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Inside This Issue: Inside This Issue Jungle Jive: Race, Jazz, and Cartoons by Daniel Goldmark Taking Henry Flynt Seriously by Benjamin Piekut Hearing Hip-Hop’s Jamaican Accent by Wayne Marshall Capturing Sound and Making Beats: Review by Joseph Auner Ives's 129 Songs: Review by Gayle Sherwood Magee American Popular Music: Review by Daniel Sonenberg |
Ives's
129 Songs: Review by Gayle
Sherwood Magee
Excerpt from Charles Ives's
The Cage Courtesy of A-R Editions In his
self-published collection of 114 Songs (1922), Charles Ives
reintroduced himself as a professional composer to a wide audience of performers
and peers. During the two decades after walking away from a promising
compositional career, Ives had developed an increasingly eclectic style that
is apparent from the first page of his song collection. One moment he
gleefully attacks traditional harmony (for example, in the massed clusters of
“Majority,” which opens 114 Songs), while other songs
revert to dreamy impressionism (“Evening”), anti-Romantic
modernism (“The Cage”) and nostalgic nationalism (“Down
East”). Ives even deploys a quaint, unironic late Victorian parlor
style in classroom resettings of European art songs (“Ich Grolle
Nicht”) and in much later transferences of the field-and-flower imagery
into the domestic space of his wife Harmony and daughter Edith (“Two Little
Flowers”).1 Each song
crystallizes a musical voice, the collection comprising a series of diverse miniatures improbably bundled together and
naïvely, provocatively, and insistently offered to the world. Even as the compositional range of 114 Songs testifies to
Ives’s versatility, the printed versions of the songs have been
notoriously unreliable—that is, until now. More than eighty years after
the first appearance of 114 Songs, Ives’s often brilliant but
problematically transmitted solo songs have found their ideal editor. H.
Wiley Hitchcock’s long-awaited volume Charles Ives, 129 Songs
(A-R Editions, 2004; $250) offers the first painstaking critical
scholarly edition of 114 Songs, supplemented with fifteen songs drawn
from later publications and select manuscript sources: thirteen additional
songs printed in subsequent years and two complete “songs without
words” found among the manuscripts, as well as an alternative setting
of “My Native Land.” Not included are fifty-four songs edited
earlier by John Kirkpatrick. The high price of the volume is justifiable given the
wealth and quality of the material. For performers, scholars and students,
this volume offers a previously impossible ideal. Ives’s completed,
published songs are bound together in one volume for ease of comparison,
study and performance, in reliable and musically sensitive editions with
excellent reproductions and an essay of monographic proportions. Hitchcock’s introductory essay, “Ives as
Songwriter and Lyricist,” offers a thorough and thought-provoking
analysis of Ives’s song “types” and his role as both
lyricist and song-text “editor.” Nearly eighty pages of copious
critical reports summarize the relevant editorial issues, while particularly
significant later revisions by Ives are represented in the scores as cue-size
notes and shaded ossias (for example, in “The Rainbow”).
Concordance tables relate all earlier publications to the present, and
beautifully rendered song texts, both in English and in careful translations,
will certainly prove invaluable to singers in preparing programs. As Hitchcock explains in his introductory essay, the many
musical and textual errors in Ives’s published songs stem not from a
laissez-faire attitude towards notation, nor from a much-overstated desire to
leave his works open to further revision and participatory composition. From
an early stage, Ives appears to have invested in creating clean copies of his
songs, either in his own hand or through hired copyists, and his employment
of the Schirmer company to create professional engravings of the 114 Songs
continued this effort. Nonetheless, the original editions of 114 Songs
and the other published collections are riddled with mistakes.
