Archives for July 2013

I’m having a frickin’ blast with the Essays Before a Sonata – this is what I was born to do. My essay on Ives’s Epilogue is longer than Ives’s Epilogue. I’m finding that Ives articulated a more consistent and cohesive worldview than I expected, but his writing style is like someone set off a hand grenade under his finished manuscript, and the sentences all floated down in random order. So my job is to gather all the thoughts into little piles, and present them in logical, linear order, and he actually comes off as something of a philosopher (very unlike Cage in that respect). In short, his substance is more rigorous than his manner leads one to assume. With a caveat that I’ll spend the next year revising and revising and revising, here’s a sample to whet, if possible, your appetite:

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Ives’s panegyric on Emerson is chaotically written, as if in exaggerated imitation of Emerson himself, but it does circle around a number of discrete themes. Ives presents us with an Emerson that is a perfect type: a subjectivity maximally open to the infinite. Emerson’s expression is chaotic because no one subjectivity can take in the infinite all at once, but can only focus on a few shards of truth at a time. Yet because no partial truth is sufficient as even a temporary stopping point, his focus, limited as a condition of being a subjective mortal, is continually restless. “His very universalism occasionally seems a limitation” (p. 17) because the persistent focus on the infinite prevents him from pausing at any pragmatic resolution; thus Alton Locke’s irrelevant question, “What has Emerson for the working-man?” (p. 20) “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao,” proclaims Lao Tzu, and nothing that can be named is real enough to Ives’s Emerson to stand for reality. He “wrings the neck of any law that would become exclusive and arrogant.” (p. 14) He is conservative and radical both at once, because neither conservatism nor radicalism is broad enough to grasp infinity. He is “too catholic for the churches” (p. 14) because no one religion identified and codified by man is wide enough to embrace the infinite. “Many of the sincerest followers of Christ,” writes the Christian Ives, “never heard of Him” (p. 19), because what we call Christianity is merely a culturally specific, and thus inadequate, image of the infinite. It is said of the physicist Werner Heisenberg that when asked, once, what the opposite of clarity is, he replied, “Accuracy” – since accuracy is a measurement of the particular, and clarity is the apprehension of everything-at-once. Emerson, at least Ives’s Emerson, might have agreed, for as he quotes Michelangelo, “An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.” A ruler in the hand ensures accuracy, but the eye, seeing the whole, provides clarity….

Ives makes of Emerson such a flawless ideal that it occurs to us that he is not so much describing a historical person as subscribing to an epistemology. Truth is the totality of all collective experience, we might sum up this doctrine, yet any one subjectivity can only perceive a relatively tiny part of the total. These parts of the total, these shards of truth, must be grasped as they are, but we must not be quick to try to combine or arrange them into a smaller unity, for such an assemblage can only be partial, and from it the whole cannot be inferred. A partial truth too hastily assembled from too few experiences cuts off our perception of the larger whole. The desire to comprehend, the search for cohesiveness, leads us to too soon circumscribe the range of our experience and draw conclusions from too small a sample. Therefore the inability to comprehend is not a liability, and Emerson’s alleged shortcomings are actually signs of his virtue. That it is sometimes difficult to tell where Emerson’s train of thought is going shows his loyalty to his thought as he experienced it – his stream of consciousness, we would say today. “Vagueness, is at times, an indication of nearness to a perfect truth… An apparent confusion, if lived with long enough, may become orderly.” (p. 22) For Emerson to have imposed order on his floods of insight would have falsified them. “[O]ne of the keenest of his academic friends said that he (Emerson) could not explain many of his own pages. But why should he! He explained them when he discovered them, the moment before he spoke or wrote them.” (p. 22) This brings us up to the edge of a more radical proposition in Ives’s Epilogue (which we will cite more fully later) that what substance may be contained in music has less to do with what the music communicates to the listener than with what the composer felt while writing it.

Thus, whether Ives was tremendously inspired by Emerson’s style or whether he grasped on to Emerson because of the latter’s affinities with his own thought, he is using a vision of Emerson – not a false one, but a subjective and partial one nonetheless – to justify his own composing tendencies. As musical ideas occur to Ives, “he fills the heavens with them, crowds them in, if necessary, but seldom arranges them along the ground first” (p. 22) – and he ascribes this to Emerson’s thoughts in the essays. Emerson’s “paragraphs didn’t cohere,” and neither do some of Ives’s musical paragraphs. “[E]ach sentence seems not to point to the next but to the undercurrent of all” (p. 15) is partly true of Ives’s Emerson movement, though he latter does contain some developing variation; perhaps it actually seems truer of the Hawthorne movement. In other words, this essay is not merely an apologia for Ives’s Emerson movement, but for all of Ives’s music in which the continuity does not immediately seem logical. Assuming that the composer has closely followed his or her inspiration, the listener may not understand the music at first, but may take a deeper pleasure in coming to understand it tomorrow; thus the relationship between the composer and the piece of music is more important than that between the music and the listener. “Initial coherence today may be dullness tomorrow, probably because formal or outward unity depends so much on repetitions, sequences, antitheses, paragraphs, with inductions and summaries.” (p. 23) In Ives’s epistemology, music that is too clear, too easily understood, represents a lower-level reality that a listener will get tired of as he evolves.

