Archives for July 2014

I have no idea why I plan out dream courses I could teach, when it’s the middle of the summer. One of my great regrets (there are so many) is that I’ve never taught an American music course. It just doesn’t fit our curriculum. To do it the way I want to, it really ought to be a graduate seminar somewhere, because I’d want to get into Riegger’s Study in Sonority and the Becker Third and Martirano’s L’sGA, which I can’t do if they don’t know who Ives is yet. I taught a History of the Symphony once and I’ll never do that again because it was waaay too much material. But I had an idea the other day for an “American Symphony” course, one symphony per week, sort of creating the idea of America through symphonic form:

Anthony Philip Heinrich: The War of the Elements and the Thundering of Niagara (c. 1845)
George Frederick Bristow: Arcadian Symphony, Op. 50 (1872)
George Chadwick: Third Symphony (1894)
Amy Beach: Gaelic Symphony (1896)
Charles Ives: First Symphony (1899)
Charles Ives: Third Symphony (1911) [might ought to do the Fourth, but sentimental about Third]
Virgil Thomson: Symphony on a Hymn Tune (1928)
James P. Johnson: Harlem Symphony (1932)
Roy Harris: Third Symphony (1938)
Florence B. Price: Symphony No. 3 (1940)
George Antheil: Symphony No. 4, “1942” (1942)
Aaron Copland: Third Symphony (1946)
Leonard Bernstein: Second Symphony, “Age of Anxiety” (1949/65)
George Rochberg: Second Symphony (1956)
Roger Sessions: Third Symphony (1957)
William Schuman: Eighth Symphony (1962) [Sixth would do, too]
William Bolcom: Fifth Symphony (1989)
Glenn Branca: Symphony No. 6, “Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven” (1989)
Philip Glass: “Low” Symphony (1992)

This is a few too many. Chadwick could go, kind of a dutiful inclusion. Everything would hinge on being able to get a score to the James P. Johnson Harlem Symphony – that’s key, and I won’t do that without a score. The archive seems to be at Rutgers. Still’s Afro-American Symphony, nice as it is, would be a disappointing second choice. I don’t know how to get Bristow’s Arcadian, either, whereas I can get the earlier Jullien – but the Arcadian is significantly better, and more evocative of the American wilderness. The Florence Price 1st and 3rd symphonies are published, and either would provide a piquant highlight. And I need an analysis of the Sessions Third, I’ve tried and can’t do it myself. Blitzstein’s 1946 Airborne Symphony might be a wild, corny substitute for the Antheil.

I should set up one of those web sites that fly around on Facebook: “Which American Symphony Are You?” And of course it’s rigged so that no matter kind of wine you like, everyone gets Morton Gould’s Latin-American Symphonette. (Which I used to enjoy.)

UPDATE: Actually, I’ve always thought the relatively unknown Bristow was the best of the 19th-century American symphonists (admittedly, not saying a lot), and the reason he was on my radar screen at all is because I heard his music in a course on American music at the University of Texas, from Delmar Rogers. I got to looking around, and found that Prof. Rogers’s doctoral dissertation was on Bristow, which I hadn’t known. Couldn’t find anything else about him, I suppose he’s no longer around. But he left me with a strong impression of Bristow and I appreciate it. That class also occasioned my first attempt at an analysis of Emerson from the Concord Sonata, and I still have it.

 

…alias, Musicology as Schadenfreude.

Poor Charles Ives. He never got over his father’s death, and kept trying to fill in the gap. He was driven to keep using certain tunes and instruments in his music because they reminded him of George. He kept pretending that he’d learned more from his father than from his college teacher Horatio Parker. Unlike most composers, Ives couldn’t make up his own tunes anyway, so he’d find one and rearrange it until no one could recognize it. He never knew what he really wanted. He claimed that he didn’t need any public recognition for his music, but he mailed it out into the world anyway. He was clearly really conflicted. He was laden with a lot of gender issues that made him express himself inappropriately, and he tried to write about Transcendentalism, though he didn’t really understand it. He wrote crackpot letters to the president about crazy schemes involving political referendums, and he really didn’t understand the issues involved. He took all those dissonances out of his music for fear people wouldn’t take his music seriously, and then when he made friends with other composers who wrote dissonant music, he piled dissonances back in, with the competitiveness of a former athlete, so he could seem to be more modern than they were.

