Charles Ives in the Mirror

American Histories of an Iconic Composer

David C Paul

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780252094699
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

American composer Charles Ives (1874–1954) has gone from being a virtual unknown to become one of the most respected and lauded composers in American music. In this sweeping survey of intellectual and musical history, David C. Paul tells the new story of how Ives's music was shaped by shifting conceptions of American identity within and outside of musical culture, charting the changes in the reception of Ives across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Paul focuses on the critics, composers, performers, and scholars whose contributions were most influential in shaping the critical discourse on Ives, many of them marquee names of American musical culture themselves, including Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Leonard Bernstein.

Paul explores both how Ives positioned his music amid changing philosophical and aesthetic currents and how others interpreted his contributions to American music. Although Ives's initial efforts to find a public in the early twenties attracted a few devotees, the resurgence of interest in the American literary past during the thirties made a concert staple of his "Concord" Sonata, a work dedicated to nineteenth-century transcendentalist writers. Paul shows how Ives was subsequently deployed as an icon of American freedom during the early Cold War period and how he came to be instigated at the head of a line of "American maverick" composers. Paul also examines why a recent cadre of scholars has beset the composer with Gilded Age social anxieties.

By embedding Ives' reception within the changing developments of a wide range of fields including intellectual history, American studies, literature, musicology, and American politics and society in general, Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer greatly advances our understanding of Ives and his influence on nearly a century of American culture.

1

Conservative Transcendentalist or Modernist Firebrand?

Ives and His First Publics, 1921–1934

Early in 1921, several hundred Americans were puzzled to discover an unsolicited package in their mail that contained a pair of books.¹ The larger of the two was bound in dark red cloth, and on the cover, framed by horizontal double lines, gilt lettering with a curlicued “M” and “E” lent a modest decorative touch. Roughly twelve inches in height, its size was typical for a volume of music, which the title, “Second Pianoforte Sonata,” declared it to be. There was also a subtitle, “Concord, Mass., 1840–60,” and for it the largest lettering on the sparse front cover had been reserved—larger even than for the name of the composer, Charles E. Ives (Figure 1.1). The second, smaller book, entitled Essays Before a Sonata, contained only prose, but it was attributed to the same Mr. Ives.

The name was unfamiliar to all but a few of the recipients. Perhaps some of them thought they had received the books as targets of a marketing strategy devised by the ingenious minds of the rapidly growing advertising industry. They would not have been far off the mark, for Mr. Ives, composer and author, was also responsible for some of the most successful advertising copy ever written in the insurance business. Moreover, it was his motivational ideas and sales methods that were the standard equipment of a small army of door-to-door salesmen, who worked for the successful New York–based firm of Ives and Myrick, a subsidiary of the Mutual Life Insurance Company. Though there were many New Yorkers who received the two books, none of them (excepting personal acquaintances) realized it was that Ives. This was a pitch for a product, but one that was more intangible than an insurance policy; it was a bid for musical recognition on the part of a businessman who devoted his spare time to composing.

Those who read through the smaller book of essays would have encountered familiar ideas expressed in tortured prose. Ives had a predilection for parenthetical asides, oracular pronouncements, and an aversion to footnotes, though he laced his text with literary and scholarly references. The subjects of the essays were mid-nineteenth-century American literary worthies who had lived in Concord, Massachusetts—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott, and Henry Thoreau. Every educated American had learned to venerate these writers as the foundational and foremost figures of American letters, and Ives in Essays added his voice of assent.

Figure 1.1. Cover of Ives's self-published “Concord” Sonata (1920). Courtesy Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library of the Harvard College Library.

