Archives for 2005

Douglas McLennan calls my attention to a nice review of my new CD, by composer Christopher DeLaurenti in The Stranger, out of Seattle (halfway down the page): “Like Stravinsky, composer Kyle Gann has an astounding ability to forcibly deploy complex rhythms without sounding cluttered or pretentiously convoluted.” Woohoo! The West Coast always seems to love me better than the East Coast, and you know what, West Coast? I love you better too.

As many of you have quickly noticed, this new format allows for the possibility of comments (I can set this option or not set it per individual post). The way Arts Journal’s comments work, the ones you send go into a holding pen until I OK them. Most people, so far, have kept repeatedly sending, trying to get their comments to appear, but they won’t, automatically. This is as it should be – I’ve spent enough time cleaning obscene nonsense out of my web site guest page to know that you don’t just hand total strangers a can of spray paint and invite them to express themselves. Your comment will appear when I get time to go into the software and publish it, assuming I find it well-intended and insightful.

The way I look at this is as a time-saving feature. I’ve always tried to post and/or respond to helpful comments I get, but sometimes this takes up lots more time than writing the original post did. Now people can do their own writing – I don’t have to paraphrase or edit, and I don’t have to go through the time and delay of writing people back and asking if it’s OK to quote them. I don’t have to answer, necessarily, either. I’m hoping this will more fully acknowledge the range of wonderful responses I get, while meaning a little less work for me.

On the other hand, I don’t get paid to blog here, and this is my space. I don’t owe nobody nuthin’. Anonymous comments will be deleted without becoming public, likewise abusive ones, as well as comments I don’t see the point of. No one will grandstand in this space but me. I’m all for collective wisdom – but if you want to prove how brilliant you are at length, you can start your own damn blog (are there are places that will give you the space for free). If you want to get a group dialogue going, join some new music forum like Sequenza 21. This is my turf, period, end of sentence.

I’ve been warned, by the way, against going wild with the photos, which take up loads of web space and make the site difficult for some people to access. So sorry about those promised photos of Alex Ross’s cats, it looks like you won’t be seeing them here after all. (Too bad, I paid a pretty penny for them on the black market, and some of them caught the felines in real compromising poses.)

I’ve been writing quite a bit about the composer George Rochberg since he died last spring, and now, by some amazing coincidence, I’ve been asked to speak about him this weekend. The Colorado String Quartet, who are, or which is, in residence at Bard College, will perform Rochberg’s Quartet No. 6 (1978) at 3 PM this Sunday, Oct. 30, at Olin Auditorium here, at Annandale-on-Hudson off of Route 9G. It’s the last of the “Concord” Quartets, with which Rochberg boldly inaugurated postmodernism under the shocked eyes of the classical establishment, and the one that famously contains a theme and variations on Pachelbel’s infamous Canon. So I’ll give a little talk about Rochberg and the piece before they play it. They’re also playing stuff by Haydn and Beethoven (Op. 127), but I don’t know anything about them.

UPDATE: Oops – somehow Franz Joseph Haydn changed into Richard Wernick. I HATE it when that happens.

Thanks to Douglas McLennan, from whom all blessings flow, I have now joined the newer, sleeker ranks of Arts Journal bloggers whose wisdom is couched in the snazzy new format. No longer will I turn from Jan Herman’s blog to my own and hang my head in shame! And before, somehow because I’m on a Mac, I could never post images. Now, with the new software, I can! and I celebrate this newfound ability with an experimental post of Erik Satie, the first postclassical composer and patron saint of all who have come since. Coming up soon, I have a lot of never-before-seen photos of Alex Ross’s cat!

It seems like every month another young composer shoots out of grad school and starts blogging, brimful of enthusiasm for the musics of Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, Boulez. I have nothing against that music. And if I did, what would it matter? Might as well rail against Brahms. What depresses me, and makes me feel trapped in an age of endless musical conservatism, is the ever-renewed enthusiasm, the sense that that old, old, well-known music, music with no more secrets to divulge, music of a past century, needs ever to be championed by the young, the young of every era and for all time.

In 1973 I came out of high school brimful of enthusiasm for the musics of Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, Boulez. By the time I graduated college, I had discovered the next generation – Reich, Riley, Glass, Oliveros – and by the time I was through grad school I was grappling with Adams, Lentz, Meredith Monk. That means that during seven years of higher education I went from studying music by composers 30 years older than myself to those who were 20, 15, even 10 years older than me. Now I mainly pay attention to the music of my numerous brilliant contemporaries, and I’ve even had my music influenced by people younger than myself.

