Listening to Charles Ives: Variations on His America

By J. Peter Burkholder and Leonard Slatkin

Charles Ives is widely regarded as the first great American composer of classical music. But listening to his music is an adventure—hearing how a piece begins may not prepare you for what comes next, or how it ends. Knowing one Ives piece may not prepare you for another.

Award-winning music historian J. Peter Burkholder provides an introduction to the composer’s diverse musical output and unusual career to readers of any background, discussing about forty of the best and most characteristic pieces framed with biographical sketches. Burkholder shows how Ives mastered each tradition he encountered, from American popular music to classical European genres, from Protestant church music to his own unique experimental idiom, and then interwove elements from all these traditions in the astonishing works of his maturity. Listening to Charles Ives contains compelling walkthroughs of select pieces and ultimately reveals that there is an Ives piece for everyone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Feb 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781442247956

Book preview

Introduction

Charles Ives has the most diverse output of any major composer, from marches to symphonies, from delicate simplicity to dense complexity, from humorous stunts to spiritual journeys, from Romantic styles to modernist sounds, from sweet melodies to crunching dissonances that still surprise listeners a century later. Listening to Ives is an adventure. Hearing how a piece begins may not prepare you for what comes next, or how it ends. Knowing one Ives piece may not prepare you for another.

This diversity can be unsettling. It can also be enormously appealing. Joseph Haydn sought to make each symphony and string quartet a unique individual; Ludwig van Beethoven made his symphonies, string quartets, and sonatas into instrumental dramas; Gustav Mahler spoke of the symphony as a world and said it must contain everything. Ives’s orchestral works, chamber music, sonatas, and art songs build on these ideas. Each work is different, but all represent a kind of lived experience, as if we have entered Ives’s world—or as if he is painting a sound-picture of the world he shared with the people around him, spinning variations on the America he knew. Experiencing one of Ives’s mature works for orchestra can be like life itself, as we encounter the familiar juxtaposed with the new, the strange, or the unexpected, in a multidimensional space with more going on around us than we can take in. Other Ives pieces are lyrical, like the extended meditations on hymn tunes in his Third Symphony and violin sonatas. Many of his pieces play with style, like those that evoke ragtime, band music, or popular songs. Some works are frankly experiments, trying out a new technique for its own sake, just to see what happens. He speaks many languages as a composer, often mixing them in a single piece, and he uses them to convey feelings and experiences that could not be expressed in any other way.

The variety in style, approach, sound, and meaning from one Ives piece to another also means that there is an Ives for everyone. Tell me what kinds of music you like, and I can find a piece by Ives that you will love—probably many of them. Others you may like less, or not at all. Ives himself said he liked some of his pieces better than others, called at least a handful the best he had ever written, criticized some, and then changed his mind, encouraging performers to give them a try. When after thirty-five years of composing he published a collection of 114 Songs, he put almost everything in it, representing all the types and styles of song he had ever written, from his most recent back to his very first, from sentimental to mocking, from conventional to entirely new in style, using texts that range from Shakespeare, Goethe, and Robert Browning to poems he read in the newspaper or were written by family members or by Ives himself. It is astonishing to listen to them all and consider how such contrasting, inventive, and distinctive songs could all spring from the same brain and hands.

The best way to approach Ives is with an open mind—anything may happen—and an understanding of the multifaceted background that made him and his music the way they are. Ives was a social chameleon, fitting into a variety of roles from football team captain to church musician and from businessman to composer. In a similar way, he was a musical chameleon, changing his colors in different contexts. As a composer of symphonies, string quartets, sonatas, and art songs, he inherited the mainstream of European classical music, the tradition based on the repertoire of great works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that are performed in concert halls and listened to with rapt attention. His favorite composers were Johann Sebastian Bach, Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, and César Franck, and he knew the recent music of Richard Wagner, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Antonín Dvořák, Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, and Alexander Scriabin. The influence of all these composers and more can be heard in his music, suffusing his early works but echoing in later ones as well. At the same time, as a New England native who played drums in his father’s band, sang hymns in church and at outdoor revivals, worked as a professional church organist throughout his teens and twenties, and heard popular music from Stephen Foster to Tin Pan Alley songs and from fiddle tunes to ragtime, he brought the sounds of American music into that European framework, synthesizing traditions and creating music that was unlike anything heard before. Through that synthesis he put American music on the world stage and brought American life into the tradition of classical music.