Sounds pathetic, doesn’t it?

But wait a minute: As a teenager Ives was the youngest professional organist in Connecticut, and a precocious virtuoso playing music well beyond his years. He was lucky to have a father who could give him a thorough music education. He was an impressive baseball player as well as an incredible musician, and he went to Yale where he made dozens of friends and impressed some of his teachers enough to stay in touch with them for life. He got really lucky in the insurance business, and made about eight million dollars over the course of his career, which would be over a hundred million today; he was way up in the one percent. And yet, instead of becoming a stingy, conservative CEO, he modestly said that he hadn’t really provided enough social value to be worth all that, and he gave money away freely, especially to fellow composers who didn’t have any. His employees spoke glowingly of him for his kindness, generosity, and sense of justice; called him “a great man.” Other insurance men considered him so important that they thought you’d be fortunate to get a half-hour of his time. And unbelievably, over the already full course of this same life, he wrote an incredible, visionary, prolific body of music, being able to hear these complex symphonic structures in his head without getting any aural feedback from actual performance, which is a lot more than I could have done. Meanwhile, he kept sending his orchestra scores to conductors and getting rebuffed, but, being rich, finally took matters into his own hands and mailed out the Concord Sonata himself. And it worked! And to help, he even wrote his own book about his view of musical creativity, eruditely quoting dozens of authors and basing his ideas on those of some important 19th-century philosophers.

Gee! All this is true too. So why, if you read twelve books in a row about Charles Ives, as I’ve basically done recently, is the picture at the top the one you get? Why do my Ives research writings make me depressed for the poor old sap?

Psychobiography, gender studies, deconstructionism, intellectual history, social history – these all have important roles to play in musicology. Music history became greatly enlivened when it burst in all these separate directions in the 1980s. It had been pretty dull when it was just the hagiography of dead white composers. But all of these tendencies coincidentally reduce the agency of the subject you’re writing about. The individual is seen as driven by unconscious forces, hemmed in by his social background, unable to transcend the limitations of his upbringing. The artist’s intentions can never be taken at face value. His every perception is, of course, subjective. His actions can be endlessly mined for evidence of unacknowledged desires. Contradictions in his behavior (which we all have) are fertile ground for psychological speculation.

And the great thing is, it’s all true. We’re all basket cases. Except for the musicologist. Because what strikes me as a little unseemly is the implicit power differential between the musicologist and poor dead Ives who can’t defend himself. Unlike Ives, the musicologist is completely objective. His methods are scientific and rule out subjectivity. He’s not trying to get a teaching job, or tenure. He doesn’t have to worry whether his conference paper is perceived by the older professors as being in line with current research. He is already enlightened (it comes with the Ph.D.), and has ordered his own life much more rationally than Ives did. That he is financially secure goes without saying. And at, I dunno, 25, 40, 55, he gets the heady pleasure of magisterially looking down his scientific nose at this poor multi-millionaire, this visionary composer and captain of industry, and diagnosing which of Ives’s actions were secretly responses to his father fixation, which came from his adolescent athletic competitiveness, and which from his Victorian sexual repression.

You know, it was fun when the late Stuart Feder wrote a psychobiography of Ives, because he was an actual, trained psychologist, and everyone appreciated him weighing in from that standpoint. But I think I can safely say, to almost the entire musicological profession with possibly a couple of exceptions, you are not qualified to psychoanalyze Ives. Yet every dissertation candidate, whether he or she has dealt with his or her own father fixation or not, now gets to look for where George Ives is in an Ives score like a psycho-musicological game of “Where’s Waldo?” It’s the totally speculative character of it that makes it boring, because you can say whatever you want about Ives’s unconscious impulses without fear of contradiction – or confirmation. We don’t need to regiment ourselves to 100% facts, because I love a good narrative, but less than 85% starts to wear. I am eternally grateful to the musicologists who correlated every sketch on Ives’s manuscripts to the piece it came from – their relentless hard work has astonished me. But I’m getting programmed such that if I read the words “Ives’s father,” a little voice in my head says, “Somebody’s about to jerk off.”