Did this happen because staid, prim Northwestern University was exposing me to Meredith Monk? HA! That’s a laugh. Most of the faculty there still considered Hindemith a little outré. My generation didn’t trust our teachers to tell us everything, and we did our own research.

Now, in an endless stream, come the 21st-century postgraduates, children of the 1980s, who brush me aside as irrelevant because I don’t fawn over the important music of our time: Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, Boulez! And I think to myself, “Kids, those people are your grandparents’ generation, except for Carter, who’s your great-grandfather.” Had I followed that pattern, I would have come out of college all excited about Copland, Hindemith, Milhaud! instead of the postminimalists. If the young composers were on my timetable, I’d be considered old-fashioned by now, and they’d be grappling with music by composers born in the 1960s and ’70s. There’s a big difference between thinking about music that has been irrefutably validated by history, and music that is still in doubt, music that needs to be examined, music that no one in power will yet vouch for, music that makes your teachers uncomfortable. How do you become a composer wrestling only with a history already etched in granite, rather than interacting with still-pliable movements and a repertoire whose course you will be called upon to alter and direct?

Of course, what’s obvious is that grad school teachers are pushing Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, Boulez!, and doing so very persuasively. But – why are these young composers listening to their teachers? My generation rebelled against our teachers, and so today’s young generation is rebelling against us by – not rebelling?

I love it when bloggers blog about bloggers. Two of my confréres have written about my interview with Frederic Rzewski at Miller Theater last Thursday, David Adler and Darcy James Argue. As a paid participant of the event, I would consider it unseemly to add my own evaluative comments about the concert – nevertheless I can say that I thought they both captured the evening’s atmosphere well.

I was going to send my mother the poem by W.H. Auden that I quoted recently, which doesn’t seem to be on the internet anywhere, so I thought I might as well post it here, where, after all, she’s likely to read it. There is an audio file of Auden reading the poem via the New York Times, but it’s very late in his life and he seems to make it a little more trivial, so I recommend reading it yourself first. It’s one of my favorite poems about music ever, with some sagacious observations about the changes in performance practice wrought by time and mores:

Metalogue to The Magic Flute

(Lines composed in commemoration of the Mozart Bicentenary, 1956. To be spoken by the singer playing the role of Sarastro.)