Unfortunately for Ives, the conventional opinions about Emerson and his circle conveyed in Essays were a poor match for the unorthodox music of the “Concord” Sonata. The work is comprised of four movements, each bearing the name of one of the Concordians (two of them in the case of the third movement, “The Alcotts”), and each purportedly giving musical expression to the corresponding essay in the prose volume. At times, the music is fabulously difficult, posing challenges to even the most accomplished pianist, and it often spills into three staves (occasionally even four), the intricacies defying the customary piano-score pair. There are long passages that dispense with the rhythmic reassurances of the bar line, a section in which the composer called for a heavy board to be laid across the keys of the piano to create tone clusters; shocking dissonances; and, almost as startling, moments of utter diatonic simplicity. Few people had seen anything like it.

And so, with this mismatched pair of vanity publications, Ives began a long journey from margin to center; over the course of the next forty years, this obscure, enigmatic figure would come to be seen as the great patriarch of American music. In 1921, this outcome could hardly have been predicted, for the self-publication venture seemed a failure—and an expensive one at that. The reviews were dismissive, if not outright derisive, though the “Concord” Sonata did manage to win Ives a few early devotees, most of them denizens of the scattered modernist enclaves across the United States. It was a poor return on a substantial investment.

Nonetheless, good businessman that he was, Ives fostered the loyalty of his handful of admirers, just as he encouraged his agents to pursue any opening to secure a sale. Generally speaking, these first Ivesians placed a premium on technical innovation and expressed little interest in the putative literary content of the sonata. Accordingly, the composer's tactics of self-promotion shifted. By the early thirties, when his diabetic condition necessitated that he scale back his self-promotion activities, Ives no longer enveloped his music with the literary aura of Concord. Instead, he staked his claim as the inventor of musical techniques that were on the cutting edge of musical modernism. This was the first of many transformations Ives would undergo as a public persona, and the only one in which he, as his own advocate, would play a substantial role.

Imagining Concord: Essays Before a Sonata and Its Literary Context

The work of completing the “Concord” Sonata from copious draft manuscripts and the writing of Essays Before a Sonata were done in Asheville, North Carolina, where Ives and his wife Harmony stayed for eight weeks, early in 1919. The previous October, Ives had suffered a breakdown that was psychosomatic in nature, though incipient diabetes may have played a role. In the medical argot of the day, neurasthenia would have been the diagnosis, a nervous disease that mental health specialists regarded as having reached epidemic proportions among overworked businessmen.²

Ives fit the bill. For just under a decade, he and his business partner Julian Myrick had led their firm from success to success, becoming rich men in the process. At the same time, in the evenings and on weekends, Ives avidly pursued his avocation as a composer. When the United States joined the First World War, his schedule became even more hectic as he sought outlets for his patriotic fervor. Ives launched a second hobby as a political pamphleteer, threw himself into the Liberty Bond drive, and even attempted to enlist in the Red Cross, with intentions of driving an ambulance in France (he failed the medical exam). The pace was frenetic, unsustainable, and on October 1st, after a contentious meeting of the Liberty Bond Committee in New York, his health gave out.³ During the long period of convalescence that followed, the Iveses took the standard prescription meted out to neurasthenics: a “rest cure.” They traveled to the picturesque town of Asheville nestled at the confluence of two rivers in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the home of one of Harmony's sisters. But while there, Ives did little resting. Instead, freed of his business commitments, he devoted his time to preparing for the biggest gambit he would ever attempt to get his music noticed.

Ives never explained the inception of the blind mailing campaign nor the decision to make the “Concord” Sonata the lynchpin, but given his reputation in the insurance industry for successful sales strategies, it is reasonable to assume that he gave these matters considerable thought. Over the years, Ives had made numerous overtures to the broader musical world. He had importuned friends who were music professionals for opinions about his works, hired copyists to generate clean parts and performers to play through them, and, on one notable occasion in 1910, secured a reading of his First Symphony by the conductor Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Society.⁴ Those efforts had met with noncommittal shrugs at best and vehement rejection at worst. Ives would later recount the story of a concert violinist who floundered through the opening of his First Violin Sonata and gave up in disgust, declaring, “When you get awfully indigestible food in your stomach that distresses you, you can get rid of it, but I cannot get those horrible sounds out of my ears.”⁵ It is a measure of Ives's temerity that he would attempt an end-run around the professional musicians like this violinist, who had responded so poorly to his music, and make a direct appeal to the musical public. For this is surely what he was trying to do when he distributed his vanity publications to individuals whose names he had assembled from membership and subscription lists of major music organizations and magazines.⁶

