|
|
 Charles Edward Ives  Charles Ives, circa 1913  |
Page 1 - Page 2 Surely the Piano Sonata No. 2, better known as the Concord Sonata, is primarily concerned with time, place, and person. The time is 1840 – 1860, the heart of an era associated with his father and the period of the great American intellectual flowering of the Transcendental movement. The place is Concord Massachusetts, home to an extraordinary collection of Transcendental writers and thinkers. The people are these figures from Concord, each of whom is honored with a movement of the work. The four movements of the Concord Sonata are: I. “Emerson” II. “Hawthorne” III. “The Alcotts” IV. “Thoreau” Ives creates in music the Concord of his mind in which Emerson delivers speeches and sermons, Hawthorne’s wife Sophia looks dreamily out the window on a winter day, the Alcotts go about their domestic lives, and Thoreau plays his flute at Walden. As usual Ives makes much use of borrowed music. The Concord prominently features Beethoven’s Hammerklavier as well as the 5th Symphony. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Lohengrin and Debussy’s Children’s Corner also make appearances. From the world of popular and revival music he uses Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, Crusader’s Hymn, The Celestial Railroad, Missionary Chant, Loch Lomond, and Massa’s in De Cold Ground. 1 These borrowings help to evoke the time, place, and people of Concord. More than this, though, they become the formal materials for Ives’ iconoclastic musical experiments.  Ives'
birth place, Danbury Connecticut
previous page |
|||||||||||||||
|
323 West 108th Street · New York, NY 10025 · (212) 663–6021 · Contact Us |
||||||||||||||||