After all, the way Ives describes Emerson is not how I would describe him. When I read Emerson with Ives ringing in my ears, as I have almost my entire life, with the exploring of spiritual immensities and hurling down of thunderbolts, I am always surprised to notice how mild-mannered the old man seems. Everything in Emerson is about balance, while the more intellectually intemperate Ives (like Thoreau, unable to exaggerate enough to tell the truth) runs to extremes. In “Fate” Emerson amasses his examples of all the ways in which we can’t possibly escape fate, and then builds up a repertoire of ways in which we have that in ourselves that will counterbalance fate. In “Self-Reliance” he proclaims his independence of all human conventions and institutions, and then launches into all the reasons that this is virtually impossible. Emerson’s tone can fly thrillingly into the grandiose at times – it’s true he “doesn’t care if he loses his head or not” – but he is more often like the kindly uncle who “thinks everyone is as good as he is.” One does sometimes lose the thread in Emerson, and can’t tell what a paragraph or two is supposed to have to do with the topic, but I find that the main thing working against an impression of unity in Emerson is his habit of not beginning paragraphs with transitional phrases, so that the beginning of each paragraph has the feel of a new inspiration. (Curiously, this very paragraph-linking continuity device lacking in Emerson is one Ives uses meticulously and successfully in his Emerson movement.) Think of how different our impression of Emerson might be if we only had one audio file of him delivering one of these lectures! In general, though, I find the paragraphs in Emerson arranged topic by topic, and though the ordering gets a little stream-of-consciousness at times, I do not sense nearly as much disunity in him, or so complex a kind of unity, as Ives ascribes to him. It need not surprise us too much that we learn more about Ives’s composing process from his Emerson essay than we do about Emerson. Emerson was a remarkably good fit for the self-image Ives wanted to project, but not a seamless one.

The estimable Howard Boatwright (1918-1999), a composer whose works I have been remiss in not seeking out, did the heroic yeoman’s work of editing and fully annotating the 1962 reprint of Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata. Ives’s quotations of other writers are so frequent and so maddeningly inexact that the mind boggles to think how much Emerson, Carlyle, Channing, Ruskin, and so on Boatwright must have read to find as many citations as he did. It is almost tragic to consider how much Google would have sped up the task today. Boatwright did not succeed in finding everything, and some of the quotations he gave up on, today, one can put in Google and go directly to the source. One, on pages 20-21, is:

Draw if thou canst the mystic line
Separating his from thine
Which is human, which divine.

It’s surprising that Boatwright didn’t find this poem at the head of the “Worship” chapter in Emerson’s The Conduct of Life, since he found so many other quotes in that book. Another, on page 27:

Melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads when once the penetrating key-note of nature and spirit is sounded, — the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat, which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood, and the sap of trees.

This is from the essay on Swedenborg in Representative Men, another of the books Boatwright traced so many passages to. Ives misquotes it as “All melodious poets,” which may have thrown him off. With all due respect to his hard work and achievement, Boatwright made the occasional mistake or misassumption, and we could use a revised edition of Ives’s Essays today. (One mistake I caught as a teenager: in the quarter-tone essay, Ives mentions a “chord of nine-five-five” [p. 115], which Boatwright takes to mean a ninth and two fifths, i.e. C-D-A-E, and laments, “There is no indication as to which notes belong on the quarter-tone-sharp keyboard.” But clearly Ives was speaking in quarter-tone distances: C, E-1/4-tone#, G, A-1/4-tone#. I guess I was subconsciously on my way to becoming a microtonalist.)

UPDATE: I should add that there are references in the Essays so obscure that I despair of ever pinning them down. For instance: “Wagner seems to take Hugo’s place in Faguet’s criticism of de Vigny… that in de Vigny the artist was inferior to the poet.” (p. 74) De Vigny was a French playwright of nihilistic tendencies, Faguet a later literary critic, and I have searched every appearance of de Vigny’s name in Faguet’s works on Gutenberg.org, including the ones in French, which I can read a little bit, but uncovered no such direct comparison to Hugo. A copy of de Vigny’s Cinq-Mars was found in Ives’s library, but of course there was no mention of Faguet in the introduction to Gutenberg’s copy of that, either. Perhaps a committee of multilingual musicologists can someday devote themselves to rooting out every last reference.