As to why he chose the “Concord” Sonata, there were practical considerations. His output consisted of several symphonies and string quartets, but choosing a work in one of those genres made little sense since most of the recipients would have neither the means to render it nor the ability to hear it in their inner ear. Songs were a viable possibility, and indeed, in 1922, Ives would issue a third self-published volume containing a selection of 114 of his songs. But a piano sonata had the obvious advantage of requiring a single player, and, recording technology still being relatively new, most musical Americans possessed some skill at the keyboard. By the time Ives departed for Asheville, he had substantial drafts for two piano sonatas, but the second one had more obvious appeal: it was programmatically associated with the writers who were, by near unanimous agreement, the most important canonical figures of American literature.⁷ Ralph Waldo Emerson, in particular, enjoyed a posthumous celebrity that had proven enormously lucrative for publishers and helped make the small town of Concord, Massachusetts, where he had lived alongside the other literary worthies celebrated in Ives's sonata, a tourist destination.⁸ The name Concord was one to conjure with, and Ives knew it.

It is unclear precisely when Ives's affinity for the mid-nineteenth-century Concordians developed. Later, his proponents would claim that the Ives family had been steeped in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and their associates for generations, and that Ives imbibed the transcendentalist views that had been Concord's special issue early on, just as he did the sounds of amateur music making in his hometown of Danbury, Connecticut. But the evidence is thin. More likely, Ives's first real engagement with Emerson and his circle came in college, when, as a student at Yale University, he took an American literature course taught by the well-known pedagogue William Lyon Phelps. Even then, the Concordians do not appear as a regular presence in his correspondence or as a musical inspiration until after his marriage to Harmony Twichell, a minister's daughter who had a strong literary bent.⁹

That said, Ives cannot have been wholly oblivious to the Concordians growing up, for the process of hagiography that enshrined them in American literary history coincided with his formative years. When Emerson died in 1882, eight years after Ives's birth, eulogies poured forth, praising him as an American spiritual seer whose luminous personality, perhaps even more than the profundity of his thought, had exerted an ennobling influence on those who had read his writings or heard him lecture.¹⁰ Nor did the flood of encomiums abate, for over the subsequent two decades, leading up to the centennial of his birth in 1903, Emerson's celebrity grew enormously, and along with it, that of the writers who had been in his orbit.

Several interrelated factors propelled this process of canonization. Most significant was the expansion of print culture in the late nineteenth century, facilitated by the development of more efficient and inexpensive methods of paper making. Shrewd New York and Chicago publishing houses produced reprints of works by Emerson and his contemporaries in library series that were affordable even for Americans of limited means. At the same time, and partly in response to the expanded profile the Concordians enjoyed through mass print culture, a secondary literature of short essays, longer commentaries, and biographies proliferated. Finally, the American literature courses that began to appear in public schools, colleges, and universities in the 1880s made national heroes of this coterie.¹¹ Ives, in taking such a course at Yale, underwent a rite of passage experienced by many of his contemporaries, but one that had not existed a generation earlier.