I’m not arguing: the heroifying great composer biographies of old were one-sided if not marginally mendacious, hardly readable today, and it was time to take a different tack, apply some different methods. But let me throw out a warning sign that the pendulum has swung far enough in the other direction. We need to find an in-between position. In particular, we need to restore a sense of the artists’s agency, and treat his or her conscious actions and deliberate statements, that are there for all to see, as at least as important as the unconscious ones we’re so condescendingly attributing. Because – why would I want to read about the composer described in my first paragraph above? He sounds dismal. This is not good PR for the music or the profession. This will not inspire anyone to buy Three Places in New England. It’s a partial truth, and misleading. And you, Mr. or Ms. musicologist – how would one regard Ives’s life compared to yours? Would we all be better off if you had written the music? Too bad you weren’t his therapist, you obviously had all the answers needed to straighten him out. Now, how about a little humility, and, with it, a little infectious enthusiasm for the music you’re writing about, and maybe some admiration for the composer? Or is that just too, too pre-Derrida?

Personally, I think Charles Ives was one of the most phenomenal human beings who ever walked the planet, and I kneel in awe at his achievements. But if I were a young musicologist trying to make a career in the current academic environment, worried about how my paper would be taken at conferences, I would be leery about saying so. Luckily, I’m not.

One of the fascinating things about going through Ives’s manuscripts has been getting a feel for his composing method. I’m not likely to become an expert on it, because I’m only dealing with the piano sonatas, and I have more to do with the rest of my life than decipher Ives’s creaky handwriting, as others have heroically been doing. But I have found interesting patterns.

Early sketches for the First Sonata are more revealing than for the Concord, which is one reason I’m analyzing it too. There’s an early sketch for the First Sonata, dated Aug. 4, 1901, at Pine Mountain, where he and a friend had built a cabin. It’s an unpromising-looking, meandering melody in 6/8, ranging all over the keyboard without any motivic unity, vaguely neoclassic-looking (though there was no such style yet at the time). Looks like something a teenager might do, and he was 26! But what Ives eventually did was separate out the melody’s motives and use them all independently. A couple of motives from different measures became fused together contrapuntally to create the movement’s introduction in F# minor; then each motive gets developed by itself in one passage or another, and at two points in the finished movement, the opening measures of that sketch appear almost verbatim, by which time we’ve heard all the motives often enough to make the wide-ranging melody sound like they’re all being strung together. It’s an amazing process of transformation, to write this long, foolish-looking, aimless tune, and then build a whole structure around it to make it look like the apotheosis the music has been leading up to. That’s “trusting your material.” And in fact, virtually every note in this one-page sketch eventually got used somewhere (years later), whether the beginning, the middle, or the end, and the finished movement’s final chords use a progression the sketch had forecast in m. 4!

There’s a similar sketch for the Thoreau movement, too. It’s like he would just doodle these odd ideas all crammed against each other collage-like, and then flesh each one out from the middle and expand a ten-measure sketch into an 80-measure movement by inflating it from the inside. Whatever he wrote first he seemed to become so attached to that he would be determined to make it work, however much repetition and development it took of the individual motives. I’ve been trying to think whether I could do it. I’m pretty much a start-at-m.1-and-write-to-the-end kind of composer, though I’ll sometimes jump ahead and sketch a middle section, or more likely an ending. If I start and the music goes off the rails, I start over. Ives was tougher than I am, that’s for sure.

The examples will be in my book; sorry if it’s an excessive tease. I haven’t blogged any of my “A” material yet, only the “B” stuff, because I don’t want to scoop myself, but I’ve always believed in disseminating information. I’ve become more and more impressed with Ives’s mind, most especially from reading what he says in Essays Before a Sonata and correlating it to the way he composed. Sometimes to get the full gist you have to go read the writers he’s quoting. He was creatively very self-aware, and not naive at all.

