For forty-five years, since I was a middle-schooler in Dallas, Ives’s Essays before a Sonata has been one of the most important books in my life. Lately it’s become tremendously underrated. Some Ives scholars have dismissed it nearly entirely as a jumble of psuedo-intellectual bloviations. The literature about the book has mined it piecemeal, a few sentences at a time, for insights into Ives’s biography, or to prove that he was highly influenced by Emerson and considered himself a Transcendentalist – or to prove the opposite. One of the themes of my book is that the Essays are undergirded by a more stable and coherent aesthetic project than Ives’s scattershot prose style leads one to suspect. As I rhetorically ask in the preface, “What if Ives had things to tell us, not about himself, but about musical creativity, that only a composer of his stature was in a position to know?” He was tremendously well-read and clearly spent years forming a rational justification for his compositional waywardness, and while his manner of verbal expression may not have been the most efficient for getting his points across, it’s clear that he deliberately wrote prose in a way analogous to the way he wrote music. The book is indeed kind of a mess, but so much of its language sends chills up my spine.

I’ve written here before about Henry Cecil Sturt (1863-1946), a rather undistinguished. post-Hegelian Oxford tutor whose essay “Art and Personality” Ives wrote the Essays partly in response to. The musicology world has virtually ignored Sturt, but more than a little of Ives’s rhetoric was borrowed from him even when Ives doesn’t acknowledge the quotation. The passages below are the run-up to the climax and the climax, though not the end, of my 15,000-word essay on Ives’s Epilogue, remarking on Ives’s relation to Tolstoy and Hegel as well as Sturt. Again, page numbers are from the standard edition of Essays before a Sonata. One of the things I’d love to accomplish with my book is to get the Essays taken more seriously than they ever have been.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

From Chapter 12: A Harmony of Imperfections: The Epilogue

The part of Ives’s argument that may have seemed most radical at the time is his separating off beauty from substance. Beauty has nothing to do with substance (p. 76), he affirms, and then gives examples of circular reasoning to show, a little disappointingly, that beauty can’t be defined. “The word ‘beauty’ is as easy to use as the word ‘degenerate.” Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you [pp. 76-77].” In claiming that we can reach no consensus on the meaning of beauty, Ives may be following the lead of an 1898 book he had rather cursorily dismissed in the Prologue: Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? Tolstoy, preparing to encapsulate the entire history of the various theories of beauty, throws up his hands in advance over writers’ inability to define the term: “…after whole mountains of books have been written on the subject by the most learned and profound thinkers… the question What is beauty? remains to this day quite unsolved, and in each new work on aesthetics it is answered in a new way.”[1]

Yet, despite this disclaimer Tolstoy, once he’s gone through definitions from an impressive wealth of historical treatises starting with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica of 1750, does manage to distill all the answers down to derivations of two fundamental concepts: beauty is a manifestation within an object of “the Perfect, of the Idea, of the Spirit, of Will, or of God”; and that beauty is “a kind of pleasure we receive which does not have personal advantage for its object,”[2] i.e., that is disinterested and does not create desire. (“Selfish pleasure,” writes Sturt accordingly, “is the death of art.”[3]) His feigned complaint aside, Tolstoy ends up demonstrating that there is far more unanimity on the definition(s) of beauty, at least in modern times, than Ives follows up on. Likewise, these conceptions align with the definition given in George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty, published in 1896 and based on lectures given at Harvard just prior to that. “Beauty,” Santayana concludes, “is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.”[4] Moreover, as Sturt had also written, the perception of beauty has the subjective experience of seeming objective:

When I judge a thing to be beautiful, my judgment means that the thing is beautiful in itself, or (what is the same thing more critically expressed) that it should seem so to everybody. The claim to universality is… the essence of the aesthetic; what makes the perception of beauty a judgment rather than a sensation.[5]

Apparently, Tolstoy is the only other writer on aesthetics in the two centuries before Ives to deny beauty (defined as pleasure) a major role in the value of art. (Coming close, Sturt soft-pedals the role of pleasure, and defines beauty otherwise; “Beauty,” he writes, “is a kind of high vitality,”[6] a more ambiguous phrase that Ives takes over from him.) Tolstoy considers the idea of beauty/pleasure as all-determining in art a perversion of the upper classes once they left traditional Christianity behind. He points out how often writers on aesthetics begin with a repertoire of approved artworks and then stretch the theory to fit them: “There exists an art canon according to which certain productions favored by our circle are acknowledged as being art… and the aesthetic laws must be such as to embrace all these productions.”[7] The truth all these writers since Baumgarten have missed, by Tolstoy’s lights, is that the importance of art lies not the pleasure it gives, but in “the purpose it may serve in the life of man and of humanity.” He seizes on the common ability of one person’s narrative or means of expression to recreate his inner emotional state in, or transmit it to, another person, and concludes that, “To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling – this is the activity of art.”[8] Tolstoy’s corollary to this is, that as “Humanity unceasingly moves forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid,” the best art is that which communicates feelings which will be most conducive to the spiritual improvement of society. And for Tolstoy, what determines the fruitful direction of spiritual improvement is the great truths of religion.

