Chamber Music of Charles Ives: Authenticity Of, Necessity Of, Aberrancy Of

L   ong before his death in 1954, at 80, Charles Ives seemed less like the father of American music than an eccentric uncle whose antic behavior and uncensored opinions at birthdays and funerals conscript his relatives into manufacturing an endless series of apologies and disclaimers... During the past decade, the picture of Ives has metamorphosed from eccentric uncle into cagey impresario and entrepreneur, a process explained by Gayle Sherwood Magee in her aptly titled ‘Charles Ives Reconsidered’... Magee’s book is a model of contemporary musicology—sympathetically sober in its judgments and interdisciplinary in its methods… Ives may have experienced every sound he perceived and every emotion attendant upon those sounds … as music. If we imagine this differently-eared, alternatively-wired Ives, a lot of what critics have found problematic about his music and career falls away. He probably possessed an acute and unaccountable impulse to use sounds expressively. As he matured, he had to balance the need to acquire skills through musical education against the preservation of this impulse.”
  — David Schiff, review of Gayle Sherwood Magee’s Ives biography, ‘Charles Ives Reconsidered’, in The Nation 05-JAN-2009.

W   hy do I work in this way and get all upset over what just upsets other people? No one else seems to hear [the music] in the same way [that I do]. Are my ears on ‘wrong’?”
  — Charles Ives, response to violinists’ criticism of his Violin Sonata No. 1.

T he current issue of The Nation has a wonderful review by David Schiff, of the Charles Ives biography/musicological analysis by Gayle Sherwood Magee. Magee’s book is a delight. Schiff’s review is a delight as well.


A t its best, good criticism genuinely returns the [Foucault-ian/Adorno-ian] ‘gaze’ of the subject whose work is reviewed. Not content to merely be constructive in explaining or characterizing what the work is/was, the best criticism is deeply original in its own right. It is no way ‘derivative’ or predictable or fashionable, nor does it parasitize the reviewed work by way of using the review as an occasion to massage the egos of others.

F  ashion is fraud.”
  — CrimethInc, Recipes for Disaster.

D avid Schiff’s essay is a wonderful example of excellence in criticism. He commends Gayle Sherwood Magee for her musicological scholarship and explains in detail the merits of her new book and the rationale for his judgment. These are not so much features of a distinctive authorly ‘voice’ but of an engaging authority—the friendly and well-tuned mind behind the voice.

W   hat has been lost [in journalism in recent years] is the authority of the critic - his/her strength of voice. In an age where every opinion is valid, there are no more great critics in the mould of Bernard Shaw, Tynan, and Toynbee.”
  — Mark Ryan, former Director, Institute of Ideas, London.

W   ell, only if you ignore the work of David Schiff, Arthur Danto, and quite a few others.”
  — DSM.

S chiff goes (in the last page of his essay) well beyond the idioms of ordinary ‘review’ or criticism to reflect on the problems of doing biography and biographical musicology, including the vagaries of elusive personalities—subjects who [deliberately, cagily] left fragmentary and conflictual evidence, as a means of manipulating their own legacies and public personae. He poses additional novel possibilities that might account for Ives’s unusual career(s) and compositional output—stimulated in part by David’s recollections of his own father’s idiosyncrasies. He suggests entirely new avenues for medico-musicological exploration. He does this casually, in a three-page review, with a conversational style that reads like a letter from a friend or a transcript of a conversation in your living room.

In other words, Schiff’s review starts out reading like an excellent-but-conventional piece of criticism but gradually takes on some of the qualities of a Borges short-story—with conjectures that may or may not be feasible to pursue but are nonetheless captivating in their intriguing ‘No rules! Question everything!’ possibilities.


    [50-sec clip, Bekova Sisters, Ives, Piano Trio, ‘I. Moderato’, 1.2MB MP3]

Ives pallido ci dice di iniziare ‘ma deciso a non mollare’ ... Okay. We begin playing decisively but mezzopiano then, as instructed, and without ‘letting go’. Wow. What an amusing notation in the first bar!

