One sentence in Essays Before a Sonata has already cost me more time and trouble, I think, than the entire sonata:

 “And there sits the little old spinet piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony.”

The full paragraph sounds as though Ives is describing Orchard House in Concord, Mass., after a visit there, which is entirely plausible; Orchard House opened to the public as a museum in 1912, Ives wrote the essays in 1919, and he and Harmony liked to visit Concord. But I can find no evidence that Sophia Thoreau ever gave the Alcotts a piano. We know from Edward Emerson’s much later article about Thoreau that the Thoreau family scrimped and saved to buy a piano so that Henry’s sisters, Sophia and Helen, could learn to play. It seems doubtful that Sophia was ever in a position to give away a spinet, and there’s simply no record of it. The Thoreau scholars are mystified when I mention it. The first mention of Sophia in almost any Alcott biography is in 1877, when Anna and Louisa May bought the Thoreau house from her.

Of course, Beth in Little Women was based on Louisa May’s sister Elizabeth (pictured), called Lizzy (and spelled that way in family correspondence, which I’ve been reading in manuscript at Harvard’s Houghton Library). Beth is described as devoted to her piano. But while Little Women takes place entirely in a fictionalized Orchard House, the desperately poor Alcotts actually lived in twenty different places before finally achieving stability there in 1858, and poor Lizzy died a few months before they moved in. It’s difficult to imagine them carting a piano around. Moreover, in Orchard House today there is no spinet piano, and the staff there tells me there has never been one. Instead, there are a melodeon and a big square piano. Ives grew up with a square piano in his own house, and surely knew the difference between that and a spinet.

The Alcotts literature is maddeningly cavalier about occasionally referring to a nearby piano with no thought of explaining how they afforded one; the melodeon is never mentioned. The few facts I’ve been able to assemble are these, and keep in mind that Louisa May was born in 1832, Lizzy in 1835:

1843: The family is at Fruitlands, the badly thought-out Transcendentalist communal living colony. Louisa May writes in her journal, “Had a music lesson with Miss P. I hate her, she’s so fussy.” Miss P is Ann Page, the only woman at Fruitlands besides Mrs. Alcott. No mention of what musical instrument, if any, was involved.

July 24, 1846: Lizzy writes in her journal for 1846, the only year that survives: “I went to the post office. When I got home, Lydia Hosmer was here. I taught her a tune on the piano.” The family was then living at Hillside, which Hawthorne later bought and renamed The Wayside. (And by the way, the Alcott children’s journals are a real hoot. “Did my spelling lessons yesterday, and some long division. Mr. Emerson and Miss Fuller came by to see father. Today Mr. Thoreau took us daisy-collecting.” Geez, kids, name-drop much?!)

1852: Manufacture date of the melodeon.

c. 1855: Unitarian minister Henry Whitney Bellows takes a liking to “the twenty-year-old Lizzy” and gives her a piano, an incident that Louisa May will transpose to Mr. Lawrence in Little Women. This leads one to suppose, among other things, that the family no longer possessed the piano referred to in 1846.

1858: Lizzy dies while Orchard House is being renovated for the family to move in. The family is then given the square piano (manufacture date 1843) by “Auntie Bond,” Louisa Caroline Greenwood Bond, who was some kind of “foster sister” to their mother. The piano had belonged to Auntie Bond’s husband’s first wife, Sophia Bond; did Ives mix up these two Sophias? (The number of Sophias then living in Concord could have populated a good-size town by themselves.) Anna, the oldest sister, and Louisa May are written about as having played it.

1868: Louisa May writes Little Women. She depicts Laurie Lawrence, the love-interest, drowning his sorrows after Jo refuses his proposal of marriage in an angry performance of the Pathetique Sonata, presumably Beethoven’s. The sole mention of Beethoven by name is of a bust of that composer in a room in Vienna in which Laurie is trying to forget Jo by (and I find this rather unintentionally humorous) writing an opera.

The only volumes of music listed among Bronson Alcott’s books in Houghton Library are a few Italian operas. No Beethoven. That Beth/Lizzy may have played some Scottish tunes seems like a reasonable conjecture, but the only reference I’ve been able to unearth as to the kind of music the girls played is a folk song harmonized by Weber that Louisa May mentions in her 1843 journal: “Hail, all hail, the merry month of May.” That Lizzy “played at” Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony I have always assumed was a flight of wild imagination on Ives’s part, more necessitated by the sonata’s program than inspiring it. Ives’s memory was notoriously unreliable and his quotations rarely accurate, but I can’t completely discount the possibility that he correctly reported something he was told at Orchard House, something that might have been known by family friends at the time, but that no one has ever bothered to document in the subsequent literature; or perhaps his tour guide was herself misled. I am sorely tempted to forge, in neat, feminine handwriting, the following letter and slip it in among the Alcott archives:

Dear Louisa,

Today I had a rollicking good time ripping through the Kalkbrenner piano transcription of Beethoven’s Fifth on the old spinet Sophie gave us, the score of which I then burned to make sure it didn’t end up among daddy’s papers at Harvard. MWA-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

Your crazy sister,

Lizzy

Meanwhile, hundreds of program-note writers for the Concord have taken Ives’s little story at face value. Personally, I wouldn’t. If you know of any relevant information, please contribute.