In a sense this is so parallel to Ives’s intent that I’m a little surprised he didn’t seize on Tolstoy as more of a potential ally. Both wanted to remove beauty/pleasure from the criteria for art and emphasize instead a perception of spiritual truth and inspiring example. It’s true that Tolstoy’s criteria were relentlessly Christian in a statically conservative way, and that, since for him aesthetic theory superceded individual works of art, Beethoven’s Ninth must be accorded bad music for perverted tastes because it was unintelligible to the common man: “I am unable to imagine to myself,” he wrote, “a crowd of normal people who could understand any of this long, confused, and artificial production, except short snatches which are lost in a sea of what is incomprehensible.”[9] Though Tolstoy’s vision allowed for the improvability of mankind, it did not include the possibility of art that could be ahead of its time, that might be incomprehensible at first but understood later. And so Ives waves Tolstoy off completely: “From his definition of art, we may learn little more than that a kick in the back is a work of art, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is not [p. 5].” It seems to me, though, that Ives and Tolstoy were theoretically similar in their aesthetics: the purpose of art for both was not to give pleasure (pleasure often being a symptom of a temporary perversion or “under-value”), but to lead man toward further spiritual enlightenment. It was mainly their religions that differed, Ives’s being more ineffably mystical and less church-bound. Then again, Ives – writing a sonata that remains “difficult” to average listeners even a century after its completion – was surely uncomfortable with Tolstoy’s insistence that art should be understandable, and instantly understandable, to the working class…..

[1] Tolstoy, What Is Art?, p. 20.

[2] Tolstoy, What Is Art?, p. 41.

[3] Sturt, “Art and Personality,” p. 308.

[4] Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 31.

[5] Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 26.

[6] Sturt, “Art and Personality,” p. 313.

[7] Tolstoy, What Is Art?, p. 44.

[8] Tolstoy, What Is Art?, p. 51.

[9] Tolstoy, What Is Art?, p. 158.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

It may seem peculiar, in retrospect, that Ives writes this long Epilogue to a book meant to accompany the Concord Sonata without any direct allusion to his own music (except, glancingly, in the second paragraph). Without seeming to make a special case for his own work, he is attempting to arrive at an aesthetic groundwork that will justify his deviations from musical normalcy. One passage from Sturt must have offered a particular point of identification, though he only quotes the second sentence of it: “Suppose that we come upon a strange artist who is producing work which he affirms to be art. The work may not be quite like any other work in the world, but it is art so long as he feels in doing it as true artists feel, and so long as his object is akin to the objects that true artists admire.”57 Ives must indeed have felt like that “strange artist” he refrains from mentioning, the one whose “ears were on wrong,” and Sturt seems to offer the artist permission to make this judgment for himself. Accordingly, Ives needs to arrive at a viewpoint in which his own confidence in his music can be set equally against all those musicians who, over the years, thought he was doing something incomprehensible, if not amateurish or insane.

Sturt begins his essay with a complaint that aesthetics has too often been written about art experience from the viewer’s standpoint, and not enough from the artist’s.58 And Ives writes at times as though the validity of art lies less in the listener’s recognition than in the experience the artist had while creating it. “Whether he be accepted or rejected, whether his music is always played, or never played – all this has nothing to do with it – it is true or false by his own measure…. [p. 81]” And again, leading to the Sturt quotation, “The artist does feel or does not feel that a sympathy has been approved by an artistic intuition and so reflected in his work. Whether he feels this sympathy is true or not in the final analysis, is a thing probably that no one but he (the artist) knows but the truer he feels it, the more substance it has…. [p. 81]” As to the question of whether Debussy’s music contains substance, “Debussy himself, doubtless, could not give a positive answer. He would better know how true his feeling and sympathy was, and anyone else’s personal opinion can be of but little help here [pp. 80-81].” Ives veers close to admitting that the substance of music might not be entirely accessible to the listener, in a rather astounding statement: “what music sounds like may not be what it is [p. 84].”

In this connection, Ives pulls a Hegel quotation from Sturt’s article, and it is one of his rare deliberate and admitted misquotations:

If we may be permitted to leave out two words, and add a few more, a sentence of Hegel appears to sum up this idea, “The universal need for expression in art lies in man’s rational impulse to exalt the inner…world (i.e., the highest ideals he sees in the inner life of others) together with what he finds in his own life – into a spiritual consciousness for himself [p. 81].”

This is from a passage that Sturt quotes at greater length, in which Hegel discusses the question, “What is man’s need to produce works of art?” Hegel’s answer is that man “reduplicates himself” “in order to strip the outer world of its stubborn foreignness, and to enjoy in the shape and fashion of things a mere external reality of himself.”59 The original form of the sentence Ives takes pains to change (after unconcernedly misquoting so many other lines) is: “The universal need for expression in art lies, therefore, in man’s rational impulse to exalt the inner and outer world into a spiritual consciousness for himself, in an object which he recognizes as his own self [emphasis added].”60

Now this is odd, coming from a composer who painted, in his music, a child’s Fourth of July, Manhattan’s Central Park in the dark, the voices of Americans singing a hymn at a train station after the sinking of the Lusitania – Hegel speaks of art as exalting the inner and outer world, and Ives pointedly deletes the “outer.” In addition, he appends his own new apposition to “inner world”: “the highest ideals he sees in the inner life of others.” It is as though he is limiting substance to the inner world of someone, if not specifically of the artist himself, perhaps thinking that portraying the outer (physical) world – as Debussy did in La Mer, and Strauss in the Alpine Symphony? – comes too close to what he defines as mere manner. In any case, we’re in somewhat dangerous territory, aesthetically speaking, if only the artist him- or herself can determine with exactitude whether the sympathy and artistic intuition in an artwork rise to the level of substance. For if only the artist knows whether his own work is spiritually and emotionally true, what artist, speaking for himself, would confess otherwise? Perhaps Ives, with his long history of being told that his ears were on wrong and his music was distasteful, needed exactly this permission to make the determination for himself, and without external ratification. And what artist reading this – or writing it – can vouch with assurance that his or her creative experience was as intense as Ives’s?

