jwilzewske: psychiatry

Showing posts with label psychiatry. Show all posts

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Gogol’s Terminal Psychosis, No Effective Medical Palliative Care in Sight

I n the last stage of his life Gogol is increasingly consumed by a religious mania. He considers his past work a sin and burns the second part of his major novel, ‘Dead Souls’. In the end he refuses to eat. In his final hours he is visited by the fantastic figures from his own works – and they show themselves to be more reasonable than he is himself at this point. Gogol has utterly broken with his previous life and renounces it; now it is avenging itself. … This opera is not so much a biography as a poetic and satirical study of one of the greatest Russian writers, whose emotional life is as mysterious and fascinating as his idiosyncratic works... Lera Auerbach … has found her own voice, and it is full of stylistic freedom and dramatic power.”
— Theater an der Wien opera, program notes, 2011.

T he person must, according to the DSM-IV, have at least two out of five symptoms:

(i) delusions, (ii) hallucinations, (iii) disorganised speech, (iv) grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, or (v) functional incapacities or negative symptoms (such as alogia, avolition, etc)—for a substantial percentage of a one month period;
Plus, continuous signs of disturbance must continue for at least six months;
Plus, substantial social or occupational dysfunction must be evident;
Required exclusion criteria include substance abuse, mood disorder, and pervasive developmental disorder.

C heck, check, and check—with regard to Nikolai Gogol in the last 6 months of his life.

I f you are expecting in Lera Auerbach’s new opera a Gogolesque, cynical account of human nature, or about the ruling class (‘We are the 99%!’), or a scatology as absurdist art, you will not find it here.

N or will you learn famous Gogol’s concept of the untranslatable Russian word пошлость (‘poshlost’). [Vladimir Nabokov explained this as “posh-lust”, “not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive” (Nabokov 1944, p. 70)—the falsely transcendent.] Пошлость reduces reality to a sort of cavalier mediocrity and unrepentant vulgarity—a moral and spiritual condition from which humankind cannot escape—compulsive smutiness, radical pointlessness, compulsive garish carnival, absurd superfluousness.

N o, in this fantastical new opera we get nonstop existential angst and horror—superbly manifested in Auerbach’s score and libretto, and in an exceptionally fine production by Theater an der Wien (who commissioned the work), with performances by ORF Radiosymphonieorchester, Arnold Schoenberg Chor, Grazer Kapellknaben, and Mozartknabenchor Wien… a convincing reenactment, showing the suffering Gogol, receiving no effective medical help for his end-of-life psychiatric condition.

I t is as though Gogol’s invention, пошлость, ironically haunted him during his final days. Which amounts to a lesson to us all, to be careful about what we dream, what we think, what we dwell upon. As our minds begin to fail late in life, those one-time droll ideas of ours—every hubristic preoccupation; every cynical mental posture we ever indulged—every one of them could become real in our waning days—and we may be powerless to make them stop from bothering us. Bad karma or poetic justice, hunting you down in your own lifetime! Ein Alptraum jagt den nächsten!

B efore writing a note of ‘Gogol,’ composer Lera Auerbach immersed herself in the writer’s complete works and over twenty books written about him. It would take similar efforts to begin to understand this opera: taking us inside the fevered mind of its title character, ‘Gogol’ is less a biographical narrative set to music than a phantasmagorical, psychological investigation. Given a virtuosic staging by director Christine Mielitz, it is also an overwhelming theatrical experience.” — Zwölftöner (Werner Kmetitsch), 17-NOV-2011.