Relax, Maestro, put your baton down;
Only the fogiest of the old will frown
If you the trials of the Prince prorogue
To let Sarastro speak this Metalogue,
A form acceptable to us, although
Unclassed by Aristotle or Boileau.
No modern audience finds it incorrect,
For interruption is what we expect
Since that new god, the Paid Announcer, rose,
Who with his quasi-Ossianic prose
Cuts in upon the lovers, halts the band,
To name a sponsor or to praise a brand.
Not that I have a product to describe
That you could wear or cook with or imbibe;
You cannot hoard or waste a work of art;
I come to praise but not to sell Mozart,
Who came into this world of war and woe
At Salzburg just two centuries ago,
When kings were many and machines were few
And open atheism something new.
(It makes a servantless New Yorker sore
To think sheer Genius had to stand before
A mere Archbishop with uncovered head;
But Mozart never had to make his bed.)
The history of Music as of Man
Will not go cancrizans, and no ear can
Recall what, when the Archduke Francis reigned,
Was heard by ear whose treasure-hoard contained
A Flute already but as yet no Ring;
Each age has its own mode of listening.
We know the Mozart of our fathers’ time
Was gay, rococo, sweet, but not sublime
A Viennese Italian; that is changed
Since music critics learned to feel “estranged”;
Now it’s the Germans he is classed amongst,
A Geist whose music was composed from Angst,
At International Festivals enjoys
An equal status with the Twelve-Tone Boys;
He awes the lovely and the very rich,
And even those Divertimenti which
He wrote to play while bottles were uncorked,
Milord chewed noisily, Milady talked,
Are heard in solemn silence, score on knees,
Like quartets of the deafest of the B‘s.
What next? One can no more imagine how,
In concert halls two hundred years from now,
When the mozartian sound-waves move the air,
The cognoscenti will be moved, then dare
Predict how high orchestral pitch will go,
How many tones will constitute a row,
The tempo at which regimented feet
Will march about the Moon, the form of Suite
For Piano in a Post-Atomic Age,
Prepared by some contemporary Cage.
An opera composer may be vexed
By later umbrage taken at his text:
Even Macaulay‘s schoolboy knows today
What Robert Graves or Margaret Mead would say
About the status of the sexes in this play,
Writ in that era of barbaric dark
‘Twixt Modern Mom and Bronze-Age Matriarch.
Where now the Roman Fathers and their creed?
“Ah where,” sighs Mr. Mitty, “where indeed?”
And glances sideways at his vital spouse
Whose rigid jaw-line and contracted brows
Express her scorn and utter detestation
For Roman views of Female Education.
In Nineteen-Fifty-Six we find the Queen
A highly-paid and most efficient Dean
(Who, as we all know, really runs the College),
Sarastro, tolerated for his knowledge,
Teaching the History of Ancient Myth
At Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Bennington, or Smith;
Pamina may a Time researcher be
To let Pamino take his Ph.D.,
Acquiring manly wisdom as he wishes
While changing diapers and doing dishes;
Sweet Papagena, when she’s time to spare,
Listens to Mozart operas on the air,
Though Papageno, we are sad to feel,
Prefers the juke-box to the glockenspiel,
And how is – what was easy in the past –
A democratic villain to be cast?
Monostatos must make his bad impression
Without a race, religion, or profession.
A work that lasts two hundred years is tough,
And operas, God knows, must stand enough:
What greatness made, small vanities abuse.
What must they not endure? The Diva whose
Fioriture and climactic note
The silly old composer never wrote,
Conductor X, that over-rated bore
Who alters tempi and who cuts the score,
Director Y who with ingenious wit
Places his wretched singers in the pit
While dancers mime their roles, Z the Designer
Who sets the whole thing on an ocean liner,
The girls in shorts, the men in yachting caps;
Yet Genius triumphs over all mishaps,
Survives a greater obstacle than these,
Translation into foreign Operese
(English sopranos are condemned to languish
Because our tenors have to hide their anguish);
It soothes the Frank, it stimulates the Greek:
Genius surpasses all things, even Chic.
We who know nothing – which is just as well –
About the future, can, at least, foretell,
Whether they live in air-borne nylon cubes,
Practise group-marriage or are fed through tubes,
That crowds two centuries from now will press
(Absurd their hair, ridiculous their dress)
And pay in currencies, however weird,
To hear Sarastro booming through his beard,
Sharp connoisseurs approve if it is clean
The F in alt of the Nocturnal Queen,
Some uncouth creature from the Bronx amaze
Park Avenue by knowing all the K‘s.
How seemly, then, to celebrate the birth
Of one who did no harm to our poor earth,
Created masterpieces by the dozen,
Indulged in toilet-humor with his cousin,
And had a pauper’s funeral in the rain,
The like of which we shall not see again:
How comely, also, to forgive; we should,
As Mozart, were he living, surely would,
Remember kindly Salieri‘s shade,
Accused of murder and his works unplayed,
Nor, while we praise the dead, should we forget,
We have Stravinsky – bless him! – with us yet.
Basta! Maestro, make your minions play!
In all hearts, as in our finale, may
Love be crowned, assume their rightful sway.

And remember, if you’re going to hear Marilyn Nonken play music by Frederic Rzewski tonight at 8 at Miller Theatre (116th St. and Broadway), you might as well catch an early dinner and hear me interview Frederic onstage at 7 before the concert.

I have a new work being premiered at Bard College’s Olin Auditorium on Wednesday, November 2 – and repeated next January 24 at the Knitting Factory in New York. It happened in this wise. Pat Spencer, flutist of New York’s Da Capo ensemble, played in my microtonal opera Cinderella’s Bad Magic, which we performed in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Pat is, of course, (with apologies to Walter Piston) an incredible flutist. She has mastered much of the world’s most difficult flute repertoire, and is a relentless perfectionist. She once showed me a rhythm in a work that only an insane or incompetent person would have written, a quintuplet inside a septuplet with rests and dotted notes or something, and was berating herself for not being able to get it perfect. I said to her, “Has it ever occurred to you that the composer wouldn’t be able to play that rhythm accurately himself, and that maybe it’s his fault for writing an unplayable rhythm, not yours for not being able to play it?” It had never occurred to her. That’s the kind of musician she is. If it can be written, it can be played, and the composer is never wrong.