This book aims to be true to Ives’s diversity while offering an introduction to about forty of his best and most characteristic pieces. After an opening chapter that explores some unusual aspects of Ives’s career and music through an imagined experience at a concert of songs, the book proceeds roughly chronologically, tracing Ives’s path from his early exposure to several musical traditions, through his training in European classical music and his incorporation of American music and experimental techniques, to the astonishing works of his maturity. Each chapter focuses on pieces that reflect Ives’s changing vision and the range of his music at each stage.

By going in roughly chronological order, we can follow Ives’s development. He started with the commonplace and became extraordinary. The pieces we will encounter represent steps along his path, as he learns his craft in four musical traditions; masters the methods and conventions of each tradition, including its characteristic genres (types of piece), forms (standard ways of structuring a piece), and styles; combines aspects of these traditions in new ways; invents new musical techniques; and creates an individual idiom and musical personality unlike anyone else. The music he knew inspired his own, and what he knew and how he used it changed over time, so a chronological presentation is the best way to explain the variety of his music and the traits of each piece. It also helps us understand Ives’s music in the context of his artistic aims, which vary greatly from piece to piece, and his many ways of reshaping borrowed musical material to make new music, which developed from traditional methods to remarkably innovative approaches.

Our focus throughout will be on the pieces themselves, getting to know each one on its own terms. Each chapter features descriptions of works by Ives, including vignettes that attempt to capture the experience of listening to the music. Recommended recordings for each piece mentioned in this book are listed in the Selected Listening at the back. An ideal way to use this book is to pause before reading each description, listen to the piece about to be discussed, then read the section on the piece, and finally listen again, perhaps following the description as you listen; this allows you to hear and respond to each work on your own terms, learn about it with the music still resounding in your ears, and then hear it again, focusing on the characteristics, effects, and events described in the commentary. There is more than one way to listen to and interpret each piece. My ways of understanding and hearing Ives’s music are not the only ones. I hope they will inspire you to delve into each of his works and explore your own approaches to hearing and making sense of this music.

In providing background for and describing each piece, I will avoid specialist terminology whenever possible, introducing and defining musical terms only when they can help to make a description clearer and simpler.

The central purpose of this book is to offer guidance to listeners, including what to listen for and where to focus your attention. As the title says, this is a book about listening to Ives’s music. As often as possible I will describe pieces not as one might visualize them or encounter them on the page, but as you can hear them in real time. Often I will attempt to depict a piece in live performance: as a historical recreation of a performance in Ives’s lifetime, or of a concert, real or imagined, in the present or recent past. In these passages, marked with horizontal braces, I have allowed myself a novelist’s license to bring the event to life, filling in the gaps in the historical record (which are many), and imagining how it might have been.

Although the focus is on listening to Ives’s music, this book is also in a way a biography—a specifically musical biography. These pieces fit into a narrative, tracing Ives’s changes throughout his career. We know the outlines of that career well: his youth in Danbury, Connecticut; his early training as a pianist and organist; his studies in music theory, harmony, counterpoint, and composition with his father, George Ives; the churches where he was employed as an organist; his schooling, from grammar school through college at Yale, where he studied with the composer Horatio Parker; his work in New York as a businessman, culminating in his cofounding of one of the most successful insurance agencies of his time; his family life, friendships, and marriage to the always supportive and wonderfully named Harmony Twichell; and his pieces that were performed, reviewed, and published. The Timeline highlights the major events of his life and career.