Ives’s 4 violin sonatas (1908, 1910, 1913-?14, 1906-?16) and 3 piano sonatas (1905, 1909, ‘Concord’ 1915) are well-known. There are good recordings of them; the pieces are relatively often performed—more often in conservatory recitals maybe than other programs or concert series, but still... The San Francisco-based Ives Quartet and Blair String Quartet do regularly perform Ives’s string quartets, as do others. The Miró Quartet will perform Ives’s Quartet No.1 on Friday 23-JAN at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie in NYC...

T   he Second Quartet is Ives in his early maturity, written between 1911 and 1913. The perplexing and sudden conjunctions, conflations, revelations, quotations and miasmic cuts are all firmly evident. But the somewhat tersely romanticised opening doesn’t quite prepare one for the fulminous writing to come: unceasingly powerful chromaticism. Here the quotations abound in tense, often hallucinatory rapidity... The [Blairs’] playing is involved and involving and conveys Ives’s journey from late Romanticism to modernism with conviction.”
  —  Jonathan Woolf, Musicweb International, FEB-2007.

B ut Ives’s piano trio does not receive so much attention as it deserves.

A nd if your taste runs to the exotic or experimental, then there are other pieces of Ives’s chamber music that you may like to be aware of. Ives’s throw-down Fugues in B-flat and D; his bombastic Fugue in phrygian, hypolydian and dorian modes; his contemplative Largo for violin, clarinet and piano, for example.

O r his ‘Largo for piano quintet’, subtitled ‘Law of Diminishing Returns’? Quirky finance inspiration for an insurance-man-cum-composer! What the heck does that sound like, I wonder? Go to the Yale University library and check out a copy and find out! Or go to PeerMusic Classical who publish these unusual Largos Risolutos Nos. 1 & 2.

I   ves in his last works finally regained his undiluted, uncompromised, uncontentious, and un-ironic compositional voice—the voice of innocence that he had left behind so long ago.”
  —  Gayle Sherwood Magee, Charles Ives Reconsidered, p. 162.

S chiff exposes impolite tastes, judgments and ideas for what they are. He lets the reader infer how unjust or ill-founded our received prejudices may be. In Schiff’s elegant 3-page essay, the indeterminate nature of Truth is laid a little barer than it has ever been, barer even than Magee has done. Without doubt, bare, original Truth is more beautiful than pretty verisimilitude. It is especially beautiful and surprising to find such beauty in a short review/criticism article in a publication for a general audience. Bravo!

M agee’s efforts to debunk the medicalization/psychiatrification of Ives’s emotions are praised and synopsized in Schiff’s essay. But [‘It takes one to know one’] composer Schiff goes still further in normalizing Ives’s experimentality within the diversity of mainstream-composer personalities. To Schiff, every last one of us has his/her own unique ears and inspirations and obsessions, each her/his own skills and gifts and blind-spots. Not one of us is exactly like Ives, Schiff says, but neither was Ives any more aberrant or less aberrant in the spectrum of humanity than any of the rest of us is, lest auld acquaintance be rudely forgot.

H appy New Year! Peace!

D   on’t pay too much attention to the sounds, for if you do you may miss the music.”
  —  George Ives, remarking to son Charles about the proper way to conduct hymns at a revival meeting.

• Schiff D. Ives’s ears. The Nation 2009; 288:30-3.
  
• David Schiff at Reed College
  
• David Schiff website
  
• Magee G. Charles Ives Reconsidered. Univ Illinois, 2008.
  
• Gayle Sherwood Magee at Univ Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  
• Journal of Music & Meaning website
  
• Music & Politics journal at UCSB
  
• Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology Online (DDMO) at Indiana Univ
  
• American Musicological Society website
  
• Empirical Musicology Review
  
• Blair String Quartet webpage at Vanderbilt
  
• Blair String Quartet at Vanderbilt Univ
  
• Blair String Quartet. Charles Ives: String Quartets. (Naxos, 2004.)
  
• Bekova Trio. Ives and Clarke Piano Trios. (Chandos, 2000.)
  
• Bekova Trio website
  
• Critics’ role in creating the artifacts of ‘history-as-exchange-economy’
  
• Ives Catalogue at Yale Univ
  
• The Charles Ives Society
  
• Adorno T. The Jargon of Authenticity. Routledge, 2006.
  