So she played in Cinderella’s Bad Magic, which uses thirty pitches to the octave. It’s kind of a graceful, lyrical, light-sounding piece, as you can hear in excerpt here if you want, and you never suspect how devilishly difficult it is for the flutist. Basically, the only pitch she could play unaltered was A, and the other 29 all required fingerings and lip alterations foreign to conventional flute music. The ordeal would have made any sane woodwind player swear off microtonality forever, but Saint Pat, martyr to new music, not only wanted me to write another microtonal piece for her, she got Da Capo’s clarinetist Meighan Stoops interested, and they both wanted a microtonal piece. Well, a microtonal flute-and-clarinet duo sounded like an exercise in futility – why go through the horror of microtones for only two lines, which would barely let you hear the in-tuneness of the intervals? So I added a virtual piano part (which will be played on keyboard sampler by Blair McMillan, who recently had a nice profile in the Times), a fretless bass (played by my son Bernard, who’s been putting up with dad’s bizarre tunings his whole life), and a layer of background reference chords on sampler which I’ll play myself. In short, Bernard and I are playing with the Da Capo ensemble, and I have the easy part.

The 13-minute result, which you can listen to a fake MIDI version of here if you’d like, which I made to help the players find their pitches, is called The Day Revisited. That’s not the title you’ll see on the program, however. For some reason I’ve been kind of obsessed by my music of the early 1980s lately, and the idea that came to me was to take some themes and chords from a little piece I wrote in 1982 called As the Day Is Long, for semi-improvising flute, drums, and synthesizer with a tape background, and reuse them in a purely-tuned context. (Actually, you can hear a really poor-quality recording of As the Day Is Long from my web site here.) So the piece looks back on that moment of my life from a 23-year perspective, with all the tendencies purified into something smoother. Once again there are 30 pitches to the octave – different ones this time. For awhile I called the new piece As the Day Is Long (Revisited), but that seemed a little clunky, and it gradually shortened in my mind to The Day Revisited, which still captures the rather nostalgic flavor. I didn’t make that change in time to get it right in the program – but such complications can make the history of a work all the more interesting, n’est-ce pas?

Anyway, if you’re not near Bard November 2, I’ll put in a reminder about the January 24 performance in New York.

One last post on Charles Ives (previous ones here and here), and if you’re tired of the subject, read no further. I got a bug up my ass about his reputation after running across a reference to him on the internet by a composer who casually referred to him as politically rightwing, as though that were something everyone knew about Ives. Of course, Ives was actually a Wilsonian Democrat whose ideas were too radical even for 1930s Democrats, let alone today’s: he favored a world government to prevent wars (the League of Nations being a first step), a cap on annual salaries of executives, national phone voting for national issues to more directly register the national will, and a prohibition on any rich person having the right to interfere in government. Today we would have to call him a socialist or worse, because there is no major political party with ideas remotely as democratic, liberal, and left-leaning as Ives’s. A self-made millionaire who funded liberal causes and voted against his pocketbook, he was kind of a minor George Soros of his day. And yet, ludicrously, his reputation, now based more on innuendo than fact, has become such that musicians routinely bring him up as a parallel to Wagner, as someone whose music one can only like despite his personal failings.

Antonio Celaya writes to remind me that when Lou Harrison had a nervous breakdown and needed several months’ hospitalization, John Cage applied to Ives, who paid Lou’s expenses; and that he did this knowing Harrison was gay, which Lou was never secretive about. The biography Composing a World: Lou Harrison, Musical Wayfarer, by Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman, confirms this. In 1942 Harrison frankly told the draft board that he was gay, yet Ives’s relationship with Harrison in the late 1940s was affectionate, writing him humorous letters to “Lew Harry Son,” and treating him much as a son. Lou spent years editing Ives’ manuscripts, and I remember him referring to his sponsor reverently as “Mr. Ives.” Does this sound to you like Charles Ives was a homophobe? Do you know of someone whose information on the subject would be better than Harrison’s?

