The Sound of the Picturesque

Picturesque and Sublime by the Housatonic

Though Danbury was a small industrial city, indelibly marked by environmental pollution, strikes, and social upheaval, Ives’s musical evocations are overwhelmingly pastoral in mood. With a brisk walk, Victorian Danburians could be amid countryside that was palpably bucolic. A close reading of the Transcendentalists was formative for Ives’s understanding of the numinous in nature. Emerson’s “Nature” featured in an essay he wrote in his senior year at Yale for William Lyon Phelps’s celebrated course on American literature. A lifetime later, Ives returned to the Transcendentalists in the first section of his Essays before a Sonata, an aesthetic manifesto published to accompany his Second Piano Sonata, Concord, Mass. 1840–60, whose muscular first movement is titled “Emerson.”

Ives’s view of nature, like that of his literary heroes, was fundamentally shaped by looking; visual contemplation would lead to spiritual truth. For Emerson, as for his English contemporary John Ruskin, familiar natural forms could reveal the profundities that lie behind or beneath them. Ruskin first formulated his aesthetic theory by looking closely at the work of J. M. W. Turner. It is no surprise that on his first trip abroad, to England in 1924, Ives headed to the Tate Gallery. There he steeped himself in Turner’s work, which he revered more than that of any other artist. Turner’s early watercolors captured a profusion of detail within the comforting framework of the picturesque; but one suspects it was the later, visionary canvases that Ives admired. Like Ruskin, he would have been aware that a work like Turner’s Norham Castle, Sunrise, though apparently unfinished, inchoate and hazy, was rooted in a lifetime of close observation.

“The higher Emerson soars, the more lowly he becomes,” wrote Ives, and the same is true of Turner, who, Ruskin complained, retained a lifelong fondness for “black barges, patched sails, and every possible condition of fog.” The affinity between the composer and the long-dead English painter surely rested upon their shared insistence on solid earthy matter, on the real, rendered truly, but without excessive detail or flashy finish. Ives quotes Ruskin on the power that all great pictures have, which “depends on the penetration of the imagination into the true nature of the thing represented.” When Ives described Emerson as “a seer painting his discoveries in masses with any color that may lie at hand—cosmic, religious, human, even sensuous; a recorder freely describing the inevitable struggle in the soul’s uprise,” he could have been describing Turner, or himself.