Ives’s lack of experience in proofing and correcting his own
publications was part of the problem, while the absence of an active
editorial intermediary for the later
collections continued and sometimes magnified the errors. Hitchcock further
suggests that the printers at Schirmer were probably German born, thus
explaining many of the errors in text. But in addition to these problems stemming from the
practicality of publication, I would suggest another source for Ives’s
notational “errors.” In a work such as “On the
Antipodes,” Ives attempted to bridge written and performative
traditions, transcriptive and prescriptive notation, drawing on an aural
ideal that was American, not European, in origin. He wrestled with copyists
and engravers who misread his phrase slurs on the salty line
“[Sometimes Nature’s nice and sweet, as a little pansy,] and sometimes
‘it ain’t’,” (mm. 18-19), that is to be sung
“between a shout and a drawl.” Hitchcock restores Ives’s
slurs and realigns text and accompaniment, which will offer the performer
more specific directions in conjunction with the ensuing decades of recordings,
and performances. While the impetus for such alterations
is clearly outlined in the critical reports, some of Hitchcock’s other
decisions could benefit from further elaboration. In “The Cage,”
Hitchcock changes a central line (“only when the keeper came around
with meat,” mm. 45-55) from its original notation in sharps to flats,
on the basis that flat notation “maintain[s] the whole-tone collection
complementary to that of [mm.] 21-44” (p. 429). Yet the manuscript
source and all later printings have the same line notated in sharps, possibly
signaling that Ives wanted to emphasize that the pitch content of this line
balances the opening and closing passages of the song, effectively creating
three symmetrical blocks, or “bars,” that structure the piece.
Here, Hitchcock’s editorial decision appears to alter the work’s
symmetrical layout without clear recourse to any corrections or additions by
Ives. The origins of the
songs’ dates remain unclear as well. In the critical reports, most
dates are drawn from James Sinclair’s A Descriptive Catalogue of the
Music of Charles Ives, but others are drawn from the consensually derived
dates from the Ives worklist in the latest Grove, prepared by J. Peter
Burkholder, Sinclair, and myself, which represents the most recent
re-examination of Ives’s dates. It is unclear what criteria were used
in choosing one date over another, and in at least one case the date appears
to derive from neither source. For the song “The Children’s
Hour,” Hitchcock offers a date of “?Ca. 1902-07,”
contradicting both Sinclair’s date of 1901 (which maintains
Ives’s original date for the work) and the Grove worklist date of
1912-13 (pp. 393 and 425). In the critical reports, Hitchcock notes that Ives
used a Longfellow text including the line “Edith with golden
hair,” and states that the song “prefigures astonishingly Edith
Osborne Ives, adopted in 1916 as the Iveses’ daughter, and her blond
locks.” One wonders whether Ives indeed anticipated the gender,
name, and hair color of his adopted child up to thirteen years before she
joined the family (the Iveses met Edith in 1915 and formally adopted her in 1916). The date offered here (“?Ca.
1902-07”) assigned to the song perhaps suggests
Hitchcock’s and Sinclair’s reluctance to accept that Ives could
have written such an impressionistic but tonally well-behaved work in 1915 or
later. The consensual date of 1912-1913 offered in the Grove worklist is
still probably two to three years too early, but it is within a more likely
range of the Iveses’ first meeting Edith. Given Ives’s tendency
to safely compartmentalize his domestic settings from the more explosive
modernist works underway at the same time, a more direct connection between
“The Children’s Hour” and Edith Ives seems clearly
defensible. The co-existing and contradictory dates of “The
Children’s Hour” highlight the difficulty in assigning any single
reliable date to much of Ives’s music. For this reason, and perhaps
more importantly for the purpose of easy access by performers and scholars,
an alphabetical rather than chronological ordering in the volume would have
been preferable. While the alphabetical concordance offered in Table 4 (pp.
xxiv-xxvi, the first two without page numbers) connects the songs to numbered
entries in the Sinclair catalogue, the original 114 Songs (where
relevant), and the current collection, the incorporation of page numbers
would have rendered the table more helpful. Such issues aside, one of the many accomplishments of
Hitchcock’s edition is its potential to spur further reconsiderations
of this central portion of Ives’s compositional output. This remarkable
volume stands to attain the iconic status already enjoyed by Ives’s
songs themselves. Hitchcock, A-R Editions, and MUSA must be commended for
their vision, patience, and commitment in bringing this extraordinary and
necessary project to fruition. —Gayle Sherwood Magee University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Note 1 I am grateful to Susan Youens for making the
connection between the resettings of Romantic Lieder texts and Ives’s
later “flower” settings. ISAM home Who we
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