Ives Gets You Under His Skin

THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY of the birth of Charles Ives was celebrated in and around Danbury, Connecticut, where he was born and raised and eventually settled. These celebrations took place in 1974. I was a year out of high school, living one town south. My exposure to Ives’s music was probably more robust than that of my coevals, but we had a hip high-school music teacher, Joe Celli, one of whose adventurous programs was a concert that included a multimedia presentation of “The Unanswered Question.” I played amidst a terrified section of fellow violinists, our fingers way the hell up on the E string, offering, as the composer put it, “The Silence of the Druids, Who Know, See, and Hear Nothing.” It’s one of Ives’s most-accessible works, a terrific introduction both to his music and his way of thinking, and two recordings of it are part of the 22-CD RCA and Columbia Album Anthology, focusing on what those labels issued on LP between 1945 and 1976.

Although Ives’s music was known, during his lifetime, to a few fellow-composers like Henry Cowell and performers like pianist John Kirkpatrick, it was otherwise neglected. By the early decades of the last century, the classical-music audience had been conditioned to seek pleasant-sounding works in the European tradition, although even Debussy had a struggle. A concurrent splinter group, primed by Stravinsky, began supporting the outré experiments of Schoenberg and his followers, and this flowed into Academia. Insecure critics (and critics are always nervous) took up the atonal cause and we sailed through the mid-20th century under the misapprehension that Tchaikovsky and his ilk were old hat, while atonal and aleatory music was the stuff that smart people enjoyed. Even Stravinsky wandered into twelve-tone territory.

Given the crunchy nature of much of his music, it should have been a boom time for Ives, but his music remained slow to emerge, to put it mildly. He was following in nobody else’s footsteps, at the same time synthesizing a sound that celebrated the wide variety of music and sounds he grew up hearing. His best-known works thread quotes from hymns, folksongs, marching bands (especially mediocre ones), and the symphonists he admired, like Beethoven.

He ran a very successful insurance firm, and thus had no need for his music to make money. He was also a generous supporter of other struggling composers. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 after the premiere of his Symphony No. 3, “The Camp Meeting” (over 40 years after piece was written), but he gave the money away, stating “prizes are for boys, and I’m all grown up.”

Most of his mature works were written between 1897 (when he began his Symphony No. 2) and 1927, when he ruefully confessed to his wife that he no longer could compose. Ives was still in his 50s, but fell into a compositional silence for the rest of his life (he lived until 1954) paralleling that of his contemporary, Sibelius.

The range of Ives’s sounds and styles is impressive; the works range from comfortably Romantic-era to cacophonous chaos, and include chamber works, songs, symphonies, and many occasional pieces. This CD anthology tends to focus on the orchestral works, as that’s what was gaining increasing attention during the period covered by this set. But it starts with the premiere recording of Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2, subtitled “Concord, Mass., 1840-60.” Composed between 1904 and 1915, it musically portrays some of the people associated with transcendentalism, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau in four wildly contrasting movements. After its publication in 1920, a number of adventurous pianists took up the piece, often including only individual movements in concert. John Kirkpatrick discovered the sonata in 1927 and became an ardent advocate, making the recording that starts off this set in 1945 and revisiting it (in stereo) in 1968, also included. (More recent champions of the sonata include Marc-André Hamelin and Jeremy Denk.)

Similarly, Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 1, from 1910, wasn’t premiered until William Masselos tackled it in 1949, and, too, made two recordings that are included here, in 1950 (mono) and 1968 (stereo).

Only one of the composer’s four violin sonatas is included here, which is too bad but is, I guess, the luck of the draw given the scope of the set. It’s the Violin Sonata No. 2, in a historic 1950 recording by Patricia Travers and pianist Otto Herz.

