Search Results

Ives first conceived the Concord Sonata while on vacation at Elk’s Lake in 1911, based in part on pieces he had already been working on. He claimed to have been able to play the piece by 1915, though it wasn’t written out in publishable form until 1919. After publication he came to regret having simplified the piece somewhat, and he continued tinkering with it until a second edition finally appeared in 1947. This extraordinarily long gestation period creates unusual textual problems for performers of the work.

This chapter focuses on Charles E. Ives's self-promotional activities during the period from 1921 to 1934. Its point of departure is an analysis of Essays Before a Sonata, published by Ives as a prose prolegomenon to his Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840–60” in 1920. The chapter begins with a discussion of the literary context of Essays Before a Sonata and the inspirations for “Concord” Sonata. It then considers Ives's involvement with the Franco-American Society as well as his ambition in planning and executing the distribution of Essays, the “Concord” Sonata, and 114 Songs. It also examines how Ives staked his claim as the inventor of musical techniques that were on the cutting edge of musical modernism as opposed to transcendentalism. Finally, it concludes with an assessment of the unpublished autobiographical Memos.

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's advocacy of Charles E. Ives and his music between the years 1927 and 1947. Cowell's ideas about Ives can be grouped into two periods: those produced prior to the sentence he served at San Quentin State Prison for a 1936 conviction on a morals charge, and those produced after his release in 1940. This chapter first considers Cowell's portrait of Ives as a New England musical ethnographer before discussing the views of anthropologists, folklorists, and musical modernists about folk music. It then examines how Cowell became interested in folk music, along with his influence on Ives. It also looks at the notion of a usable past, advanced by Van Wyck Brooks in his essay “On Creating a Usable Past,” in which he called for a rewriting of the history of American literature. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Ives's “Concord” Sonata and Ives's commitment to freedom (in the sense of refusing to impose a fixed final form on his works).

After the musical canon became established in the Gilded Age, the status quo in American music persisted well into the second decade of the twentieth century. George Chadwick, Amy Beach, Horatio Parker, and many other late romantic composers remained active and maintained much of their styles. Before 1915 two American composers, Charles Ives and Leo Ornstein, were writing unusual and original music. Despite their completely different backgrounds, career tracks, and historical reputations, both men arrived at musical positions that were remarkably similar and endured comparable problems. Both also wrote programmatic music in the broadest sense. In January and February 1915, Ornstein gave a series of four concerts at the Bandbox Theatre in New York City, by far the most significant event in his American performing career. His most uncompromising foray into modernism was the Violin Sonata, Op. 31. For Ives, his Concord Sonata was a bold move that established his name before the musical world. This chapter focuses on the lives and musical careers of Ornstein and Ives.

The third chapter studies the third movement (“The Alcotts”) of Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840–1860, and demonstrates how Ives's harmony short-circuits the philosophies of the New England Transcendentalists, anticipating post-Lacanian psychological complexity. Along with Ives’s transcendental project, the chapter looks to Copland’s opera The Tender Land, which exchanges static octatonic minor-third cycles with major-third cycles (as in Ives), but this now expands in scale, exhibited in two key scenes from the work. The expanding harmonic rotation portrays the sexual awakening of the naïve young subject of the opera, Laurie Moss. In their broader function the cycles speak of the regeneration of the American landscape and the families who settle on it. Taking a cue from Lacan, who became influenced by the emerging American meta-discipline of “cybernetics” we interrogate the operations of these cycles as feedback-loops that propel desire forwards through constant rotation and exploration.