But placing his music in the context of that career is far from simple, because of uncertainty about when he wrote each piece. For most of his adult life he earned his living in the insurance business, while composing evenings, weekends, and vacations. He worked on most of his larger works intermittently over many years, usually alternating his efforts between several pieces at once, and most of his compositions were first performed or published long after they were conceived. Ives was inconsistent and sometimes inaccurate in dating his manuscripts, and the dates for each piece that he recorded in his memoranda or his lists of works seem more often to apply to his initial idea than to the final completion. Thus most pieces had long gestations, and we cannot always tell when Ives began or finished work on them, much less when he dreamed up or finalized a particular feature. In the 1990s, Gayle Sherwood Magee established dates for when most types of music paper (sheets printed with staff lines for music notation) that Ives used were published, and she has been able to use that information along with handwriting analysis to date many of his handwritten manuscripts, from sketches where he jotted down a first idea or worked out a passage, to drafts of longer sections, to copies of whole pieces in pencil or ink. Her dates remain approximate and are not universally accepted, but they have been incorporated into the standard catalogue of Ives’s musical works, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives by James B. Sinclair, and into the article on Ives in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, available online through Grove Music Online. I use the dates given in Sinclair’s Catalogue or in Grove, recognizing that though uncertain, they are the best we have.¹

I have relied throughout on the biographies of Ives by Frank R. Rossiter (1975), Stuart Feder (1992), Jan Swafford (1996), Gayle Sherwood Magee (2008), and Stephen Budiansky (2014), as well as my own earlier books and articles. Descriptions of Ives’s works draw on my published analyses.² Ives is eminently quotable, and I often include passages from his writings, from those around him, or from reviews. Especially valuable are his self-published book Essays Before a Sonata; his informal memoirs published posthumously as Memos, which provide the background to dozens of pieces and are laced with wicked and self-deprecating anecdotes; and the interviews with many of Ives’s family members, friends, and colleagues in Vivian Perlis’s Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History. These and other sources on Ives’s life, music, and career can be found in the Selected Reading.

A particularly useful resource is the website of the Charles Ives Society (charlesives.org), which provides audio recordings of most tunes Ives borrowed (see the box below). Those tunes are printed (with their words when they have a text) in The Charles Ives Tunebook, edited by Clayton W. Henderson.

This book is designed to accompany you on a journey through Ives’s music. Its ultimate aim is to make some of that music a lifelong companion for you, music you return to, music you cannot forget, music that shapes your experience of other music and perhaps of life itself. I write this book for you—if you have read this far, you are my audience—and I dedicate it to the memory of my father, an avid reader who was also an avid listener to classical music. He was an adventurous sort who loved finding new music and finding out more about music that was already familiar. It was on recordings he brought home when I was a teenager that I first heard Ives’s music. He found Ives endlessly fascinating, always worth another listen. So do I.

AUDIO RECORDINGS OF BORROWED TUNES

To hear the hymn tunes, popular songs, patriotic songs, and fiddle tunes Ives borrowed and reworked in his music, listen to the audio recordings on the Charles Ives Society website, at charlesives.org/borrowed-tunes. Since many hymn tunes are sung to more than one set of words, the hymn tunes are listed on the website by the name of the tune rather than by the first line of the text (e.g., Bethany rather than Nearer, my God, to Thee).

• 1 •

A Most Unusual Career—and a Recital of Songs

You walk into the recital hall and take a seat, eager to hear the well-known singer in a live concert. He strides onto the stage to applause, followed by the pianist who will accompany him. Both bow, the pianist takes her seat, and they begin to perform Dichterliebe, a cycle of songs by Robert Schumann.¹ The songs offer a range of emotions, now yearning and delicate, now hopeful and happy, now urgent and dramatic, now sad and contemplative, always reflecting the feelings of the German poetry as you follow the translations in your program booklet. This is the kind of music you came to hear, the height of the nineteenth-century art song tradition, in the richly expressive musical language of that era, known as the Romantic style. But it is only the beginning of a varied program you look forward to with anticipation.