And let me repeat, because it may have gone out of currency, a story about Ives told by one Charles J. Buesing, who worked for Ives at the Ives & Myrick Agency, and who was interviewed by Vivian Perlis for her splendid oral history project. In 1969, Buesing said,

We worked a half-day on Saturdays. We would rarely see Mr. Myrick, but Mr. Ives would be there many Saturdays. One man came by me one Saturday afternoon, and he had tears in his eyes. As Mr. Ives went out the door, this fellow said, “There is a great man.” And he told me this story. He had had the experience for the past few months of not making any sales at all. Since we were wholly on a commission basis, if you didn’t sell, you just didn’t eat. Charles Ives walked up to this man’s desk and he thought he looked rather dejected so he said, “Charlie (his name was Charlie too), do me a personal favor. Will you take out your wallet?” And he did. “Now,” he said, “you open it.” Then he said, “Will you point it toward me?” The wallet was empty. Charles Ives said, “I thought so. No one can ever make a sale of anything with an empty wallet. Now, I want you to take this as a business loan. I know you’ll have so much confidence with what I am going to put in that wallet that you will pay me back, and I don’t want any I.O.U. or anything else.” And he put fifty dollars in there. It was after the [1929 stock market] crash, and this man had fifty dollars in his pocket. He hadn’t seen that much income in the past couple of months. It made a big difference with him. This is the kind of man that Ives was.

And this is the kind of story that people used to tell about Ives before Maynard Solomon (author of a passable Mozart biography and a really sucky Beethoven biography) wrote a nasty article accusing him of trying to pump up his reputation, an article whose assertions have been completely discredited by subsequent scholars. Yet ever since that article people have practically broken their legs trying to climb on the bandwagon of the Ives-despisers. Yet there are many laudatory comments in Perlis’s Charles Ives Remembered, by friends and coworkers and musicians remembering what a kind, generous, unpretentious man he was. He volunteered as an ambulence driver during World War I, but was turned down on account of his heart condition. His family had been fervent abolitionists, and his parents adopted a poor Black boy. Unlike so many musicians, Ives was devoted to his wife, and she to him. He bankrolled musical projects by Cowell, Slonimsky, and others, and almost single-handedly kept new experimental American music alive during the Depression. He won a Pulitzer Prize, the country’s most distinguished music award, and replied, “Prizes are for boys,” giving half the money to Harrison and the other half to Cowell’s New Music Edition. Truly we can say of Ives as W.H. Auden said of Mozart,

How seemly, then, to celebrate the birth

Of one who did no harm to our poor earth,

Created masterpieces by the dozen….

And yet, unfathomably, Ives has become one of those composers that people can hardly speak about now without reference to his alleged failures as a human being. It’s shameful, an example of Wagnerphobia missaplied and run amok. Did Ives have faults? Sure – he seems to have been a little strait-laced, and went into business partly because he couldn’t handle the Bohemian lifestyle that many musicians lived. I think less of him for that, but I keep up a rather middle-class lifestyle myself, and am perhaps more like him than I like admitting. He’d get choleric and fire off nasty insults at music critics and orchestra conductors who he thought didn’t know their jobs. Let’s see, have I ever done anything that awful? Are these sufficient basis to hang a permanent cloud of moral suspicion over him? As one correspondent noted, Ives was such a great man and such an incredibly innovative composer that people can’t deal with him, and they have to whittle him down to size to digest him.

Why do I get so exercised about it? For three reasons:

1. Because I’m a music historian, and I prefer that people believe things about music that are true (the reason for which I am similarly always defending Mozart against that wretched Amadeus film);

2. Because Ives is my favorite composer, and more than anyone else the source of my musical ideas and aesthetic attitudes, and I feel a personal stake in his reputation; and,

3. Because if someone as selfless, generous, well-intentioned, and full of integrity as Ives can be saddled with a scandalous reputation after his death by an evil cabal, or perhaps by just an ignorant bunch of musicians who don’t read much, then not one of us is safe from the machinations of hate-mongering slanderers. I don’t flatter myself that I have as many excellent qualities as Ives did, and I shudder to think what 22nd-century Maynard Solomon will lie in ambush to attach to my name unfounded charges of racism, wife-beating, or whatever post-postmodern thought-crime for which no word has yet even been coined.