Let us not shy away from Ives’s intent, nor politely assume that he couldn’t have meant to assert anything so heterodox, but grasp his point explicitly though it lead to absurdity. The entire force of his life might reside in his most extravagant claim. The artist has an experience while creating his art, and the spiritual intensity of that experience constitutes or determines the substance of the art. (This does not equate, we will remember, to feeling the specific emotions he may be depicting.) The listener to the music, the viewer of the art, may not recognize the quality of the substance – that is of no matter. Only the artist can “know how true his feeling and sympathy was, and anyone else’s personal opinion can be of but little help here.” We cannot found an aesthetics on the reception of the subjective and fallible, so often imperceptive, so easily misled, audience. Nor is it necessarily fatal if the artist lack the manner (the technique? the competency?) in which to communicate his or her vision, as long as the vision is embodied in the art. In the Prologue (p. 6) he speculates that “A true inspiration may lack a true expression,” though he admits that if it is not true enough to result in a true expression, we might have to conclude that “it is not an inspiration at all.” We perhaps find ourselves in the territory, mentioned in Ives’s Memos, of the old stone-mason John Bell, whose raucous and off-key singing George Ives excused to a parishioner who complained: “Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds. If you do, you may miss the music. You won’t get a heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds.”61 (Ruskin’s “harmony of imperfections” comes to mind.) It was the fervency with which John Bell believed what he was singing, not its technical polish, that made it art. What has sound got to do with music? What music sounds like may not be what it is. There might be a great work of art, and only the artist knows about it – only the artist experiences it. In retrospect, in fact, this is a simple description of pretty much the state Ives was in in 1919, and had been for many years. It is a state many an artist knows at a moment of triumph alone in her studio.

Of course, what is desirable, what makes the slow, difficult, inconsistently remunerative process of art socially worthwhile, is that that private state is generally deemed temporary. The art is shown, the music is listened to, and through whatever process of neuron mirroring makes artistic perception possible and potent, a psychological process occurs that recreates, according to whatever inexact process of analogy, a frame of mind within the viewer or listener something like the one that was originally in the artist. Even the listener to old John Bell might be spellbound by the inspiring sincerity of his flawed performance. As Ives had already seen, this process is infinitely vulnerable to failure, and in the 1920s, as a result of mailing that sonata out, he was about to gather a huge new wealth of evidential experience. It was possible that no one would ever respond to the Concord Sonata in the way that Ives hoped. It is hypothetically possible, according to this theory, that there exists, somewhere in the world, a great work of art whose substance no one has ever perceived, that has gone unrecognized, that might even be inaccessible to anyone living. Perhaps what was important about it was that the artist had the experience. Perhaps the mere fact of having created the glorious, never-to-be-understood work would make its way into the collective unconscious and indirectly elevate mankind’s perception of art. In that sense, perhaps theory will have to eternally presume the artist innocent – at least, an artist who has created a work we don’t understand.

Ives’s own musical vision was validated in the end, though hardly universally; of all the world’s music lovers, it is a safe guess that only a relatively tiny percentage would choose to continue listening to the Concord Sonata. And what does the quantity or percentage of appreciative listeners matter? It is tempting, though useless, to wonder whether Ives might have formulated the point differently, could he have foreseen how much lasting and universal substance music lovers would have indeed found in his difficult music by the 21st century. Perhaps we must assume a Platonic world of art, inaccessible to general knowledge, of which the public reception of art is only an imperfect mirror. We can admit the theoretical point while also granting its pragmatic inutility. On the other hand, perhaps the mere recognition of that occulted Platonic realm might serve to inspire a little welcome humility among those who are so quick and confident to affirm that our musical society is an efficient meritocracy, and that the artists who get the most visibility, attention, and honors are certainly those who deserve them. Occasionally we find that it was not Louis Spohr who was so great, as we thought, but the obscure Franz Schubert; and who knows but that another Charles Ives might be composing unheard-of things, today, in isolation? If Ives can teach us that the public world of art is a mere caricature of the real thing, and that we should revere aspects of creativity that don’t seem obvious or available to us, perhaps that is a worthwhile and sufficient lesson for the Essays Before a Sonata.

 

57 Sturt, “Art and Personality,” p. 328.

58 See Sturt, “Art and Personality,” pp. 291-92.

59 Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, p. 36. One of Hegel’s examples in evidence is charming: “Even the child’s first impulse involves this practical modification of external things. A boy throws stones into the river, and then stands admiring the circles that trace themselves on the water, as an effect in which he attains the sight of something that is his own doing.”

60 Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, p. 36.

61 Ives, Memos, p. 132.

I am stunned by the news on Facebook that musicologist and my close friend Bob Gilmore has died at age 53. He had survived a bout of cancer when I saw him two years ago in Amsterdam and London, and was physically reduced, but last I’d heard he was on the road to complete recovery. What a loss! He was not only a superb scholar (biographer of Harry Partch, anthologizer of Ben Johnston) but an incredibly irreverent spirit, incisive and fearless. I’ll never forget, after corresponding with him for years, pulling into Dartington, England, on the train and seeing his wild red Irish-fro emerge from the crowd – and then having to quickly acclimatize myself to his irrepressible personality. Two days ago I bought his new biography of Claude Vivier, and was planning to write about it here. I had never much warmed up to Vivier, but one evening in Dartington Bob took me back to his apartment and gave me the crash course, scores and recordings of the most striking works. I was fairly convinced, and added Vivier to my teaching repertoire. Bob was a walking intellectual’s party, his wit, sarcasm, insight, and appreciation of drink and conversation irresistibly sweeping one back into 1920s Paris (or more apropos, perhaps Shaw’s London). The times I could tell you about – in Dartington, where he brought me to teach twice, we drank for hours at a bar that had been there since the 15th century. And consider the musical intellect that could smoothly segue from Partch and Johnston to Vivier. I can’t picture a world without him. I can’t imagine that long, rippling, sardonic laugh ringing out no more.

