Excerpts from my most recent “More than Music” show on NPR: “Finding the Common Good – Charles Ives at 150”:
Ives is a self-made Connecticut Yankee, born in 1874, who’s all about seeking common purpose, common sentiment, common good. So at a moment when our nation seems to be coming apart, Ives speaks to us about the things that hold us together – or used to. And yet this year’s Ives Sesquicentenary – remarkably – is mainly being celebrated abroad, by European orchestras.
I’m recently back from a nine-day Indiana University festival — by far the biggest Ives celebration here in the US, with two and three events daily. Among the participants was the pianist Gilbert Kalish, still going strong at the age of 89. Back in the 1970s, when the music of Ives was being discovered half a century after he composed it, Kalish was a key figure in a great awakening. At a public forum on Ives’s piano music, I asked him to reflect upon the fate of Charles Ives in the US today. He suddenly fell into a crestfallen mode and said:
“It’s a kind of cultural tragedy in a way – if you think of it.”
Why would losing touch with Charles Ives seem a “tragedy” for Americans? It’s not just because he’s our most remarkable concert composer. It’s because he embodies what we’re losing touch within the American arts today: cultural memory.
Here’s a perspective on Ives from a distinguished Civil War scholar, Allen Guelzo:
“Ives fills a great blank in the experience of a lot of Americans. We exist in an environment that is so immediate, that is so rootless, which lacks so much in the way of cultural ballast, that we feel sometimes like we’re floating weightlessly. In that respect we live downstream from the cultural shift that occurred in Ives’s lifetime. And Ives responds to it by trying to provide for us ballast in the form of the past and the experience of the past. And that’s different from the way other American composers have come at it. Because a lot of American composers who want to invoke the past really do it almost in a decorative fashion. It’s almost like walking into an antique store. That is not the case for Ives.”
Ives, Guelzo says, negotiated a “cultural shift” at the turn of the twentieth century, when American lives were challenged by new technology, and by a decline in the authority of religion and other sources of moral authority. That reminds him of today. And Allen Guelzo is also reminded, by Charles Ives, of Abraham Lincoln. They both feasted on American memory. They both furnished the kind of cultural ballast with which we’re losing touch.
“Lincoln constantly surprises me. I keep finding entirely different ways of looking at the man and how the man looked at things. I am impressed by his sense of historical capacity, and how the history of the country weighed on him, almost as a burden. He felt a kind of responsibility, especially in 1861 to 1865, that everything was balanced on a pinhead, and he was determined to keep that balance the way it had been designed. He’s determined to do that because the future depends upon it. Not only the future of the country, but the future of the very idea of democracy.”
Abraham Lincoln and Charles Ives, Allen Guelzo says, shared a capacity to inhabit American history. And they rallied people – in their different spheres of government and the arts — to participate in that, and discover common roots.
In some respects Ives parallels his European contemporary Gustav Mahler, intermingling high and low — the philosophic with the everyday. Ives’s Concord Sonata closes with a transcendental Nature reverie remembering Thoreau playing the flute on his doorstep overlooking Walden Pond. But an earlier movement of the same work triggers a blast of ragtime to evoke Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fanciful short stories.
It cannot be coincidental that two of the most notable exponents of the Concord Piano Sonata also relish rags by Scott Joplin and his progeny. One is Steven Mayer, who we’ve been listening to. The other pianist is Jeremy Denk, who’s just released an Ives album on Nonesuch including all the piano and violin sonatas. Ragtime was the rage beginning in the 1890s, when Ives was at Yale and pounded ragtime in theaters and taverns. In fact, ragtime was an essential catalyst for what Denk calls “the whole universe of American popular music.” And he continues:
“Ragtime is a way of taking a pre-existing tune and syncopating it and giving it a new life; it’s an act in which you revive something that’s square and stale.”
European composers, and also American composers, attempted to “harness” jazz – and shackled it with quotation marks. Ives, by comparison, is never slumming or condescending. His deployment of ragtime is torrential, impolite, elemental. Denk experiences in Ives “a tremendous homage” to ragtime, an “oppositional” and “improvisational” abandon. And he cites as a case in point Ives Third Violin Sonata, begun in 1905. It’s one of five works on his new Nonesuch Ives Sesquicentenary release, in which he’s joined by the violinist Stefan Jackiw.
Here’s a LISTENING GUIDE to the whole NPR show – which you can access here:
3:00 — Allen Guelzo on Ives and “cultural ballast”
4:50 — The parade down Main Street: William Sharp and Steven Mayer perform “The Circus Band”
7:00 — “The Alcotts” and the “human faith melody”
12:00 — The sonic sorcery of “The Housatonic at Stockbridge”
22:30 — Jeremy Denk, Ives, and ragtime
30:00 — Slavery, “Old Black Joe,” and the Second Symphony
39:30 — Edie Ives on why her father was “a great man”
42:30 — Allen Guelzo on Ives and Lincoln
44:00 — William Sharp and Steven Mayer perform “Serenity”