In 1999 Joseph N. Straus published an article in Musical Quarterly entitled “The Myth of Serial ‘Tyranny’ in the 1950s and 1960s.” In it he claimed that, contrary to the common belief, there had never been any pressure on young composers to use 12-tone technique in their music, that the 12-tone composers wielded no power in academia, and that 12-tone music was just a hunky-dory little movement that attracted scads of converts because it was just so damn fun. As I believe I’ve written about here, Anthony Tommasini took him neatly apart in a response in the Times for putting his thumb on the scales by limiting his statistics to pre-1970, the period in which the serialists were not yet firmly established in academia. Here’s another, more recent reaction:

Straus’ effort to remove the onus from serialism and serialists by insisting that neither had the “power to coerce and compel,” therefore, there could have been no “tyranny” except as “myth,” misses the crucial point: the real, lived-and-experienced atmosphere of the 50s and 60s was dominated psychologically, aesthetically, intellectually, and riven by the earlier emergence of a power-house of artistic presence in the persons of Arnold Schoenberg and his two satellite, equally strong artist-composers, Alban Berg and Anton Webern…. [T]he guileless, benign picture Straus tries to sell us fades before the reality he strives so hard and ineffectually to displace and deny. His tactics of detoxifying serialism and serialists, which remind me of efforts to denazify Hitler’s Germany or debolshevize Stalin’s Russia, simply do not convince.

Had he paid more attention to the palpable presence of the 12-tone, serialist dominated journals which set the tone of the period…, understood that American academic composers took readily to serialism, its logics, methodologies, magic squares, set theories because it now gave them something solid and intellectual that offered certainties where previously none had existed, then he would have been better able to comprehend why under-graduates and graduate students in particular felt frozen and intimidated – why they resented and feared their teachers and the ideas they promulgated which disclaimed any value attaching to works produced in any way other than the serial….

Above all, Straus fails to comprehend that primarily the greater majority of the American and European post-W.W. II generations of serialists found in serialism an escape from the necessity to be artists and make art, and could still call themselves composers even though what they produced were more demonstrations or illustrations of theoretical-analytical thought processes or thought experiments than they were attempts to say anything artistically meaningful in persuasive human terms.

Does this come from some former grad student still smarting from rejection by his teachers? No. Does it come from a rabid Downtowner who hates all 12-tone music? No. Does it come from some mid-career composer angry because he isn’t getting performed enough, or can’t get a teaching position? No. It comes from an elder statesman, someone who was a professor rather than student during the period in question, a famous composer at the end of a successful career of orchestral performances. It comes from someone who had mastered the 12-tone language himself, and written many successful pieces using it. Thus spake George Rochberg.

The myth of a homophobic Charles Ives has gained traction, to the point that it sometimes seems that if a person knows only two things about Ives, one is that he wrote music and the other is that he hated gays. I alluded to this in my post about Ives the other day, and I received the usual questions. Let me set a couple of things straight.

The image of Ives as homophobe rests on two pillars: Ives’s abandonment of Henry Cowell after the latter was sent to San Quentin on a homosexual morals charge; and his regular use of effeminacy as an insult, calling people he didn’t like “sissies” and “old women in pants.”

To take the first charge: In 1997, during the Henry Cowell Centennial Conference at Lincoln Center, there was an exhibition of Cowell’s correspondence. One exhibit was a letter from Charles Ives, written to Cowell at San Quentin. It was warm, supportive, sympathetic, with no hint of disapproval. As I recall, it was written in Ives’s handwriting, which was odd, because by the late 1930s his wife Harmony was writing most of his letters for him. A bunch of American music scholars and I stood around wondering at this letter, which so flew in the face of the legend that Ives cut Cowell as a friend after the homosexual incident. We theorized that perhaps it wasn’t Ives who had trouble with Cowell’s homosexuality, but Harmony – which would explain why this was a rare Ives letter not in her handwriting. I have never yet seen this written about – perhaps some Ives scholar is saving it for a new book – but thus fell down to dust one leg of the Ives homophobia myth.

Parenthetically, I’ve always wondered why this myth reflected so much worse on Ives than on Cowell. After all, Cowell was charged with corrupting the morals of a minor, and I think most of my friends and acquaintances would agree that having sex with an underage person is a bad thing (at least morally bad), regardless of the sexual orientation involved. Why couldn’t Ives (or Harmony) have very reasonably disapproved of Cowell seducing a minor, if he had believed that’s what happened, without a charge of homophobia? Why is it assumed that Ives would have felt just dandy about Cowell and a 16-year-old girl? As it happens, Cowell seems to have been, if not completely innocent, more innocent than charged, and got screwed over by a vindictive DA. In any case, he was later given a full pardon, and the evidence against him was acknowledged as faulty. In my experience, everyone seems willing to believe poor Cowell was innocent – yet Ives continues to be blamed for an abandonment that, according to the evidence I’ve seen, never happened. In any case, Cowell remained Ives’s friend and wrote a fine biography of him in 1954, and if Ives didn’t do anything Cowell couldn’t forgive him for, I don’t see that the rest of the world has any business not forgiving him as well.

