It's a staggering performance. In his writings, Ives imagines Emerson as someone who is so 'intensely on the lookout for the trail of his star that he has no time to stop and retrace his footprints.' On the CD, Hamelin not only looks up at the sky, he launches into the stratosphere.
A hundred years ago, Charles Ives composed a portrait of a year in New England. The Holidays Symphony veers between tender sentiment and savage chaos, a sonic three-ring circus. Beautiful and provocative, the composition, like the rest of Ives' music, encourages the listener to think about sound in new ways.
The poet Walt Whitman makes an interesting comparison with Ives. Both men experimented with their art forms, juxtaposed serious themes with frivolous beauty, and spent decades editing and revising their masterpieces. Also like Whitman, Ives imagined various musical strains from around the world merging into a single song of mankind, but whereas Whitman used music as a metaphor, Ives used music as his medium.
The emotional material for Ives' music came from his experiences growing up in the town of Danbury, Connecticut, the son of the town bandmaster, George Ives. George had been a Union Army bandmaster in the Civil War and had a playful relationship with music that he that he passed on to his son. Once, George had two bands march toward each other while playing different songs, just to know what it would sound like.
Ives wrote most of his music between 1900 and 1920, a period in which the United States became a world power. He worried that prosperity was leading Americans to lose touch with their values. In an attempt to enshrine the America he cherished, Ives composed four movements that trace boyhood memories of seasonal celebrations, an American 'Four Seasons.' This was the Holidays Symphony.
Washington's Birthday
The first movement of Ives' Holidays Symphony takes place on George Washington's birthday and explores the snowed-in claustrophobia of winter. The piece begins like someone whistling aimlessly. Ives transforms this music into something mournful by harmonizing it with trembling strings.
From this bleak, snowy moonscape, Ives brings his audience into the sweaty bustle of a barn dance. Fragments of Camptown Races and Turkey in the Straw can be heard in the din.
Composers before Ives, notably Béla Bartók and Maurice Ravel, had referenced folk music in their work. In most cases, they 'corrected' the roughness of folk performers to conform to art music expectations. Not Ives. He kept all the 'wrong' notes and worked hard to notate the music so a classically trained musician could play it.
The barn dance music gets wilder until it comes to a complete confrontational crunch. Then, a serene melody floats out, like sentimental parlor music. While that plays, a separate strand of music weaves into the composition, as if a musician on the back porch of the dance is playing something just for herself. The movement ends with more winter harmonies.
Decoration Day
The second movement of the Holidays Symphony is Decoration Day, honoring the dead of the Civil War (now celebrated as Memorial Day).
Musically, Decoration Day begins with a few quiet motifs. The first to arise is the opening of Adeste Fidelis. This drifts into a motif Ives said represented the ultimate question: what is the meaning of life? A beautiful original rhapsody follows, perhaps representing mourners as they gather spring flowers. After the last grave is decorated, Taps sounds out. The trumpet plays quietly from as far away from the audience as possible for just a glimmer of sound.
When the ranks form again, one of Ives' favorite marches leads to another mass of sound that stops and the recurring 'meaning of life' theme, this time answered with the chords that we know to mean 'amen.' In the far distance, Taps returns.
Ives conceived most of Holidays Symphony between 1897 and 1913 but it took him almost another twenty years to finish it. Work in the insurance business supported Ives during that time, but didn't nurture his soul. He composed at night, on weekends, and on the train during his commute from Connecticut to his office in New York City.
The Fourth of July
The Fourth of July presents the summer holiday with all the chaos of a town potluck. Like the previous movements, quotations from other music abound, in this case patriotic tunes like Yankee Doodle. When most of the orchestra plays a version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, a fife and drum core joins in, but out of sync and in a different key. The energy and chaos involved requires a second conductor.
There's sudden silence before the first rocket arches its way up into the sky, followed by a full burst of fireworks. Ives' familiar crunch leads us back into silence as the glimmers of sparks disappear into the night.
Thanksgiving Day
The Thanksgiving movement can be traced to Ives' college days at Yale. Music originally written for the organ at Center Church in New Haven was reworked into the final movement of the Holidays.
Thanksgiving illustrates the changes that occur when ideas confront one another. Once again Ives divides the orchestra into groups playing hymns in two opposing keys. Most prominent is the traditional Thanksgiving hymn, The Shining Shore. Again, the bottom drops out, and we hear the swing of a scythe—either the harvest or the Grim Reaper has arrived. The ultimate question is asked again and as the music picks up again toward celebration and noise, the listener expects a confrontational crunch.
