Anchoring Shards of Memory

JOSEPH HOROWITZ is the author of 13 books exploring the American musical experience. His Naxos documentary €lms include Charles Ives’ America. As director of the NEH-funded “Music Unwound” consortium, he has initiated Ives sesquicentennial celebrations via Indiana University, the Brevard Music Festival, the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Bard College. His “More Than Music” series, on National Public Radio, will feature additional Ives tributes.

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Among canonized composers of classical music, Charles Ives—born 150 years ago this autumn—possesses the most elusive, least stable reputation. There are composers whose standing has sharply declined (the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer were once repertory staples) or risen (Sergei Rachmaninoff is no longer despised as a sentimental anomaly). There are composers whose full stature was only recognized generations after they died (Hector Berlioz's opera The Trojans languished for a century). But Ives remains a moving target.

That at the same time he is for many the supreme American creative genius among concert composers, a figure protean and iconic, must say something about America and Ives both: as ever, we're not sure who we are. Even our orchestras and instrumentalists perform him far less than they should. If it follows that the present Ives sesquicentenary is insu—ciently observed, that is all the more reason to take stock.

Though Ives lived and worked in New York City, he was and remained quintessentially a product of New England. He was born in Danbury, Connecticut; he eventually settled in nearby West Redding. His dates—1874 to 1954—are misleading: his creative years began in the 1890s and mainly ended by 1926. That he was therefore a product of the late Gilded Age and early 20th century, preceding the modernist decades, is initially difficult to grasp because his music was only later discovered. The momentous (though poorly attended) New York City premiere of his Concord Piano Sonata, finished by 1919, took place in 1939; Lawrence Gilman wrote in the New York Herald Tribune: “It is … the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication.” Ives's Second Symphony, finished by 1909, was first heard in 1951. The conductor was Leonard Bernstein, who called Ives “an authentic primitive—a country boy at heart,” “wandering in the grand palaces of Europe like one of Henry James's Americans abroad, or better still like Mark Twain's innocents abroad.” Of these two famous assessments, Gilman's was more apt. Bernstein's—which he repeated as late as 1987—misreads Ivesian complexities as untutored. As an undergraduate at Yale, Ives composed a song, “Feldeinsamkeit,” that bears comparison with the lieder of the German masters. He moved on from there. The “primitive” in Ives is a sometime pose.

Ives's first reputation, congealing midway through the 20th century, was framed by modernists who pedigreed “originality.” Ives's “experiments” in tonality and rhythm were compared to those of Arnold Schoenberg, whose music he did not know. In his landmark volume (1941), Aaron Copland ventured: “Ives was far more originally gifted than any other member of his generation. … [He] had the vision of a true pioneer, but he could not organize his material.” (In 1968, Copland declared himself guilty of a “misapprehension,” having ultimately found in Ives “a richness of experience … unobtainable in any other way.”) Elliott Carter—compared with Copland a later, higher modernist—discovered in Ives “a lack of logic. … The esthetic is … often too naïve to express serious thoughts.” In that same 1939 assessment (which he would, like Copland, later reconsider), Carter joined a parochial debate that long usurped riper assessment: “The fuss that critics make about Ives’ innovations is … greatly exaggerated, for he has rewritten his works so many times, adding dissonances and polyrhythms, that it is probably impossible to tell just at what date the works assumed the surprising