Next up is a set of songs by Charles Ives, an American composer whose music you have never heard. The singer nods to the pianist, signaling that he is ready to begin. Then the pianist attacks the keyboard, pounding both hands down on a horribly dissonant group of notes that sounds more like a child beating their palms on the keys than like any music you know. But it is not just random pounding, or a regrettable mistake; again and again she hits the same notes, the left hand always striking the low notes just after the right hand hits the high ones, like a rebounding echo. BANG! BANG! BANG, bang (pause) bang-BANG! The rhythm reminds you of the drum corps of your school’s marching band. While the pianist keeps pounding away, sometimes changing the notes or varying the rhythm, the singer starts to sing a melody that sounds like a familiar tune. It rises and falls, at first loud and punchy, then soft and hymnlike, then forceful again, but all seemingly in a different musical universe from the piano.

Booth led boldly with his big bass drum—

(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)²

The drumming, the dissonance, the sound of hymns, the language of a religious revival—this is all quite unexpected, very different from the lovely Schumann songs you were just hearing. You look back at your program. This song is called General William Booth Enters into Heaven. What sort of raucous, noisy, drum-filled, bloody heaven is this? What kind of composer writes such a song, and why?

IVES AND HIS MUSIC

Welcome to the world of Charles Ives. He composed his songs for exactly this sort of occasion: a voice recital, a concert by a featured artist with an accompanist, on which you might hear music from various composers, written over several generations and in individual, highly contrasting styles. He did not intend to disrupt the proceedings or knock his listeners back on their heels—well, maybe a little, since he later wrote that he wanted to create music that exercised his listeners’ ear muscles rather than soothing them with well-worn sounds:

Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful.³

But like Schumann, who was one of his models for song writing when he was young, Ives was trying to convey an experience through music, reflecting the feelings and images in the text. His music is so different from Schumann’s because the experiences he sought to convey are different, and the music he knew was different. The march-like drumming, the new chords, the hymnlike melodies, and the stark and sudden contrasts of style were all as much a part of him as was the musical tradition he learned from Schumann and other European composers. He sought to bring the music and the life he knew as an American into the realm of the international concert stage and the classical masterworks, and he wanted to have his music heard in the concert hall side by side with Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Dvořák, and Debussy.

This is easier to hear and understand if the first piece you encounter by Ives is not quite so different from the music you know as General William Booth is from Schumann’s songs. Yet that sudden shock of the new is exactly how the world of music came to know Charles Ives. Like other composers, Ives studied performance and composition when he was young, learned styles and genres of music that were current in his time, wrote music that fit into those traditions, and gradually developed an individual idiom. But unlike most composers, the crucial parts of Ives’s development happened out of public view. He did not make his career as a performer or teacher of music, as composers have done since the Middle Ages, or from composing alone, as a fortunate few have been able to do since the nineteenth century. His only paid positions in music were as a church organist, and he quit the last of those at age twenty-seven. He made his living instead in the insurance business, where he was one of the great innovators. He composed evenings, weekends, and vacations, producing hundreds of works, few of which were performed. Then a health crisis in 1918, in his mid-forties, gave him a sense of the limited time he had left on earth, spurring him to use his financial resources to promote his music and get it out to performers and the public. And—of course—it was his most recent music that he started with and promoted the hardest, for that was the music that was dearest to his heart and most expressive of who he was then.

As a result of this unusual career, musicians and the public learned Ives’s music in reverse chronological order, encountering late, complex pieces such as the Second Piano Sonata (known as the Concord Sonata) and the Fourth Symphony in the 1920s; the American-flavored orchestral works Three Places in New England and A Symphony: New England Holidays in the 1930s; the more approachable Third Symphony in the 1940s; and the Romantic-style Second and First Symphonies only in the early 1950s, shortly before his death and over four decades after their completion. The first pieces to become known were among his most radical, and many listeners found them hard to digest. He was attacked as an amateur, praised or reviled as an avant-gardist, regarded as a hundred percent American without influence from Europe, considered a philosopher in music because of the Transcendentalist associations of his Concord Sonata, and believed to not care about musical style or craft because of passages widely quoted from his writings. All of these views of Ives are wrong, misunderstandings created by the way we came to know his music.