The advent of American literature courses typifies the self-reflexivity of the late nineteenth century, when Americans, confronted by rapid changes—mass immigration, the escalation of industrialization, and a growing role on the world stage—raised questions of national identity. Studying the literary past was one way of finding answers—or rather, inculcating in American youth a particular set of socially sanctioned answers. Textbooks from the time period reveal a startling regularity to the narratives then advanced in high school and college literature courses. As literary historian Nina Baym has shown, the common factor is a trials-to-triumph trajectory in which a definitively American literature arises from Puritan roots but attains its full flower through the secularizing tendencies of Unitarianism and the élan of transcendentalism. The pivotal figure in these textbooks, the great redeemer of American letters is always the same: Ralph Waldo Emerson.¹²

Exemplary is Initial Studies in American Letters, authored by Yale English professor Henry A. Beers, first published in 1887, reissued in 1891, and revised in 1895 (by which time, Ives was a sophomore). The first three chapters of the book span 1607 to 1837 and are mostly spent enumerating the shortcomings of early American writers. By and large, Beers viewed this period as having more historical than literary significance, and what little Americans produced that could be called belletristic fell far short of the mark set by contemporary English authors. But in 1837, Emerson delivered his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard, “The American Scholar,” and inaugurated the “one movement in the history of the American mind which has given to literature a group of writers having coherence enough to merit the name of a school.” Besides Emerson, there was Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Henry Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—all denizens of Concord at one time or another, and, excepting Hawthorne, all committed transcendentalists. Typically, Beers did not regard the Concord coterie as the unexpected yield of previously barren soils. Rather, he explained, “the movement was but a new avatar of the old Puritan spirit,” a spirit that Unitarianism had quickened by softening the “traditional prejudice…against the ornamental side of life.” Also typical were the traits Beers assigned to the individual authors belonging to the school. Emerson, for example, was the seer, the man of principled and poetic abstractions, who could be hard to understand, sometimes contradictory, but always the dispenser of truths. Hawthorne, on the other hand, was the consummate artist, whose style though at first “stilted and bookish…gradually acquired an exquisite perfection, and is as well worth study as that of any prose classic in the English tongue.”¹³ Consulting other textbooks of this period—Henry S. Pancoast's An Introduction to American Literature (1898) say, or William P. Trent's A History of American Literature, 1607–1865 (1903)—one finds much the same narrative and similar critical assessments of the members of the American literary pantheon.¹⁴

In a brief prefatory note, Ives explained that Essays and the “Concord” Sonata were together “an attempt to present (one person's) impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over a half century ago.”¹⁵ The acknowledgment of subjectivity in the parentheses—Ives's insertion, not mine—is misleading, for what he presented was not just his impression but one that he shared with the majority of Americans who had studied the Concordians in high school or college literature courses. It was an impression garnered from textbooks and classroom instruction by the likes of Beers, Pancoast, and Trent, who recycled the same narrative of American literary history. Thus, from the standpoint of the reception of Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau, the content of Essays is wholly unremarkable—and, as it would turn out, a bit dated.

Because the turn-of-the-century consensus made Emerson the central figure of the Concord milieu, and because Emerson had become a flashpoint for debate by the time Essays was written, it is worth taking a closer look at Ives's assessment of the writer. His Emerson essay is divided into three sections, the first dealing with the “substance” of the Concordian's accomplishment, the general content of his prose writings, poems, and lectures, apart from specific examples.¹⁶ In this section, Ives drew the curtain on an Emerson garbed in the raiment in which he was customarily portrayed: “Though a great poet and prophet, he is greater, possibly, as an invader of the unknown,—America's deepest explorer of spiritual immensities.” And, in keeping with past precedent, Ives traced the standard lineage of the Concord sage. Generations of Emerson's forebears had prepared the way, he explained, their “mental and spiritual muscles” hardened by the rigors of Puritanism. To a great extent, theirs was a religion “based…on a search for the unknowable, limited only by the dogma of its theology…while Emerson's transcendentalism was based on the wider search for the unknowable, unlimited in any way or by anything except the vast bounds of innate goodness.” Freedom from the shackles of dogma had come through the agency of Unitarians, who “fought for the dignity of human nature” against “arbitrary revelation.”¹⁷ Like a dutiful undergraduate, Ives was hitting all the marks as he reiterated re...