The second case is more difficult to make, and many will not be convinced by it – but I’m going to make it anyway. Like Ives, I grew up in a culture in which charges of effeminacy were a standard insult. In Texas in the 1960s, we called guys we didn’t like “sissies,” “girlie-men,” taunted them by saying they should be wearing a dress. This had nothing to do with homophobia. It had to do with our own fears of failing to live up to the unrealistic image of manhood impressed on our insecure imaginations, and to overcompensate we ascribed such failure to our enemies. (Ives, whose father was an impecunious musician in a family of solid businessmen, was probably acutely susceptible to this psychology.) For one thing, we were so ignorant of homosexuality that we thought it might be a one-in-a-million condition, something we would never encounter. I went into college talking this way, found that homosexuals were far more common than I’d been led to believe, and learned with a shock that the way I was used to expressing myself might be misinterpreted as disparaging gays. Of course, I cleaned up my speech immediately – I had no desire to offend any group of people for being who they were, and many of my new friends were gay. Calling people “sissies” was admittedly a graceless and ugly way of expressing ourselves – but to label it homophobia is to retrofit an anachronistic standard into a culture that wouldn’t have understood the charge. (Why hasn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger been vilified as homophobic for his “girlie-men” comment? What did Ives say worse than that?) Nor was it misogynistic: in the macho John Wayne world I grew up in, men were supposed to be men, and women – rather idealized and installed on pedestals – women. It was an unfortunate world in a lot of ways, and I suffered from it and continue to. But homophobia and misogyny played no conscious part in it.

Thus it was that when I read Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata at age 14, nothing about its language jarred me – that’s how people I knew talked. One of the wonderful things about Ives’s prose writing is how much of the vernacular slips into his high-toned philosophical discourse. The unfortunate flip side of this is that some of that vernacular, in hindsight and from the point of view of a civil rights era, now has a nasty ring to it. Since I come from a part of the country whose enlightenment level creeps along more slowly than the average, my upbringing in the 1950s was probably on some kind of cultural par with Ives’s in the 1880s. Ives called critics “sissies” and “Rollos” when they were hidebound and conventional in their thinking – which are not characteristics associated with gays. In any case, if you’re going to charge Ives with being a homophobe, then you might as well charge me with having been one for the first 20 years of my life, and I alone know how misguided such an interpretation would be.

Ives assigned the royalties for his Third Symphony to Lou Harrison, who conducted its premiere in 1946 (and gave him half of the Pulitzer Prize money he won from the work). I don’t know how “out” Lou was by that point, but I find it difficult to believe that Ives was in complete ignorance of his sexual orientation. In short, I have never seen any evidence that Charles Ives ever in his life discriminated against a gay person, or insulted one, or avoided one, or even that he hated gays. He did hate people who were intellectually timid and conventional, and in disparaging them he employed an old-fashioned vernacular idiom that no educated person would ever use today, because it now sounds homophobic. That’s unfortunate. Ives’s music enjoyed a big surge in popularity in the 1960s, and a lot of people who thought it undeserved have picked away at Ives’s minor personal faults with a tenacious schadenfreude that seems all out of proportion. Ives’s alleged homophobia should not be one of the first things anyone learns about Ives. In fact, it needn’t be brought up at all – unless someone has some evidence.

I’m like a backward berry
Unripened on the vine,
For all my friends are fifty
And I’m only forty-nine.

My friends are steeped in wisdom,
Like senators they go,
In the light of fifty candles,
And one on which to grow.

How can I cap their sallies,
Or top their taste in wine?
Matched with the worldly fifties,
What chance has forty-nine?

Behold my old companions,
My playmates and my peers,
Remote on their Olympus
Of half a hundred years!

These grave and reverend seniors,
They call me Little Man,
They pat my head jocosely
And pinch my cheek of tan.

Why must I scuff my loafers
And grin a schoolboy grin?
Is not my waist as ample?
Is not my hair as thin?

When threatened with a rumba,
Do I not seek the bar?
And am I not the father
Of a freshman at Bryn Mawr?

O, wad some pawky power
Gie me a gowden giftie,
I’d like to stop at forty-nine,
But pontificate like fifty.

Ogden Nash: The Calendar-Watchers, or
What’s So Wonderful About Being a Patriarch?