The Concord Sonata

Charles Ives's Piano Sonata No. 2 "Concord" is not just any piece. This piece has consumed my imagination ever since I first listened to it in high school, and over the ensuing years I have slowly attempted to learn to play it, while also researching the background of the piece and investigating every corner of Ives's output.

I have visited this spot many a time.

I have often said that this piece is as beautiful for its concept as for the execution of that concept. In four movements Ives portrays the spirit of four writers who lived during the Transcendentalist movement in New England in the mid-nineteenth century. This was a movement that emphasized the basic goodness and decency of people, and organized religion and government were seen as a threat to that purity. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the subject of the first movement of the sonata, crystallized the general feeling of Transcendentalism in an 1836 speech: "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds... A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."

Of the four writers, Emerson was the most important to Ives. This is evident in the fact that the Emerson section of the sonata also existed as a piano concerto and an overture, and that Ives continuously tinkered with this movement, claiming that it was never quite finished.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is an odd choice of subject for the second movement, since he was actually opposed to Transcendentalism. He believed all men were inherently evil, and most of his stories focus on Puritan guilt. Thus, he serves as sort of a foil.

The third movement is titled "The Alcotts", referring to Louisa May Alcott and her family. In the context of the sonata, this represents the idea of simple living; Louisa's parents were involved in a Transcendentalist community living experiment called Fruitlands, and Louisa's literature illuminates the joy of the common life.

Finally, Ives closes with a movement based on Henry David Thoreau, who also valued simple living but took it to the extreme, retreating into nature for a prolonged period. By ending with Thoreau, Ives makes the intriguing statement that perhaps the answers to some of life's deepest questions lie in nature.

Now on to the music. The Concord Sonata is very cyclical, with short themes that appear in every movement, in varying transformations. It traces a path from extreme dissonance and density to absolute clarity at the end of the Alcotts movement, before returning to austerity for Thoreau. It is difficult to describe the music itself in great detail, but I did write some program notes when I performed the Emerson movement on my junior recital at Wheaton. Here's an excerpt:

"From a performance standpoint, the Concord Sonata presents a unique set of challenges. Any serious performer approaching the score is likely to be baffled by Ives's footnote: '…there are many passages to be not too evenly played and in which the tempo is not precise or static; it varies usually with the mood of day…a metronome cannot measure Emerson’s mind and oversoul, any more than the Concord steeple bell could'. The writing is dense, often notated in three or four staves, and a certain Yankee ingenuity is required to account for every note in Ives's massive chords. In keeping with the Transcendentalist spirit, the sonata is intended to be a virtuosic tour de force, an American answer to Beethoven’s Hammerklavier. Indeed, the piece rivals Beethoven's great sonata in its motivic saturation (with fragments of Beethovenian themes, no less!), and in its exploitation of both percussive and textural piano effects. The second movement contains passages of tone clusters to be played with a strip of wood, and the final movement briefly requires a solo flute.

The fact that the Concord Sonata still sounds radical to our ears today is a testament to Ives's imagination and artistic courage. Right from the outset, it explodes with barbaric chords and polyrhythms. The opening four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony appear repeatedly, with many different harmonic and psychological implications. Ives conjurs up a tour de force of sound: grinding dissonances that seem to scream from the keys, distant church bells, splashing arpeggios. There are moments in which all the little themes piles up on top of each other, like several people trying to talk at once, only to dissolve into some kind of grand Transcendentalist statement. Ives lovingly captures the chaos and awkwardness of American life, a wackiness that cannot be notated in 4/4 time or arranged in neat diatonic harmony. The fact that the Concord Sonata still sounds radical to our ears today is a testament to Ives's imagination and artistic courage. The piece still bears the label of 'difficult music', but I do agree with Lawrence Gilman's assessment of its greatness*. I hope you enjoy the ride."

I will quickly address the companion readings to this piece before this post becomes too unwieldy. First, Ives's own Essays Before A Sonata are a great demonstration of his brilliance, not just in music, but as a thinker. In the Prologue, he hits the reader with one weighty question after another, mostly about the idea of portraying concepts and/or concrete objects in music. He poses these questions about evaluating the success of programmatic music even as he is writing an extremely highbrow programmatic piece.

The piano at the Alcotts' Orchard House.

