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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

The Missteps of Genius

God knows I think Charles Ives is god – or rather, Charlie knows I worship him – and I bristle like hell when he’s called an amateur, but I have to admit his rhythmic notation makes me tear what’s left of my hair at moments. Below are mm. 84-86 as taken from the second movement of the Piano Sonata No. 1, and below that the corrected rhythmic notation as I feel sure he intended it:

PSon1-iib-score

PSon1-iib-ex

In the original, the first half of the first measure has only seven 32nds duration in the right hand, and the second half of the second measure has twelve 32nds instead of eight. Now, poor Lou Harrison edited this from the manuscript, and perhaps the mistake is his addition. But Ives does seem to get befuddled when he starts using 32nd-notes and 64th-notes, and I’m not convinced that his conception of a double-dotted note matches what most of us think it is. I’ve made my alterations based on how the rhythmic motive plays out in the rest of the passage, and on how the two hands are laid out relative to each other. The point is to show how Ives used ragtime rhythms and motives to create static textures of phrases going out of phase with each other.

I’m analyzing the First Sonata to have something to use as a contrast to the Concord, and that chapter is threatening to become an entire second book. I have to guiltily admit, too – I think I slightly prefer the First Sonata to the far more celebrated Second. Jeremy Denk tells me that the First is harder to play. And there are many places in it where I recoil from what’s on the page and think Ives clearly meant something else. We’ve never had a clear, fully professionally engraved score of either work, nor are likely to in the forseeable future.

 

 

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American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)

Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects

Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station

New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking

The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross

William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer

Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation

Eve Beglarian's Home Page- great Downtown composer

David Doty's Just Intonation site

Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site

The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer

Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues

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