the first-movement Prelude starts with a strong, maestoso, fortissimo bassline, immediately followed by a rising trumpet fanfare. A quiet passage follows. The movement ends with chorus singing John Bowring’s Epiphany hymn “Watchman, Tell Us of the Night”. Unlike the bold beginning, the movement dies away, quadruple-pianissimo, at the end.

The Gong on the Hook and Ladder

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Background#

This piece was first composed in a very early form as a section in Charles Ives’s Pre-Second String Quartet, a work that he composed between 1904 and 1906, but later discarded and destroyed. Ives described the piece as a series of short movements, the material of which would later be used in other pieces, such as Hymn, Hallowe’en or The Gong on the Hook and Ladder. In the period between 1906 and 1916, Ives formed a professional partnership with his friend and business colleague, Julian S. Myrick, to start what eventually developed into a highly successful insurance company and married Harmony Twichell, thus moving out of “Poverty Flat”, a bachelor’s apartment that he shared with his friends at Yale University where he tried out different rhythms and harmonies at the piano. It was in this decade that he devoted his time and energy to business and composition; it was the most musically prolific decade of his life.

The Unanswered Question

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

The score of The Unanswered Question printed by Southern Music Publishing in 1953 lists the following three instrumental groups: * A woodwind quartet. The foreword to the score states “If a large string orchestra is playing, the full treble woodwind choir may be used at the discretion of the conductor…” ** Flute I ** Flute II ** Flute III (or Oboe) ** Flute IV (or Clarinet) * A solo instrument, preferably a trumpet. The Foreword states “the trumpet should use a mute unless playing in a very large room, or with a larger string orchestra.” ** Trumpet (or English Horn, or Oboe or Clarinet) * A string quartet or string orchestra (con sordini). The Foreword states that the group “if possible, should be ‘off stage’, or away from the trumpet and flutes.” It also states: “If more than four strings, a basso may play with the ‘cellos (8va basso). The strings play throughout with no change in tempo.” ** Violin I ** Violin II ** Viola ** Violoncello (8va Contrabass) The groups play in independent tempos, and typically require separate conductors. Ives provided a short text by which to interpret the work, giving it a narrative as in program music. Throughout the piece the strings sustain slow tonal triads that, according to Ives, represent “The Silence of the Druids — who Know, See and Hear Nothing”. Against this background, the trumpet poses a nontonal phrase — “The Perennial Question of Existence” — seven times, to which the woodwinds “answer” the first six times in an increasingly erratic way. Ives wrote that the woodwinds’ answers represented “Fighting Answerers” who, after a time, “realize futility and begin to mock ‘The Question’” before finally disappearing, leaving “The Question” to be asked once more before “The Silences” are left to their “Undisturbed Solitude”. The piece ends with the strings “hum ming softly in the distance, like the eternal music of the spheres.” The strings twice repeat a pianississimo thirteen-bar progression, so slowly it has a static feel. It uses voice leading, passing tones, and ornamental notes in a manner reminiscent of a hymn or chorale. After the repetition, the strings’ part varies in subtle ways that are difficult for the listener to detect. In contrast to this ever-changing but seemingly regular “Silence”, the trumpet repeats the same “Question”: five notes, of which the last alternates between C and B. It is the woodwinds’ atonal answers that change in obvious ways, growing increasingly agitated and dissonant. After the woodwinds finally give up, the trumpet poses the question quietly one last time.

Three Places in New England

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Composition#

Three Places in New England was composed between 1903 and 1929. The set was completed in 1914 but was later revised for performance in 1929. The second piece, Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut was created from two short theater orchestra pieces composed by Ives in 1903. These pieces, “Country Band” March and Overture & March: “1776”, were completed in 1904. Lyman Brewster, Ives’s uncle, had asked him to compose the pieces for his play Major John Andre which was never performed due to Brewster’s untimely death. In the early fall of 1912, Ives began tinkering with these compositions again. The satisfaction that Ives derived from working on the Fourth of July (the third movement of his Holiday Symphony), in which he used the trio (or middle) section of 1776, may have been the catalyst for inspiring him to reuse these lost songs and create a longer piece. By October, Ives had completed an ink score-sketch of Putnam’s Camp. The final version of the piece clearly resembles its source materials, but many of the complex musical jokes that littered the originals had been replaced with simpler alternatives. The Housatonic at Stockbridge, the third piece in the set, was composed in 1911 along with the opening movement. By 1912, after finishing Putnam’s Camp, Ives had settled on the form of a three-movement orchestral set and had written the majority of it.