Essays After a Sonata is in publishable form, and I’ve got six weeks left to think and rewrite, and think and rewrite, and reread other books and think and rewrite, which is just how I wanted it. And now I have to decide how and whether to address what’s bothered me about most of what’s been written about Charles Ives in the last thirty years. Maybe writing about it here will show me how not to write about it in the book, which is something this blog is sometimes good for.

At some point in the 1980s, all the musicologists started trying to demonstrate that Ives hadn’t been so original after all. They compared his piano figurations with (very dissimilar) ones by Chopin and Liszt, showing triumphantly that he was well versed in the European literature. They downplayed the influence of Ives’s father, and hinting that Ives learned a lot more from the German-trained Horatio Parker than he admitted. Everything he did in music he actually learned from the Europeans, if you just look at it the right way, and that’s why he was a great composer after all. They set out to prove (and here I’m going to start quoting from an article, to be named later, that I find particularly inspiring for its perspective on this) that Ives “. . . was as much a part of the European tradition of art music as were Mahler, Debussy, Schoenberg, Bartok, Stravinsky, Berg, and the other progressive composers of his time.” (p. 99) Their aim, this author said, was “to prove the worthiness of Ives’s music, to remove the stigma of its ‘outsider’ status, and to show that it ‘lies squarely within the European tradition, extending and transforming the aesthetic assumptions . . . of late Romantic tonal music. . . .’” (p. 99)

This bugged me. In fact, for many years in the ‘80s and ’90s I refused to read any books about Ives, because everything the musicologists were saying about him made me wince (and after the Maynard Solomon episode it only became worse). It was Jan Swafford’s biography of Ives, which was sent to me by the publisher and which I avoided even opening for years after I got it, that I finally grudgingly picked up one day and couldn’t put down. Jan – a fine composer himself – got it right, and lured me back into the Ives musicology fold.

And the rationale given was that Henry Cowell had created a false or at least exaggerated picture of Ives, as someone who was a self-made experimentalist, who had no European training, no contact with tradition, who had made up all of his musical ideas out of his own head. This false image of Cowell’s had become too widespread, and had to be combatted and corrected! And so, now that I’m finishing my own Ives book, I’m rereading through Cowell’s biography of Ives to catch him red-handed in such gross exaggerations. These are from Cowell’s book:

As far back as [Ives] can remember a great deal of chamber music was played by his father and his friends – sonatas, trios, and quartets – chosen from the sturdier sorts by Handel, Bach, and Beethoven. (p. 23)

On 12 June, 1890, one of [Ives’s] organ recitals began with the Overture to William Tell, and continued with… a Bach Toccata, and Mendelssohn’s F-minor Organ Sonata. (p. 27)

[Quoting Ives:] “Besides starting my music lessons when I was five years old, and keeping me at it until he died, with the best teaching that a boy could have in Bach and the best of the classical music, and the study of harmony and counterpoint, [my father] above all this kept my interest, and encouraged open-mindedness…” (p. 30)

[Quoting Ives:] Father had kept me on Bach and taught me harmony and counterpoint from when I was a child until I went to college, and there with Parker I went over the same things even with the same harmony and counterpoint textbooks… (p. 32)

[Quoting Ives:] “I found that listening to music seemed to confuse me in my own work… Hearing the old pieces that I had been familiar with all my life, for instance the Beethoven symphonies, Bach., etc., did not, as I remember, have this effect.” (p. 41)

[Quoting Ives:] “It seems to me today as it did 35 or 40 years ago, and ever, that still today Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are among the strongest and greatest…” (p. 89)

WTF!? I read Cowell’s book in the late ‘60s, and never remembered him saying that Ives had no knowledge of European music, but over the years reading the musicologists had finally convinced me that Cowell must have almost mendaciously, for ideological purposes, squelched the facts of any contact Ives had had with the European canon. And this, above, is what I find. And, come to think of it, what I had remembered reading. (In Cowell’s own The Nature of Melody, he takes all his examples from Bach. He was hardly anti-European.)

