When Charles Ives Wrote a Song as Magnificent as Brahms’s

In the remarkable absence of any suitable acknowledgement of the Charles Ives Sesquicentenary by our nation’s slumbering orchestras, it has fallen to the National Endowment for the Humanities to celebrate the 150th birthday of America’s greatest creative genius in the realm of classical music.

In its latest embodiment, the NEH Music Unwound consortium, which I have directed for a dozen years, is mainly dedicated to four Ives festivals. The first of these has just transpired at the Brevard Music Festival. Music Unwound contextualizes topics in American classical music. (My NPR “More than Music” programs, which do the same, are also NEH-funded via Music Unwound.) The video clip posted above samples “Charles Ives: A Life in Music,” which uses Ives’s songs to tell his story.  

This little theater piece, which I created a decade ago, features a supreme Ives interpreter: the baritone William Sharp. The excerpt here posted, from the July 15 Brevard performance (with pianist Deloise Lima and actress Allison Pohl), juxtaposes two settings of Hermann Allmers’ poem “Feldeinsamkeit” – the famous one by Brahms (1882) and another by the 23-year-old Yale composition student Charles Ives that, incredibly, is just as good.

This exercise deserves to banish the notion – once pervasive — of Ives the gifted dilettante or “primitive.” As Ives himself noted (a reminiscence quoted by Bill prior to singing the two songs), his setting is quite different from Brahms’. The “active tranquility” of Nature, here evoked, became a signature Ives trope. Ives’s Schumanesque piano accompaniment incorporates active particles of harmonic grit not to be found in Schumann. 

Ives pertinently wrote: “To think hard and deeply and to say what is thought, regardless of consequences, may produce a first impression . . . of great muddiness . . . The mud may be a form of sincerity.” He endorsed the “mud and scum” Ralph Waldo Emerson extolled in his poem “Music”: “There alway, alway something sings.” “Feldeinsamkeit,” “Remembrance,” “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” “Thoreau,” and other outdoor reveries are in Ives invariably discordant, however faintly. The water, the ether are never wholly limpid; harmonic and textural impurities abound. Ives’ visions of river and meadow, woods and mountain-top are layered with Emersonian mud and scum: active particles of sound; actives particles of memory. It speaks volumes that Ives’ favorite painter was J. M. W. Turner, whose obscurely layered landscapes resist clarity.

The poetic text for “Feldeinsamkeit,” in English, reads: 

I rest at peace in tall green grass
And gaze steadily aloft,
Surrounded by unceasing crickets,
Wondrously interwoven with blue sky.

The lovely white clouds go drifting by
Through the deep blue, like lovely silent dreams;
I feel as if I have long been dead,
Drifting happily with them through eternal space.

The Brevard festival also included a contextualized performance of Ives’ Concord Piano Sonata (magnificently played by Michael Chertock) and of the transcendent finale of his Second String Quartet. And there was an orchestral concert (led by Delta David Gier) featuring Ives’s Second Symphony prefaced by some of the songs, familiar and not, he adapts. My terrific partner in these presentations was J. Peter Burkholder, our pre-eminent Ives scholar. 

Upcoming are Music Unwound Ives festivals via Indiana University/Bloomington (September 30 – October 8), Bard College’s The Orchestra Now/Carnegie Hall (November 9, 16-17, 21), and the Chicago Sinfonietta/Illinois State University (March 19-22, 2025). 

The first of these – including the premiere of a “visual presentation” of Ives’ Three Places in New England created by Peter Bogdanoff – will be the most ambitious Music Unwound festival ever mounted, with some three dozen events; for complete IU program information, click here.

In addition, The American Scholar will be creating an online Ives Sequicentenary program companion. And I’ll be dedicating my November NPR “More than Music” show to Charles Ives, born 150 years ago this October.