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Remembrance of Sounds Past
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20535 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1992 |
4,812 Words |
| Author
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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CHARLES IVES
"My Father's Song"
Stuart Feder
New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992
368 pp., $35.00
Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair," said Charles Ives (1874-1954).
Such creature comforts were not for Ives. His notions of beauty were unlikely, even startling. In a Yale-Princeton Football Game (1898) he depicts crowd cheers, referee whistles, and a touchdown run, subtitling the work "Two Minutes in Sounds for Two Halfs within Bounds." Another piece, Central Park after Dark (1906), suggests the nocturnal activities of fire engines, newsboy, and elevated trains. Other compositions, by contrast, display more grandiose, if likewise unorthodox, aims. The Concord Sonata for piano (1910-19) was an attempt to describe in tones the philosophy of the Transcendentalist, including Emerson and Thoreau; and the unfinished Universe Symphony was intended to convey nothing less than the turnings of the celestial spheres.
Ives' music always had its own, unique effect, whether it was the last discordant, cacophonous blast of a full orchestra in the Second Symphony (1901-1911), the wailing lament of a lonely trumpet the in The Unanswered Question (1906), or the happy whistle of a small boy in the song "Memories, I" (1897). As Leonard Bernstein, a longtime champion of Ives, put it, "There is always that fresh, awkward, endearing primitive style of his, where all the rules get broken…[It is] full of wrong notes, incongruous as a Marx Brothers routine."
Cranky, reclusive, and wickedly funny when he wanted to be, Ives was America's greatest musical inventor, the musical equivalent of his contemporary Thomas Edison. Though his works were little known and infrequently performed in his lifetime, he has become since his death a celebrated composer, an icon and godfather of modernist music.
He was born in 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut, the son of George Ives, the local bandmaster. After receiving his initial musical encouragement and education from his father, Ives went to Yale, where he indulged two favorite interests: sports and music. Upon graduating in 1893 he went to New York, where he cofounded the successful insurance firm of Ives & Myrick. For the next twenty years Ives led a double life, working by day
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