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

212 Pages·2014·5.24 MB·English

by  Ives

Breaking Time’s Arrow
Musical Meaning and interpretation
Robert S. Hatten, editor
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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
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Naomi André The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, Pastoral
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The Italian Traditions and Puccini:
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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
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Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, and Beethoven’s Late Style
Correlation, and Interpretation Michael Spitzer
Robert S. Hatten
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Intertextuality in Western Art Music Associations in Schubert’s Song Cycle
Michael L. Klein Lauri Suurpää
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Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland The 1589 Interludes for La pellegrina
Nina Treadwell
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and Meaning in Music Reflections on Musical Meaning
Steve Larson and Its Representations
Leo Treitler
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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
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© 2014 by Matthew McDonald
All rights reserved
no part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or
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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
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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