A Revelatory Visual Rendering of an American Musical Masterpiece

Of the masterpieces of American classical music, among the least appreciated and least performed is Three Places in New England by Charles Ives.

There is an obvious reason: the piece fails in live performance unless it’s contextualized. In particular, the first movement – “The ‘St. Gaudens’ in Boston Common” – makes little impression unless an audience gleans its inspiration: Augustus St. Gaudens’ bas relief of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s historic Black Civil War regiment, most of whose members perished in a heroic assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina. Ives here singularly produces a ghost dirge suffused with weary echoes of Civil War songs, work songs, plantation songs, church songs, minstrel songs. It is an intense patriotic tribute eschewing the stentorian.

Movement two – “Putnam’s Camp” – uncorks a rambunctious July 4 celebration, as processed by an eagerly imaginative child. Movement three – “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” – is the most majestic, most eloquent American musical rendering of the sublime in Nature. It’s all iconic Americana, never glib, never touristic. But it risks sounding esoteric.

A remedy: Peter Bogdanoff’s ingeniously poetic “visual presentation” for Three Places in New England, which premieres on October 5 at the Ives Sesquicentenary Festival at Indiana University/Bloomington as part of an Ives concert by the Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Arthur Fagen. The same concert will incorporate commentary and source tunes for Three Places and Ives’s Symphony No. 2. The visual presentation will next be seen Feb. 22 at an Ives Sesquicentenary concert given by the Chicago Sinfonietta conducted by Mei-Ann Chen. 

For “The St. Gaudens,” Ives furnished a poem reading in part:

Moving—Marching—Faces of Souls!

Marked with generations of pain,

Part-freers of a Destiny,

Slowly, restlessly—swaying us on with you

Towards other Freedom! . . . 

Moving—Marching—Faces of Souls!

Ives’s own program note for “Putnam’s Camp” reads:

Once upon a “4th of July,” some time ago, so the story goes, a child went there on a picnic. Wandering away from the rest of the children past the camp ground into the woods, he hopes to catch a glimpse of some of the old soldiers. As he rests on the hillside of laurel and hickories, the tunes of the band and the songs of the children grow fainter and fainter;—when—“mirabile dictu”—over the trees on the crest of the hill he sees a tall woman standing. She reminds him of a picture he has of the Goddess Liberty,—but the face is sorrowful—she is pleading with the soldiers not to forget their “cause” and the great sacrifices they have made for it. But they march out of camp with fife and drum to a popular tune of the day. Suddenly a new national note is heard. Putnam is coming over the hills from the center,—the soldiers turn back and cheer. The little boy awakes, he hears the children’s songs and runs down past the monument to “listen to the band” and join in the games and dances.

(At the forthcoming IU performance, “The St. Gaudens” will be preceded by a reading of Ives’s poem by William Sharp; “Putnam’s Camp” will be preceded by a reading of Ives’s note, again by Bill; “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” will be preceded by a performance of the song by Bill and Steven Mayer. In the video above, Ives’s note is read by Wendy Bricht, and Ives’s song is performed by Bill and Paul Sanchez.)

Supported by the NEH Music Unwound consortium, the Indiana University Ives Sesquicentenary Festival (Sept. 30 to October 8) is curated by J. Peter Burkholder and myself. Participants include pianists Steven Mayer, Jeremy Denk, and Gilbert Kalish, the Pacifica String Quartet, university ensembles, and scholars from a variety of disciplines. All concerts are free. For further information – and a 50-page Program Companion – click here.