Archives for August 2012

ELK LAKE, NEW YORK – Charles Ives wrote in his Memos that he got the idea for the Concord Sonata in the summer of 1911 at Pell’s. Pell was Henry Pelletier Jones, a friend of Ives’s father-in-law Joseph Twichell, his establishment more formally known as Pell Jones’s Cabin. The Twichell family used to spend a few weeks in August or September there, and Ives and his wife joined them in 1909, 1910, and 1911. Ives suffered from what was then called neurasthenia, kind of a tendency toward nervous breakdowns (and his first heart attack came in 1906, when he was only 31); he needed lengthy getaways.

In the 1950s, Pell’s got more officially renamed the Elk Lake Lodge, and it’s still as much in business as ever, so Nancy and I have come here to see the landscape in which the Concord Sonata was born. Nothing like taking a vacation and writing it off as a research expense. I thought no one here would have any idea about Ives, but actually the welcome information packet in the rooms has this in the last paragraph: “It [Elk Lake] looks much the same as it did when Charles Ives composed parts of his symphonies No. 3 and No. 4 there between 1909-1911.” And the manager, when he finds out guests are classical music fans, enjoys telling them that Ives stayed here.

There’s a photo of Ives, with his wife Harmony almost hidden behind him, sitting at the beach downhill from Pell’s lodge in 1909: working on his music, smoking, wearing a hat and shielding himself from the sun with an umbrella:

And a hundred and three years later, possibly to the week, on that very spot, SO WAS I!!

The log wall just behind Ives remained there for a century after his last visit, but was finally destroyed by the six-foot high flood caused by Hurricane Irene, so it was replaced just last year with the rock wall behind me. And here’s the view Ives and I both had from this spot:

There’s also a photo of Ives getting out of or into a rowboat, so for the first time in my life I got in a rowboat, and rowed around the islands out in the middle. (We did use to go canoeing a little around the Susquehannah years ago, but physical activity has never really been my thing.)

I took the photo at top from our lovely little private balcony at the Emerson cabin, where we stayed the first night. It would be so fitting to think Ives had worked on the Concord in the Emerson cabin, but actually that property wasn’t acquired until 1919. Things change a lot in a hundred years, even if Elk Lake itself has been kept in pristine condition.

 

 

The black metal band Liturgy is down to just two members plus electronics. I don’t know how they do that yet, but I’ll see them play in Hudson, NY, Friday night and find out. Meanwhile, you can see them here, backstage at the Pitchfork festival in Chicago last month. Hunter Hunt-Hendrix does most of the talking, but you can see my son Bernard look really, really cool, and he talks a little about having been born in Chicago. Not a life I could have chosen, but I’m envious.

One of my sabbatical-and-summer goals, which I have now achieved, was to finish five out of the fifteen chapters of my book on the Concord Sonata. In particular, I wanted to finish the analytical chapters on “Emerson” and “Hawthorne.” Between them those two movements account for more than 3/4 of the sonata’s pages, and by far the most complex ones as well; comparatively, “Alcotts” and “Thoreau” will be a snap. If I could finish “Emerson” and “Hawthorne,” I thought, accounting for every measure and system – and I have, with 14,000 words and 80 musical examples in the “Hawthorne” chapter alone – then the rest of the book will fall into place. I’m waiting to hear back from a publisher, and I could go on and on about about neat things I’ve found, but this is going to take a couple of years and I don’t want the information pre-empted, even by myself. Thus, partly, my recent uncommunicativeness.

One thing I’ve been realizing, though, is how much we need a new performing edition of the Concord. Ives published two editions, in 1920 and in 1947, with quite a few changes between them. A lot of dissonance was added to “Emerson” in particular, but, as Geoffrey Block has shown in his article “Remembrance of Dissonances Past” in Philip Lambert’s Ives Studies, the bulk of it was restoring dissonances that Ives had omitted from the first edition as possibly seeming too radical. (Specifically, many of them were dissonances in the orchestra part of the discontinued Emerson Concerto from around 1909.) So much, once again, for the idiot charges about Ives “modernizing” his music after the fact, may they rot in music history’s dustbin.

Theoretically, my object is to analyze the 1947 score in every detail, but I keep running into deviations between that score and the recordings I’m familiar with, especially John Kirkpatrick’s, which I’ve known for 43 years. For instance, there’s a passage at the end of “Hawthorne” where the “Human Faith” theme returns in an abstract thicket of notes at the middle of page 47, with a couple of chromatic oddities thrown in (left hand):

The normal version of the theme wouldn’t have the D-natural, and the final G’s and A’s would be sharp. This next example is how it appears in the manuscript, and how Kirkpatrick plays it in both his recordings, 1945 and 1968:

