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Breaking time's arrow : experiment and expression in the music of Charles Ives PDF

212 Pages·2014·5.24 MB·English
by  Ives
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Breaking Time’s Arrow Musical Meaning and interpretation Robert S. Hatten, editor A Theory of Musical Narrative Pleasure and Meaning in the Byron Almén Classical Symphony Melanie Lowe Approaches to Meaning in Music Byron Almén and Edward Pearsall Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of Dance-Music Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, Relations in 3/4 Time and the Second Woman in Early Eric McKee Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera Naomi André The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, Pastoral Raymond Monelle The Italian Traditions and Puccini: Compositional Theory and Practice Musical Representations, Subjects, and in Nineteenth-Century Opera Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought Nicholas Baragwanath in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber Jairo Moreno Debussy Redux: The Impact of His Music on Popular Culture Deepening Musical Performance Matthew Brown through Movement: The Theory and Practice of Embodied Interpretation Music and the Politics of Negation Alexandra Pierce James R. Currie Expressive Forms in Brahms’s Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini’s Late Style Instrumental Music: Structure and Andrew Davis Meaning in His Werther Quartet Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy Peter H. Smith William Echard Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Essays in Analysis and Meaning Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith Robert S. Hatten Music as Philosophy: Adorno Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, and Beethoven’s Late Style Correlation, and Interpretation Michael Spitzer Robert S. Hatten Death in Winterreise: Musico-Poetic Intertextuality in Western Art Music Associations in Schubert’s Song Cycle Michael L. Klein Lauri Suurpää Music and Narrative since 1900 Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland The 1589 Interludes for La pellegrina Nina Treadwell Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music Reflections on Musical Meaning Steve Larson and Its Representations Leo Treitler Is Language a Music? Writings on Musical Form and Signification Debussy’s Late Style: The David Lidov Compositions of the Great War Marianne Wheeldon MA TTh ew McDonAlD Breaking Time’s Arrow Experiment and Expression in the Music of Charles Ives InDIAnA UnIversITy Press Bloomington & Indianapolis This book is a publication of Indiana University Press office of scholarly Publishing herman B wells library 350 1320 east 10th street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 UsA iupress.indiana.edu Telephone 800-842-6796 Fax 812-855-7931 © 2014 by Matthew McDonald All rights reserved no part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American national standard for Information sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed library Materials, AnsI Z39.48–1992. Manufactured in the United States of America library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McDonald, Matthew (Matthew James), author. Breaking time’s arrow : experiment and expression in the music of Charles Ives / Matthew McDonald. pages cm — (Musical meaning and interpretation) Includes bibliographical references and index. IsBn 978-0-253-01273-9 (cloth : alkaline paper) — IsBn 978-0-253-01276-0 (ebook) 1. Ives, Charles, 1874-1954—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. series: Musical meaning and interpretation. Ml410.I94M45 2014 780.92—dc23 2014012350 1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14 Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Ives and Time 1 Part I: Three Dualities 1. God/Man: I Come to Thee and Psalm 14 29 2. Community/Individual: sonata no. 1 for Piano and string Quartet no. 2 43 3. Intuition/expression: “nov. 2, 1920” and “Grantchester” 70 Part II: Contexts and Methodologies 4. elements of narrative: The Unanswered Question 103 5. Ives and the now: “The Things our Fathers loved” 127 6. Cumulative Composition: Ives’s emerson Music 144 Notes 169 Bibliography 179 Index 187 This page intentionally left blank Preface In 2001, I began researching the music of Charles Ives. I spent countless hours at the piano that summer, familiarizing myself with every score I could get my hands on. I particularly remember accompanying myself through the entire set of 114 Songs—quite a feat, as I’m a pianist but no singer. originally, I had outlined a thorough consideration of time and temporality in Ives’s music, but, ultimately, a small portion of this outline ballooned into the entire project. After completing my thesis and converting one chapter into an article, I had no plans or desire to develop the material further, but after a few years, rejuvenated, I returned to the research as the partial foundation for a new book project. By this time, however, I had grown dissatisfied with much of my previous work and discarded it in favor of completely new material. I envisioned that this would be a “definitive” state- ment of my ideas about Ives’s music, a culmination of my work over the previous several years. It eventually became clear, however, that I would never be fully sat- isfied with the book and could tinker with it forever; the printed version, inevita- bly, would always feel unfinished. Its fixed form belies the reality of my research, which would be better represented by the endless pages of notes and drafts on my desk and hard drive, many discarded or forgotten, their potential contribution to the whole left unclear or undetermined. Around 1910, Charles Ives began work on what he referred to as an overture or concerto inspired by ralph waldo emerson. originally, this was to be one in a set of several overtures devoted to great “Men of literature,” but ultimately Ives made significant progress on only two. while composing the Emerson Over- ture, Ives developed some of its cadenzas as studies for solo piano, one of which he completed. After