The solution is to consider his music in more or less chronological order and understand each piece against the background of Ives’s own past. For all I know, you will take to General William Booth Enters into Heaven like a duck takes to water, and love it immediately, even when it bumps up against Schumann in a song recital and provides a shocking contrast. But no matter whether you love it or hate it or are simply nonplussed on first hearing, your understanding of the song can be enriched by knowing how it draws on the musical traditions Ives knew, and even what it has in common with songs like Schumann’s.

ALMOST EVERY KIND OF SONG IMAGINABLE

Our chronological journey through Ives’s life and music will begin in the next chapter. For now, let us start in the middle of the story, return to the imaginary song recital with which this chapter began, and listen to some songs that will give us a sense of his craft and of the diversity of his music.

Ives’s songs are a good place to start because they are central to his work as a composer. About half of his roughly four hundred compositions are songs. When he set out to promote his music in the early 1920s, his second project (after his Concord Sonata) was self-publishing a book of 114 Songs, a sort of omnium-gatherum of music covering his entire career from his first song in 1887 to his most recent ones from 1921. Characteristically, he arranged the book in roughly reverse chronological order, so his newest songs came first and those in more conventional idioms were buried deep inside. He had 1,500 copies printed and sent them out to libraries, periodicals, musicians, and critics, hoping to interest someone in his music.⁴

Ives made the collection as varied as possible, apparently hoping that everyone would find in it something to like. As the composer Aaron Copland put it in his review,

Almost every kind of song imaginable can be found—delicate lyrics, dramatic poems, sentimental ballads, German, French, and Italian songs, war songs, songs of religious sentiment, street songs, humorous songs, hymn tunes, folk tunes, encore songs; songs adapted from orchestral scores, piano works, and violin sonatas; intimate songs, cowboy songs and mass songs. Songs of every character and description, songs bristling with dissonances, tone clusters and elbow chords next to songs of the most elementary harmonic simplicity.⁵

Unfortunately, most people’s tastes are not as all-encompassing as Ives’s. There may have been something for everyone to like in the collection, but that meant there was also something for almost everyone to dislike. Copland approved of the songs in modern styles, but he criticized the songs in more traditional Romantic styles and in the idioms of popular music and wondered why Ives bothered to include them. Others hated the songs that were the most radical in style, including the first one in the book, Majority, which used tone clusters—all the notes one can play on the piano with the flat of one’s hand or one’s forearm—to suggest masses of people. Ives himself suggested that some people would not even look at the rest of the songbook after seeing that on the first page.⁶

Because Ives’s songs are so diverse, sampling a few of them can illustrate the variety of his music. They can also help us understand how Ives used references to musical styles and types to convey meaning. We all have a sense that music can mean something; music can elate us, move us to tears, bring back memories, make us dance, inspire us to action, calm us down, and affect us in many other ways. But how music does this is a very complicated question. The songs are a good laboratory for exploring how Ives’s music conveys meaning, because the range of possible meanings is suggested by the text. So instead of asking how music can be meaningful in the abstract, we can consider how Ives’s music in his songs changes or deepens how we understand the words. As we will see, Ives often creates meaning by evoking familiar music that carries particular associations.

MEMORIES

You notice on your program that General William Booth is the first of a half dozen songs by Ives. After that initial shock, you do not know what to expect. The next one is Memories, which Ives composed in 1897, when he was in his early twenties. You see in the program booklet that it has a subtitle—A, Very Pleasant; B, Rather Sad—and that Ives wrote the words for it himself. You brace yourself for drums and dissonance, but that is not what you get.

The pianist begins, quickly alternating low notes with her left hand and chords with her right—boom-chick boom-chick boom-chick and so on. It sounds very familiar, a kind of musical background you have heard hundreds of times before. After all the novel sounds of the previous song, you recognize this as tonal music, music that follows the same rules of harmony that Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms observed, using the progressions from chord to chord and the relations between notes to define a key—a sense of home base, where the music starts and to which it returns at the end. Usually this would not be a surprise—you hardly noticed that Schumann’s music was tonal since you expected it would be—but given your recent experience with General William Booth you cannot help but observe how different this song sounds.