A uerbach regularly collaborates with soloists and ensembles including Hilary Hahn, Vadim Gluzman, Leonidas Kavakos, Julian Rachlin, Philippe Quint, Gautier Capuçon, Alisa Weilerstein, David Finckel, Kim Kashkashian, Tokyo String Quartet, Borromeo Quartet, Artemis String Quartet, Vanbrugh String Quartet, Kremerata Baltica, Camerata Pacifica, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Auerbach was born in the city of Chelyabinsk, adjacent to Siberia. After writing her first opera when she was 12, she moved to the U.S. in 1991 where she studied piano and composition at Juilliard. Her piano studies took her to the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover. She was awarded the Hindemith Prize by the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in Germany, Deutschlandfunk’s Förderpreis, selected as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and in 2007 she was selected as a member of the Young Global Leaders forum by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

G ogol’s ‘grotesque’ is a—] means of estranging—a comic hyperbole that unmasks the banality and inhumanity of ambient reality.” — Susanne Fusso, p. 69.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Sociotropic Provenance of Liszt’s Mid-Career Piano Works

The santa indifferenza of Liszt is the ‘holy indifference’ advocated by St. François de Sales and other spiritual writers in the Catholic mystical tradition. And this in turn is obviously identical with the non-attachment advocated in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions... Needless to say, ‘holy indifference’ is not at all the same thing as plain, unholy indifference, and is fully compatible with intense concern for goodness, beauty, and Truth.”
— Aldous Huxley, letter, 26-OCT-1961.

Eezek a darabok példái annak, hogy a romantika korszakában hogyan tudott megszólalni egy-egy szonett, bármi is, észre a következmények. A romantikus Liszt érzékenységének köszönhetően a versek hangulata, mély mondanivalója jut el a mentálisan zavart befogadóhoz, okoz a további kárt.”

A ttended an excellent concert tonight, given by pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet in the Harriman-Jewell Series.

Liszt—Consolations, S. 172
Liszt—Années de pèlerinage, troisième année, ‘Les jeux d’eaux’, S. 163
Liszt—Venezia e Napoli, ‘Tarantella’, S. 162
Liszt—Ballade No. 2 in B minor, S. 171
Liszt—Deux légendes, S. 175
Liszt—Isolde’s Liebestod, S. 447
Liszt—Polish Songs (after Chopin), ‘Meine Freuden’ S. 480

A esthetic experience is a kind of access to psychic reality, both our own reality and the reality of others—that much is certain from hearing these pieces. Aesthetic experience and creativity not only aid our recovery from ‘bad psychological states’, they are also valuable for understanding and distinguishing internal reality and external reality. I listened to Thibaudet’s sensitive and highly-animated performances of these Liszt pieces, and as I did so I wondered more and more about the circumstances of how they were composed. Liszt’s major keys (all except S. 171) are like they have “something to prove,” no, more like there is someone whose mood they are emphatically meaning to elevate or tranquilize, like they were conceived with a particular patient and a therapeutic purpose in mind?

N ote: in recent days I’ve been working on health services research involving mental health and measures of quality and access to care for mental and behavioral conditions. This recent focus of my attention no doubt ‘primed’ me to respond to this concert in the ways that I did.

I n that regard, the importance of including ‘patient-intended’ criticisms and ‘partner-perceived’ criticisms and the parallel importance of examining gender differences in models of exchanges of criticisms between partners and depression of one or both partners—these are discussed in an excellent paper published last summer by Kristina Peterson and David Smith (link below) at the University of Notre Dame. Of course, Peterson’s and Smith’s study focused on members of the general population, not couples who are elite artists/composers/writers/celebrities.

Liszt’s illness was prefigured by depression, which was, in part situational... [He] began to drink cognac heavily and was warned to decrease his intake by his physicians. He also smoked a lot of [George Sand’s?] Havana cigars.”
— John O’Shea, 1995.

S o, gee, these pieces were written roughly in the aftermath of Liszt’s relationship with Marie d’Agoult and the recurring encounters occasioned by family events involving their children (Cosima; and until their deaths in 1859 and 1862, respectively, Daniel and Blandine) and also through Chopin—more or less between 1841-1867, from when Liszt was about 30 to 55 years old.

T his must’ve been stressful and awkward… Sociotropic process, the psychic equivalent of a semi-permeable membrane, which selectively and through passive transportation or active transportation allows some emotional ‘molecules’ to pass through the membrane but prevents others from passing. The emotional brew contained several types of dissolved ‘solute’ molecules, in a family chamber—multiple compartments now separated by thin semi-permeable membranes with pores, and sealed... (Seated in Row #2, in close proximity to the piano and Thibaudet in-charge, it is natural that one’s imagination will run wild.)