OK, so Kirkpatrick didn’t like some of the 1947 changes, and in fact, refused (uncharacteristically) to help Ives prepare the new edition because of it. But in the copy of the 1920 score that Ives used to make the changes for the 1947 score, I can find where Ives did indeed add naturals to the second (tied-over) D, but I can’t find any naturals on the G’s and A’s – and Ives caused a lot of problems, all through the sonata, by sometimes canceling accidentals and sometimes not, usually assuming that they shouldn’t carry over but occasionally, it seems, forgetting. So I don’t feel at all confident that the naturals in 1947 are right. I can imagine, at this kind of hairy point in the movement where all is chaos, maybe he really wanted a weird, chromatically distorted version of his main theme. But certainly in the first draft he wanted it the way Kirkpatrick plays it, and I can’t, myself, trace the process through the manuscripts that led to the 1947 alteration. Meanwhile, we know that Ives himself liked to play the piece differently every time he sat at the piano, so there’s plenty of rationale for taking liberties – but the present score only gives one version, and how many pianists get to go through all the sources and see the different versions? It would certainly be nice to have an edition that includes all the reasonable ossias.

A worse problem has to do with the quotation of the hymn Martyn in F# on page 34. In both 1920 and 1947 versions, it’s just triads in the key of F#. But many of you will recall that Kirkpatrick adds a lot of little dissonant “shadow” thirds as afterbeats:

Again, Ives didn’t print these thirds in either score. Some of them – the first few – are included on one of his manuscript pages, along with some other variations that didn’t fly. (Next to those thirds he wrote “angels of our” and the next word looks like “inarla” – but could be “nature”? A Lincoln reference? But if so, why?) More of them, but only single notes, not thirds, are included in the version of this passage that got drafted into the second movement of the Fourth Symphony. A few of them, but also some very different lines, went into another piano piece based on “Hawthorne,” The Celestial Railroad. Kirkpatrick adds them tastefully, they sound consummately Ivesian, and I’m so used to his recording that I’m disappointed when I hear a recording that omits them. But while Ives certainly toyed with the idea, I can’t find a manuscript with textual evidence for the specific ones Kirkpatrick plays. So I feel kind of guilty now when I hear them – they’re so beautiful, and Ives clearly thought about them, but after a quarter-century of planning a new edition of the Concord, he equally clearly decided not to add them.

As for the pianist who wants to add them, where will you find a text? Well, I took these down in dictation from Kirkpatrick’s 1968 recording, but Kirkpatrick also produced his own hand-written private performance edition of the Concord, which I’ve seen. (Not a printable option: he puts in meters everywhere, and the Ives scholars are trying to roll back what’s seen as Kirkpatrick’s too-free hand with the Ives scores.) Among the recordings I have, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Nina Deutsch, and Robert Shannon play some of these thirds, but fewer than Kirkpatrick and not always the same ones; and most of the other pianists stick to the score and omit them. So a good, new performance score should offer some guide to including them, since they’re now so much a part of the tradition – but which text to use? How many different possibilities? The hell of it is, Ives probably would have found any solution acceptable, but a good performance edition should offer guidelines as to what the options are. As it is, you can’t really prepare an authentic performance of the Concord, it seems, without doing your own research at the Yale library.

No new edition is in the works, and I’m ambivalent – I’m very specifically keying my analyses to the 1947 edition, and a new one that was paginated differently could render my book obsolete. You just can’t use measure numbers with this piece, because there are so few bar lines. Ives sure knew how to make things difficult and ambiguous.

(And yes, I know all about Ives’s house in West Redding being up for sale. Sad story, very expensive land, the huge sums it would take to save it aren’t forthcoming. I feel even sadder that the Ives birth-house in Danbury, which I visited and toured so many times, is literally falling down. Seems nothing can be done. Not being a one-percenter, I try not to think about it and think about the Concord manuscripts instead.)

David Patterson, whose copious and well-researched writings about John Cage I’ve quoted nearly every time I’ve written about the man, has a new obsession these days: William Carey Wright (1825-1904), a composer whose son Frank Lloyd Wright became a famous architect. The video linked to is part of a Kickstarter program to finance a recording of W.C. Wright’s music, and you get to hear some of it, along with speculation about why F.L. Wright considered his buildings “symphonic,” and why he built them up with motifs and variations the way a composer writes a symphony. Interesting stuff. Nothing wrong with a man finally getting his music heard because his son became famous (wrote the composer whose son is guitarist for the black metal band Liturgy).

 

Apparently “The Silence Does Not Exist” (as Google retranslates it) can now be read in Italian.

UPDATE: I do enjoy Google’s automatic translation of Amazon’s Italian synopsis:

In the world of contemporary music is a before and after “4’33” “of John Cage. This composition is not known, this silence” active “- not a pianist who plays for 4 minutes and 33 seconds – is one of the works art’s most famous, controversial and misunderstood of all time. Kyle Gann tells the imaginative life of John Cage and analyzes his masterpiece, illuminating the philosophical and musical influences: from Marcel Duchamp to the theory of Zen, by Erik Satie with white linens tli Robert Rauschenberg. the centenary of the composer’s birth and exactly sixty years after the first groundbreaking performance of “4’33” “, this essay explores the interpretations and the reactions that the hand has aroused Cage (a Dadaist experiment? a reflection on ‘Listening? a joke?), and the ways it has changed all the music that was written that night in 1952 to today.