As the pianist continues, the singer comes in, breathlessly singing in a lilting rhythm, starting each phrase with a leap up to a peak, bouncing down, and then undulating up and down, spitting the words out as quickly as he can. The melody conveys a sense of fun and excitement, a perfect fit for the text. Although the title of the song is Memories, the words are all in the present tense, those of a child talking about sitting in the opera house waiting for the curtain to go up, hearing the orchestra, and whistling and humming along with the music. And then the singer, embodying that child’s experience in the moment, starts to whistle—an extraordinary and unexpected effect in the middle of a song recital.

It is as if the passage of time has fallen away and we are back in our childhood—or Ives’s childhood in the 1880s. The opera house is not the Metropolitan Opera House in New York or Covent Garden in London but the theater or auditorium in small cities and towns all over the United States (like the one in his home town of Danbury, Connecticut, shown in the next chapter), where touring companies came to present operas and operettas as well as plays, minstrel shows, variety shows, vaudeville, magic, and all sorts of public entertainments, and where local performers also took the stage. This song, with its rapid declamation of a light-hearted text in a lilting melody over light accompaniment with very few places to stop for breath, is in a style that was heard often in such theaters in the second half of the nineteenth century, like a patter song in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

You are in a recital hall in the twenty-first century listening to a program of art songs, songs that are part of the classical tradition and are intended to be listened to with rapt attention, while you keep quiet. But the words and the music are telling you that it is the late nineteenth century and you are a child in a theater in your home town, getting excited and making noise along with the orchestra as it starts to play before the show begins. This magical effect has been called fictional music: a piece of music that enacts a performance by a different set of musicians in a different setting for a different audience, and invites you to imagine yourself as a member of that audience in that time and place.⁷ Ives did not invent this effect—there are many famous examples, like the moment in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique when we hear an English horn and an oboe imitate cowherds playing their pipes and imagine ourselves out in the country—but he uses it often. In this song, the combination of a familiar musical style with the words’ present-tense description of what we are doing places us in the middle of a particularly vivid memory. This is music about the experience of listening to music.

The music reaches a climax of excitement, and the singer shouts Curtain! Shouting in a song is again extraordinary. The music has lured you into a music hall from a century and a half ago and has wound you up with anticipation, and then the curtain goes up before your eyes. What happens next? After a pause, what sounds like an entirely new song begins, in a new key, as if this is the show you have been waiting to hear. The singer, who has been acting the part of a child excited to be at the opera house, is now playing the part of a performer onstage, and you are part of the audience in that theater. The music is now much slower and softer, in a completely different mood and style. Instead of alternating low notes and chords, the piano slowly plays each chord as an arpeggio, sounding each note in the harmony from lowest to highest, dropping part of the way back down, and repeating the gesture in a series of waves, creating a gently arching accompaniment that reminds you of a nocturne by Fryderyk Chopin. The singer joins in with a melody that sounds like a sentimental parlor song of the mid-nineteenth century, a song for amateurs to sing at home, in the style of Stephen Foster’s Gentle Annie or Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair. The words are also nostalgic: overhearing an old song that seems tattered and worn with use, the singer remembers it as the tune his uncle hummed, sweet but a little sad. The music is gorgeous, and the effect is dreamy. Like the first part of Memories, this portion uses an old and familiar musical style to create fictional music, a song about the experience of hearing an old and familiar song, which we assume had the same slow and sentimental character as the melody we are hearing now. Although this part of Ives’s song, like the first, begins in the present tense, the words lead explicitly into the world of the past, as the overheard tune brings to the singer’s mind memories of hearing his uncle hum and seeing him shuffle to the barn.