 

One of the passages in my book I’m most proud of is the one in which I analyze my transcriptions of Ives’s recorded performances of the Four Transcriptions from Emerson (passages of the Concord‘s Emerson movement that he revised to be closer to the way he played them). One of my external readers advised firmly that this chapter should be stricken from the book. That’s right: for the first time, someone transcribed what actual notes Charles Ives played when he considered that he was playing Emerson, giving us a chance to see how what Ives thought with his fingers differed from what he wrote in the score, and a distinguished (one presumes) music professor declares that this has no place in a book on the Concord Sonata! It didn’t teach him anything about the Emerson movement, he says; but might it teach us something about Ives? Isn’t peer review grand?!

I have taken advantage of the blog format to do something I can’t do in a book: provide audio files of the recordings I transcribed, which I managed to embed in the blog page. They work on my browser, and I hope they work on yours.

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From Chapter 6: The Emerson Concerto and its Offshoots

On four occasions in the 1930s and ‘40s Charles Ives went into a recording studio and had someone record him playing the piano:

* Columbia Graphophone Co., 3 Abbey Road, London, June 12, 1933 – shellac pressings
* Somewhere in NYC on an unknown date in the mid-1930s (between 1934 and 1937) – Speak-O-Phone discs on aluminum
* Melotone Recording Co., NYC, on May 11, 1938 – lacquer-coated blanks
* Mary Howard Studio, NYC, on April 24, 1943 – lacquer-coated blanks

He recorded some 42 tracks, some interrupted and picked up where they left off because the recording media of the day would not accommodate more than five minutes to a side. Three of the 1943 tracks were excerpts from the Emerson movement, seven and a half minutes in total1; in 1938 he tried to play Hawthorne and quickly broke off; and in 1943 he managed to play The Alcotts warmly and in its entirety, a precious document we will have occasion to study. Fifteen of the tracks, including some of the most complete, were of a relatively new piece called Four Transcriptions from Emerson, which consisted of sections from the Emerson movement as rewritten in the 1920s; they are attempts to play the movement more the way he liked playing it himself than was represented in the sonata’s 1920 publication, and the first in particular has passages from the original Emerson Concerto written back into it. He also played some of his Studies for piano, including portions of Nos. 2, 9 (subtitled The Anti-Abolitionist Riots of the 1830s and 1840s), 11, 20, 23 – all of these except No. 20 were written from material in the Emerson Concerto.

Thus, of the 42 tracks Ives recorded across these four occasions, no fewer than 31 were of material related to Emerson from the Concord Sonata. Ives was clearly intent on getting across his idea of Emerson with his own hands. He was only 58 at the first recording session, 68 at the final one, but though the recordings let his impressive prowess at the keyboard shine through at moments, he sounds like a rather frail old man. Diabetes at its worst had once reduced his weight to a hundred pounds, vitiated his eyesight, led to heart palpitations, and caused crippling neuritis in both arms, and though his weight and health began improving after the initiation of insulin treatments in April of 1930, his weakness is evident in his fumbling and at times arrhythmic interpretations. [All this information is footnoted to Budiansky’s Mad Music elsewhere in the text.] He often breaks off playing, muttering, “Oh, no, I can’t,” or ”Oh, I have to stop,” or ”That’s enough.” He also hums or sings or groans at moments, and the most touching entry is the song “They Are There” with Ives singing lustily but erratically as he accompanies himself, made in three takes in 1943 – he apparently hoped the song might gain some currency in the wave of World War II patriotism. Also, one item I find psychologically gratifying is that in 1938 he suddenly played a couple of minutes of the first-version Largo for his First Symphony that Horatio Parker had rejected and made him rewrite because it went through too many keys. Forty years later, he still had that music in his head, and he was not going to let Parker have the last word.

The sound quality, coming from soft aluminum or lacquer-coated discs, is highly variable, but for a 2000 compact disc release on CRI records, Richard Warren Jr., the curator for historical recordings at Yale University, transferred the original discs to digital sound files using a Packburn Audio Noise Suppressor, and repairing needle jumps via computer. Following CRI’s much-lamented 2003 demise, New World Records reissued the recording in 2006. Some of the tracks had already appeared on a Columbia vinyl recording during the Ives centennial. Mary Howard, the recording engineer for the 1943 session, remembers Ives saying that certain people had asked questions about how to interpret his music, and added, “Interpret! Interpret! What are they talking about? If they don’t know anything about music – well, all right, I’ll tell them.” “[H]e’d pound and pound,” Howard recalled, “and Mrs. Ives would say, ‘Now, please take a rest.’ He drank quantities of iced tea, and he’d calm down and then go back at it again, saying, ‘I’ve got to make them understand.’” And it helped. As we’ll see, these recordings have provided considerable insight toward restoring that mythical behemoth the Emerson Concerto…..

[Here follow sections on the Emerson Concerto as realized by David Porter, the related Piano Studies, and the Four Transcriptions from Emerson.]

Ives’s 1933 recording of the First Transcription (though he does not limit himself to that score) is one of the best documents we have tracking his thinking about the Emerson Concerto. He more or less plays the first two measures of the Transcription (corresponding to the first system of the Concord, and mm. 3-4 of the Concerto), and then skips to m. 14 of the Concerto (corresponding to page 2 of Study No. 9, for a long passage absent from the Transcription), rejoins the Transcription toward the end of Study 9 and then follows it into the Study No. 1 material, proceeding into Study No. 2 and following it to then end. In short, he basically plays the first 87 mm. of the Emerson Concerto except for mm. 1-2 and 5-13. This is as close as we can get to hearing Ives play the Emerson Concerto himself, as he had it in his hands and head, including the first three centrifugal cadenzas. He left us a compelling record that this really was the way he wanted it. Except, he has a moment of seeming uncertainty at the beginning, going into a little repetitive riff on a few chords before rebeginning the descent, something as in Ex. 6.9.