S ome small emotions crossed Liszt’s semi-permeable membrane, like small molecules cross dialysis tubing, in their attempt to reach equilibrium. Bigger emotions, bigger molecules, not so much...

Y ears of Pilgrimage’... this conceit implies a wanderer in search of truth, and, one can only imagine that the title is, in good measure, Liszt’s autobiographical reverse-osmotic self-mythologizing.

Because Marie broke with both Liszt and George Sand, she has been given a ‘bad press’ in biographies of both of those celebrities... What was the private life of a woman like this? A woman who left her great love (Liszt) after five years and returned to Paris, not to her husband who would have taken her back, nor to her family, but to an independent life... One of the first things one must ask about any independent woman in the 19th Century is: Where did the money come from; how did she support herself? ... Posterity has reproached Marie d’Agoult for not having loved Liszt’s art sufficiently to sacrifice herself to it.”
— Phyllis Stock-Morton.

O ne might question whether Liszt was really as cultured as Marie presented him in her memoirs... he quoted famous authors indiscriminately—St. Augustine, Petrarch, Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Hugo, the Bible. Although he seemed avid to read and represent himself as a reader, it is not clear that he had digested much or developed any critical abilities. Even in the springtime of their romance, Marie, always a precise thinker, criticized not only some [trashy, sophomoric] books he liked [Bande Dessinée comic strips] but also the [purple] language of his letters.”
— Phyllis Stock-Morton, p. 24.

W hether or not the Charismatic Hungarian was literally searching for Truth truth, he was surely searching for audiences receptive to his preferred, dramatic, truthy historiography—part of which we heard in these emphatic works that Jean-Yves performed. Years later, Marie, too, in her writings prevaricated, denied, revised, glossed, hid…

W hat were Liszt’s sources of support, emotionally? How lonely was it, “at the top”? How much of a mutual “nightmare” had Franz and Marie been to each other, I wonder?

M arie d’Agoult’s nightmares, especially in Italy, in Venezia e Napoli, were unrelenting. Not much is known of these—what the subjects or imagery in them were, and so on. There is only the evidence of a few letters, and even less is objectively known about the quality of Franz’s sleeping. Not much detail is known about Marie’s suicide attempts; their frequency, their seriousness, her moods and ideation in between them...

H oly extra-marital stress-diatheses! What, if any, mental health services did Liszt avail himself of during the years of these compositions? Was Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein any help at all to Liszt in the years subsequent to Liszt’s break-up with Marie, or was Carolyne instead mostly a hazard, a hindrance? Was in fact Liszt’s music-making the only ‘therapy’ he received, self-administered? Alan Walker’s books don’t have anything to say about this. But that is what I wondered, more and more, as Jean-Yves’s recital progressed...

A s for Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, what modest amount is known of her emotional condition during those years is gathered together in Phyllis Stock-Morton’s recent book (link below). Well worth your look if you’ve made it this far in reading this blog post...

N either Liszt nor d’Agoult was continuously the more forceful personality, I suppose. Both were likely self-propelled multivalent ‘causes’ and ‘effects’, both Forces of Nature to be reckoned with. There were pressures, one upon the other; interpersonal dynamic equilibria; inescapable sociotropic osmosis...

W e are grateful, of course: very grateful to have these beautiful, vivid pieces today—we who are hardly aware of what pressures and emotional costs were associated with their composition. We are grateful, too, to Jean-Yves Thibaudet for reanimating them in the way he was able to do last night with such insight and consummate skill. Through the music, we might learn something about ourselves, even if we shall never be certain of the truths between Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult.

J ean-Yves was born in 1961 in Lyon to a German-born mother and French father, both amateur musicians. In addition to diplomatic duties, Jean-Yves’s father taught history and geography at the University of Lyon and was a good amateur violinist. His mother, an accomplished pianist, taught German language and literature at the University.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Boston Cecilia: The Curious Incident of Brahms in the Night-Time

B rahms, a musical ‘wonder-worker’, was a great symphonist, of course. But he also loved the human voice, alone and in varied combinations. And I believe there is no chorus better equipped to reveal the intensity of feeling he brought to this repertoire than the Boston Cecilia.”
— Donald Teeters, Cecilia Music Director.