• Danto A. Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life. Columbia Univ, 2007.
  
• Roth M. Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Duchamp, and Cage. Routledge, 1998.
  
• Schiff D. The Music of Elliott Carter. Faber & Faber, 1998.
  
• Sinclair J. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives. Yale Univ, 1999.
  
• Smallman B. Piano Quartet and Quintet. Oxford Univ, 1996.
  
• Tuttleton J. A Fine Silver Thread: Essays on American Writing and Criticism. Dee, 1998.

Nash Ensemble: Atmospherics and Encores

O  ur piano quintet is looking for new ideas for encore pieces. Any suggestions?”
  —  Anonymous.

The usual objective is a sparkling, novel, jewel-like ‘character piece’ that is shorter than 3 minutes in length and that is ‘approachable’ and does not make heavy demands of the listener. It should read like pungent microfiction. Additionally, you want something that conveys an intense presence—show-stopping emotionality.

One serious option is to treat the encore as a ‘tag’ or a synoptic ‘capstone’ for your program—melding with the other pieces. You choose for an encore a character piece that is light and simple, something composed about the same time as other pieces on the program and preferrably by someone whose style and compositional methods and worldview are coherent with the rest of the program. If it has those features, it can serve as a ‘tag’, and its tagness/epilogiality will be immediately evident to the listeners.

A whimsical option that aims at surprise is to choose something wholly unexpected (a polka or mazurka, if the rest of your program has been heavy going) or something that embodies a counterintuitive, dramatic contrast against the other pieces (much slower or faster tempo; different articulation or timbre)—possibly composed in a different period or by someone of disparate worldview and methods, yet arriving at a similar result or addressing a similar compositional challenge as the other pieces had done.

You can go for drop-dead flash virtuosity. You can tug on the audience members’ nostalgia. You can ‘plug’ your most recent recording or an up-coming performance with a short selection. You can capsulize your ensemble’s namesake [composer] if you’re one of those eponymously-named ensembles, provided your eponymic was thoughtful enough to write a short, sweet piece. And so on.

In any case, a good encore piece should be the musical equivalent of a bespoke chocolate truffle. [The foregoing was just a brain-dump for the anonymous question-asker (and for others who struggle with similar challenges), on ‘How We Search for Suitable Encore Pieces’.]

For sheer bon-bon-ness, you might try Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals VII, ‘The Aquarium’.

S  aint-Saëns] invents various kinds of musical masquerade and cross dressing. Furthermore, many aspects of the work suggest that it is a musical farce to be put on by the very people who are supposed to get [the jokes], evoking the spirit of carnival as described by Bakhtin... [The] musical depictions demand that the instrumentalists performing the piece impersonate themselves as ‘characters’ in the salon, just as the instruments they play represent particular animals. Essential to the work is this kind of performing ‘about’ performance, a notion that in effect literally materializes immaterial aspects of music such as melody and timbre and allows Saint-Saëns to subvert the Romantic surface-depth paradigm by taking up instrumental materiality as one possible ‘substance’ to be revealed within the context of late nineteenth century chamber music.”
  —  Erica Scheinberg.

Carnival of the Animals’ nominally is a set of orchestral character pieces, each of which is meant to describe a particular animal, usually by mimicking the sounds it makes or characterizing the way it moves or carries itself. But, as musicologist Erica Scheinberg has written, it contains many ‘inside jokes’ about composers and music. There are passages mocking Offenbach’s ‘Can-Can’, wry liberties taken with Berlioz’s ‘Dance of the Sylphs’, poking fun at Mendelssohn’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, mocking the turgidness of several Rossini arias, parodying then-current dance-hall tunes, and mocking Saint-Saens’s ‘Danse Macabre’.

It is extremely ‘meta’—today, just as it was during Saint-Saëns’s lifetime—and so is just waiting, ready to serve your own meta-purposes!