The short essay about The Alcotts brings a very important point to light; he mentions the spinet piano in the Alcotts household "on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony". Here he makes the connection between the simplicity of the New England household and the revolutionary spirit of Beethoven, because in the nineteenth century, a typical American's first experience with the classical canon would be not in the concert hall, but in the home. In this way the seemingly plain lifestyle of these people touches on something bigger, more immense, even divine. And at the end of the Alcotts movement of the sonata, as the Beethoven theme rings out in rich, triumphant C major, this quotation from the essay summarizes the effect: "All around you, under the Concord sky, there still floats the influence of that human faith melody, transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the cynic respectively, reflecting an innate hope— a common interest in common things and common men—a tune the Concord bards are ever playing, while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethovenlike sublimity, and with, may we say, a vehemence and perseverance—for that part of greatness is not so difficult to emulate."

One last point to make about that particular movement is that, in the process of laying out his artistic philosophy in this piece, Ives also makes a case for tonality as an arrival point. After two movements of the most hardcore dissonance, the climax in C major feels incredibly majestic, because it is earned.

Kyle Gann's essay concerns Henry Brant's orchestration of this piece, which I had the privilege of hearing live in Chicago. In some ways the orchestration is a great gift; being able to hear orchestral colors and notice melodic lines that were previously hidden in the texture has helped me greatly in my piano interpretation. But the piece also loses something as a symphony. The piano is a solo instrument, and as such the most intense moments are really visceral, bursting with virtuosic derring-do. When I perform the climaxes of Emerson, Hawthorne, or The Alcotts, I have to give my entire physicality to the music and pour my heart into it as well. The experience of hearing a performer's struggle to victory in this music is more electric than hearing a whole orchestra. It's that kind of piece, and I think that's the way Ives intended it.

It is now quite late. Hopefully I will be able to adapt some of these thoughts to my presentation tomorrow, and also play some excerpts convincingly.

*In another part of the program notes I included a quotation from Lawrence Gilman's review of the public premiere of the piece, where he recognized it as the greatest music ever composed by an American.

Ives and His Contemporaries

Ah, Charles Ives. This composer is dear to me in so many ways. The first reason is more personal than musical; Ives spent most of his life in Danbury, Connecticut, which is just 20 minutes north of my hometown. As an Ives fanatic, I have visited every relevant site, from his birthplace to his grave to a mountain where he once built a shack for composition retreats. When I walk through the woods of Connecticut and drive down country roads lined with historic churches and colonial-era houses, I feel a special kinship with Ives's music. I understand where his inspiration came from.

Me at the summit of Pine Mountain, where Ives used to sit and contemplate nature.

But Ives means more to me than that. His music is a near-perfect representation of America, vacillating between aggressive, boundary-shattering dissonances and retreats to nostalgia. These two styles are often in conflict, even in the same piece. Ives loved patriotic tunes and the hymns of church traditions, and he gleefully inserted fragments of these songs into his music wherever possible.

For now I'll refrain from talking about the Concord Sonata, which is absolutely my favorite piece of music and which I consider one of the greatest pieces ever written. The introductory listening for Ives was Three Places In New England and The Things Our Fathers Loved.

It seems a bit strange that Three Places In New England has become the go-to Ives piece to program in an orchestral concert. It is not completely audience-friendly. The first movement, also the longest, does not have much interest beyond some lush string chords and tasteful dissonances in the piano (always a part of Ives's orchestra). But when we get to Putnam's Camp, it is vintage Ives (though, knowing both the Concord Sonata and the Fourth Symphony, I experience major déja vu at the opening). The polyrhythms are fascinating, and the evocation of an out-of-control marching band is quiet novel. All the patriotic tunes would come across as pandering to the audience if they weren't wrapped up in such a sophisticated framework.

The final movement, The Housatonic at Stockbridge, most completely captures the New England spirit of this piece. Ives takes one of his best art songs and adapts it to an orchestral canvas, and the effect is extremely exciting. Muted strings run up and down in the background like a slight breeze, hinting at possibilities. The vocal line is played by the cellos, and dissonant notes on the glockenspiel trickle into the ear. I've read that this piece was composed shortly after Ives's marriage. He and his wife shared an intimate walk along the Housatonic River, talking about the future that lay ahead of them. I love the fact that Ives captured this moment and then orchestrated it, magnifying it. It reminds me of the dialogue surrounding the pivotal wedding in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, as the townfolk speculate on another young couple getting married. By getting married, they get a glimpse of the profound, transcendental truths underlying the quiet life in their town. I think that what Wilder did in that play is exactly what Ives did in his music: examining the simple, common decency of people and taking it to a place of exaltation.

