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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