Juxtaposing Musical Styles

Memories is a wonderfully clever song, using familiar musical styles to take us to a particular time and place and evoke specific moods. The juxtaposition of different musical styles is characteristic of Ives’s music, and we will hear it in most (though not all) of the pieces we encounter.⁸ Using these juxtapositions to create fictional music, music about the experience of listening to music, also became characteristic, especially in his later pieces.

Style is a word often used in discussions of music, and it is worth pausing a moment to consider what we mean when we use it. A style is a characteristic manner or mode of composing or performing, an overall effect, that is created from the combination of many individual aspects of music and is distinctive from other styles. We recognize different styles of clothing for different purposes, groups of people, and historical eras: one wears a tuxedo or gown to a formal party, but not to the beach or to plant tulip bulbs in the garden; people from different nations, ethnic groups, economic classes, professions, or cliques in high school can often be identified by what they wear; and a teacher today does not dress like teachers did in the 1700s or the 1400s. In the same way, styles of music are associated with different social functions, nations, groups, and historical periods. We can identify musical styles and distinguish them from each other easily, almost immediately, if we are familiar with them. The differences between country music and hip hop are obvious, and if we hear a musical style out of its usual place—square dance music at a church service, for instance, or a hymn at a square dance—we are struck by how it breaks our expectations, whether that is meaningful (say, to honor the memory of a favorite fiddler) or just inappropriate. We can talk about style at many levels: the style of an era, a nation, or a type of music, but also the style of an individual composer, of a particular piece, or even—as in Memories—of one part of a piece. The many differences of style are part of what makes music so endlessly fascinating.

Because Ives uses so many different styles in his music, and often features contrasts between them within his pieces, style will be a recurring theme throughout this book. Sometimes we will have to wade into the weeds of technical description to make clear how these styles sound or how to tell one from another, but often the styles will be familiar ones and their differences will be obvious.

THE CIRCUS BAND

The next song in the recital is called The Circus Band, and band music is what you hear. The pianist plays a brief introduction, establishing the key and the character of a march. Then the singer joins in with a tune in band style, singing about the circus parade on Main Street, led by the band. The words are again written by Ives and in the present tense—the band is coming down the street right now—but from a boy’s perspective, suggesting that this is another song about a memory of hearing music years ago during one’s childhood. The parade is brought to life by the sights described in the text and by music in the style of a band march. The only thing you notice out of the ordinary is that sometimes the rhythm is syncopated, when the singer or pianist lands on a note a bit sooner or later than you expect, just before or after a beat rather than on it, creating an offbeat accent against the steady background beats that makes the music sound even more exciting. These offbeat accents add up, leading to a moment of syncopation that departs from how a real marching band would sound and reminds you that you are listening to an art song about a parade, not the parade itself.

Typical of a march, the first section—called a strain in the band world—repeats exactly, followed by another repeated strain in a closely related key. If this were a march by John Philip Sousa, you would expect these two strains to be followed by a trio, an extended section in a new key. What comes is a bit of a surprise: the music has been tonal throughout, but now the pianist plays a big dissonant chord, her right hand on the high notes followed immediately by the left playing low notes. The shock of this sudden change of style makes you sit up straighter in your seat. As she repeats the chord—BANG! BANG! BANG, bang (pause) bang-BANG!—you recognize the rhythm and effect you heard at the beginning of General William Booth Enters into Heaven, and you realize that this is Ives imitating drumming. These sounds might be startling when played on the piano, but to hear drummers play this familiar rhythmic pattern before or during a march is a perfectly ordinary event.

The use of strange sounds to evoke something very familiar reinforces the sense that this song is fictional music, like Memories: a song that asks its listeners to imagine that we are on Main Street long ago listening to the band in a circus parade rather than in a recital listening to a singer and pianist. Memories sounds like the music it evokes, and so does most of The Circus Band, but the piano-drumming is a stylization, musical sounds that pretend to be other music. Although it does not really sound like drums, we recognize through the bang-y chords and the familiar rhythm that it is referring to drumming, and we understand in context that these chords are acting out the part of the drums, just as the voice and piano are acting out the parts of the other instruments in the band.

