Tone Roads No. 1

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’.”

Structure#

Tone Roads No. 1 is scored for a small chamber ensemble consisting of a flute, a B-flat clarinet, a bassoon, a first violin, a second violin, a viola, two cellos, and a double bass. Ives also sanctioned performing the piece with a chamber orchestra, as long as the instrumentation remains the same. It has a total duration of seven to eight minutes, according to Ives. However, most performances tend to be three or four minutes long. It is marked Allegro at the beginning of the score and has a total length of 42 bars without repetitions or 70 bars with repetitions. The piece is meant to be repeated twice with first and second endings, although the first four bars are omitted after repeating. The scoring is presumed to have changed within the few years after the piece’s completion. Ives wrote in pencil in some manuscripts that it is possible to use three violins, two violas, two cellos, and double bass, apart from the wind section mentioned previously. In other manuscripts, Ives also added a trombone. However, the original instrumentation, which was discarded at the time, featured a flute, a clarinet, a trombone, and a piano.

Roads#

Written “half serious, half in fun, but carefully worked out”, Tone Roads No. 1 is a piece where counterpoint is paramount, as contrapuntal lines are meant to represent roads, all converging in the center of a town, where a meeting is taking place. According to Ives, the “Tone Roads” are meant to represent roads that lead right and left (F. E. Hartwell & Co. Gent’s Furnishings), right before starting an afternoon’s sport. All the wagons and carriages in the township take different roads that are in different conditions, but all of them converge in “Main Street” in the end. In this case, the center of town is represented by all instruments (or roads) ending up in the same key: “All roads lead to Rome.”

Recordings#

• The first documented recording of this composition was taken in October 1962, with the Boston Chamber Ensemble with conductor Harold Farberman. It was released in 1963 on LP by Cambridge Records.
• Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic recorded a live performance of the string orchestra version of this piece in November 1988. The recording was taken at the Avery Fisher Hall in New York City and was released by Deutsche Grammophon on compact disc in 1990 and re-released in 2004, 2013, and 2018.
• Conductor Ingo Metzmacher also recorded the piece with the Ensemble Modern under EMI Classics. The performance was recorded at the hall of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, between December 2 and 6, 1991. The recording was made available on compact disc in 1992 and re-released in 2008,

External links#

• Score published by Peermusic, via issuu