Wednesday morning at 9:15, Sept. 19, in Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, I’m giving the keynote address for a Harry Partch conference hosted by NEC and Northeastern University where my incredibly brilliant former student Anthony DeRitis runs the music department. It’s scheduled (my keynote, that is) to run until 10:30, and I’m making it as long as possible to leave no room for questions, and then I’m DONE. All I have to do for the next three days is listen to microtonal performances and papers on aspects of Partch. My piece The Unnameable is scheduled to be performed Wednesday night, by someone besides me, thank God. I don’t even have to teach the rest of the week. Boy, my life can be a frickin’ bowl of cherries sometimes.

I do wonder what brand of cigar Harry’s smoking there. I’m halfway through a smooth Romeo y Julieta Lonsdale at the moment.

 

This morning I lost one of my dearest friends and most important musical role models, and the world lost one of its best composers. Bill Duckworth was diagnosed with pancreas cancer a year ago last February. He got into a state-of-the-art therapy program, and had the disease in remission, and for quite a few months it looked like he was going to beat one of the fastest and most lethal cancers there is (and the same one that killed Morton Feldman). But he finally started having bad reactions to the chemo, and it wore him down. I had heard about a week ago that he had decided to go off chemo, and he went fast after that, slipping away about midnight last night, according to his wife Nora, who called this morning.

I’ve written many, many composer obituaries, but I don’t know if I can do Bill justice, at least not so soon. He was a quietly upbeat character, a Buddhist with a cynical but philosophical approach to life. I thought of him as a classic Capricorn, restrained and a little impenetrable, but mischievous and loyal. He had a tough early life. His father abandoned the family and never wanted anything to do with Bill, and his mother died, of cancer, while he was in high school. He was able to chuckle at adversity, and you got the feeling that whatever happened, he’d seen worse. He got all his degrees in music ed, because he had started out in that major, and (as he told me) it was the late Vietnam era in which, if you changed your major, the government suspected you were trying to extend your education to avoid the draft, so they drafted you. He taught at Bucknell from the mid-1970s on, loved by students (including my son, who studied composition with him), though considered a loose cannon by the administration, who couldn’t seem to deal with their nice young music ed guy becoming a famous composer. Bill gave me advice about surviving academia that I quote to myself every week: “Don’t talk to the adults.” Of the undergrads, he liked to say, “Everything you tell ’em is news.” He also said “We’re living in strange times” often, the whole 25 years I knew him, a phrase I associate with him. He was just about to retire from teaching when he got the cancer diagnosis.

Bill’s most famous piece is undoubtedly The Time Curve Preludes, and he seemed to always think it was his best as well, along with Cathedral, the huge interactive internet piece he spent his late years on. (Hard to talk so soon about those having been his late years.) The Time Curve Preludes is indeed a wonderful piece (there’s a lovely new recording by pianist Andy Lee on the Irritable Hedgehog label) and one of those pieces in which the way its composer thinks crystallizes and becomes indelible, but I never thought it was fair for Bill to come off as a one-work composer. Later pieces of his, I think, have more depth and dimension: Blue Rhythms, Imaginary Dances, Mysterious Numbers, Simple Songs about Sex and War, Gathering Together/Revolution, and, of course, Southern Harmony, which was kind of the choral companion piece to Time Curve. After he married technology genius Nora Farrell, Bill took on a new life as one of the pioneering internet composers; I wasn’t always tech-savvy enough myself to follow along, but he became famous in Australia and gained a worldwide following. I have frequently described Bill’s music as Mozartean, by which I mean it has a clear right-brain logic that is difficult to pinpoint but easy to hear. If the culture ever changes so that elegant design is once again as highly valued as macho eclecticism, I think it will be realized that Bill is a truly major composer; even as it is, there are many younger composers who think so. As far as I know, I’m the most Duckworth-influenced composer alive. Back when my music was rather impractically caught up in Herculean rhythmic complexity, Bill’s ensemble music gave me a new model for streamlining and spreading out the rhythmic interest for more grateful performability. Several of my pieces (Private Dances, New World Coming, movements of The Planets and Implausible Sketches) were explicit attempts to compete with him on his own territory and learn from him.