One of the most fun aspects of writing this Concord Sonata book is going sentence by sentence through Essays Before a Sonata –  a book I’ve read many times starting around 1969 – and determining exactly what Ives was trying to say. (In fact, I’m surprised that I’ve spent almost as much time in my career parsing the literary writings of composers as I have their music.) Ives’s writing is often not at all clear, though his unclarity sometimes has an underlying intention; and he got some historical facts wrong, which it is amusing to correct. One of my main self-imposed tasks is to nail down as far as I can his famous distinction between substance and manner in the Epilogue. Taking all his examples, I’m coming to the conclusion that substance was, for him, a kind of emotional maturity and higher moral viewpoint on the part of the artist that enabled him or her to make art edifying, even life-changing, as well as merely entertaining; in other words, only a highly evolved person is capable of artistic substance. This is, to say the least, easier to gauge in literature than it is in music. One of his more revealing exemplars is the novelist George Meredith (1828-1909), a Victorian whose name I don’t recall ever having seen outside of the Essays, where he is somewhat incongruously contrasted with Richard Strauss (purveyor of mere manner). So I’m reading Meredith’s The Egoist (1879), which certainly does view its characters’ actions from a profound psychological viewpoint. And I was particularly taken by this rather typical passage:

Popularity with men, serviceable as it is for winning favouritism with women, is of poor value to a sensitive gentlemen, anxious even to prognostic apprehension on behalf of his pride, his comfort and his prevalence. And men are grossly purchasable; good wines have them, good cigars, a goodfellow air: they are never quite worth their salt even then; you can make head against their ill looks. But the looks of women will at one blow work on you the downright difference which is between the cock of lordly plume and the moulting. Happily they may be gained: a clever tongue will gain them, a leg. They are with you to a certainty if Nature is with you; if you are elegant and discreet; if the sun is on you, and they see you shining in it; or if they have seen you well-stationed and handsome in the sun. And once gained they are your mirrors for life, and far more constant than the glass. That tale of their caprice is absurd. Hit their imaginations once, they are your slaves, only demanding common courtier service of you. They will deny that you are ageing, they will cover you from scandal, they will refuse to see you ridiculous.

This is substance indeed.

 

As I’ve said before, peer review is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? My Concord Sonata book, of which I’ve completed about nine of fifteen chapters, has certainly been passed around through the ranks and meticulously examined. Or rather, bits of it have. Yale UP didn’t want to send more than a couple of sample chapters out to readers, which I rather understand. And, in search (futile so far) of funding to take a semester or year off and devote myself to the remainder, I’ve had the book evaluated by a number of grant-giving panels whose comments come back to me. (My favorite so far: “This looks like a project that will get completed whether Gann receives funding or not.”) Only they don’t get to see the actual book, but rather my outline, argument, bibliography, and so on. And the bibliography is restricted to a page, which even in 11-point font leaves off a lot of books I’m reading, and the outline of the book to three pages. In short, it’s been quite an extensive range of music professors judging how good Essays After a Sonata: Charles Ives’s Concord will be, based on excerpts, quotations, outlines, and so on.

What’s amusing and a little perplexing is that these professors themselves don’t seem to understand how the process works; because, based on these meager crumbs of information they have to judge from, they are alarmed at my potential sins of omission. “What, I don’t see Professor X’s book listed in the bibliography – he’d better not try to write this book without consulting it, it anticipates much of what he’ll want to say!” “I don’t see what Gann can add to the topic that Professor Y hasn’t already said in his own book, he’s set the bar very high!” “Gann reveals no awareness that Professor Z has already covered this territory thoroughly!” They all have their favorite Ives authors, which may be themselves for all I know, since it’s all anonymous, and they seem petrified that I’m going to venture out into public without reading the available literature. And yet they compliment my previous productivity, and my overall knowledge of American music, so they don’t seem to imagine that I’m a rank amateur.

I’m a conscientious guy, and I don’t like making a fool of myself in public, so I dutifully note their prescriptions. Beneath the end table next to me as I write this, to my wife’s despair, stand three two-foot-high stacks of scholarly books about Ives that I’ve been methodically plowing through. It’s true I am accustomed to writing about music that is almost devoid of previous commentary, but in this case, I recognize that dozens of books have dealt with the Concord Sonata at some length. My strategy has been to read maybe half of them first (they all repeat the same information quite a bit), to then mostly write my own book in draft, and afterward to go back and read the rest of the literature, and reread much of what I’d read, to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Given that I approached this project, like all my projects, with many things I already wanted to say on my own, reading the entire literature before I started just seemed terribly inefficient, as though, at my age, I were going to be able to hold all that information in mind through the rest of the process. So, yes, I wrote some sample chapters without having yet scoured all possible sources.

