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Inside
This Issue:
Inside This Issue
Pianos, Ivory, and Empire by Sean
Murray
Searching for Brooklyn’s
Jazz History by Jeffrey Taylor
Celebrating Carter, review by
Ève Poudrier
Reenvisioning a Critical Chapter in
American Music, review by Ray Allen
Robert Ashley’s Operas,
review by David Grubbs
Charles Ives and His Tunes, review
by Tom C. Owens
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Charles Ives and His Tunes
by
Charles Owens
Clayton
Henderson has revised, updated, and improved his indispensable The Charles
Ives Tunebook in its handsome second edition (University of Indiana
Press, 2008). Since it was published by J.
Bunker Clark’s Harmonie Park Press in 1990, The Charles Ives Tunebook
has served a vital function for students of Ives’s music, documentating
the two hundred or so tunes that Ives quoted or paraphrased. Henderson focuses on the
first full appearances of borrowed
tunes in Ives’s works including the unfinished pieces. By presenting
the borrowed melodies in categories—hymns, patriotic songs, popular songs, etc.—the Tunebook
provides both a general reference of the source material to which Ives so
often turned, and a window on Ives’s musical mind in terms of the
number and style of tunes in each category. Henderson augments this second function by
using sources for the tunes that date from Ives’s time, thus showing
how the tunes as he knew them differ in some cases from the versions known
today. An irony of the collection is the way that perusing it underlines the
aural and experiential nature of Ives’s music. Many of these tunes,
particularly the ones Ives used repeatedly, clearly had a deep significance
for him, but when one looks at the tunes themselves, outside the context of a
given work by Ives, there are few distinctive musical reasons for the use of
one tune over another. As Henderson
notes, they are largely stepwise and mostly in major keys.
Henderson
sees Ives’s use of tunes as a way of encoding personal meaning. He
elaborates on this idea via Ives’s own prose descriptions of the way
borrowed tunes function in works such as The “St. Gaudens” in Boston Common, and Decoration
Day. He also notes the use of quotation as a sort of musical punning in
works such as the second movement of the Trio for Violin, Violoncello, and
Piano. Thus, tunes have memorial, comic, and philosophical functions, and
like the tunes themselves, these roles are often interwoven. The Ives of the Concord
Sonata and its accompanying Essays informs Henderson’s general
understanding of quotation’s function and of the seeming contradiction
between the simple borrowed material
and its highly complex presentation: “Ives’s transcendentalist
views held that the music of the common man also contained the true substance
of life, a unity underlying all diversity, a simplicity behind the
complexities of existence. In using homely tunes, Ives attempted to represent
this substance, this unity and simplicity, albeit clothed in complicated
accompanying sound fabrics” (xv).
Many of the changes
in this second edition stem from important Ives scholarship completed after
its first publication. James Sinclair’s Descriptive Catalogue of the
Music of Charles Ives (Yale University Press, 1999) replaces John
Kirkpatrick’s Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue (Library of the
Yale School of Music, 1960) as the source for the numbering and dating of
Ives’s works and serves as a principal source for information on
borrowed material. Peter
Burkholder’s All Made of Tunes (Yale University Press, 1995)
also informs Henderson’s
choices in this edition; indeed the two books function as a kind of
conversation on borrowing in Ives’s music. Where Burkholder focuses on
the way borrowed material shapes whole pieces and movements and is
particularly interested in the fragmentation and development of the material,
Henderson
hears the allusions in Ives’s works as whole events, and he tends to
refer to phrase-length segments of tunes. He states that for Ives, “the
melody of the source was a sacred thing” (13). Thus, the Tunebook
is an attempt to preserve these melodies not so much as an investigation of
Ives’s music but of its constitutive materials, the musical experience
of the mind behind it.
The Tunebook has grown in ways that match our
maturing understanding of Ives, particularly the increased awareness of his
ties with the European “classical” music tradition: almost twice
as many tunes now appear in this category, with additional and new entries by
Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Dvořák, Franck, Handel, Tchaikovsky,
and Wagner. Here is yet further refutation of the myth that Ives stood apart
from, and was mostly uninfluenced by, the European tradition of the
nineteenth century. Almost every category has seen some change. The most
stable are “Popular Instrumental Tunes,” with no additions, and
“Patriotic Songs and Military Music,” with only one.
