Ives Charles - Breaking times arrow : experiment and expression in the music of Charles Ives

Breaking Times Arrow

MUSICAL MEANING AND INTERPRETATION

Robert S. Hatten, editor

A Theory of Musical Narrative

Byron Almn

Approaches to Meaning in Music

Byron Almn and Edward Pearsall

Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera

Naomi Andr

The Italian Traditions and Puccini: Compositional Theory and Practice in Nineteenth-Century Opera

Nicholas Baragwanath

Debussy Redux: The Impact of His Music on Popular Culture

Matthew Brown

Music and the Politics of Negation

James R. Currie

Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccinis Late Style

Andrew Davis

Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy

William Echard

Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert

Robert S. Hatten

Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation

Robert S. Hatten

Intertextuality in Western Art Music

Michael L. Klein

Music and Narrative since 1900

Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland

Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music

Steve Larson

Is Language a Music? Writings on Musical Form and Signification

David Lidov

Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony

Melanie Lowe

Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of Dance-Music Relations in 3/4 Time

Eric McKee

The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, Pastoral

Raymond Monelle

Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber

Jairo Moreno

Deepening Musical Performance through Movement: The Theory and Practice of Embodied Interpretation

Alexandra Pierce

Expressive Forms in Brahmss Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His Werther Quartet

Peter H. Smith

Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and Meaning

Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith

Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethovens Late Style

Michael Spitzer

Death in Winterreise: Musico-Poetic Associations in Schuberts Song Cycle

Lauri Suurp

Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for La pellegrina

Nina Treadwell

Reflections on Musical Meaning and Its Representations

Leo Treitler

Debussys Late Style: The Compositions of the Great War

Marianne Wheeldon

MATTHEW McDONALD

Experiment and Expression in the
Music of Charles Ives

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Bloomington & Indianapolis

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2014 by Matthew McDonald
All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McDonald, Matthew (Matthew James), author.

Breaking times arrow : experiment and expression in the music of Charles Ives / Matthew McDonald.

pages cm (Musical meaning and interpretation)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-01273-9 (cloth : alkaline paper) ISBN 978-0-253-01276-0 (ebook) 1. Ives, Charles, 1874-1954Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series: Musical meaning and interpretation.

ML410.I94M45 2014

780.92dc23

2014012350

1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14

In 2001, I began researching the music of Charles Ives. I spent countless hours at the piano that summer, familiarizing myself with every score I could get my hands on. I particularly remember accompanying myself through the entire set of 114 Songsquite a feat, as Im a pianist but no singer. Originally, I had outlined a thorough consideration of time and temporality in Ivess music, but, ultimately, a small portion of this outline ballooned into the entire project. After completing my thesis and converting one chapter into an article, I had no plans or desire to develop the material further, but after a few years, rejuvenated, I returned to the research as the partial foundation for a new book project. By this time, however, I had grown dissatisfied with much of my previous work and discarded it in favor of completely new material. I envisioned that this would be a definitive statement of my ideas about Ivess music, a culmination of my work over the previous several years. It eventually became clear, however, that I would never be fully satisfied with the book and could tinker with it forever; the printed version, inevitably, would always feel unfinished. Its fixed form belies the reality of my research, which would be better represented by the endless pages of notes and drafts on my desk and hard drive, many discarded or forgotten, their potential contribution to the whole left unclear or undetermined.

Around 1910, Charles Ives began work on what he referred to as an overture or concerto inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Originally, this was to be one in a set of several overtures devoted to great Men of Literature, but ultimately Ives made significant progress on only two. While composing the Emerson Overture, Ives developed some of its cadenzas as studies for solo piano, one of which he completed. After suspending work on the overture, Ives had no evident plans to develop the material further, but he later returned to it as the foundation for a new piece, the first movement of the Concord Sonata. For the Concord movement, however, Ives discarded much of the music of the overture and added a significant amount of new material. The first movement of the Concord, many believe, is the definitive musical expression of Ivess ideas about Emerson, and in 1920 Ives presented it to the musical community as the culmination of his work as a composer. Ives stated on many occasions, however, that he would likely never be fully satisfied with the music and could tinker with it forever; the Emerson music, inevitably, would remain unfinished. The fixed form of the Concord movement belies the reality of Ivess musical conception, which is better represented by the multiple versions and endless pages of sketches and emendations, many discarded or forgotten, their status unclear or undetermined.

At this point it may seem that I have been writing about Ives for so long that I can no longer separate my own creative process from his. But the parallels I have drawn are both genuine and unsurprising. Writing about music is in large part a creative act, and one that has much in common with writing music. Perhaps there are music scholars who produce essays like Mozart produced scores, but most of us, I suspect, follow the Beethovenian model. Academic writing, especially in the era of word processing, is largely a process of cutting and pasting, deletions and insertions. Like most pieces of music, the finished academic product presents itself confidently, with few traces of its convoluted genesis. But here is where the analogy with Ivess music ends. Ivess music is remarkable for the extent to which it bears the traces of its Frankensteinian construction. Pieces are often characterized by extreme fragmentation, stark juxtapositions of highly contrasting segments of music that are very often borrowed from other sources or from Ivess own body of work.