Ex. 6.9 Emerson Transcription No. 1 opening, as played by Ives in 1933

One has to wonder, at such puzzling moments in the recordings, whether he was intentionally improvising, or had a moment of indecision or misremembering about what to play next.

Thus the First Transcription. Our primary reason for spending time with the Third Transcription is that Ives interestingly (and clearly intentionally) deviated from the score every time he recorded it. As (soon to be) printed, it follows the sonata movement fairly literally, with almost unnoticeable note changes, from sys. 14-3, m. 3, through the first six beats of sys. 16-4, at which it dies out with a repeated C and a few pppp dissonant chords. How Ives played the movement at his four recording sessions, however, was different indeed. The first measure (corresponding to sys. 14-3, m. 3 in the sonata), he never plays literally at all. In each case he played a rather rambling introduction which eventually leads into the second movement of the printed Transcription. In my own transcription of these four introductions as recorded, we can get a view of Ives as improviser over a ten-year period.

A word about the following (and preceding) transcriptions: I do not vouch for the notes in detail. The sound quality of these recordings is not at all pristine. I have played the audio files at different speeds in an attempt to get all the notes, and in so doing, a note that seems audible at one speed will disappear at another; a note sustained from a chord may sound like it has been restruck when it hasn’t; dissonances deep in the bass may be mistaken for tremolos and vice versa. I have even made use of pitch-transcription software, which, because it will sometimes register harmonics of notes as well as the fundamental, I have found generally inferior to my own ears. The rhythms are more secure, since one can pinpoint in the audio file the exact time-point at which a note starts, and Ives does maintain a fairly clear feeling of beat. I think my transcriptions are adequate for showing the variations in Ives’s improvised versions of various passages, and I think they are followable with the recordings, but I am sure that close listeners to the recordings will disagree with some of my note choices, as I have so many times come to disagree, upon further listenings, with my own.

Subject, then, to the limitations of converting audio to notation, Ex. 6.10 shows what Ives played to open the Third Transcription in 1933. [The third Emerson transcription starts abruptly with page 14, system 3, measure 3 of the Concord. Admittedly, the scores of Ives’s Transcriptions are in the process of being published and not available yet.]

Ex. 6.10 Beginning of Third Transcription as played by Ives in 1933

Note the opening on a Bb; the move to a diminished seventh chord; the momentary cadence on Eb-major; the rise to A and then Ab; the C-minor triad in the right hand contradicted by the E-natural in the left; chromatic rumblings in the bass around D, C#, and Eb; and then the Transcription pretty much takes off with its second measure. A couple of years later, Ives records the piece again, and we find all these elements preserved, though with some differences (Ex. 6.11).

Ex. 6.11 Beginning of Third Transcription as played by Ives in mid-1930s, take 1

In 1938 Ives makes a third recording, and all the elements we’ve named are still intact except for the cadence on Eb, which is replaced with a flurry of chromaticism and a recitative-like solo line (Ex. 6.12).

Ex. 6.12 Beginning of Third Transcription as played by Ives in 1938

In 1943 Ives makes his final recording. Here (Ex. 6.13) the opening Bb proceeding to a dminished seventh chord is jettisoned, replaced with a more dramatic flourish leading directly to the treble Ab and also dispensing with the Eb-D treble sonority which, in the other three versions, led into the notated part of the Third Transcription.

Ex. 6.13 Beginning of Third Transcription as played by Ives in 1943

These four versions of an improvised introduction to the Third Transcription contain enough similarities to demonstrate that Ives had in his head (and fingers) a number of elements which, for him, constituted the opening to this work. Such recurring elements as reappear always occur in the same order. Porter found some of these elements in two sketches on pages associated with the Emerson Transcriptions. At f4890 (Ex. 6.14) we can see the Eb triad (though with a D# and B-natural), some notes moving to the A-C dyad, the chord with G on top going to A and G#, the G-C-Eb motive with E-natural in the bass, and the F-major triad with an E descending to D#.

Ex. 6.14 Notes from Third Transcription at f4890

At the end one will notice a D in the bass, and at f4947 – a printed page of the Third Transcription with many emendations by Ives (Ex. 6.15) – we find the Eb-B-D motive (Ives’s naturals can sometimes look almost indistinguishable from flats), and it precedes the B-D#-F#-A-C-E-G chord we’ve already seen.

Ex. 6.15 Notes from Third Transcription at f4947

If we compare the notes Ives played in his first recordings with those in the score of the Third Transcription and Sonata movement, we see some correspondences that would be difficult to notice, since the fugal theme on top is omitted and some of the notes are sustained at much greater length (Ex. 6.16).

Ex. 6.16 Correspondence of Ives’s improvisations to the notated Third Transcription

Thus, for the correlating passage of the Emerson Concerto, Porter combined the Third Transcription (identical to the Sonata movement in this case) with some of the elements found at f4890 and f4749 and, using Ives’s 1933 recording as a guide, worked a corresponding two-measure piano intrusion into this point (Ex. 6.17).

