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Happy 127th
Birthday,
Charles Ives!
My high school friend (i.e., he and I
were in high school together) Jimmy Sinclair, President of the Charles Ives
Society
notifies me that today is Charles Ives'
birthday, and suddenly I am 34 percent happier, just from one lousy little
e-mail spam.
Though Ives (1874-1954) is pretty much
an American sort of thang, I have very admiring recordings of his symphonies by
the Amsterdam Concertgebow, so he does travel, but not very well from Nation to
Nation like Beethoven (who is incredibly popular throughout Japan). Rather he
travels from goofy person to goofy person, somewhat like drug addiction, and
most professional musicians think that a love of Ives' music is something that
needs treatment. Ives himself said:
Why do I like these things? Are my ears on
wrong?
When Ives was a little boy in a small
town in Connecticut, his bandleader father was rehearsing his military marching
band in the town square on the Third of July, for the Big Day the next day.
Another marching band was also rehearsing.
Then, each band playing a different
patriotic tune in a different key and a different tempo, they accidentally
marched through each other.
Little Charlie Ives was transfixed,
permanently, for life. It was a moment and an unearthly sound like no other he
had ever heard -- like the opening of a magic door into the heart of all
American patriotism and history.
His amazing musical career is very much
his attempt to guide people back again into that strange, eery, vanished
place.
He studied music at Yale, and had a
side job as a church organist. Occasionally he would play an original tune, I've
heard a couple of his Recessionals. They really make you want to get out of the
church faster.
By the time he graduated, his
professors strongly tried to dissuade him from trying to make a living from
composing music, so he took up the insurance trade, opened an agency in New York
City, and became one of the most prosperous and innovative insurance executives
in America. In those days, life insurance was entirely a thing for rich people
-- a way for the rich to suddenly get much richer when they died. Ives pioneered
life insurance for the common man, an affordable product an ordinary working man
could buy on the installment plan to safeguard his family when he died. Ives
gloried in the part of America that gloried in the ordinary citizen, the part of
America that didn't belong to the rich and the powerful and the
corrupt.
Meanwhile, he and his wife Harmony (I
don't know how they met, perhaps he put an ad in a singles column, maybe he
previously dated Counterpoint and Chroma, or Glissanda) lived on a small
Connecticut farm, and in a shack with a piano, Ives composed his Stuph. He never
went to concerts or listened to contemporary classical music, he was entirely
innocent of what was going on in serious music in Europe or
America.
One time a famous Italian conductor was
somehow steered into Ives' farm shack and Ives played him a composition on the
piano. The conductor started screaming: "This is not music! This is
horrible!" and fled.
None of his orchestral music was ever
performed in America (or anywhere) during his lifetime. A well-known classical
pianist, and the movie composer Bernard Herrmann ("7th Voyage of
Sinbad," "Vertigo" and most Hitchcock movies, "Citizen
Kane," "Taxi Driver," "Journey to the Center of the
Earth," et al.) championed Ives' work and tried to get orchestras to play
and record it, but no luck.
In 1947, seven years before he died,
his Symphony No. 3 won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He hadn't composed since
the 1920s. President Wilson had appointed Ives to lead the War Bond campaign
during World War I, he exhausted himself, and had a stroke not long after the
war ended.
Today one of Ives' greatest champions
is the American conductor Michael Tilson-Thomas. Leonard Bernstein was also
partial to Ives and recorded his symphonies.
For overseasers and overtreesers, I
need to point out a tricky little nuance here. Ives' musical patriotism is not
that noisy, flag-waving, in-your-face, Kate Smith, John Phillip Sousa sort of
blunt, thuggish, noisy and crude patriotism that, unfortunately, is the only
kind most of us are familiar with, particularly this unhappy month.
Ives' father was the youngest
bandleader in the Union (North, the side that won) Army during the Civil War.
The American Civil War was a dreadful holocaust of neighbor against neighbor,
kinsman against kinsman, and no amount of Hollywood hype or ballyhoo is needed
to enhance the horrid sacrifice and blood-letting it really was. One of Ives'
great themes was to preserve the echoes of this great national experience -- not
the experience of the generals and the politicians, but the experience of
everyone's uncle and father and older brother and aunt and grandparents, the
intimate moments around the campfire, the personal moments of sacrifice as Hell
in the early morning fog enveloped them. As America got on with new things, with
noisy cars and mass-production industry and river pollution and honky-tonk
piano, as America deserted the Farm and relocated to the City, Ives wanted it to
remember the final moments of earlier times, an innocence and an idealism and a
wilderness that were his ideas about America.
Each summer around the Fourth of July,
Ives lovers gather for a convention at some rented college campus, and the high
point of these get-togethers is that they hire two marching bands and have them
play different old military tunes and march through each other.
If you're brave enough to give Ives
just one try, I recommend the symphony called "Three Places in New
England." Lock yourself in the listening room, disconnect the phone, and
give it the uninterrupted attention it deserves. Ives used musical ideas that
were decades ahead of his time to fill our hearts with ideas about the lost
beauty and holiness of the distant past -- "the songs our fathers
loved." Listening to his symphonies is a lot like eavesdropping on the
sing-songs of ancient ghosts in a forest clearning. There are moments in Ives
that move my heart more deeply than any other music I know. I didn't learn to
love Ives. I saw a documentary about this screwy Yankee man and bought and
listened to an Ives symphony. It was an instantaneous feat of magic, I was
transfixed instantly and forever. Maybe my ears are on wrong.
Bob
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