As the song continues, you get exactly what you expect from the trio of a Sousa march: a brief introduction, a new strain of melody, a dramatic episode known to band aficionados as a dogfight, and a repetition of the new melody, all in the style of a late-nineteenth-century march. The dogfight is so called because its dramatic back-and-forth between the high and low instruments sounds a bit like dogs snapping and barking at each other, with lots of colorful notes and chords from outside the key to heighten the tension. The last repetition of the trio strain is as loud and full as possible, thickening the texture of the music with a highly energetic rising and falling line that imitates the trombones in the band (Ives even marks this passage Hear the trombones!), and the song ends with a bang.

WALKING

Next up is Walking. As usual, the piano begins first, but this time the introduction is longer. It starts loud, alternating low notes—what musicians call the bass line, the lowest part—and high chords. The chords are what you notice most: more dissonant than in Memories but not as crunchy or harsh as the piano-drumming. As the right hand alternates two chords in irregular rhythm and the bass line in the left hand keeps a steady pulse, you notice that each note and chord continues to sound even after the next one is played, muddying the texture. This blurring effect is created on the piano when the player presses a pedal that lifts off all the dampers, the weighted pieces of felt that normally drop onto each string and stop the sound as soon as the player stops holding down the key she pressed to play the note. The pianist releases the pedal, the blurring ceases, and you hear rich, slightly dissonant chords harmonizing a jaunty tune, soon taken up by the singer as he describes the sights on a morning walk in October, from church steeples to glowing autumn leaves.

Unlike Memories and The Circus Band, this song does not immediately remind you of any music you have heard before. It is not exactly tonal—at any rate, it does not follow the same rules of harmony as music by Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms—but it is not far away from tonal music. Both melody and harmony sound as fresh and rugged as an October morning. As the title suggests, this is a song about taking a walk and all the things we see and hear along the way. The steady rhythms and up-and-down motions of the music neatly portray energetic walking. The blurred chords in the piano introduction are explained when the singer mentions the village church-bells; like the piano-drumming in The Circus Band, the passage with the dampers off is a musical stylization, a way to convey on the piano an impression of the resonant reverberations of tolling church bells. Twice the voice rises to a peak and falls back down, illustrating the sights of the ridge and the hills.

The piano introduces a new section with faster motion, and the singer pushes on with a steady gait. Suddenly the music slows and quiets, the church-bell chords return in the piano, and over them the singer speaks of seeing a church where a funeral is taking place. Then the pace picks up again as he points out a tavern where a dance is happening, and the piano plays a syncopated melody reminiscent of square dance tunes with a touch of rag-time, like the fragments of dance music we might hear from a distance as we pass by. The music that opened the song returns, and the first section repeats with new words as the walk continues: today we do not choose to die or to dance, but to live and walk. On walk, the singer keeps repeating the two notes he just sang for to live, subtly drawing an equivalence between living and walking, that lively movement that is poised midway between the stillness of the grave and the jauntiness of dancing. The music quiets and fades without slowing down, as if the walkers continue moving at the same pace and gradually disappear into the distance.

Music about Experiences

Like the two previous songs, Walking is about an experience. Instead of a remembered experience from childhood, this is one in the present. Instead of a direct focus on hearing music—in a theater, on the street, in a parade—where the music itself is the center of attention, this is a walk through a landscape. But it is a landscape with people in it, represented by the music—church bells, dance music—that is associated with their activities. As we will see, many of Ives’s pieces are about experiences, both of music directly and of events in which music plays a role and therefore can represent people and what they are doing.⁹

Thinking over the last three songs, you realize that all of them describe shared activities: we are waiting for the show to begin, watching the parade, or walking with a friend. Ives often focuses on such shared experiences. His landscape pieces are usually populated by crowds. But some works, like the next song, speak of an individual experience.

THE CAGE

As you have come to expect by now, The Cage is different from every other Ives song you have heard tonight. The pianist plays only chords, dissonant chords that mostly sound like the same