Ex. 6.17 Emerson Concerto, mm. 264-267

In later years, as we can notice above, Ives began treating the Third Transcription’s opening a little more rhapsodically. Nor does he follow the printed score closely once he reaches m. 2 of the score. In particular he tends to replace the first nine beats of sys. 14-5 (in the sonata) with a group of repeated chords and then some repeating motives or chromatically moving chords, before restarting with the syncopation in the notated tenth beat. The point of the recording for Ives, one gathers, was to introduce the quick runs that were eventually notated on page 15, so he tends to play that passage fairly literally. Each version except the 1943 (which he abandoned in mid-take) does die away with a repeated note (or minor-ninth dyad) and chords, but the number of repetitions vary, as do the chords. These variations suggest what has been speculated28, which is that Ives was probably making the recordings from memory, without a score in front of him. The loud Eb-B-D motive with the bass octaves or tremolos is related to a minor-2nd/minor-3rd motive, but there seems to be no hint of the fugal theme in the introduction, nor of any of the other Emerson themes. Ives didn’t write this material down as part of the Third Transcription, but he carried it around in his head and could reproduce it fairly similarly, if evolvingly, at intervals of several years each. This gives us as close a picture as we can get of how he would improvise on and expand a piece that he thought of as relatively fixed in its material.

From the comparison of these transcribed recordings with the printed Third Transcription from Emerson and the sketches, I think we learn something both about Ives’s improvisation style and his playing in general. It seems from the available evidence that when he played rather extemporaneously Ives tended to have in mind a musical structure that he had already worked out. His idea of timing and tempo was extremely flexible, and here we find him holding out at great length notes that he had written as a series of eighth-notes in the final score. He seems not to be just “making notes up,” but recomposing, as he plays, a passage that had for him some kind of firm identity in its relationships, though he felt free to interpolate motives and chords within it. He will write next to a sketch, “I find I play something like this here” (as Porter found on f2230)29, or write “sometimes” next to an accidental. This is not free improvisation, but reconsidering over and over how a passage might have been written. One thinks of the complaint of Ives’s grandmother who, hearing Emerson lecture, found that “the printed text, which she knew almost by heart, was hardly more than an outline in his lecture. Apparently Emerson liked to trust to the mood of the moment….” One could hear some of these recordings and think of Ives’s printed scores as merely outlines. “Music may resent going down on paper!,” Ives wrote to Cowell.30 The classical musician’s inability to identify with that jazz attitude has been the source of misunderstandings about Ives.

1 The passages of Emerson Ives played in 1943 included system 5-3, beat 10, through p. 6; sys. 17-1 through 18-1, m. 1; and sys. 14-2, beat 4, through 18-1, m. 1.
2 Budiansky, Mad Music, pp. 1, 207, 213.
3 Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History, p. 210.
……..
28 By, for instance, James Sinclair in the liner notes to Ives Plays Ives, New World Records 80642-2, p. 6.
29 Porter, p. 17.
30 Ives to Henry Cowell, August 12, 1928; quoted in Owen, Selected Correspondence, p. 155.

All material copyright © Kyle Gann 2014

All that is currently clear is that Essays After a Sonata: Charles Ives’s Concord will be delayed, as musicologists argue over whether I’ve flattered them enough. But they can’t silence me, and as I’ve been chary of posting excerpts of the book for fear of getting scooped on some of my ideas, it is perhaps time to spring some of those ideas out into the world. This way you can judge the book, piecemeal, for yourselves, and savor the naughty thrill of reading a book someone doesn’t want you to read. Of course, it may be – who knows? – that my blog readers will quickly tire of my personal insights and demand that I add in more and more quotations from other Ives books already in print. In that case I will be humbled, and forced to concede that the musicologists were right after all.

So I start here with the passages explaining why I think Ives’s opposition between substance and manner may have had its source in the art critic John Ruskin. In an early review of my book proposal, an anonymous prof sternly warned me that the subject of Ives’s intellectual inheritance had been exhaustively mined by Peter Burkholder in his Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music, and that I would find nothing new to report. Peter’s book is indeed excellent, but Ruskin is not mentioned in it (nor is Tolstoy, Hegel, or Henry Sturt, all of whom I discuss in terms of their appearances in Essays Before a Sonata). Peter had his priorities and I have mine. My book does not render his superfluous, nor vice versa. It would be as ludicrous to fault him for not doing what I did as it would to fault me for not duplicating him. There is room in Ives’s world for at least two people to frame complementary narratives of his mental development.

One recurring idea in my book is that when one traces the quotations in Ives’s Essays to their source, the original context often tells us more about what Ives was thinking than the specific quote does. (All pages numbers within the text refer to Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata.)

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From Chapter 4: Emerson: The Essay

…A sentence from the 19th-century art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) at this point seems almost like a non-sequitur, but carries an unsuspected weight once one is aware of its original context: “Suppose I like the finite curves best, who shall say I’m right or wrong? No one. It is simply a question of experience [p. 23].” This is from a chapter in Modern Painters11 in which Ruskin is discussing the geometry of forms which imitate nature. He demonstrates, first, that curves such as a circle or oval are less pleasing than more gradually expanding curves that reach out to infinity (the spiral of a nautilus shell, for example), because we can perceive their (the former’s) endpoint and necessary repetitiveness; and, secondly, that the curves of a landscape tend toward the spiraling and infinite because of the natural forces which created them (for instance, a river flowing downhill gains more momentum as it descends, and gradually increases the angle at which it cuts into a hill; Ruskin was a natural historian before painting became his passion).

And so, contrary to what one might think on reading Ives’s isolated quotation of him, Ruskin is not acquiescing to the subjectivity of the perception of beauty, but indeed grounding it in a kind of geometrically natural objectivity. Ruskin continues: “[W]hen we find on examination that every form which… has been received as lovely,… is composed of these infinite curves, and that Nature uses them for every important contour, small or large, which she desires to recommend to human observance, we shall not, I think, doubt that the preference of such lines is a sign of healthy taste, and true instinct.”12 In other words, those with little experience might find the simpler, more self-contained forms more pleasing, but a more developed perception will learn to recognize that the curves that point to infinity, if more challenging to perceive, are closer to nature and therefore more profound. Thus Ives uses Ruskin, if you’re aware what Ruskin was really saying, to justify the more complex curves of the Concord Sonata as more analogous to nature, thus more satisfying to comprehend in the long run, than the quickly-apprehended outlines of a simple sonata form. And we can cite, though Ives doesn’t, this explicit example of Emerson’s agreement on this point: “A beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of.”13 (We will have much more to say about Ruskin in Chapter 12 where we discuss Ives’s Epilogue.)

