The Christopher Small Reader. Christopher Small G.
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of the music is not the result of incompetence or naivety but arises naturally from his personality, from his belief in the freedom and autonomy of the individual, and above all in the unity that underlies all the variety of nature. There are those who, like David Wooldridge in his biography, and John Cage, blame Ives for abandoning the full-time profession of music and going into business. Cage writes: “I don’t so much admire the way Ives treated his music socially (separating it from his insurance business); it made his life too safe economically and it is in living dangerously economically that one shows bravery socially.”17 Wooldridge and Cage reveal what is in fact an inappropriately romantic view of the position of a composer in society, which would no doubt have been quickly dismissed by William Billings and his colleagues. Ives’s life in business is an expression of his faith in the unity of life; it was a gesture towards life and against fragmentation and the isolation of the artist. The rightness of his course is shown by the fact that his inspiration dried up as soon as he retired from business.
In considering both his beliefs and his techniques, the idea of Ives held by many Europeans, even among those who are sympathetic to his music, as a great original who sprang from nowhere, dissolves when we become aware of the nature of the American musical tradition, outside that of the Europeanized art music of the nineteenth century. At the same time, he had been thoroughly grounded in the European tradition both by his father (whose own musical training had included the working of Bach chorales and the transcription of opera scenes from Gluck and Mozart as well as of baroque masses, and whose small-town orchestra was capable of turning in excellent performances of Rossini, Mendelssohn, Verdi, Meyerbeer and even Mozart) and by the conventional but expert Horatio Parker at Yale. But his attitude towards the great masters of that tradition remained equivocal; on the one hand he could assert with confidence that “Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are the strongest and greatest in all art, and nothing since is stronger than their strongest and greatest,” while at other times he could voice interesting doubts, speaking of “a vague feeling that even the best music we know—Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms—was too cooped up—more so than nature intended it to be—not only in its chord systems and relations, lines, etc, but also in its time, or rather its rhythms and spaces—blows or not blows—all up and down even little compartments, over and over (prime numbers and their multiples) all so even and nice—producing some sense of weakness, even in the great.” And again: “I remember feeling towards Beethoven that he’s a great man—but Oh for just one big strong chord not tied to any key.”18
His relationship with the indigenous music of the United States, on the other hand, was much more positive. His awareness of the continuity of the outdoor camp meetings with the psalm singing of the early colonists is as obvious as his love of the music. There is little in his compositions that actually suggests the quality of such meetings in a literal way, although the marvelous choral outburst at the end of the Thanksgiving movement of the Holidays Symphony comes near to it. But this wild, highly individualistic quality runs through all of his music. The Second String Quartet is in fact based on it; the four instruments are all characterized (the second violin is cast as Rollo, the type of prissy milksop musician whom Ives so despised), while the three movements are entitled: Four Men Have a Discussion, Arguments and Fight, and They Climb a Mountain and Contemplate. Other examples are to be found in the early scherzo, Over the Pavements, a representation of the different independent walking rhythms that could be heard in a busy street before the advent of the internal combustion engine.
In most of Ives’s work, as in that of the New England tunesmiths, the needs of the individual voice or part take precedence over the neatness or consistency of the over-all effect (one is reminded of Whitman’s bold “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself!”). It is this fact that accounts for the notorious dissonance of his work, as well as for its rhythmic complexity. In allowing each voice to go its own way he was expressing his version of the ideal of individual freedom, but we should notice that while the relationships between the voices are complex in the extreme, often allowing no room for the stately, logical chord progressions of tonal functional harmony, they are not chaotic; Ives has them under control. There are accounts from those who knew him well of his ability to keep a number of rhythmic patterns going simultaneously, and he was well able to play his own music on the piano. His ideal of liberty remained firmly within the law, although the law was to be subtle and flexible to allow for the greatest degree of variety of individual interaction. He could be tolerant when it came to performances of his own music; provided that the music was attempted with sincerity and simplicity of purpose, he did not mind too much if it did not come out exactly as he wrote it—hence his famous comment on an early well-intentioned but botched performance of Three Places in New England—“Just like a town meeting—every man for himself. Wonderful how it came out!” One wonders, in fact, whether he would have liked some of today’s recorded performances by the same kind of superstar conductor and instrumentalist as those who once pronounced the music unplayable, so smoothly and perfectly co-ordinated; in their very technical proficiency they are regressing towards the mean of European music, and the quality of adventure which he treasured is lacking from the experience.
In the multiplicity of his sources, from Beethoven to American folk tunes, gospel hymnody and ragtime, in the protean variety of his musical styles, from straightforward tonal harmony (regarded by him as only one of an infinite number of expressive means) to polytonality, polyrhythm and polymeter, proto-serial music, spatial music, Ives introduced something completely new into western music, which has become an increasingly important factor in it, especially to those Americans who succeeded him. In European music we obtain a hint of this all-embracing quality only in the work of Mahler, and in his famous remark, made to Sibelius, that “A symphony must be like the world; it must contain everything!” In the music of Ives, in fact, the work of art becomes not just an expression of nature or of an attitude to nature; it becomes a part of nature, flowing along in the flux of time as much as a rock or a tree. Like a natural object it contains not one but many meanings; the extraction of meaning requires more work on the part of the hearer, but the music allows the hearer to enter in and find his own meaning, rather than have it presented to him ready-made, depending on the aspects of it on which we concentrate our attention. This, for example, is what he says of the pieces which he calls Tone Roads:
The Tone Roads are roads leading right and left—“F.E. Hartwell & Co., Gents’ Furnishings”—just starting an afternoon’s sport. If horses and wagons can go sometimes on different roads (hill road, muddy road, straight, hilly hard road) at the same time, and get to Main Street eventually—why can’t different instruments on different staffs? The wagons and people and roads are all in the same township—same mud, breathing the same air, same temperature, going to the same place, speaking the same language (sometimes)—but not all going on the same road, all going their own way, each trip different to each driver, different people, different cuds, not all chewing in the key of C—that is, not all in the same key—or same number of steps per mile … Why can’t each one, if he feels like trying to go, go along the staff-highways of music, each hearing the other’s “trip” making its own sound-way, in the same township of fundamental sounds—yet different, when you think of where George is now, down in the swamp, while you are on Tallcot Mountain—then the sun sets and all are on Main Street.19
And elsewhere in the Memos he discusses the structure of a piece and comments, “This may not be a nice way to write music, but it’s one way!—and who knows the only real nice way?”20
In his multiplicity Ives draws together many threads of American music and brings them to the surface from where they had lain, submerged and neglected, for more than a century. He celebrates the fact that what people play or sing is not necessarily the same as what they think they are playing and singing, and acknowledges their right to sing or play as they wish; indeed, given the right attitude in the listener, the result can be just as beautiful as more accurate or more formally disciplined music making.
Ives seems never to have seriously considered studying in Europe; those who did go to Europe either before or after him came back imbued with European attitudes, no matter how “American” they believed themselves to be. The music of Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, even of Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt, remains European-style