Charles Ives and Arnold Schoenberg, both of whom turn 150 years old this year, are the most important composers of their generation produced by Austro/Germany and the US.
Though Ives was said by some to “know his Schoenberg,” he plausibly denied it. Schoenberg, however, paid sufficient attention to Ives to have written a magnificent encomium: “There is a great man living in this country – a composer. He has solved the problem of how to preserve one’s self and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise of blame. His name is Ives.”
Ives shared with Schoenberg a condition of neglect. He did not share the 12-tone method of composition which Schoenberg anticipated would insure a robust musical future. But Schoenberg admired him anyway – at least for his pride and self-assurance.
Both composers responded to an acute twentieth century challenge with a radical innovation. For Schoenberg, the challenge was spent tradition: the seeming exhaustion of tonal harmony, and a trajectory that anticipated its extirpation. For Ives, the challenge was the absence of tradition: he lacked New World forebears of sufficient consequence to fashion a distinctive American idiom. He invented a strategy deploying American memory shards complexly intermingling with one another and with the Germanic template.
Schoenberg’s innovation – composition with 12 tones – proved a wrong move, but fatally popular. Ives’s innovation was a right move, but fatefully ignored.
I posed an obvious “what if” in my book Dvorak’s Prophecy:
“It is believed that during his New York Philharmonic tenure Gustav Mahler encountered Ives’s Third Symphony in score, took an interest, and might have premiered it with the Philharmonic had he not died in 1911 at the age of 50. Imagine that the score Mahler found was instead Ives’s Second and that he led the premiere performances at Carnegie Hall sometime before the Great War. The discovery of Ives’ songs and Concord Sonata would have been accelerated. American classical music would have acquired a past linking to the vernacular, and to writers and painters of consequence. No interwar commentator – not even Virgil Thomson – could have claimed that all pre-1910 American composers were faceless European clones. The spasmodic odyssey of American classical music could have acquired a pertinent ongoing shape.”
Instead of Ives, it was Aaron Copland who created an American style: sleek, streamlined, Francophile – and not nearly as protean, not nearly as resonant. It is Ives, not the interwar modernists, who connects to the American past, to the Civil War, to the Transcendentalists, to the quintessentially American self-made “unfinished” genius: Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, William Faulkner.
A few weeks ago, scripting my NPR show on Leonard Bernstein, I revisited William Schuman’s American Festival Overture (1939), which Bernstein programed alongside Ives’s Second on his first subscription concert as music director of the New York Philharmonic. Re-encountered today, it’s already a relic, almost a caricature of the wrong road taken.
To read a blog about the one Schoenberg 12-tone piece I still adore, click here.
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