Ives wrote: “To think hard and deeply and to say what is thought, regardless of consequences, may produce a first impression … of great muddiness. … The mud may be a form of sincerity.” He endorsed the “mud and scum” that Ralph Waldo Emerson extolled in his poem “Music”: “There alway, alway something sings.” “Feldeinsamkeit,” “Remembrance,” “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” “Thoreau,” and other outdoor reveries are in Ives invariably discordant, however faintly. The water, the ether are never wholly limpid; harmonic and textural impurities abound. Ives’s visions of river and meadow, woods and mountaintop are layered with Emersonian mud and scum: particles of sound; particles of memory.
It speaks volumes that Ives’s favorite painter was J. M. W. Turner, whose obscurely layered landscapes resist clarity. Of the “shadow lines” Ives often adds to his crowded textures, Jan Swafford writes in his exceptional Ives biography that they “suggest other realities, parallel memories, the subconscious. They murmur sometimes inaudibly … but float up now and then like a phantom presence within the music. Always they suggest something beneath the surface, beyond the immediate time and place.”
IV
In Mahler’s Vienna, the leading painter was Gustav Klimt, who comparably practiced a psychological realism stressing desire and anxiety, neurosis and transcendence. His mural Philosophy (1900) shows a tangle of naked bodies floating aimlessly: an aqueous cosmos inhabited by torpid humanity. As in other Klimt paintings, the liquefied medium suggests a stratum of primal subjectivity, an unconscious world of instinct: a stream of consciousness. The gently irregular harp tones punctuating the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony similarly suggest particles adrift in an amniotic medium. In Mahler’s Ninth, harp tones articulate the slow motion of both outer movements; the seemingly random forward motion of this music in fact generates structure in the relative absence of the sonata forms that Mahler more commonly deployed. And so for Mahler, “water” is not—as in Ives—“nature.” Rather, nature is the rarefied Alpine meadows Mahler signifies (in two of his symphonies) with the distant clamor of cowbells. And, like his water music, Mahler’s mountain mode distills harmony and texture; it abjures mud and scum.
Ives, too, maps mountain summits, peaking with the tingling closing pages of his Second String Quartet and Fourth Symphony (the same music, redeployed). This is not the thin, rarefied air Mahler breathes aloft, but something muddy with hidden possibilities. Ives pertinently writes of Emerson: “As thoughts surge to his mind, he fills the heavens with them, crowds them in, if necessary, but seldom arranges them along the ground first.” More fundamentally: like Mahler, Ives discovers the transcendental in outdoor tramps and reveries. Like Mahler’s, his is a religious personality rejecting dogma, seeking and finding the divine in nature, and so silencing his demons and surmounting worldly travail.