T he Boston Cecilia and mezzo-soprano, Krista River, gave a wonderful performance of “nocturnal” art-songs by Brahms last night, at First Church in Cambridge.

Motet ‘O Heiland, reiss die Himmel auf!’ (O, Savior, open Thy Heaven! Rip it Open!)
Waldesnacht, Op. 62 No.3
Der Abend, Op. 64 No.2
Nächtens, Op. 112 No2
Abendständchen, Op. 42 No.1
O, schöne Nacht, Op. 92 No.1
Abendlied, Op. 92 No. 3
Alto Rhapsody, Op.53 (Krista River)
Botschaft, Op. 47 No.1 (Krista River)
An die Nachtigall, Op. 46 No. 4 (Krista River)
von Ewiger Liebe, Op. 43 No. 1 (Krista River)
Die Mainacht, Op. 43 No. 2 (Krista River)
Wie Melodien zieht es mir, Op. 105 No.1 (Krista River)
Ständchen, Op. 106 No. 1 (Krista River)
Liebes lieder, Op. 52 (mixed chorus and four-hands piano (Barbara Bruns, Keith Glavash))

T he texts for Op. 52 are really over-the-top, on many levels:

Rede, Mädchen, allzu liebes (Tell me, dear, who rouses my ardor, may I come now?)
Am Gesteine rauscht die Flut (Against the ‘rocks’ the ‘torrent’ rushes.)
O, die Frauen (Without women I would long ago have become a monk.)
Wie des Abends schöne Röte (If I could glow like the sunset and please but one person…)
Die grüne Hopfenranke (The green vine tendril.)
Ein kleiner, hübscher Vogel (Like an itsy, bitsy bird caught in a thicket, I long to be freed.)
Wohl schön bewandt war es (Once my lover’s gaze could penetrate.)
Wenn so lind dein Aug emir (Your loving eyes banish my troubles.)
Am Donaustrande (On the Danube beach… Ten locks protect my love; I’ll now smash them like glass.)
Schlosser auf, und mache Schlösser! (Locksmith, make me many locks!)
O, wie sanft die Quelle! (How gently the stream flows!)
Nein, es ist nicht auszukommen! (No, my merriment is not mad, my quietude not love-sickness!)
Vögelein durchrauscht die Luft (Like a little bird rushes through the air.)
Sieh, wie ist die Welle klar (See the moonlight on the clear water! My love, love me now!)
Nactigall, sie singt so schön (The nightingale sweetly sings, so embrace me, my love, in the dark here.)
Ein dunkeler Schacht is Liebe (What a dark pit is Love.)
Nich wandle, mein Licht (Stray not, my love, in the watery meadow.)
Es bebet das Gesträuche (My shrub quivers with desire when I think of you.)

B rahms was in love, sort of, but with whom, in what way, and to what end? (Man, oh, man! Clara Schumann had her ‘hands full’ with brilliant-but-problematic men in her life!)

T his final concert of the group’s 133rd season was entitled ‘Bring on Brahms’, with a “nocturnal” theme. But beyond that superficial ‘thread’ linking these pieces together, the program provided an extraordinary glimpse into the depths of Brahms’s loneliness and dependency.

T he music is gorgeous. But many of the texts are troubling, not least of these the Alto Rhapsody, Op 53, for alto, male chorus, and orchestra, written in 1869 as a wedding gift for Robert and Clara Schumann’s daughter, Julie.

P eter Ostwald, in his essay in Walter Frisch’s edited volume (link below; see page 30), gives some evidence that the Rhapsody was composed by Brahms a few days before the wedding and gifted by Brahms to the bride, in a fit of unjustified pique. Correspondence in preceding months between Johannes and Clara indicates the scope of his teasing Clara about ‘marrying one of your daughters’.

B ut he never earnestly made any moves in that direction, no physical intimacy and no known expressions of intent by Brahms. The Italian Count Marmorito swept Julie off her feet. And so now Julie is getting married and Brahms works himself up into a righteous snit? What the?

