Charles Ives’s Concord: Essays After a Sonata
by Kyle Gann (Music 780.92 Ive)
2021 was the one of a few years
that could be considered the centennial of Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata. The
truth of this well-known piece is more complicated than most, as Ives revised
it many times. The Concord Sonata is fascinating for many reasons, but I think
it’s particularly notable in 20th century music in that it’s one of the most
atonal pieces that is fairly well-received universally, even by audiences that
don’t usually warm up to such music. I think one of the main reasons for that
is that it’s somewhat “programmatic” music, rather than “absolute”: that is,
each of its movements make reference to figures in the transcendentalist
movement, and listeners can calibrate what they’re hearing through that kind of
interpretive filter. That frame of reference, plus the notion that Ives
distributed a sort of book with the early editions of the piece entitled
“Essays Before a Sonata,” gave listeners some extramusical considerations to
grasp onto while appreciating the music.
We have a great book that attempts
to unravel the many mysteries of Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2, more commonly known
as the Concord Sonata, that you can borrow from Polley. It’s called Charles Ives’s Concord: Essays After a Sonata by
composer and long-time music journalist Kyle Gann, and you’ll learn more about
both this piece and Ives more generally than you ever thought possible in these
pages. I should start off with a bit of a caveat, though: this is the kind of
book that you’ll get the maximum benefit from if you read music notation.
There’s a lot of material here that you’ll be able to get through just fine if
you don’t, but Gann attempts to untangle the complexities of this this piece
from both historical and musical perspectives. That means there are sections of
more formal musical analysis sprinkled throughout the book.
That issue aside, and I’m guessing
that there’s probably a pretty significant overlap between music readers and
Ives fans, anyway, this book is just a phenomenally deep take on the Concord
Sonata. The first chapter, although relatively brief, lays out more than I’ve
ever seen elsewhere about the origins of the piece, and Ives’ stature around
that time of his life. I imagine many of us have heard tall tales around Ives,
this notion of a person who led a very serious kind of double life as an
insurance salesman by day and composer by night, approaching music in totally
unique ways that most of the world didn’t even begin to catch up to until the
1960s, and toiling away at this music that remained mostly unknown and
unplayed. It turns out that while elements of that picture are accurate, some
of the details might change the way you conceptualize where he was coming from.
Take his job as an insurance salesman, for example: I guess in my mind I had
always pictured that meaning that he’s a kind of blue collar worker, low on the
corporate totem pole, and I don’t recall going over any details to the contrary
in music school. In reality, Gann points out that “By 1921, he was quite a
wealthy businessman, in the top 1 percent by fortune.” It’s quite true that
only a few people knew that he spent all of his spare time composing music,
though. But his wealth and status in the insurance industry certainly explains
how he was able to self-publish many of his works, and mail them out to people
who he thought might be interested in them.
The Concord Sonata was one such
piece. Gann reports that there is evidence of him starting to work on it dating
back to 1911, starting to perform parts of it for people by 1915, and in 1919,
he had prepared a version of the piece that he paid music publisher G. Shirmer
to print 750 copies of. He additionally printed an accompanying set of essays,
called “Essays Before a Sonata,” and in 1921, he mailed hundreds of copies of
the piece to a list of music-related figures whom he thought might be able to
further advance his work. It’s worth noting that he underwent a similar
self-publishing and mailing campaign in 1922 for his “114 Songs.” He chose his
recipients of these materials from a subscription list for the Musical Courier
and Who’s Who in America. He found few sympathetic recipients this way, though
the piece did find its way to several pianists who played portions of the
Sonata publicly as early as 1921 and a full performance around 1927. Then Ives
continued to revise the piece in the ensuing decades, publishing what’s now
considered to be a more definitive version in 1947.
The next chapter is devoted to
Ives’ Essays Before a Sonata, in which Gann immediately challenges another
commonly-held assumption about the written work accompanying the music. It’s
often been said that Ives was somewhat careless with the quotations he
leverages throughout his essays to make his points, but Gann has found that his
quotations are in fact quite accurate. He includes an appendix that further
delineates this issue. The main focus of the chapter, however, is simply
reflecting on how novel it was for Ives to create this kind of preparatory
literary work for his music, and how unusual it was at the time for
programmatic instrumental music of this kind to be made.
These chapters are brief but very
informative, and then the bulk of the book is spent approaching the Concord
Sonata musically from a few different angles: movement by movement, across the
whole piece, and looking into how some material appeared in other Ives
compositions. Again, music readers will get the maximum benefit out of this
analysis, but I would still encourage you to read on if you’re interested in
Ives. Each movement of the Concord is considered from so many perspectives,
including Ives’ essays about the piece, that you’ll still find a lot of
revealing insights here. And in these sections, you’ll find all kinds of
fascinating approaches Ives used that were quite unusual for their time. For
example, even from the beginning of the piece, the main theme of the Sonata,
often referred to as the “Human Faith” theme, is obscured, coming into focus later.
Ives has noted that he wanted themes to coalesce out of their own development,
rather than the more traditional method of stating them first and then having
variations spin off. Then Ives draws from his set of idiosyncratic approaches,
using things like bi-tonality, quotations from other familiar classical and
folk music pieces, and occasionally implementing things that are now called
“extended technique,” like using a board on the piano keys to perform large
clusters of notes.
Most of the analysis is done using
the 1947 version of the Concord. Toward the end, Gann does a brief comparison
of some of the differences between the earlier version printed in 1920 and the
1947 edition. It’s remarkable that Ives continued to refine this piece for so
much of his life. Clearly it was of deep significance to him, and even though
he ceased to write new music in 1927, he devoted a lot of time to making the
Concord the best it could be.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try Charles Ives and His World by Peter J. Burkholder or Charles Ives: A Life With Music by Jan Swafford.)
( official Jan Swafford web
site )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to
this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
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