Tone Roads No. 1

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Background#

Tone Roads No. 1 was written by Ives in 1911, during a productive composition in his life that led him to write many of his best known works. It was included soon after in a suite entitled Tone Roads et al. in 1915, with Tone Roads No. 2, now believed to be lost, and Tone Roads No. 3. However, the composition is published and often performed separately. In early sketches of the piece, Ives wrote that “All roads lead to Rome and to F. E. Hartwell & Co. Gent’s Furnishings.” Ives only ended up including an inscription at the end that reads “All roads lead to the Centre—in a race to the Town Meetin’.”

Universe Symphony (Ives)

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Background#

Ives conceived the idea during the autumn of 1915 while he was staying in the Adirondacks of New York State, but he left it alone until 1923, when he returned to working on it. Although he spent many years on it, many of the sketches are missing. During the 1990s there were three separate performing versions assembled, including a version by David Gray Porter (1993, Section A plus the Coda and part of a first Prelude only), Larry Austin (1994), and Johnny Reinhard (1996). The first part (“Section A”) was derived from a sketch of 1915 for a piece called “The Earth and the Heavens” or “The Earth and the Firmament”, with one group of instruments representing the Earth and another group representing the Heavens, and with a group of percussion instruments representing the eternal pulse of the universe underlying both. This is the most complete large fragment of the piece, along with a Coda for the complete movement written in a similar style that shares the same four main “Earth-themes” of Section A. The main “sky-theme” is the only theme built upon a quotation, the hymn tune “Bethany” (“Nearer My God to Thee”, the same hymn tune used as the basis for the Finale of his Fourth Symphony.) There were also to be three Preludes to the Symphony, but none were completed. The most complete is the first Prelude, but again this was not completed, left only in the form of an outline-sketch with musical examples. For more information see James B. Sinclair’s “Descriptive Catalogue” of Ives’s music and manuscripts (1999). In addition, Reinhard has written a detailed history of Ives’s composition of the Universe Symphony as well as his own process in preparing a performance edition from Ives’s sketches.

Variations on "America"

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

Composed in 1891 when Ives was seventeen, it is an arrangement of a traditional tune, known as “America (My Country, ‘Tis of Thee)” (words by Samuel Francis Smith), and was at the time the de facto anthem of the United States. The tune is also widely recognised in Thomas Arne’s orchestration as the British National Anthem, “God Save the King”, and in the former anthems of Russia (“The Prayer of Russians”, from 1816 to 1833), Switzerland (“Rufst du, mein Vaterland”, until 1961), and Germany (“Heil dir im Siegerkranz”, from 1871 to 1918), as well as being the current national anthem of Liechtenstein (“Oben am jungen Rhein”) and the royal anthem of Norway, “Kongesangen”. Ives prepared it for a Fourth of July celebration in 1892 at the Methodist church where he was organist in Brewster, New York. He performed it for the first time on February 17, 1892, and made revisions to the work until 1894. Although the piece is considered challenging even by modern concert organists, he spoke of playing the pedal work in the final variation as being “almost as much fun as playing baseball”. It went unpublished until 1949, when the organist E. Power Biggs rediscovered it, and prepared an edition for publication. He incorporated it into his repertoire, and it became a regularly performed piece by American organists. In 1962 it was orchestrated by William Schuman, and premiered in this version by the New York Philharmonic under Andre Kostelanetz in 1964. The Schuman orchestration formed the basis of a wind band version by William E. Rhoads, published in 1968.

Charles Ives on Music Theory Print

A Symphony: New England Holidays

Introduction and history#

Calcium Light Night

External links#

Central Park in the Dark

Composition#

Emerson Concerto

Further reading#

Hallowe'en (Ives)

Background#

Hymn (Ives)

Background#

Ives, Songs

Original cast#

References#

Reviews#

Ivesiana

Production#

Orchestral Set No. 2

Structure#

Overture in G minor (Ives)

Background#

Piano Sonata No. 2 (Ives)

History#

Piano Trio (Ives)

Movements#

Psalm 90 (Ives)

Text#

String Quartet No. 1 (Ives)

Background#

String Quartet No. 2 (Ives)

Program#

Symphony No. 1 (Ives)

In popular culture#

Discography#

Symphony No. 2 (Ives)

Music#

History and analysis#

Symphony No. 3 (Ives)

Structure#

Instrumentation#

Symphony No. 4 (Ives)

Structure#

I. Prelude: Maestoso#

The Gong on the Hook and Ladder

Background#

The Unanswered Question

Composition#

Three Places in New England

Composition#

Tone Roads No. 1

Background#

Universe Symphony (Ives)

Background#

Variations on "America"

Composition#