Bill hired me to teach part-time at Bucknell in 1989; without that early foot in the door, I would almost certainly not be in academia today, because everyone else in that world considered me a dangerous radical. For several years while I was at the Voice Bill and I had lunch at Bennie’s Burritos in the West Village almost every week. That was a fun time. “We’re living in strange times” was the final cadence to many a topic of conversation. Summer of 2011, after his diagnosis, we spent a couple of afternoons together and I recorded some long interviews about his life and music, so that he would have his own input to an eventual biography. We joked about death being the last desperate career move a composer had, because they never seem to take us seriously until we’re dead. After that, as recently as last spring, I really thought he was going to make it and we’d be able to have those lunches again.

Bill worked with Relache in the old days, and we’ll dedicate tonight’s performance of The Planets to him.

The times suddenly seem a lot stranger.

 

For those in the Hudson Valley or thereabouts tomorrow, September 13, the Relache ensemble is playing my suite The Planets live, with the amazing video by John Sanborn, at Bard College. It’s in Olin Auditorium at 8. Nothing like airing your astrological interests to your colleagues in the science division.

My son’s other band (besides Liturgy), Guardian Alien, is beginning to take off; just coming off a Midwest tour, they’ve got a new album out on Thrill Jockey, See the World Given to a One Love Entity, with an accompanying video. The album is one forty-minute track, high-energy and improvised but well structured, and fun to listen to. In fact, Bernard told me he took to heart some of the criticisms I had made of free improv in my early Village Voice writings, and took care to avoid the worst clichés. The genre, he says, is psychedelic rock. I asked, “Isn’t that kind of old-fashioned? I mean, did they still have psychedelic rock in the eighties?” “Well, the eighties were probably a low point for it, but it’s always been around, and that’s what they still call it.” So there you go. I do admire about pop musicians that they are not so squeamish about describing their music in terms of categories. They’d rather make a connection to the audience than be so frickin’ ascetically pure-minded.

 

ELK LAKE, NEW YORK – Charles Ives wrote in his Memos that he got the idea for the Concord Sonata in the summer of 1911 at Pell’s. Pell was Henry Pelletier Jones, a friend of Ives’s father-in-law Joseph Twichell, his establishment more formally known as Pell Jones’s Cabin. The Twichell family used to spend a few weeks in August or September there, and Ives and his wife joined them in 1909, 1910, and 1911. Ives suffered from what was then called neurasthenia, kind of a tendency toward nervous breakdowns (and his first heart attack came in 1906, when he was only 31); he needed lengthy getaways.

In the 1950s, Pell’s got more officially renamed the Elk Lake Lodge, and it’s still as much in business as ever, so Nancy and I have come here to see the landscape in which the Concord Sonata was born. Nothing like taking a vacation and writing it off as a research expense. I thought no one here would have any idea about Ives, but actually the welcome information packet in the rooms has this in the last paragraph: “It [Elk Lake] looks much the same as it did when Charles Ives composed parts of his symphonies No. 3 and No. 4 there between 1909-1911.” And the manager, when he finds out guests are classical music fans, enjoys telling them that Ives stayed here.

There’s a photo of Ives, with his wife Harmony almost hidden behind him, sitting at the beach downhill from Pell’s lodge in 1909: working on his music, smoking, wearing a hat and shielding himself from the sun with an umbrella:

And a hundred and three years later, possibly to the week, on that very spot, SO WAS I!!

The log wall just behind Ives remained there for a century after his last visit, but was finally destroyed by the six-foot high flood caused by Hurricane Irene, so it was replaced just last year with the rock wall behind me. And here’s the view Ives and I both had from this spot:

There’s also a photo of Ives getting out of or into a rowboat, so for the first time in my life I got in a rowboat, and rowed around the islands out in the middle. (We did use to go canoeing a little around the Susquehannah years ago, but physical activity has never really been my thing.)

I took the photo at top from our lovely little private balcony at the Emerson cabin, where we stayed the first night. It would be so fitting to think Ives had worked on the Concord in the Emerson cabin, but actually that property wasn’t acquired until 1919. Things change a lot in a hundred years, even if Elk Lake itself has been kept in pristine condition.

 

 

The black metal band Liturgy is down to just two members plus electronics. I don’t know how they do that yet, but I’ll see them play in Hudson, NY, Friday night and find out. Meanwhile, you can see them here, backstage at the Pitchfork festival in Chicago last month. Hunter Hunt-Hendrix does most of the talking, but you can see my son Bernard look really, really cool, and he talks a little about having been born in Chicago. Not a life I could have chosen, but I’m envious.