“Popular Songs” and “Hymns” have both seen substantial
additions, as has the section on “College Tunes,” which is
particularly valuable in view of the increasing obscurity of its subject
matter. The fraternity songs Ives uses were known to only a select audience
even in Ives’s day.
A few pieces have also been removed from the Tunebook,
and an examination of one of these cases provokes thought and a few questions
about Henderson’s
criteria for determining the use of borrowed material in a given work. The
first edition lists Stephen Foster’s “Nelly Bly” (tune 124)
as the source of the flute line in measure 41 of Decoration Day, and
indeed the contours of the tunes closely match. The second edition states,
without comment or elaboration, that Ives does not borrow from “Nelly
Bly.” In All Made of Tunes, Burkholder discusses this potential
borrowing but concludes that the passage is in fact related to
“Marching through Georgia,”
which Ives has already used in the movement, and which is more topically
relevant. It seems likely that Henderson
has accepted this argument, especially in view of his discussion of Ives’s
use of patriotic songs, which points out the way that Ives often takes the
meaning or association of a particular tune into account when placing it into
a musical context. Although Henderson’s
basic methodology is clear, a bit more explanation in such cases would be
helpful.
Henderson
is more overt in his discussion of potential overlap and ambiguity between
similar tunes, such as the famous motive from Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony and Charles Zeuner’s
“Missionary Chant,” which are identical apart from the
number of times the first note is repeated. The Hymn tunes
“Azmon” and “Shining
Shore” form
another almost indistinguishable pair. In such cases, Henderson emphasizes
that Ives uses quotation contextually and thematically, so when a fragment
that could be from the tune “Eli
Yale” appears in the transcendent finale of the Fourth Symphony (m. 65,
oboe), he relates it instead to Lowell Mason’s “There Is a Happy
Land,” which Ives also uses in the symphony’s second movement.
These borderline calls point out the interpretive nature of the book and of
listening to Ives’s music. They also demonstrate the richness that
comes from applying a contextual knowledge of the source material to the
music. Ives’s mind was associative; his music and prose comprise networks
of inter-referential meaning. And, while Henderson is correct to point out that one
does not suddenly understand Ives “because one has ferreted out
borrowings from every nook and cranny of his music,” (7) knowing the
content and context of this musical “substance” enhances the
interpretive and aesthetic experience of the music.
Although Ives wrote most of his music without the
prospect of a specific performance, he wrote for an audience with aural and
musical experiences similar to his own. In 1940, Ives’s brother-in-law,
Joseph Twichell, described the effect of hearing a recital featuring excerpts
from the Concord
Sonata and selected songs in a letter to the Charles and Harmony Ives:
. . . I don’t know a single thing about
music—not a single thing, except that I like it or I don’t like
it; except how it makes me feel. . . . So much of it was to me so
amazingly familiar; something I hadn’t at all expected. . . . As to the
songs I did really and truly enjoy them all very much. . . . But one
or two of the accompaniments . . . had me licked. Just what they had to do
with the song I couldn’t figure. It sounded to me sometimes as if
Charlie was trying to put one over on the singer; as if he had said to the
good lady, “I’ll bet you can’t sing ‘Nearer My God to
Thee’ while I play ‘Marching through Georgia’.” . . .
It was for me a never-to-be-forgotten afternoon. It was simply great (Charles
Ives Papers, Gilmore Music Library, Yale University, Mss. 14, Box 32,
Folder 10).
Twichell recognizes the allusions in the songs, and
while they puzzle him, they also create a sense of community and familiarity.
The music functions on multiple levels with layered meanings—musical,
textual, comic, profound, personal. The great value of The Ives Tunebook
is that it preserves the music, some of it quite ephemeral, that Ives
transformed to create such musical depth and this rich sense of
community.
—Tom
C. Owens
George
Mason University
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