11 Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. 4, IV. Banks, Chapter XVII (London: George Allen, 1902), p. 283.
12 Ibid, pp. 283-84.
13 Emerson, “The Poet,” in Essays, p. 212.

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From Chapter 12: A Harmony of Imperfections: The Epilogue

…Let us address more directly, then, before going further, the aspects of substance and manner. We know of no precedent for Ives’s use of these specific terms to indicate higher and lower artistic values, but 19th-century criticism is rife with such categorical oppositions.7 David B. Robinson notes in this connection Emerson’s distinction between genius and talent in his essay on “The Poet”: “Talent may frolic and juggle; Genius realizes and adds.”8 Ives’s demotion of the composer Max Reger from “genius” to “man of ‘talent’” on page 88 is perhaps an echo. But there seems to me to be a striking parallel between Ives’s project here and that of John Ruskin in Volume 2 of Modern Painters (1846). Ives quotes Ruskin only three times, but the contexts from which those quotes are taken are so apposite as to make me think Ruskin’s influence on Ives was more pervasive than has been noticed. The Emerson essay mentions Ruskin’s “imagination penetrative”; the “Imagination Penetrative” chapter of Modern Painters is preceded by one on the “Imagination Associative,” which Ives certainly also must have read. Here Ruskin draws a distinction between fancy and imagination parallel to Ives’s manner and substance, though referring to the artist’s process rather than the quality of the art. He describes the painter of mere fancy:

When an unimaginative painter is about to draw a tree… he probably lays on his paper such a general form as he knows to be characteristic of the tree to be drawn, and such as he believes will fall in agreeably with the other masses of his picture, which we will suppose partly prepared. When this form is set down, he assuredly finds it has done something he did not intend it to do. It has mimicked some prominent line, or overpowered some necessary mass. He begins pruning and changing, and, after several experiments, succeeds in obtaining a form that does no material mischief….

Where the powers of fancy are very brilliant, the picture becomes highly interesting; if her images are systematically and rightly combined, and truthfully rendered, it will become even impressive and instructive; if wittily and curiously combined, it will be captivating and entertaining.9

Sounds like manner to me. Ruskin then describes the process of an artist who is capable of imagination:

If… the combination made is to be harmonious, the artist must induce in each of its component parts (suppose two only, for simplicity’s sake,) such imperfection as that the other shall put it right. If one of them be perfect by itself, the other will be an excrescence. Both must be faulty when separate, and each corrected by the presence of the other. If he can accomplish this, the result will be beautiful; it will be a whole, an organized body with dependent members;—he is an inventor. If not, let his separate features be as beautiful, as apposite, or as resemblant as they may, they form no whole. They are two members glued together. He is only a carpenter and joiner.10

The one painter composes a painting from images of nature stored in his memory, each one of them perfect independently; the other imagines the painting as a whole, full of imperfections in the individual forms which harmoniously balance each other and create a texture reflecting nature in its complexity and underlying emotive expression. (Ruskin’s visual examples, too lengthy to cite here, are impressive and worth looking up.) Though Ruskin is difficult to quote succinctly, here he is again on the fanciful painter:

Now, I suppose that through the whole of this process, he has been able to refer to his definite memory or conception of nature for every one of the fragments he has successfully added… But, as far as the process of combination is concerned, it is evident that, from beginning to end, his laws have been his safety, and his plague has been his liberty. He has been compelled to work at random or under the guidance of feeling only, whenever there was anything left to his own decision… He has walked as a drunken man man on a broad road; his guides are the hedges; and, between these limits, the broader the way, the more difficult his progress.11

Now, imagine how much Ives may have recognized himself in the subsequent contrasting portrait of the imaginative painter, and what a heady compliment it must have felt:

The advance of the imaginative artist is precisely the reverse of this. He owns no laws. He defies all restraint, and cuts down all hedges. There is nothing within the limits of natural possibility that he dares not do, or that he allows the necessity of doing. The laws of nature he knows; these are to him no restraint. They are his own nature. All other laws or limits he sets at utter defiance; his journey is over an untrodden and pathless plain… He saw his tree, trunk, boughs, foliage, and all, from the first moment; not only the tree, but the sky behind it….12

Ruskin’s division is more severe than Ives’s: a painter is capable of either fancy or imagination, but the processes are mutually exclusive. And, like Ives (with his Beethoven/Strauss pairing), he draws this line not between good art and bad, but between sublime, permanently relevant art – and pretty good art that people like, but which does not manifest eternal values and will probably go out of fashion. In the “Imagination Penetrative” chapter, Ruskin takes Dante as an Imagination example in poetry, and Milton (no minor poetaster) as the poet of mere Fancy, whose description of Satan “is too far detailed, and deales too much with externals; we feel rather the form of the fire-waves than their fury, we walk upon them too securely….”13

Now the reader has in mind the very clear distinction (possibly too speciously clear to be true, once one contemplates it) that Ives had in mind before writing, and that he was going to recreate in the sphere of music; this juxtaposition may throw the entire essay into relief. The word fancy was not going to retain any intellectual heft by 1919. In using substance and manner, he focuses on not the creative faculty of the artist but qualities of the artwork, which already reduces the rhetorical dynamism a notch, and is going to be harder to make stick in a medium as immaterial as music. He does not possess Ruskin’s phenomenal powers of description. The aspects that make music transcendent are not as easy to pinpoint as those of poetry and painting. A Ruskin-like analysis of why the “Archduke” Trio is an objectively better piece than Also Sprach Zarathustra might serve his purpose, but would mire him in endless details. In 1846 Ruskin was straining to preserve an Enlightenment tradition that landscape painting was a scientific branch of natural philosophy, and that, rightly done, it imparted true scientific knowledge of natural forms14; by 1919, artistic perception had come to be understood as more subjective, and Ives has Henry Sturt on his other shoulder lamenting the impossibility of objective criteria. But as part of his philosophical and moral (but not artistic) conservatism, he feels the force of Ruskin’s dichotomy.