And you know what? I have found that the bulk of what I want to say about the piece hasn’t been covered before at all. Somehow I already knew this, because if my curiosity could have been previously sated I wouldn’t have launched on this project in the first place. But it turns out Professor X’s book barely mentions the Concord, and contains almost nothing I can use. Professor Y’s book looks at the Essays Before a Sonata from a completely different standpoint than I do, and his book and mine hardly overlap. Professor Z argues from premises I consider bone-headedly mistaken. No one else before me has untangled the rhythmic processes at the end of the Hawthorne movement, or even noticed them. No one else has read Henry Sturt’s 1909 article “Art and Personality” to find all the unacknowledged influences on Ives’s Epilogue. No one else has asked why Ives intentionally altered the Hegel quote he uses. I am ominously warned that I will only reinvent the wheel (and even if so I might roll it more entertainingly), but this mountain of books hardly touches on the aspects of Ives that fascinate me. The Concord Sonata, and the Essays, are, from my increasingly well-informed viewpoint, practically virgin territory. Everyone talks around them and says very little about them.

What puzzles me is the simultaneous admiration expressed for me and also the collective fear that I’m suddenly going to break ranks and lurch out on my own, abandoning the rest of the profession. Academia always gives me a sense that I risk offending if I fail to keep my aims modest, even timid. I am supposed to be adding a few bricks to the magnificent edifice of knowledge that we’re all involved in; god forbid I should run out and build a nice sturdy storehouse out of planks I cut myself, on the shore of my own Walden Pond. We all like to be quoted, and I am as guilty as anyone of picking up a new book on a topic close to my research and immediately scanning the index for “Gann, Kyle, 13, 39, 122.” But I have also seen myself rather inordinately over-quoted, and wondered if the author had trouble coming up with much to say for himself. I wish the community had a little more interest in what I have to say, and considerably less fear that I was going to neglect to quote all the right people. Ives wrote his Essays at age 45, I’m now age 57 and I’ve been reading them for 44 years. Given that I come to this from a lifetime of involvement in post-Ives American music, and also a background in philosophy and aesthetics rare for a musicologist, I assert that I should be able to write an interesting book about the topic without ever having consulted any other book at all! And even so I do my scholarly duty.

One of the debilitating misconceptions in the composing world today is that music is always a strictly individual project, that collective creativity plays no role at all. Academia seems to have the reverse neurosis, that we should all link arms, each new book adding only a modicum of detail to the outline already established. I suppose I am not yet ascended to the level of someone like Charles Rosen, so that my musings on musical topics are generally considered, in themselves, worthy of note. Fair enough. But I do, likewise, evaluate book proposals for publishers myself, and if the author seems in general to know what he’s doing, I do not jump to the conclusion that if he hasn’t said a particular thing yet, that he’s in mortal danger of never saying it at all. I think I am more generous to other academic authors than some of them are to me, and aware that there’s only so much that one can get across in a prospectus, and – even more importantly – that large projects can evolve into something quite different from what was previously envisioned. I do not exult, as they tend to, over petty mistakes that an editor would have easily caught. (One academic once doubted my ability to write an American music book because I momentarily forgot there was no k in Frederic Rzewski’s first name.) It takes a certain amount of imagination to read a proposal, or prospectus, or sample chapter, and envision the latent trajectory of the whole; it takes none to chip away at vulnerable details out of context. And I find this collective impulse on the part of scholars to rein in their colleagues and discourage originality rather disheartening, distasteful – and uninsightful.

Here’s writer and English professor Ben Yagoda, saying the exact same thing in today’s Times that I said recently in my piece about what I’ve learned about composing from being a writer:

[G]ood writers (like good conversationalists) are always conscious of the person or persons on the receiving end of their words.

Robert Graves and Alan Hodge called their guide to writing “The Reader Over Your Shoulder,” and it’s an apt metaphor, bringing to mind a little guy perched up there, looking over your stuff and reacting the way a hypothetical reader might. I actually prefer to think in terms of an imagined face-to-face encounter, with eye contact the operative metaphor. Bad conversationalists and bad writers look out into the distance or at the floor, and don’t notice when their listeners’ faces are puzzled, annoyed or bored. Good writers perceive that and respond. And the best writers anticipate these reactions, and consequently are able to avoid them.

Also, I’d say, the best composers.

My partner in minimalist conference-running David McIntire actually went to San Francisco and visited the elusive Dennis Johnson this week, composer of the five-hour piano piece November and gaining quite a belated reputation recently as a minimalist pioneer. Dennis is self-admittedly dealing with the early stages of Alzheimer’s, but he staves it off via physical exercise and took our musicologist friend on quite a hike. Turns out Dennis was born November 22, 1938, so we have that now for the reference works; and David saw some music, without enough context to make sense of it yet. On a clear day Dennis can see the Golden Gate Bridge from his apartment, and David sent me a few photos of him. I can’t think now why I had pictured him as tall and heavy-set: