Mahler, Ives, and Today’s Cultural Memory Crisis

In celebration of the Charles Ives Sesquicentenary, I’ve written a long piece on Ives and Gustav Mahler for The American Scholar. The topic is not new: these composers quite obviously have in common a radical propensity to juxtapose the quotidian with the sublime – parade bands and tuneful ditties with the most rarefied metaphysical strivings. But my perspective is, I think, new – and pertinent to the fraught times in which we live.

The American experience is today ever more crippled by a condition of pastlessness. More than any previous composers, Ives and Mahler are obsessed with the act of memory. Mahler’s memories typically stem from his childhood years in Iglau, Ives’s from his Danbury childhood. What is more: Ives virtually curates the American past — the Revolutionary and Civil Wars; the Transcendentalists. No less than Mark Twain, no less than Herman Melville, he is an American icon — and yet remains mistrusted and misunderstood. That at the same time he is for many the supreme American creative genius among concert composers must say something about America and Ives both: as ever, we’re not sure who we are. 

Not so long ago, Ives was misclassified as a prophetic modernist. An obsession with “who got there first?” pigeonholed him as an intriguing historical oddity rather than an expressive genius. It placed him firmly in play, but proved essentially patronizing. Once the modernist criterion of originality dissipated, however, it became possible to resituate Ives as a complex product of a dynamic period of  American growth itself undergoing revision. 

Hence the sesquicentenary opportunity at hand, celebrating the 150^th birthday of this most volatile cultural bellwether. With Ives ensconced in a pervasive fin-de-siecle moment, we can at last thrust him onto the international stage he deserves and inquire: what about Charles Ives resonates with musical developments abroad – not as a possible harbinger of Arnold Schoenberg or Bela Bartok, but as a precise contemporary of the European composer he most striking resembles? 

The creative act, however understood, is therapeutic: a conversation with the self. For Mahler, for Ives, shards of memory proved an exigent mooring ingredient. Their occurrence is made to seem involuntary, unpremeditated, unwilled. In Mahler, a signature memory swath is public rituals of mourning written into the dirges of his symphonies. The funeral mode may intrude at any moment — as when the clarion fortissimo opening of the sanguine Third instantly dissipates to the wailing winds and searing trumps cries of a pianissimo processional. In Ives, a distinctive memory swath is of sounds heard over water, which may (as in the song “Remembrance”) evoke his father, or (as in the song “The Housatonic at Stockbridge”) his courtship. In Ives’ “The St. Gaudens on Boston Commons,” the memory of Civil War songs is spectral: a haunting of the present.

My American Scholar essay concludes: If Nietzsche, processing decades of bewildering flux, diagnosed a condition of  “weightlessness,” today’s affliction is pastlessness. Our world of social media and mounting, ever multiplying gadgetry swims in bits and pieces, in disconnected dots, in superficia and ephemera. Processing the lapse in cultural memory evident all around us, we should fear losing touch with the arts – with civilization – as a renewable reservoir. 

Leonard Bernstein’s recovery of Ives’ Second Symphony in the 1950s — widely reported and acclaimed – should have secured Ives a firm foothold in the American symphonic repertoire. Bernstein broadcast and recorded Ives. He espoused Ives on national television. He took Ives abroad. He laid the groundwork – but it never happened. Incredibly – tellingly — the present Ives Sesquicentenary is mainly being celebrated abroad. In the United States, it will be commemorated most ambitiously not by any orchestra or music director, but by the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University/Bloomington, which in October hosts nine days of cross-disciplinary exploration supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Who else — what institutions of education and performance – will remember Charles Ives in years to come? It is not an idle question. It is now 78 years since Lou Harrison unforgettably wrote:

“I suspect that the works of Ives are a great city, with public and private places for all, and myriad sights in all directions . . . . In the not-too-distant future it may be that we will enter this city and find each in his own way his proper home address, letters from the neighbors, and indeed all of a life, for who else has built a place big enough for us, or seen to it that all were equally and just represented? Such is the work of Ives And if we here, in the United States, are still really homeless of the mind, it is not because men have not spent their hearts and spirit building that home . . . but simply because we refuse to move in.”

A side topic in my American Scholar essay: No other American composer connects more explicitly with the ragged New World arts species epitomized by Herman Melville. Both Melville and Ives eschewed finishing school in Europe – the treasures and literary traditions of Italy and France; the conservatories of Vienna and Berlin. Concomitantly, both embraced a democratic ethos. Melville’s schooling was obtained on the South Seas among sailors of every race and stripe. Ives insisted that his second vocation – selling life insurance – enhanced his musical vocation; “Get into the lives of the people!” he thundered.  Melville’s masterpieces are proudly unkempt. So it is with Ives: a frontier trait. If Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno are peak American achievements in large and smaller forms, so are Ives’ fifty-minute Concord Piano Sonata and four-minute “Housatonic at Stockbridge.” And an early Ives composition, his Second Symphony, parallels Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: fearlessly mining American vernacular speech and song, they are kindred landmarks in appropriating the European novel and symphony. In short, the pantheon of the self-created, “unfinished” American genius – the high canon of Emerson, Melville, and Twain, also of Walt Whitman, George Gershwin, and William Faulkner – is Ives’ rightful home. And yet he remains less known, less widely appreciated. 

The forthcoming Ives festival at Indiana University – possibly the most ambitious Ives celebration ever mounted — devotes an afternoon to “Ives and American Literature.” Other topics in play include Ives the man, Ives and the American band, Ives in performance, Ives and Nature, Ives and the Gilded Age, Ives and hymnody, and Ives and the Civil War. All the concerts and talks will be free of charge, and they’ll all be live-streamed. For further information, click here. 

The newest online edition ofThe American Scholar (whose editor, Sudip Bose, deserves an Ives Medal) includes my Ives/Mahler piece alongside four additional Ives Sesquicentenary essays — by Peter Burkholder, Allen Guelzo, Tim Barringer, and Sudip himself — that comprise a 50-page Ives Sesquicentenary Program Companion. I’ll shortly be posting a blog pondering the significance of these fresh musical and extra-musical perspectives.