Charles Ives’s vision of America still strikes a chord

One hundred and fifty years ago, in the small town of Danbury, Connecticut, a humble insurance agent was born. On nights and weekends he composed music, much of which was never performed during his lifetime. His name is Charles Ives, and since his death in 1954 his reputation as America’s first truly original composer has gradually grown.

In honor of the anniversary, pianist Jeremy Denk released an album IVES DENKwith violinist Stefan Jackiw. It contains four of Ives’s violin sonatas and two of his massive piano sonatas – some of the composer’s most personal, thorny, intricate and beautiful works.

Ives was a free thinker and wrote music that was decades ahead of his time. His wildest ideas were inherited from his father, George, a jack-of-all-trades musician and director of the Danbury orchestra, who assigned his son to sing songs in one key and play along with the accompaniment in another. In his memoirs, dictated to a secretary in 1930, Ives recalls his father saying: “If you can write a fugue right, I’m willing to suggest you try the wrong way.”

Much of Ives’s music sounds, at least on the surface, as if it was actually written “wrong.” Ives challenged traditional music theory. In his Violin Sonata No. 2, played with exceptional controlled madness by Denk and Jackiew, the hymn “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” bursts in ecstasy over a piano gone mad.

Ives was obsessed with all the music around him. You never know when snippets of popular church hymns, circus marches, parlor songs or ragtime ditties might find their way into a piece. In Ives’s day, his listeners might have thought he was simply playing on popular culture, but Ives, in his unusual and incisive way, tells us that these songs are part of the gravel that covers the foundation of American music. In the ramshackle, ragtime-influenced middle movement of the Violin Sonata No. 3, you can hear Ives fiddling with the music, stopping and starting, as if he were testing ideas on the spot.

His ideas were not always favorable. Of the First Violin Sonata, which premiered in San Francisco in 1928 at a series of concerts designed by Henry Cowell, Ives recalled the day he invited the famous violinist to his home to perform the work. “He didn’t even read the first page,” Ives wrote in his memoirs. “He was irritated by the rhythms and notes, and he got angry. He said, “It’s impossible to play.” This is not music. This makes no sense.” Denk ranks the sonata among Ives’s most ambitious works and describes its eerie centerpiece in the album’s liner notes as “a sharp musical meditation on the Civil War.”

There’s a kind of freewheeling, “Watch Me Build This” swagger to Ives’ music that sounds unmistakably American. Although these works were written over 100 years ago, they sound surprisingly modern.

Ives began working on his Piano Sonata No. 1 around 1915, but it would have to wait another 34 years for its public debut. The twilight opening movement sounds innocent enough, like something Brahms might have written had he lived another dozen years. Ives quotes both a hymn and a cowboy song—the sacred and the profane often collide with Ives. About 25 minutes later, just before the ominous finale, the music couldn’t sound more discordant as it stumbles through the dangerously combative anthem “Bringing in the Sheaves.” Denk’s performance is delightfully insane.

Ives believed in the utopian possibilities of music. It is therefore not surprising that his Piano Sonata No. 2, subtitled “Concord, Massachusetts, 1840–1860”, is inspired by the American Transcendentalists. It is a gigantic, comprehensive work—individual portraits of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts.

However, common threads are intertwined. Immediately, at the beginning of the “Emerson” movement, there is a hint of Beethoven’s 5th, heard low in the left hand. This da-da-da-daaa theme would eventually evolve into one of Ives’ most tender pieces of music in the movement called “The Alcotts.” Elsewhere in the “Hawthorn” section of the sonata, Ives indicates that a narrow plank of wood exactly 14-3/4 inches long is used to press multiple keys simultaneously. The result is a mysterious cloud of notes in the right hand that floats against the melody of arpeggiated chords in the left. It could just be a gimmick, but Ives makes it work beautifully.

These performances by Denk and Jackie are both subtle and muscular—like Ives’s music, filled with contradictions, failures, grace and vision. And it would be hard to find more satisfying annotations than those of Denk, whose 2022 memoir Every good boy is doing well offers the same combination of perception and wit. In this album, he sums up the composer of 2024 for us, saying that Ives is “optimistic, but always sloppy, always falling apart at the seams.” His music suggests that America will just have to pull through and deal with its own failure.”

An album of Ives’ music, especially one that is so well played and makes you wonder how Ives DenkWorth doing at any time, regardless of your sesquicentennial. The fact that it was released during an election campaign filled with opposing views of what it means to be an American adds to its special credibility.

Copyright: NPR 2024