Dancing Through Time

During his lucrative career Charles Ives wrote groundbreaking works including ‘Work or Fight’ (1918), ‘The Amount to Carry: Measuring the Prospect’ (1912), ‘How to read the rate book’ (1920), and probably his most read pamphlet: ‘Life Insurance with Relation to Inheritance Tax’ (1918). Had he been reliant on his musical income (playing the church organ and a few self-published compositions) he would surely have been bankrupt, rather than the millionaire he became through his pioneering work in insurance.

​

Charles Ives had an early, unique exposure to music which left its mark on the man, and on his compositions. His Father, George Ives had been a union army band leader during the civil war and introduced Charles to the classical music tradition, but also the popular songs of Stephen Foster (‘Camptown Races’, ‘Old Folks at home’), and the American Hymnal. As well as this more traditional exposure George Ives would perform musical experiments with his sons; instructing them to sing in one key, whilst accompanying them in another. The young Charles Ives would listen to several of the Connecticut community marching bands rehearsing in the same space, and evidently enjoyed hearing the simultaneous melodies in conflict; He would return to that polytonal sound world repeatedly throughout his life, and it is evident especially at the explosive close of his Second Symphony.

​

Charles Ives studied at Yale University and brought his compositions to Horatio Parker, a composer American in nationality, but thoroughly European in outlook. Parker insisted that Ives conform to European classical traditions and it was probably during the composition of his (distinctly Germanic) 1st Symphony Ives began sketches for what would be his (thoroughly American) 2nd Symphony. The songs he wrote at Yale are still sung on campus and according to his teammates he could have sought professional careers as either a runner or a footballer (American, naturally).

​

Although Ives had been playing the organ professionally since the age of 14 he decided on graduation to leave his professional music ambitions behind, took up an insurance sales position, and moved to New York in 1899. He would write music after work and at the weekends and almost none of his colleagues knew of his other life beyond insurance. The 2nd Symphony was probably completed for the most part by 1902 but as Ives rarely published, or even performed his music it is difficult to say when the symphony was ‘finished’. The symphony was first performed in 1951 by Leonard Bernstein, Ives’s most famous champion. Ives stopped composing abruptly in early 1927, telling his wife that "nothing sounds right". He spent the remainder of his life revising and refining his work. The 2nd Symphony was revised in 1909, 1910, and had its original, rather traditional, last few bars overhauled in bombastic style in the late 1930s.

​

Charles Ives left behind a fascinating catalogue of music including 6 Symphonies, two dozen orchestral sets and other works for orchestra, 2 string quartets, 4 violin sonatas, two dozen keyboard and organ works, 12 cantatas, and almost 200 songs that range in character from drinking songs (Son of a Gambolier - for piano, voice, kazoo, and optional symphony orchestra) to atonal dirges (The Majority) to the bizarre (Slugging a Vampire). His experimental music often prefigured modernism by several decades, experimenting with extreme dissonance, tone rows, bitonality, atonality, quarter-tones, and polyrhythms.

The 2nd Symphony is in 5 movements, i and ii run together, as do iv and v. the vast majority of the melodies, and most of the countermelodies are quotes of either popular songs of the day, hymns, or recycled germanic classical music from Ives’s time with Horatio Parker; a full list of quotes would be immense.

The first movement is taken from a much earlier organ piece although revised to include the major themes for the symphony. the first theme is a variation on the Stephen Foster song Massa's In De Cold Ground/To the White People of America, specifically the melody at ‘Hear that mournful sound/'Tis your brothers' cry!’. It is several minutes until the turgid, almost despairing sound world is cleared and we hear the first partial quote of Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean (horns and cellos) a theme which is present throughout the work but is only heard in full at the end of the last movement. That theme in turn is accompanied by the American folk reel Pig Town Fling. If the music here seems to tread on the toes of Dvořák’s New World Symphony it’s worth remembering that Ives may have been writing the first movement of this symphony in the first few months after the New World’s American Premiere in 1894.

​

The first movement relaxes and disperses into string solos and finishes with an expectant, almost questioning solo on the oboe. The full wind herald in the 2nd movement which is a sonata based on an array of quotations and half-quotations. Most notably the abolitionist songs Wake Nicodemus and Bringing in the Sheaves. These and other themes are developed, altered, and layered. The trombones attempt to reinstate civility with their intonation of the Hymns When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, and  Father, I Stretch My Hands To Thee. The secular tunes win out however and the development section nears boiling point with the introduction of snare and bass drum. The brass Hymns seem to return triumphant at the end of the movement, but it’s a close run contest.

​

The third movement is a ‘Meditative Interlude’ between the more boisterous halves of the symphony. It is based mostly around two more hymn tunes, Beulah Land and Materna (later known as America the Beautiful).

​

The brief fourth movement is a condensed, and more anguished, statement of the first movement. Reminding the audience of the three main themes before they are fully exploited in the last movement.

​

The last movement starts in unusual territory, being composed almost entirely of fragments, big and small, of the Foster song Camptown Races, decorated liberally with reels such as Turkey in the Straw. The horn melody which calms things temporarily is constructed of several songs already heard in the symphony of which Long, Long Ago is perhaps the most familiar. Following this is a fugal development which owes more to Ives’s studies with Parker than his idiosyncratic father, there is a brief hint at Columbia once more, before a restatement on the cello of the Foster melody. The final few pages of the symphony see Ives looking forward to his most polyphonic and dissonant future. We hear just about every theme in the symphony in a short space of time, often several simultaneously. Just as the symphony is at risk of toppling over the bugle call reveille sounds (just in case you were somehow asleep!) as Columbia the Gem of the Ocean makes its triumphant arrival. That should be that, but that wouldn’t be Ives. Reminiscing on how the amateur bands of his youth would signal the very last song Ives says: “the players played any old note, good and loud, for the last chord.”

​

Notes by Tom Davies