S o this is no sublimated, futile Brahmsian love-letter! If it is, it’s a grotesque, way-tardy, imploding bomb of a love-letter.

O r a socially inappropriate continuation of his not-so-cryptic communications with Clara, disguised as a wedding present for Julie? Maybe… Co-opting the odd misanthropic text, taken from Goethe’s ‘Harzreise in Winter’, wrapping it up with a bow. Just great. Wandering and chromatically dense... wandering, dour C minor: perfect for the Goethe misanthrope.

B ut then we get the second section aria, which actually does obfuscate Brahms’s personal motivations/social pains. And then we have the genuinely tender, reverential conclusion, not at all like the aggressive beginning.

W hy does this guy deserve analgesia? Doesn’t he need to find Truth the hard way, through experiencing the painful consequences of his own self-absorption? Wish we had the real back-story to this weird gift! Not a sublimated love-letter, but instead a thinly-veiled, morose, awkward confession/apology by 36-year-old bachelor Brahms, to Julie or to Clara?

N obody makes art like this anymore! Deeply, inadvertently revelatory—with nostalgic, tragic, narcissistic, fatalistic themes all mixed-up, launched by Brahms to suit his own obscure, would-be exploitive but frustrated ends. Wish we could read Julie's ‘thank-you’ letter to Brahms for this wedding gift...

T he last movement of the Rhapsody redeems the weirdness of the first parts. The lilting triplets are warm and benign; the kindly appoggiaturas in the men’s parts vow beneficence, not only toward the dedicatee (Julie Schumann) but toward Womankind in general; the plagal IV-to-I ‘amen’ cadence at the end.

L istening to the concert last night, I thought about Brahms’s extreme emotional sensitivity—whatever it was that led him to dwell, not just on his difficulties with intimacy, but on themes of justice and to sympathize with creatures and humans unnecessarily thwarted or punished. His afternoon walks, entering into trances so easily; driving his esthetic and emotional sensitivity into the nighttime—his capacity to so appreciate and identify with beauty and harmony in what he saw and did that he would become totally overcome by ecstasy and write these things. How wonderful that we have these pieces, revealing so much as they do, not only about Brahms but about the human realities of having existential ‘itches’ that you can’t (are too timid to—; oughtn’t to—) ‘scratch’! How great for the Boston Cecilia to put together this intense short-course, exploring Brahms’s psyche!

A ber abseits wer ist’s?
Im Gebüsch verliert sich sein Pfad;
hinter ihm schlagen die Sträuche zusammen,
das Gras steht wieder auf,
die Öde verschlingt ihn.

Ach, wer heilet die Schmerzen
dess, dem Balsam zu Gift ward?
Der sich Menschenhaß
aus der Fülle der Liebe trank!
Erst verachtet, nun ein Verächter,
zehrt er heimlich auf
seinen eigenen Wert
In ungenugender Selbstsucht.

Ist auf deinem Psalter,
Vater der Liebe, ein Ton
seinem Ohre vernehmlich,
so erquicke sein Herz!
Öffne den umwölkten Blick
über die tausend Quellen
neben dem Durstenden
in der Wüste!

[But who is that there?
His path vanishes in the underbrush;
behind him the thicket closes in;
the grass stands up again, revealing no trace;
the wasteland swallows him up.

Ah, who eases the pains
of him for whom sweet balsam became poison?
Who drank the hatred of Man
from the abundance of Love?
First scorned, now a scorner,
he secretly obsesses about
his own virtuousness—
wallows in unrewarding egotism.

If there is on your psaltery,
Father of Love, one note
his ear can be made to hear,
then refresh his heart now!
Open his clouded gaze
to the thousand springs
that are next to him who thirsts
in the wilderness!]”
— Goethe, Harzreise in Winter.

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

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.

Charles Ives, Largo ‘Law of Diminishing Returns’ for Piano Quintet, 1908-9; M.S. at Yale Univ

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!

Differently-eared Charles Ives, engulfed by coat, (c) Naxos

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.