Connecticut Yankee September 20, 2007
Posted by Tom Moore in : Uncategorized , trackback
Charles Ives (1874-1954)
The greatest and most original of American composers? Perhaps. Thirty-three years ago the music of Charles Ives was everywhere, in celebration of the centennial of his birth. Ives, born and raised in Danbury, Connecticut, educated at Yale, where he played baseball and studied composition with Horatio Parker, was seen as someone who refused to compromise his art by watering it down for feeble ears accustomed to American regurgitations of European musical models, someone whose music reflected the granitic cragginess of the New England landscape and the ideals of the transcendental thinkers of Concord, Massachusetts – Emerson, and especially Thoreau. Since the heady days of the Ives centennial and the American Bicentennial, the tide has receded, and years can pass before one sees a work by this composer on a program.
Where to start? For me there are certain works which are fundamental – the two great piano sonatas, the Fourth Symphony, with a level of complexity almost impossible to hear outside the concert hall, the two string quartets, the four sonatas for violin and piano.
And the truly mystical works for orchestra – the Unanswered Question, the sempiternal flow of the Housatonic at Stockbridge. Of equal importance is Ives’ writing – the Essays Before A Sonata, and the Memos.
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