What’s more, ‘Carnival of the Animals’ has for many years been a prime vehicle for music outreach and education programs for kids (see, for example, this, from a kids’ program at Music Institute of Chicago). Consequently, performance of the piece triggers for many adults today intense and instantaneous memories of their musical childhood—of everything that has led them now to be sitting in their concert hall seats listening to you. This is a bonus that you cannot get with just any old encore selection—instant [Freudian] flashback and epiphany. To be honest, my own response to these pieces is like this—primitive and immediate, as though I were five years old once more. That alone is enough to make these Saint-Saëns movements good encore material—and it exemplifies some of the qualities that you might look for in other suitable material.

The 7^th movement, ‘The Aquarium’, is wonderfully atmospheric. For the image of water splashing (brighter, compared to deep rumbling of the sea in the cello part and the flutey undulations) we have the glass harmonica’s and two pianos’ (or glockenspiel, xylophone, celesta, or small cymbals) movements. A realistic evocation of moving water involves varying and controlling the dynamics on a short time-scale and the contrary-direction voice-leading in the different parts. Irregular intervals represent the erratic swimming of fish. Saint-Saëns creates florid kinesthetic/synaesthetic ‘visual-acoustic’ parallels.

Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces Op.16. No.3 (Faben) likewise convey ‘visual-acoustic’ parallels, and likewise mostly via short time-scale timbre changes. The Five Orchestral Pieces Op.16. No.3 (Faben) is sometimes translated to English as ‘Color Music’, ‘Morning on the Traunsee’ and ‘Summer Morning at a Lake’ by authors like Boretz and Cone. The musical progressions move in a slow and undulating manner throughout, which is similar to the ‘quivering reflection of the sun on a sheet of water’ (Dahlhaus, 1989). Schoenberg acoustically mimics the changing light on the waves by the changing timbre of instruments; the colors of the changing brightness lie in the differing timbres of the instruments. Saint-Saëns’s ‘Aquarium’ is like this, although the voice-leading in the Saint-Saëns’s string parts represents, I think, rays of light filtering down to the depths, from the point of view of the fish. The flute and pianos and glass harmonica manifest most of the surface watery features, including the sparkly play of light up top.

Insofar as ‘Aquarium’ has been used in many film soundtracks, it has the added advantage of being especially familiar to general audience members (compared with other of the ‘Carnival of the Animals’ movements). The Nash Ensemble has a particularly nice rendering of ‘Aquarium’.


    [50-sec clip, Nash Ensemble, Saint-Saëns, Carnival of the Animals VII, Aquarium, 1.5MB MP3]

The Nash’s octet version does include the flute and glass harmonica and two pianos as-scored by Saint-Saëns. But the glass harmonica is out of practical reach for most ensembles and, in any event, the instrument does not travel easily—delicate; risky. Most of the time, the orchestral incarnations of the piece have a celesta or glockenspiel or xylophone substituting for the exotic glass harmonica. And, anyhow, the anonymous emailer in the blockquote above said her/his ensemble are a piano quintet; you are not going to bring out a flute or other players to participate in an encore when the rest of your program was straight piano quintet. Right. So is there a published arrangement of this Saint-Saëns piece for piano quintet? No. So improvise one!

Here’s one way: take the string parts from the original octet score, and take the Lucien Garban reduction of ‘Aquarium’ for solo piano and put them together. Fine-sounding instant piano quintet!

Yes, some of the spectral qualities that the glass harmonica or celesta add go by the boards. If that disappoints you, then improvise some flourishes in the upper register of the piano. The Garban transcription is tough enough by itself, so your efforts to accessorize it into something even more virtuosic will be all the more dazzling. (N.B.—Whether you improvise or leave it as-is—the string parts and the solo piano reduction—the piano’s doubling of the strings does risk trampling on the string parts, so you’ll need to rehearse with care, to make sure you’re achieving a good balance.)

Yes, the first-piano part descending ‘ten-on-one’ and ‘eight-on-one’ ostinato, while the second-piano plays ‘six-on-one’, is lost in the Garban transduction to solo piano. (After all, not many human beings can totally decouple the right-hand rhythmically from the left-hand.) So some of you purists reading this blog post may object strongly to my idea of a piano quintet adaptation of ‘Aquarium’. That’s fine. If the sacrilege is too great, don’t do it. But if you try it and it ‘works’ for you, more power to you!

