In 1921, Charles E. Ives, a wealthy co-proprietor of the New York life-insurance firm Ives & Myrick, launched a bid to rebrand himself as an American Beethoven. He sent copies of his Second Piano Sonata, titled “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860,” to hundreds of musicians, critics, and patrons across the United States. The first movement, “Emerson,” begins with a kind of axe-swinging gesture: an octave B gets smashed into dissonant splinters. Fractured impressions of Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau ensue. Most of the recipients dismissed the composer as a crank, but a few were spellbound by his transcendentalist conjurations, and a cult began to grow. In 1939, the pianist John Kirkpatrick played the “Concord” at Town Hall, eliciting critical awe. In 1947, Ives’s Third Symphony, a stately mashup of Christian hymns, won him a Pulitzer Prize. In 1951, Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic in the première of the raucous, joyous Second Symphony. By century’s end, Ives had seemingly been canonized as the craggy patriarch of American music; in the mid-nineties, I attended three festivals centered on him.
Lately, though, Ives has drifted to the margins again. The hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of his birth, on October 20th, passed with little fanfare. Carnegie Hall is presenting very little by Ives this season, and the Philharmonic is playing nothing at all. It fell to the Jacobs School of Music, at Indiana University Bloomington, to mount a proper tribute—“Charles Ives at 150,” a nine-day festival in early October. Part of the neglect has to do with the fact that craggy patriarchs are no longer in fashion, particularly ones who were prone to misogynistic and homophobic rhetoric, as Ives was. But the deeper problem is that American musical organizations have grown perilously risk-averse. Something has gone wrong when the Berliner Festspiele features Ives in depth while New York overlooks him.
American music offers nothing better than Ives at his best. My touchstone is “Three Places in New England” (1912-21), which the Jacobs School Philharmonic performed in Bloomington. The final movement, “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” evokes a Sunday-morning walk that Ives took with his wife, Harmony, along the Housatonic River: mist rising off the water, a church choir in the distance. After a polyrhythmic depiction of the currents, we hear the hymn “Dorrnance,” first in a major-key context and then in darksome minor. A cacophony builds, indicating a maelstrom of inner feeling. In its wake, the hymn steals back in for two quick-fading measures. A bittersweet progression stops mid-phrase. The vision vanishes. This incomparable ending not only replicates the blindsiding impact of nature’s sublimities; it also conveys how such epiphanies echo in our memory, forming sites of perpetual longing.