Charles Ives and National Understanding

Charles Ives, 150 years old, is immensely important right now. Why is that? What’s changed?

For the Ives Sesquicentenary festivals currently sponsored by the NEH Music Unwound consortium, The American Scholar has published an extraordinary online Program Companion. In addition to my essay on Ives and Mahler, it features contributions by a leading American art historian, a leading American Civil War historian, a prominent magazine editor, and the eminence gris among contemporary Ives scholars. These fresh perspectives not only transport Ives far beyond the modernist decades in which he was once incongruously confined; they propose his music as a vital source of national understanding and hope for the future. 

Tim Barringer is Yale art historian who really knows music. His studies of Frederic Church, the Hudson River School, and the “American Sublime” have transformed our understanding of nineteenth century American visual art. Tackling Ives for the first time, Tim has come up with a array of landmark insights. “By examining the key American visual media of Ives’s formative years,” he writes, “we might begin to identify suggestive parallels with his idiosyncratic, vernacular creative practice.” Ives’ “deep sense of local belonging” was “increasingly unusual in a country scarred by Indigenous dispossession and political schism, one in the throes of rapid economic and social change.” His music “revisited the scenes of his youth as if searching the pages of a Victorian album, whose sepia photographic prints and stiff . . . portraits could offer a shockingly direct link with lost times and people, with the faces of the dead. Indeed, the very lifeblood of Ives’s works is a vividly immediate affect that we might think of as photographic.”

Tim cites an 1892 photograph of the Ives house (reproduced above) and comments: “The photograph marked a radical divergence from earlier forms of popular representation seen on the walls of Victorian American – like this 1869 Currier & Lives lithographic print:

“Images of this kind hover in Ives’s pictorial imagination in the way that Stephen Foster’s songs are ever-present in his musical vocabulary as fondly remembered half-truths of an earlier era. .  . But unlike the print’s sugary idyll, the photograph of the homestead at Danbury (much like Ives’s later scores) incorporates a multitude of incidental, miscellaneous, quotidian details. The lens registered the undulations of worn brick pavement and the soil in the road. . . . the uncanny smack of truthfulness that also marks out Ives’s compositions.”

And Barringer explores what drew Ives to the paintings of J. M. W. Turner – paintings “though apparently unfinished, inchoate and hazy” were “rooted in a lifetime of close observation.”

Allen Guelzo, again, is a historian who happens to know music – like Barringer, a rarity. His essay “Battle Hymns” stresses the continued ubiquity of the Civil War in American memory during Ives’s formative Connecticut years. “Overall, Connecticut sent some 55,000 men into the Union ranks . . . almost a quarter of its white male population.” In the years following, “Connecticut veterans organized Grand Army of the Republic posts with no color line, ‘as colored and white are united.’” For Ives the Civil War became “a shining moment of moral truth” – and “the compositions he wrote to remember it are all lavish demonstrations of a determination to use the American past to understand the present.” Specifically, Ives read the war as “the Won Cause”:

“The Civil War was for Ives a living cause, the cause of emancipation. This at a time when American writers were either glamorizing the Confederacy and Jim Crow (from Augusta Jane Evans to Thomas Dixon), politely accommodating Southern sensibilities (the American Winston Churchill in The Crisis), or feeling sorrowful for the price northerners had paid (in William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham) and pretending that the Civil War had been about something other than slavery. In Ives’s use of Civil War songs and marching music, the war served . . . as a symbol of certain eternal verities—about freedom, about race, about the American experience itself. . . . His uses of Civil War music are not meant to entertain or impress, but to draw the listener into the ideals of the conflict itself, the world of Danbury in the full bloom of abolitionist energy, a world that, through his music, he could ensure would never be lost.”

Sudip Bose, the editor of The American Scholar, has undertaken this extraordinary initiative, publishing the Ives Sesquicentenary Program Companion in recognition both of Ives’s importance and of his neglect. Sudip’s essay “A Boy’s Fourth: Listening to Ives in an Age of Political Division” ponders his own experience of Ives’s The Fourth of July. He writes: “In the past several years, with our nation divided, with whispers of civil conflict growing louder and more insistent, with a general anxiety that seems never to relent, I have been hearing in The Fourth of July something far more harrowing, menacing even, than I ever have before. That great cacophonous cloud at the center of the movement seems less like an outpouring of joy than a vision of a nightmare, all those quotations of Americana suddenly sounding like snarling, angry taunts, each fragment crying out to be heard above the others, brash and brutal and bullying. I can’t help imagining this terrifying chaos as an apt metaphor for today’s America, one in which the distorted lines of ‘Columbia’ or the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ suggest not nostalgia but something far more sinister. Even the work’s final two measures—which once seemed to me like America’s answer to the Mahlerian ewig, a statement on earth everlasting and our place on it— have been transformed in my ears. Those phrases in the strings, hesitant, unresolved, enigmatic, conjuring up a last trail of dying light in the evening sky—they seem to ask an unsettling, unanswerable question: Where do we go from here?”

Finally, J. Peter Burkholder, the most indispensable of present-day Ives scholars, contributes “The Power of the Common Soul.” Ives, Peter writes, shows us “how to listen to every voice and see the good in everyone.” A core message “is his celebration of the music and music-making of common people . . . He upends the [traditional] hierarchy of taste. . . . Hope is one of the great themes of Ives’s music: a celebration of the past, not as a place to return to, or to feel nostalgia for, but as inspiration for the future . . . Music has always been a kind of social glue . . . When Ives incorporates into a composition a hymn tune . . . , it comes with some of that ‘social glue’ attached.” 

Peter’s essay closes: “In his words for the song ‘Down East’ (1919), a rumination on ‘songs from mother’s heart’ that culminates in ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ he says it plainly: ‘With those strains a stronger hope comes nearer to me.’ We need that hope today.”