suspending work on the overture, Ives had no evident plans to develop the material further, but he later returned to it as the foundation for a new piece, the first movement of the Concord sonata. For the Concord move- ment, however, Ives discarded much of the music of the overture and added a sig- nificant amount of new material. The first movement of the Concord, many be- lieve, is the “definitive” musical expression of Ives’s ideas about emerson, and in 1920 Ives presented it to the musical community as the culmination of his work as a composer. Ives stated on many occasions, however, that he would likely never be fully satisfied with the music and could tinker with it forever; the “emerson” music, inevitably, would remain “unfinished.” The fixed form of the Concord movement belies the reality of Ives’s musical conception, which is better repre- sented by the multiple versions and endless pages of sketches and emendations, many discarded or forgotten, their status unclear or undetermined. At this point it may seem that I have been writing about Ives for so long that I can no longer separate my own creative process from his. But the parallels I have drawn are both genuine and unsurprising. writing about music is in large part a creative act, and one that has much in common with writing music. Per- haps there are music scholars who produce essays like Mozart produced scores, but most of us, I suspect, follow the Beethovenian model. Academic writing, es- pecially in the era of word processing, is largely a process of cutting and past- ing, deletions and insertions. like most pieces of music, the finished academic product presents itself confidently, with few traces of its convoluted genesis. But here is where the analogy with Ives’s music ends. Ives’s music is remarkable for the extent to which it bears the traces of its Frankensteinian construction. Pieces are often characterized by extreme fragmentation, stark juxtapositions of highly contrasting segments of music that are very often borrowed from other sources or from Ives’s own body of work. while studying Ives’s compositional process, as when actually writing about it, I began to experience my scholarly work in parallel with Ives’s compositional work. As I examined Ives’s notoriously unruly manuscripts, the process of ne- gotiating the photocopies (organized in folders within boxes), the manuscripts themselves (organized likewise), the printed scores, and the formidable cat- alogues of John Kirkpatrick and James sinclair made me feel that I was being forced to channel Ives himself, to embody his peculiar sense of organization—or lack thereof—as I tried to keep these various documents, boxes, books, and other materials organized on the medium-sized desk assigned to me in the yale music library and the growing number of trolleys at my side. But channeling Ives is not an experience that holds much appeal. Ives is a fascinating and problematic figure. There is much to admire about his life and views, and much to be critical of as well. These topics require an even-handed ap- proach, one that has too often been missing in studies of the composer and his music. Frank rossiter drew attention to what he called the “Ives legend,” bril- liantly explicating the mythology through an eight-point dissection of an article by the critic r. D. Darrell (rossiter 1975: 248–49). More recently, Gayle sher- wood Magee has pointed to the persistence of this legend and “the advocacy role that shapes most scholarship and biography” (2008: 2). Ives’s musical output is exceptionally eclectic, which has always been a big part of its attraction for me. But although I love much of it, I’ll freely admit that there are more than a few pieces I don’t care for. And as for his ideas, they run the gamut from inspiring to repugnant. nonetheless, his music and ideas create unique and fertile imagi- native spaces through which to listen to and think about music. This is what brought me back to Ives’s music as a subject, and this is the aspect of my subject I hope to elucidate and enrich. * * * viii Preface some General notes regarding Dates and nomenclature Dating Ives’s music is an immense challenge that has been taken on by many over the years. Ives himself provided the early data, with John Kirkpat- rick doing the heavy lifting after Ives’s death, his work culminating in the Tem- porary Mimeographed Catalogue (1960). More recently, Magee and James sin- clair have worked toward an updated, more reliable chronology. Throughout the book, I draw on the latter scholarship, as reported in Grove Music online (Burk- holder, sherwood, and sinclair 2012) and amplified in sinclair’s A Descriptive Catalogue of The Music of Charles Ives (1999). readers interested in more detail should begin by consulting sinclair’s catalogue. • All references to manuscripts from the Charles Ives Collection at yale University follow James sinclair’s microfilm numbers; these are always designated with an “f” followed by a four-digit number (“f6678,” for example). • when relevant, pitches are identified using the scientific nomenclature that designates middle C as C4, the pitch one octave above as C5, the pitch one whole step below as B3, and so forth.  • Barlines appear only sporadically in the printed editions of many works, such as the Concord sonata, “Majority,” “nov. 2, 1920,” and “Grantchester.” For these pieces, I will refer to specific passages by identifying the page, system, and (when applicable) measure. For example, in the original, 1922 edition of Ives’s 114 Songs, “p. 50/1/2” would refer to the second measure of the first system on p. 50 (from the opening of “nov. 2, 1920”); “p. 51/1” would refer to the first system on p. 51, which is not subdivided into measures. Preface ix

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Charles Ives (1874–1954) moved traditional compositional practice in new directions by incorporating modern and innovative techniques with nostalgic borrowings of 19th century American popular music and Protestant hymns. Matthew McDonald argues that the influence of Emerson and Thoreau on Ives's c
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