I bought the box set of Ives’s symphonies as a teenager, and you would have to be deaf or illiterate or a moron to listen to Ives’s First Symphony and think that Ives had no cognizance of European tradition. Peter Burkholder, in his magnificent book All Made of Tunes, has shown at admirable length how Ives carefully studied, and imitated, symphonies by Brahms, Dvorak, and Tchaikovsky in a studious attempt to master the traditional forms. But you knew it without the demonstration. Someone who could play the Mendelssohn organ sonatas at age 15 is going to be awfully difficult to paint as an untutored savage. Ives knew as much about European music as a young American composer possibly could have at the time, without actually going to Europe. That much, some of us always knew, and learned some of it from reading Cowell. And then, as corrective to Cowell, we all have to switch to the opposite side of the argument, and pretend that everything Ives ever put in his music turned out to have precedents in the classical repertoire. I’m not even going to dignify that perception by listing counter-examples. You know what they are.

My impulse, in my book, was to just ignore the whole straw-man argument and describe the Concord as I know it to be, from the evidence in the score. But I ran across a very thoughtful, theoretically worded, pitch-perfect article on the topic by John McGinness, called “Has Modernist Criticism Failed Charles Ives?” It’s in the Spring, 2006, volume of Music Theory Spectrum, which maybe you read, but I hadn’t. You can tell how gentlemanly McGinness is because he couches his title as a question; I would have made it a statement, in all upper-case letters with several exclamation points following, but that’s just me. He writes that the Ives scholars missed an opportunity: they could have used Ives’s music to bracket or criticize the Euro-modernist assumptions of analyzability and teleological progress, but instead they warped him enough to stuff him in the same bag with Bartok and Schoenberg:

Ives scholarship represents a great trans-century irony. Rather than defending Ives’s music based on the notion that modernist critical evaluation, if not inherently faulty, is at
least inherently questionable… the reputation of Ives undergoes a thorough modernist
elevation. (p. 106)

Schoenberg, self-consciously responding to a strongly held belief in received tradition, wrote music that often seems to be a paradigm for analytic unity, thereby providing the perfect foil for a critical evaluation of the composer’s relation to analytic practice. The case for Ives, on purely formal grounds, is decidedly more ambiguous… The tools of analysis are not designed to account for musical “outsiders,” and Ives’s music is often so idiosyncratic, or sometimes so intentionally iconoclastic, that formal analytic approaches cannot adequately reflect its complexity. (p. 101)

It’s a good point, and one I have predictably struggled with in my analysis of the Concord Sonata. McGinness is inspiring me to be not only less apologetic but proud when I come to passages in the piece that I can’t parse as making sense analytically. He still seems to think that Cowell had a big thumb on the scale when writing about Ives, and I don’t see where that comes from; but he’s dead right about the overbalance in the opposite direction:

Their response to Cowell’s excessive claims about Ives’s distance from the European tradition is a necessary and justified correction… But the interpretation that it resides “squarely within the European tradition” seems almost as excessive as Cowell’s. The polemical nationalistic stance put forward by Cowell, that traditional (European-based) criticism could not adequately address the (American) complexities of Ives’s music, has been replaced by the polemical aesthetic stance that it can. (p. 101)

Thank goodness someone (polite) finally said it. McGinness also gives me some perspective, since I have so spent my life within the bubble of outsider and experimentalist music that I have little idea, I’m realizing, how that world looks from the outside:

…Henry Cowell’s labeling of Ives as an “experimentalist” during the 1930s paved the way for the widespread view that he was an “outsider” (a composer working outside the European tradition). Revisionists have been at pains to squelch this perception, not in small part because of the prejudice, modernist at heart, that experimentalist composers lack refined compositional skills. (p. 100)

I wasn’t even aware that musicologists associate experimentalism in music with technical ineptitude. If so, they can kiss my pink, spreading, academic ass. (You can see why I have trouble with peer review.) But McGinness turns the tables on them:

