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Program Notes Marc Peloquin and I have talked about Charles Ives and the Concord Sonata ever since we first met about 12 years ago. Last year, when he told me he would perform it, I was immediately excited by that possibility. After all, performances of the Concord are rare and good performances are even rarer. It’s not just that the music is fiendishly difficult, which it is, but there are so many ways to go wrong when interpreting Ives. Originally Marc and I had discussed a very elaborate performance, with a choir singing hymns and using the organ and having people speak about the piece...but that would be to say that the hymns and marches and other cross references in the Concord are hidden or embedded, like some elaborate intellectual exercise, and to find them is to find the core of the piece. That is simply not true. The hymns, tunes, fragments, and such which so richly permeate Ives’s language are simply part of the lexicon of expression that he uses. They are not an end, but a means to an end. We abandoned that approach and I offered to write something for the program. I felt completely up to the task. After all, this was a piece that evoked a powerful response in me. In the past, I have taken pride in my ability to take complex subjects and break them into smaller, more understandable parts. And I actually did make some progress going in two different directions with the essay on the Concord. PART #1—THE HISTORIANS VS. THE MUSICIANS One time I heard a performance of the “Alcotts” at Weill Hall. The pianist was excellent and the performance was pristine perfect. Yet at the end, I turned to my friend and said “she just didn’t get it.” It was my introduction to the world of Musicians playing Ives. The Musicians are skilled players who may even have played a great deal of contemporary music. They tackle the Concord as a straight-forward musical problem. The fast passages and complex cross rhythms are performed to perfection and nuances of line and phrase played convincingly. They may be a tad frustrated by the more eccentric of Mr. Ives’s musical instructions and, while they may be aware of some of the hymn tunes and other musical references, those may or may not play a part in their musical plan of the piece. The Historians, on the other hand, are the blue pencil squad who go over the score, marking each and every cross reference, hymn tune fragment, and anything Mr. Ives might have heard in the Danbury Town Square. Their performances tend to be a bit cut and dry and maybe slightly more ragged than the Musicians’ performances. PART #2—IMPRESSIONISM; IVES AND JOYCE Searching for a comparison for Ives’s Concord Sonata, I thought of a kind of American impressionism—like crossing Monet with “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean,” (one of Ives’s favorite songs). Impressionists capture a moment in time, as does Ives, and both have a sensory effect in conveying an underlying emotion. The more I pursued that comparison, the less apt it seemed to me. The impressionist creates a soft-focus visual sensation which is evocative and emotional—as much a “reflection upon” the subject as a reflection of it. With Ives, the expression is more of a direct statement. As unfamiliar and inexact as the “language” he uses may be, one develops a powerful impression of what the inner lives of the men and women might have been—the exuberant Emerson, embracing everything; the moody, moralistic Hawthorne; the spiritual, contemplative, and solitary Thoreau. While those brief summarizing phrases make the process seem cursory and static, it is hardly so. One of Monet’s haystacks will always reflect 4:15 p.m. on a summer afternoon in Giverny. The Ives is far more dynamic than that...more like a giant boiling cauldron of impressions, a rich stew of ideas, any number of which might churn to the surface at a given moment. Seeking just the right comparison, in a moment of epiphany, my thoughts turned to James Joyce’s monumental novel Ulysses. Joyce and Ives were contemporaries after all. Ives was born in 1874 and Joyce in 1882. They each deconstructed their “language” and reassembled it in powerful and completely unexpected ways. Ulysses can be seen as being in four parts—the journey of Stephen Daedelus, the journey of Leopold Bloom, their meeting, and Molly Bloom’s remarkable, life-affirming soliloquy. The last “part” in this case, is very different than the first three. The Concord Sonata is also in four parts and the effect of the last movement seems to change the apparent flow of the movements that precede it. The confidence and affirmation of the Alcotts gives way to an intense, powerful, and restless Thoreau. Ives takes us through a journey into Concord, Massachusetts during the period 1840-1860. It is a musical journey, of course, but also a journey of ideas—spiritual and intellectual—borne of earth and heaven. Ultimately, words will always fail us when describing the Concord Sonata. There simply aren’t enough of them to describe it. Ives wrote a book about the piece after all, and who would know it better? Perhaps the answer lies in another essay by Ives, the “Postface to 114 Songs.” In it he said the following: “ A song has a few rights, the same as any other ordinary citizen. If it feels like walking along the left-hand side of the street, passing the door of physiology or sitting on the curb, why not let it?.... should it not have a chance to sing itself, if it can sing? - to enjoy itself without making a bow, if it can’t make a bow? - to swim around in any ocean, if it can swim, without having to swallow ‘hook and bait,’ or being sunk by an operatic greyhound? If it happens to feel like trying to fly where humans cannot fly, to sing what cannot be sung, to walk in a cave on all fours, or to tighten up its girth in blind hope and faith and try to scale mountains that are not, who shall stop it? - in short, must a song always be a song!” Enjoy your journey. Lawrence Davis |
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