Since I think it's worthwhile to compare the original voice-and-piano version of The Housatonic at Stockbridge with the orchestral version, here are both versions back-to-back. I wish I could find an online version of Jan DeGaetani singing this, but alas, this will have to do:

And the orchestra:

The other Ives piece on the list was the song "The Things Our Fathers Loved". In this piece I hear more of that deep American nostalgia, and also Ives's penchant for employing the whole-tone scale and sometimes touching on a Scriabinesque mysticism.

Carl Ruggles was a contemporary of Ives, but I don't know nearly as much about him, aside from the fact that Ives supported him. At a concert of Ruggles' piece Men and Mountains, Ives noticed many hecklers in the audience and said something to the effect of "Don't be afraid of strong music like this  - use your ears like a man!"

Unfortunately, Ruggles does not hold a candle to Ives. Sun-Treader is modernistic and pioneering for its time, but there is a distinct lack of personality. Even though Ives can sometimes be opaque and frustrating to listen to (even by a self-proclaimed fanatic), there are unique trademarks of his style: quotations, distant bells, manic ragtime breakdowns. There is a sense of philosophical reasoning behind the music. Ives always wants to get a message across.

If there's one advantage Ruggles has over Ives, it is that his music sounds "cleaner" and that it is being played from a well-edited score. Ives left much of his scores in complete shambles, with incoherent marks and differing editions that gave publishers headaches. But this can be attributed to the fact that he was essentially an amateur composer, writing in the evenings after he returned from selling insurance, and also from the fact that he disliked the whole classical music scene.

 

 The messy manuscript of Ives's Concord Sonata.

This post has only scratched the surface of Ives and what he means to the American canon. Next time I will attempt to write about the Concord Sonata.

"Experimental" vs. "Avant-Garde" Traditions

Definitions are incredibly important to musical discourse and are often subjects of great controversy. As a composer, when I am asked the dreaded question of "What kind of music do you write?" I face a bit of an identity crisis. I could say that I write "art music" or "concert music" or "contemporary classical music". That last one always leaves a strange aftertaste; while it is comforting to identify with a tradition that is hundreds of years old, I also wonder why I feel the need to identify with it. Why not another musical tradition? Or a new one?

Composers of experimental or avant-garde music have struggled to define their music as well. What exactly is the difference between "experimental" and "avant-garde"? Are they the same?

My understanding is that "avant-garde" is a more general term, while "experimental" refers to some specific musical techniques that have become staples of that repertoire. The phrase avant-garde, according to Grove Music Online, first appeared in a military context, to describe one group clearing the way for the rest of the troops. Indeed, composers like Charles Ives and John Cage were pioneers in their fields, taking bold risks that paved the way for future composers to follow. The musical avant-garde has taken many forms, from serialism to Dadaism, but it has always been the cutting edge of musical developments, especially ones that may not really be accepted or understood until years down the road.

Reading Michael Nyman's piece on the definition of experimental music, I realized why this music is so revolutionary. While an average composer may experiment with a scale, a motif, or an instrumentation, experimental music focuses on experimenting with every possible parameter, most of which are completely outside of theoretical considerations, like the autonomy of the performer. Composers like Cornelius Cardew produced graphical scores (thereby experimenting with the parameter of notation as well) which freed the musicians to interpret the markings however they wished. In other pieces, a performer might be encouraged to tap or slap parts of his or her instrument or integrate vocals.

Experimental music has strong roots in philosophy. During the performance of a piece with chance procedures, the question arises: What is music? What is the life of music? For many of these pieces, the music lives and dies in each performance, because it will never be exactly the same twice. Recordings do not adequately capture these pieces either, because a recording only contains a single audience and musicians reacting to the particular circumstances of that performance. There is something profound about how the composer relinquishes a large amount of control in a piece with indeterminate elements. Lots of power is transferred to the performers, and the composer can only try to be happy with the results.

To reach a conclusion about the definitions, I believe that avant-garde is a broader term than experimental, because experimental music is just one category of pioneering, future-anticipating art. The experimental music movement that began in the twentieth century was characterized by several distinct compositional techniques, and while they may not be as specifically avant-garde as they were decades ago, they still distinguish this body of work.