Tempi of various ensembles’ performances of ‘Aquarium’ vary widely, with performance times ranging from 1:50 to 2:40. In other words, your effect can be ethereal/dreamy or near-demonic, depending on your taste. You can be over-the-top lyrical; or conjuring and fantastical; or subdued and meditative; or ironical; or elegantly benign and charming—you choose! The insider jokeness and transgressiveness that were intended by Saint-Saëns provide you a very long interpretive ‘leash’ with this piece.

You may want to consider how such an atmospheric piece would ‘fit’ with other program elements from the piano quintet literature:

• Elfrida Andrée: Piano Quintet in E minor (1865)
  
• Anton Arensky: Piano Quintet in D major, Op. 51 (1900)
  
• Béla Bartók: Piano Quintet (1904)
  
• Arnold Bax: Piano Quintet in G minor (1915)
  
• Amy Beach: Piano Quintet
  
• Franz Berwald: Piano Quintets No. 1 in C minor and No. 2 in A major (1857)
  
• Ernest Bloch: Piano Quintets No. 1 (1923) and No. 2 (1957)
  
• Alexander Borodin: Piano Quintet in C minor (1862)
  
• Johannes Brahms: Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34 (1864)
  
• Frank Bridge: Piano Quintet in D minor (1905, revised 1912)
  
• Ernő Dohnányi: Piano Quintets No. 1, Op. 1 (1895) and No. 2, Op. 26 (1914)
  
• Antonín Dvořák: Piano Quintets No. 1, Op. 5 (1872) and No. 2, Op. 81 (1887)
  
• Edward Elgar: Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84 (1918)
  
• George Enescu: Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 29 (1940)
  
• Louise Farrenc: Piano Quintets No. 1, Op. 30, and No. 2, Op. 31 (both with double bass)
  
• Gabriel Fauré: Piano Quintet No. 1, Op. 89 (1905) and No. 2, Op. 115 (1921)
  
• Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet (1985)
  
• César Franck: Piano Quintet in F minor, M. 7 (1879)
  
• Wilhelm Furtwängler: Piano Quintet in C major (1935)
  
• Hermann Goetz: Piano Quintet in C minor, Op. 16 (with double bass; 1874)
  
• Otar Gordeli: Piano Quintet (1950)
  
• Sofia Gubaidulina: Piano Quintet (1957)
  
• Reynaldo Hahn: Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor (1921)
  
• Heinrich von Herzogenberg: Piano Quintet in C major, Op. 17 (1876)
  
• Johann Nepomuk Hummel: Piano Quintet in E-flat minor, Op. 87 (with double bass)
  
• Vincent d’Indy: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 81 (1924)
  
• Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Piano Quintet in E major, Op. 15 (1921)
  
• Bohuslav Martinů: Piano Quintets, H. 35 (1911), H. 229 (1933), H. 298 (1944)
  
• Nikolai Medtner: Piano Quintet in C major (1949)
  
• Krzysztof Meyer: Piano Quintet Op. 76 (1991)
  
• Leo Ornstein: Piano Quintet (1927)
  
• Joachim Raff: Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 107 (1862)
  
• Alan Rawsthorne: Piano Quintet
  
• Max Reger: Piano Quintet Nos. 1 and 2 in C minor
  
• Carl Reinecke: Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 83 (1865)
  
• Anton Rubinstein: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 99 (1876)
  
• Camille Saint-Saëns: Piano Quintet in A minor, op. 14 (1855)
  
• Franz Schmidt: Piano Quintet in G major (1926)
  
• Florent Schmitt: Piano Quintet in B minor (1908)
  
• Alfred Schnittke: Piano Quintet (1976)
  
• Franz Schubert: Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 (Trout Quintet with double bass; 1819)
  
• Robert Schumann: Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 44 (1842)
  
• Giovanni Sgambati: Piano Quintets Nos. 1 and 2
  
• Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57 (1940)
  
• Jean Sibelius: Piano Quintet in G minor (1890)
  
• Sergei Taneyev: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 30 (1911)
  
• Louis Vierne: Piano Quintet in C minor, Op. 42 (1917)
  
• Anton Webern: Piano Quintet (1907)
  
• Charles-Marie Widor: Piano Quintet No. 1, Op. 7 (1881)
  
• Yitzhak Yedid: Piano Quintet ‘Since My Soul Loved’ (2006)
  
• Ludwig Thuille: Two Piano Quintets (1885)

The Hinson and Roberts book (pp. 545-68) is the premier source of ideas as you explore your options.