Instead, Ives surprises us. A large chorus sounds out Thanksgiving hymns. The choir sings a round and the whole procession passes into the distance. The different songs merge into one universal hymn of mankind.
Recognition came late to Ives. Thanksgiving was first publicly performed at the premiere of the complete Holidays Symphony in April of 1954, just a month before Ives' death.
The Second Symphony was written by Charles Ives between 1897 and 1902. It consists of five movements and lasts approximately 40 minutes.
Scoring[edit]
The piece is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 clarinets, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, snare drum, bass drum and strings.
- Allegro moltovivace
The piece departs from the conventional four-movement symphonic structure, which has been modified by the insertion of the Lento maestoso as an introduction to the Allegro molto vivace. Unusually among the classics, Schumann's 'Rhenish' symphony also has an 'additional' slow movement in fourth place.
History and analysis[edit]
Although the work was composed during Ives's 20s, it was half a century before it was premiered, on February 22, 1951, in a New York Philharmonic concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein.[1] The symphony was premiered to rapturous applause but Ives responded with ambivalence (he reportedly spat)—he did not attend the concert in person, but listened to a radio rebroadcast on March 4.[2] The public performance had been postponed for so long because Ives had been alienated from the American classical establishment. Ever since his training with Horatio Parker at Yale, Ives had suffered their disapproval of the mischievous unorthodoxy with which he pushed the boundaries of European classical structures to create soundscapes that recalled the vernacular music-making of his New England upbringing.
Like Ives's other compositions that honor the European and American inheritances, the Second Symphony makes no complete quotation of popular American tunes, but tunes such as 'Camptown Races', 'Long, Long Ago', 'Turkey in the Straw' and 'America the Beautiful', are alluded to and reshaped into original themes. The sole exception is 'Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean', whose verse is heard complete and almost unaltered at the climax of the fifth movement as a counterpoint to Ives's original first theme. There are also a number of references to works from the Western canon of music, notably the first movement of Beethoven's fifth symphony (some rather subdued compared with the original) and a rescoring of part of Brahms's first symphony, as well as a passage (in the first and last movements) from the F minor three-part invention of Johann Sebastian Bach. Ives also quotes the so-called Longing for Death motif from Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde.
Bernstein's premiere and subsequent interpretations were later widely criticized for taking liberties with the score.[3] The score used in 1951 contained about a thousand errors, but in addition Bernstein made a substantial cut to the finale, ignored some of Ives's tempo indications, changed instrumentation, and prolonged the terminating 'Bronx cheer' discord from an eighth note to more than a half note. Many conductors and audiences, influenced by Bernstein's example, have considered the last of these practices one of the trademarks of the piece. In 2000, the Charles Ives Society prepared an official critical edition of the score and authorized a recording by Kenneth Schermerhorn and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra to adhere more closely to Ives's intentions.
Recordings[edit]
Although the world premiere performance was later issued on CD, the first studio recording was made by F. Charles Adler with the Vienna Philharmonia Orchestra in February 1953.[4] Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic recorded the work in stereo and mono versions for Columbia Records on October 6, 1958.[5]Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra recorded the symphony for RCA Victor on February 7, 1973, in a multi-channel version later issued on CD with Dolby Surround Sound encoding.[6]Bernard Herrmann, another long-time champion of Ives's music, recorded the work with the London Symphony Orchestra in Decca/London's 'Phase 4 Stereo' on January 4, 1972. He had given the UK premiere of Ives's 2nd Symphony in a BBC radio broadcast with the same orchestra on April 25, 1956, a historic performance that has now been released on CD by Pristine Audio. Also of note is the 1998 recording Stephen Somary conducted with the Nürnberg Symphony Orchestra, released by Claves Records.[7]
Notes[edit]
- ^Downes, Olin. 'Symphony by Ives Is Played in Full: Bernstein Leads Philharmonic in Composer's 2d, Heard in Entirety for First Time'. The New York Times. February 23, 1951. Retrieved March 15, 2018.
- ^Sinclair, James B. (1999) A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. p. 682. ISBN0-300-07601-0.
- ^Wooldridge, Charles. From the Steeples to the Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives. New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1971, 248.
- ^Sinclair, James B (1999). A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. p. 8. ISBN0-300-07601-0.
- ^http://www.leonardbernstein.com/disc_other.php?composer_keyword=Ives&submit=Go&disc_other.php=&page=2
- ^Liner notes for RCA Victor 09026-63316-2
- ^Claves Records CD 50-9806
References[edit]
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