What you’ve got here in generous quantity are orchestral works. Two recordings of each of the four symphonies, recorded between 1958 and 1973. It was during the 1960s that Ives’s music really began to go before the microphones, but Leonard Bernstein kicked it off with his 1958 recording of the Symphony No. 2, easily the most popular of the four. This came seven years after Bernstein led the premiere performance, itself taking place a half-century after Ives had completed the work. Although the composer declined to attend the concert, citing ill-health, he listened to its subsequent radio broadcast and reportedly disliked it. (That performance was issued in the 10-CD “Bernstein Live!” set from the NY Philharmonic in 2007.) Both recordings are notable for containing hundreds of errors and, in the last movement, a big Bernsteinian cut. For a more correct version, there’s a Naxos release of Kenneth Schermerhorn conducting the Nashville Symphony. And the Ives set we’re looking at also contains a robust, straightforward version from 1973 by the underrated Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Those forces recorded the Symphony No. 3 in 1968, three years after Bernstein and the NY Phil. Both are included here. In surprising contrast to the Second, the Third, subtitled “The Camp Meeting,” has a lively Allegro at its center, flanked by two slower movement, the last of them, a Largo, titled “Communion” and ending the piece unexpectedly gently. Both are excellent performances, with Bernstein, as usual, the more sharply edged.

Ives’s Symphony No. 1 was a student piece, and it sounds it, insofar as it reflects the German romantic tradition in which Ives and his coevals were steeped. The two recordings here are by Ormandy (1968) and Morton Gould with the Chicago Symphony (1965). Gould committed the sin of writing music in a popular vein and putting out recordings as a conductor of pops-oriented stuff, so his (I don’t know what else to term it) more serious compositions and conducting work are unjustly neglected. But he’s represented here with several other of Ives’s grittier works, and does a terrific job with them.

Which brings us to the Symphony No. 4. It’s a 30-minute, four-movement work completed some time in the 1920s, offering an apotheosis of all that Ives sought to express in music. Which means it takes some getting used to.

Which is amusingly ironic. Ives did not write in an atonal manner, nor did he follow any precepts of serialism or other anti-melodic system. He sought always to offer melody, but melody as you’d hear it during a holiday parade or outside a church where a brass band might also be performing. In other words, he captured the cacophony we continually hear but left it to the listener to unravel the component strands – something we do unthinkingly when eavesdropping, for example.

Leopold Stokowski conducted the premiere of the complete work in 1965, and the recording he made three days later gave the world at large its first exposure to this complex, densely textured piece. And its polyrhythms proved so challenging that Stokowski called in José Serebrier and David Katz to assist him on the podium. Serebrier made his own recording of the piece a decade later, and that, too, is in this set.

Other major orchestral works included here are the popular Robert Browning Overture, the three Orchestral Sets, the four-movement New England Holidays symphony, Variations on “America” (in both the original organ version, recorded by E. Power Biggs, and the orchestration by William Schuman), and a number of endearing short pieces like Central Park in the Dark, Chromâtimelôdtune, The Circus Band, The Gong on the Hook and Ladder, and the rousing meditation Gyp the Blood or Hearst? Which is Worst?

Three discs in this set re devoted to Ives’s songs. He published most of them in a collection he called, simply, “114 Songs.” Here you’ll find 39 songs and 13 chorales, most of them performed by the Gregg Smith Singers or by Evelyn Lear, and it’s illuminating to hear the interpretive differences between those titles that overlap. My money is on Lear, but I’ve long been a fan of her versatility.

Soprano Helen Boatwright recorded 24 Ives songs in 1954 with John Kirkpatrick, issued on the CRI (Composers’ Recordings) label, a label that also offered the result of ventures into the studio made by Ives himself. Both were included in a five-record set that Columbia put out in 1974 and which, confusingly, also appeared in a CD set from the same label late in 2024. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Ives himself bang out “They Are There” against his own raucous vocal, but it’s also something you only need hear once. Otherwise, everything on the smaller Columbia set is duplicated on the 22 discs in this collection which, even given its analogue-era limitation, is a dazzling portrait of America’s most revolutionary composer.

Charles Ives: The RCA and Columbia Album Anthology
Recordings from the Analog Era 1945-76
Sony Classical