IV "Thoreau"


Walden Pond
and read the program notes
 

Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)

And if there shall be a program for our music, let it follow his thought on an autumn day of Indian summer at Walden…” 3
Henry Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau, Transcendental thinker, writer, and resident of Concord, was a pioneering naturalist. In 1845, wishing to escape the intrusions of industrial life, he built a small house on Walden Pond, outside of Concord, and lived there for two years. He recorded this experiment with living in nature in Walden; or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854. Other significant writings include A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and the influential essays “Civil Disobedience” and “Slavery in Massachusetts.”

For Ives, “Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘the Symphony.’” 3 Ives discusses Thoreau’s “susceptibility to natural sounds” and makes reference to some of what he heard:
His meditations are interrupted only by the faint sound of the Concord bell- ‘tis prayer meeting night in the village- “a melody as it were, imported into the wilderness… At a distance over the woods the sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept…. A vibration of the universal lyre…” 3
The music of this movement contains both serene qualities meant to evoke Thoreau’s communion with nature and more restless material related to Ives’ discussion in the Essays of the ornery aspects of Thoreau’s personality. The movement ends with an appearance by Thoreau himself, in the form of a passage for flute. Here he is merged with Ives’ father as well, a connection made by the composer when describing the comfort he found in Thoreau on the day his father died:
It is darker- the poet’s flute is heard out over the pond and Walden hears the swan song of that “Day”- and faintly echoes… Is it a transcendental tune of Concord? 3

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