“Very Likely the Most Important Film Ever Made about American Music”

During the pandemic, unable to produce concerts, I found myself making six documentary films linked to my book Dvorak’s Prophecy. The most necessary of these was and is “Charles Ives’s America.” The Dvorak’s Prophecy films were picked up by Naxos as DVDs – which almost no one purchases any more. For the current Ives Sesquicentenary, however, Naxos has streamed the Ives film on youtube – so it’s now available for free, right here.

“Charles Ives’s America” features extraordinary visual renderings by my longtime colleague Peter Bogdanoff. The necessity of the film was articulated by JoAnn Falletta, who as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic since 1999 has been a staunch and creative advocate of neglected American repertoire:

“’’Charles Ives’ America” is very likely the most important film ever made about American music. Horowitz moves Ives from the fringes squarely to his position as the seminal composer of our country. The genius of Ives is astonishing, and his creativity without equal. The presentation of his life and world is visually beautiful and deeply moving, but at the center of this film experience is his music. We are amazed by its uncompromising originality, its honesty, its poetic impulse, its clear-eyed humor, and, in the end, its absolute beauty. I fell in love with Ives all over again.”

In a review of all six Dvorak’s Prophecy films in The American Scholar, Mark N. Grant wrote:

“As a group, these videos sweep together a vast canvas of Americana . . . All are interestingly told. The video documentaries eschew the Ken Burns style of rapid montage and instead go into deep focus. Talking heads speak at length rather than in sound bites. The music . . . is not interrupted by hyperkinetic visual montages or multiple voiceovers. It’s the documentary equivalent of ‘slow food’; there is room to absorb and think and remember. . . . The videos should be widely purchased and used by educators and institutions throughout the country to proselytize the unconverted. If classical music is going to survive and thrive, we need zealous advocates like Joseph Horowitz to continue beating the drum.”

My favorite sequence from the Ives film (at 27:30) features The Housatonic at Stockbridge, with the conductor/scholar James Sinclair narrating the magical layering of Ives’s sublime depiction of water and mist. 

The film’s participants, additinal to Jim, are the Ives scholars J. Peter Burkholder and Judith Tick, and the baritone William Sharp – a peerless Ives singer whose live performances (with pianist Paul Sanchez) are heard throughout. The other music comes from Naxos recordings by Sinclair, Kenneth Schermerhorn, and Steven Mayer (whose Concord Sonata was named one of the three best recorded versions by Gramophone magazine). Supplementary funding was furnished by the Ives Society.

Naxos’s commitment to Ives bears stressing. It dates back decades, when I had occasion to  introduce Klaus Heymann – who founded Naxos in 1987 and is an unsung hero of American music — to the late H. Wiley Hitchcock, then a seminal Ives authority. 

Naxos’s “American Classics” series, in which Ives prominently figures, is itself a landmark initiative. Only on Naxos can you hear George Templeton Strong’s hour-long Sintram Symphony (1888) – a high Romantic American opus in the Liszt/Bruckner mold, triumphantly premiered by Anton Seidl in 1892 and subsequently forgotten (Neeme Jarvi considers the slow movement the most beautiful ever composed by an American). Another essential “American Classics” recording is Benjamin Pasternack’s gripping traversal of Aaron Copland’s valedictory: the non-tonal Piano Fantasy. More recently, Arthur Fagen’s Naxos recording of William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony has triggered wide and belated recognition of the most accomplished “Black symphony” of the interwar decades. And Naxos has issued stellar performances of our most neglected composer: the Indianist Arthur Farwell, who comes closer to Bartok than any other American.  

The Naxos Ives catalog totals no fewer than 19 releases, including a fresh set of “Orchestral Works” scheduled for November 1. The novelties on this recording, conducted by James Sinclair, include orchestral transcriptions of Schumann and Schubert that Ives composed while a student at Yale. Sinclair’s completion of an Ives’s torso, a theater-orchestra version of his irresistible song “The Circus Band,” is again irresistible. So is the “March No. 3” incorporating “My Old Kentucky Home.”

Here’s a Listening Guide to the Ives film:

00:00 — Ives the song composer (“The Circus Band” and “Memories”), with commentary by William Sharp

13:00 — Ives at Yale; Symphony No. 1

21:00 — Ives and his wife Harmony; “The Housatonic at Stockbridge”

32:00 — Symphony No. 2 and its sources, with commentary by J. Peter Burkholder

44:00 — “The St. Gaudens at Boston Commons” and sources

55:00 — The Concord Piano Sonata

1:06 — Ives as a “moral force” — not a modernist; Edie Ives extols her father as “a great man”

1:12 — Judith Tick on Ives the Progressive

1:18 — Canonizing Ives as a “self-made American genius”

1:20 — “Serenity”