Ives and his Times

by Tom C. Owens

Philip Lambert’s Ives Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1998; $69.95) is a comprehensive and provocative survey of research by ten prominent Ives scholars. By presenting current thought on the realization, performance, interpretation, influence, and importance of Ives’s works, this collection grapples with many critical issues in Ives research and will invigorate interest in this unique American voice.

Several articles dig deep into the music itself. Robert Morgan explores the wonderful strangeness of the song “The Things Our Fathers Loved” and its connection to European musical tradition. He demonstrates the singular yet compelling logic of Ives’s compositional language by showing how Ives understood tonality as a historical language, still meaningful and powerful, but no longer necessary or inviolable. Ives’s unfinished Universe Symphony is the subject taken up by both Larry Austin and Philip Lambert in their essays. Austin provides a complete description (plus sixteen pages of facsimile) of the Symphony sketches and explains why and how he accepted Ives’s open invitation to complete it. Lambert’s more philosophical and contextual article considers the Symphony as a part of a tradition including Scriabin’s Mysterium and Schoenberg’s Die Jakobsleiter. It is intriguing that in his most transcendental, mystical work, Ives was thinking primarily in abstract and experimental terms. Austin’s description of the sketches shows how different the Symphony is from the Concord Sonata, for instance. Lambert’s focus on cyclic structures in the sketches demonstrates the importance and intentionality of musical complexity in the piece. The context Lambert provides for the Universe Symphony proves how appropriate this hypercomplexity is in a work that attempts to embody grand cosmological principles.

In his survey of the challenges in preparing a critical edition of Ives’s songs for the Music of the United States of America series, H. Wiley Hitchcock presents compelling evidence that the songs have been printed and reprinted without any editing. Although he judiciously acknowledges the danger of correcting wrong notes that are right (to paraphrase Ives), Hitchcock’s long experience with Ives’s music and his demonstrated eye for detail make him an obvious choice for the project. Geoffrey Block examines the sketch materials and the two published editions of the Concord Sonata. He argues that the second edition (1947) represents Ives’s final intentions and that the piece should be performed scrupulously from that edition. Block also presents a close reading of the Concord sources partially in response to questions about chronology and revision famously raised by Elliott Carter and Maynard Solomon. Block shows convincingly that later additions of dissonance usually restored ideas from original orchestral sketches that were omitted from the first edition—thus, the revisions show us Ives’s earlier ideas. In “Redating Ives’s Choral Sources,” Gayle Sherwood dissects the chronology of Ives’s choral works. Her analysis of paper types and handwriting provides reliable dates for the pieces and demonstrates a logical compositional pattern. The reordering does not radically alter the familiar dates; rather, it shows that Ives, like Bach, wrote choral pieces as required for his various church jobs. The dates Sherwood assigns are often later than Ives’s own, but she finds no evidence that Ives systematically changed dates to make himself appear more “modern.” The order of pieces remains essentially unchanged and, in her words, “the revised chronology supports Ives’s reputation as a compositional innovator.”

Other essays address historical and philosophical issues. In a style recalling research on Ives from the 1970s, Wolfgang Rathert postulates an aesthetic of “potentiality,” a transcendental openness to inspiration that produced Ives’s “extremely unstable concept of the work.” He relates the intentional incompleteness of Ives’s works and his reliance on intuition during performance to Emerson’s concept of “repose,” or an emptying of the mind to allow artistic inspiration. Ironically, Ives uses the term quite differently. Drawing on Emerson’s essay “Intellect,” Ives uses “repose” as the opposite of “truth” in the Essays. It is a synonym for “manner.” Rathert’s assertion that the Concord Sonata (and by extension much of Ives’s oeuvre) “abides in an undefined zone of a modern ‘work in progress,’ whose richness of associations does not allow for completion,” provides a provocative—although to my mind less-than-persuasive—counterpoint to Block’s argument for the finished work.

In “Charles Ives and the Politics of Direct Democracy,” Judith Tick reconsiders Ives’s political ideas and projects them into a more central political position. By linking Ives’s ideas and popular movements for initiative and referendum, Tick presents his support for direct democracy as a logical extension of mainstream politics, not an impractical outgrowth of transcendentalism. She also illuminates Ives’s views on class and commercialism—issues often overlooked in commentary on his extreme use of gendered rhetoric. Stuart Feder argues that Thoreau was a constant figure in Ives’s inner life. To explore Thoreau’s symbolic value for Ives, Feder turns to the music. He considers works obviously related to Thoreau and those he calls Thoreauvian, such as “Walking,” “Sunrise,” and Tone Roads No. 3. He points out connections of style and substance between Ives’s works and Thoreau’s and uses the correspondence between Ives and Thoreau scholar Walter Harding to show the Concord philosopher’s importance in the last decade of the composer’s life. Peter Burkholder closes the volume by reviewing the reception history of the music and the history of Ives scholarship. He notes that Ives did not compose haphazardly or randomly but that he was “a skilled composer with excellent command of his materials.” Ives’s substantial ties to the European tradition, as noted by Morgan and Lambert in their essays, are also an important subject for Burkholder, who notes the influence of Debussy and of the nineteenth-century symphonic tradition. He also points out our increased awareness of Horatio Parker’s influence on Ives.

By connecting Ives with contemporary musical, philosophical, and political currents rather than portraying him as an isolated figure, Lambert’s comprehensive volume demonstrates how necessary it is to understand Ives as a part of his time, and how engaging and vital he and his music still are.

–George Mason University

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