When Ives is defended against charges of compositional incompetence with the argument that the apparently “ill-made” can be shown to “have ample precedent and to be very carefully constructed,” his defenders are succumbing to the same prejudices of modernist evaluative criteria that caused the problem in the first place. Analysis is repeatedly used to “prove” that the musical elements once eliciting criticism—for example, the borrowings and stylistic diversity—are really “systematic and logical,” and by extension, skilled and valuable. (p. 100)

So musicologists could have used the evident quality of Ives’s music to suggest that modernist paradigms of analyzability were overly limited and arbitrary – but instead they bowed to the academics and squeezed Ives, as far as they could, into those modernist paradigms. It explains why there has never been a detailed published analysis of the Concord; instead, as McGinness notes, the smaller, more rigorous and mechanistic pieces by Ives (Tone Roads, Three-Page Sonata) have been analyzed in order to prove that Ives belongs in the Schoenberg/Webern/Bartok club. As I’ve written in my book, “I think we can infer that perhaps the reason no detailed analysis of the Concord has been published is that the analysts realize that no analysis of it will look complete or fully convincing; thus, 1. the analyst will seem to have been defeated, and 2. the analysis will not vouch, through its logic and completeness, for the excellence that we all feel the Concord exemplifies. But for Ives the ability of the music to defeat analysis was an explicit goal, and if my failure will prove his point, it is a sacrifice worth making.”

Henry Cowell (whose every published word I’ve read) was not a very accomplished writer, and one sometimes strains to imagine what ultimate point he’s trying to make. But he was not clumsy with his facts. His details, as I read them against more recent books I’ve read, mostly check out. He was a little too credulous in taking Ives’s memories and stories at face value – as, indeed, he politely should have been, writing during Ives’s lifetime and with his and Mrs. Ives’s cooperation. No harm done. [I know what it’s like to get a book out on a composer, with his help, just before that composer dies. Twice now.] Being a highly experienced ethnomusicologist, he did a fantastic job of describing the role of vernacular music in enlivening Ives’s aesthetic. He did not neglect the other side; perhaps he felt, at that time, that he had no reason to emphasize it, either. If Ives’s training was split among classical music, church music, theater music, and ragtime, then he looks to me pretty average in that respect among American composers I’ve been interested in since. If musicologists ever want to deal with American composers of the more eclectic stripe, they’d better just get used to it.

Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata, if you read it closely – and perhaps this is why academics have avoided doing so – advances an aesthetic much at odds with classic modernism. In his view, if a piece of music can be analyzed, reduced to a single principle or small set of principles, then it is insufficiently reflective of how we experience the real world. To be true to nature, a piece of music must be messy, incommensurable in its parts, containing shards of truth that suggest but never add up to a whole. A piece that can be fully analyzed is a piece Ives would regard as a failure, or a triviality. I argue in my book that he took this view from the most Romantic of sources – not only Emerson, but John Ruskin, although they can only have confirmed what his artistic intuition already told him. As Jonathan Kramer has shown in his writings on postmodernism, Ives poses a challenge to the modernist paradigms, and will never fit neatly within them. Did Ives master the European musical idiom? Yes. Did he do a lot of things in his music that he had never seen or heard in any previous music? Yes. Is it really such a burden to keep both those facts in one’s head at the same time?

Today is not only the 197th birthday of Henry David Thoreau, but the milestone 60th birthday of the composer (and my good friend) Robert Carl. His Fourth Symphony is on my web site if you’d like to celebrate. (Be warned, the beginning is very soft.)

I’ve been sitting on the scoop that the black metal band Liturgy is indeed reuniting for a new tour and record, but Pitchfork broke the news. That’s Bernard Gann in the back, I think, though with enough hair he and Greg Fox can look almost indistinguishable. Bernard’s other band (or rather, one of his other bands) Guardian Alien was interviewed by High Times magazine back in May, but for some reason it was only in the paper magazine, and never appeared on the internet.