(Charles Ives): CHARLES IVES'S MUSICAL UNIVERSE (Antony Cooke)—2015. Excerpt from Chapter 9: Analysis, Section B, "Universe Symphony" (original) (raw)

2015, http://www.buybooksontheweb.com/product.aspx?ISBN=1-4958-0476-3

Charles Ives’s Musical Universe: A Resource for Discovery ABSTRACT -- Charles Ives’s Musical Universe is the first large-scale volume to look at the mechanics and fabric of Ives’s compositions over his entire creative output, while also indirectly reexamining the confusing dates of his music and priority that continue to impact his legacy. If the limited available analytical documentation has left the workings of Ives’s music still largely a mystery, perhaps it is because too much energy seems to have been expended in trying to “explain away” the phenomenon of someone “who existed outside the mold,” than to discover what he did. Ives’s religious, philosophical and cultural roots, teaching and guidance of his father, George Ives, having been found incompatible with the status quo, his later education at Yale thus deemed necessary to provide the “proper” musical education he sorely lacked. Thus, the “new” Ives hardly is more of a pioneer than multitudes of other composers of his time. Had he been unexceptional, in fact, why the countless drives to define him in such unexceptional terms? There are, nevertheless, tangible reasons why Ives’s music sounds the way it does, far beyond the characteristic brief vernacular quotations that punctuate it. The complex “code” that underlies most of Ives’s music reveals a creative force that manipulated the structural and mathematically-oriented fabric of musical sounds in ways almost unique in the music of any century, and mostly far ahead of his contemporaries. In 1987, when Carol K. Baron wrote her Ph.D. dissertation, “Ives On His Own Terms: An Explication, a Theory of Pitch Organization, and a New Critical Edition for the Three Page Sonata,” she uncovered, apparently for the first time, the systematic methodology behind much of Ives’s music. Almost a decade later, in 1996, Philip Lambert published his landmark volume, The Music of Charles Ives; finally, in book form, something tangible about Ives’s music was in print, other than just its relationship to existing melodies. These leads showed that numerous technical aspects of Ives’s compositional language indeed could be isolated, beyond the rhapsodic elements that often defy precise analysis. Charles Ives’s Musical Universe picks up where Baron’s and Lambert’s trails lead left off—oddly, allowed to wither on the proverbial vine for almost two decades. Instead, substituted for shallow analyses of the fragments of tunes that comprise little more than “window dressing,” these attributes have done nothing to reveal the extraordinary facets of the musical structure itself. In covering in great detail a wide cross section of works from across his output, the massive detail and scope of Charles Ives’s Musical Universe stands fully alone and far apart from current musical literature about the composer. No less odd, many present interpretations of Ives’s life have been a source of confusion for those who remember his precipitous ascent to iconic status in the mid-twentieth century. Even the legendary catalog by John Kirkpatrick (A Temporary Catalog of The Music Manuscripts of Charles Edward Ives), has not been immune from the effects of revisionism that has relegated Ives’s works ever forward in time, rendering the remarkable catalog a curiosity, as if carelessly compiled. The provable means by which to tie Ives’s unique innovations, priority and provenance, however, remains critically tied to his significance as the foremost prophetic figure of the twentieth century, and as such, Kirkpatrick’s catalog can be demonstrated to be no less viable today than ever. Indeed, it has no peer. As a means of setting the record straight, in 1990 by Carol K. Baron conducted research that offered a scientific means of determining the dates of Ives’s manuscripts through greatly changing handwriting characteristics that had been affected by increasing fluency, care with his manuscripts, efforts to leave legible materials behind, even eventually health issues—and so on over the course of his productive years. Baron’s system, solidly endorsed by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, is the one consistent marker that does not appear to have been reflected in the new vision of Ives, and shows that the dates of Ives’s music, however, ought not to be controversial at all, as the writer demonstrates. The importance of correcting the record is not because a decade here or there changes the sound, or the expressive power of his music; it is because of all that followed in its wake. Indeed, Ives’s priority can be ascertained with little less certainty than that of almost any major composer, this volume at last providing the long-awaited detailed analyses of his music while attempting to put reason and dispassionate facts surrounding its foundations back into the dialog.