It’s ideal for your encore piece to be familiar to the audience—this is a correlate of the requirement that an encore piece sparkle and divert the audience without placing large demands on them. But the competing requirement that the piece be ‘novel’ and ‘exciting’ means that your selection had best not be a familiar piece that receives excessive or clichéd airplay. I think this 7^th movement of the Saint-Saëns piece is nearly perfect from these perspectives.

Incidentally, only the movement ‘The Swan’ was published before Saint-Saëns’s death. (He was supposedly anxious that the pastiche qualities of these pieces would undermine his reputation. For 35 years (between 1886 and 1921), ‘Carnival’ was hardly even a ‘salon’ item, so cautious was Saint-Saëns about restricting its performance—obsessive, almost to the point of being paranoid about it.) After Saint-Saëns’s death ‘The Swan’ quickly became popular among cellists, and is one of Saint-Saëns’s most frequently-performed pieces. ‘The Aquarium’ is far less commonly performed live, despite its popularity as film-score material. Therefore it has an aspect of novelty that makes it a good choice for live encore presentations.

The Nash Ensemble next present a concert on 25-SEP, at Malvern Concert Club in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, with a program that includes the Mahler Piano Quartet; Mozart Piano Quartet in G minor K. 478; Dvořák Piano Quintet in A minor Op. 81. Then on 11-OCT their next concert is at Wigmore Hall in London.

A  fter 40 years and over 250 premières (140 commissions) the Nash Ensemble is still the best champion that any composer could hope to have. Its concerts are always meticulously polished, but what impressed about this heroically well-stuffed programme—two premières and four other chamber pieces, none more than four years old—was the illusion conjured by the players that they lived with this music for years, even if the ink was barely dry on the page. Perhaps it is precisely because the ensemble is not entirely dedicated to doing contemporary work, that it can radiate so persuasive a feeling of new pieces being assimilated into chamber-music heritage, stretching back two centuries or more.”
  —  The London Times.

• Scheinberg E. Performing Instrumental Transgression: Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals in the fin-de-siècle salon. Columbia Univ Music Scholarship Conference, 2004. (parody and inside jokes)
  
• Nash Ensemble London website
  
• Nash Ensemble Friends
  
• Nash Ensemble concert calendar
  
• Nash Ensemble. Dvorak/Saint-Saens. (Virgin, 1998.)
  
• Visions of Light (film that uses Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals as sountrack score)
  
• Glass harmonica page on Wikipedia
  
• G. Finkenbeiner, artisanal glass harmonicas
  
• Bloch T, et al. Glass Harmonica. (Naxos, 2001.)
  
• Dahlhaus C. Schoenberg and the New Music. Cambridge Univ, 1989.
  
• Hinson M, Roberts W. The Piano in Chamber Ensemble. 2e. Indiana Univ, 2006. (Pp. 545-68)
  
• Hoffman B, et al. Music for Glass Harmonica. (Vox, 1994.)
  
• James D. Cristal: Glass Music Through the Ages. (Sony, 2002.)
  
• Lyle W. Camille Saint-Saens: His Life and Art. Reprint Svc, 1990.
  
• Nichols R, ed. Saint-Saens: On Music and Musicians. Oxford Univ, 2008.
  
• Reed E. Ovations & Encores: The Musician's Guide to Getting the Best Response from Your Audience. Aspen Grove, 2000.
  
• Rees B. Camille Saint-Saens. Faber, 2008.
  
• Smallman B. The Piano Quartet and Quintet: Style, Structure, and Scoring. Oxford Univ, 1996.
  
• Teller-Ratner S. Camille Saint-Saens 1835-1921: A Thematic Catalogue of his Complete Works Volume I: The Instrumental Works. Oxford Univ, 2002.