I would venture that by not making more of his Ruskin quotes, Ives is soft-pedaling his indebtedness; possibly recognizing that in the 19-teens Ruskin’s reputation was at the bottom of a slump, and would not aid his case.15 In a sense, Ives himself was in the position of the great Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), whom Ruskin began writing Modern Painters in 1843 to defend: pursuing goals outside the boundaries of the art form as currently understood, but which Ruskin could justify as embodying “a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.”16 Ives, too retiring to even bring up his own music, is hamstrung trying to do for himself what Ruskin did for Turner. It’s fascinating, though, that Ruskin pointed to imagination as a harmony of imperfections conceived as a unity, as opposed to a collection of self-sufficient types. I think we could recognize the Concord Sonata in that characterization.

And so Ives Ruskinizes as best he can. Substance (to collect Ives’s scattered near-synonyms) has to do with reality, quality, spirit, character, spiritual consciousness, inspiration, affection, a divine spark, and truth. To return to his Emerson essay, “It gives the sincerity to the constant spiritual hopefulness we are always conscious of, and… a note of exultation in the victories of ‘the innate virtues’ of man [p. 31].” Paraphrasing one of Ives’s quotations of Thoreau (p. 32), it “satisfies hunger” rather than merely “gratifies the palate.” If an artist’s work lacks substance, it may, in a sense, be not his own fault (or at least not from lack of hard work), except insofar as every person is responsible for his or her own spiritual development. An artist needs to cultivate a kind of radical honesty, a larger insight into the workings of the human mind not based on his own education or prejudices, but in a universal sympathy, let us say even a love of one’s fellow man that makes him or her want to reach out through art to share with the world. As Ives states it most clearly,

Substance in a human-art-quality suggests the body of a conviction which has its birth in the spiritual consciousness, whose youth is nourished in the moral consciousness, and whose maturity as a result of all this growth is then represented in a mental image. This is appreciated by the intuition, and somehow translated into expression by “manner” – a process always less important than it seems…. (p. 75)

The superior artist is, then, a superior person, or at least one who has overcome his or her own psychic limitations. “The finer the sense of justice, the better poet,” writes Emerson.17 A mean, petty, limited, and/or unevolved person could not produce art of surpassing substance.18 Ives seems to have been quite serious about this. In an insert intended for a possible second edition of the Essays (included by Boatwright as a footnote, since Ives didn’t specify where it should be placed), Ives hypothesizes about an artist who pretends to value freedom when he really means selfishness: “He must be free to express his great soul but forgets, that unfair & impatient, or even indecent treatment of his wife – means that he hasn’t got a great soul to start with… [p. 253]” And thus we must displace Charles Dickens, who treated his wife shamefully (and who was, incidentally, one of Ives’s favorite authors), from among the novelists of substance based on his biography, for the sake of whatever supposed traces it may have left in his fiction. (Likewise, forget about Ernest Hemingway.) Ives goes on to describe a composer who left his family to fend for themselves: “Look into this man’s or any similar character’s (art) music – live with it long enough – & you will gradually feel the decadent part of the man’s soul – making a strenuous perhaps beautiful sound, – but you can’t live with it long – any more than he could live with his family….”19

Such a belief in the necessary morality of great artists, which seems to arise in history periodically, is one of Ives’s affinities with Ruskin, who wrote that “no supreme power of art can be attained by impious men,”20 and, “It is, of course, true that many of the strong masters had deep faults of character, but their faults always show in their work.”21 The German Idealists (of whom we can take Sturt as a neo-Hegelian) separated knowledge and morality into independent spheres, and believed that art transcended its social context; Ruskin, coming from another tradition, fused art with morality, locating truth outside art and insisting that art be judged according to knowledge.22 There are, in the literature, innumerable anecdotes of famous artists and composers acting selfishly or vindictively, and occasionally someone will cite a munificent and generous human being who was, nevertheless, a mediocre artist (in fact, Ives had a good friend who he was forced to admit was just such an example: the composer John Becker23). Still, the correlation Ives posits here is a perennially attractive one. We run into a different strain of the same conviction among those who suspect T.S. Eliot’s poetry on the basis of his antisemitism, or Ezra Pound’s poetry due to his public advocacy for Italian fascism.

7 Burkholder notes that Ives’s mentor John Cornelius Griggs uses the words content and manner to discuss Debussy in Griggs, “Claude Debussy,” in Wilbur L. Cross, ed., Yale Review, Vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale Publishing Association, Inc., 1912), pp. 484-494. But they are not used as oppositional categories. Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music, p. 71.
8 David B. Robinson, “Charles Ives on Emerson and Art,” in Cody & Budd, On Emerson, p. 186.
9 Ruskin, Modern Painters (edited and abridged by David Barrie), (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), pp. 249, 247.
10 Ibid., p. 247.
11 Ibid., p. 250.
12 Ibid., pp. 250-51.
13 Ibid., p. 255.
14 Teukolsky, The Literate Eye, p. 36.
15 As a book on Ruskin would note in 1932, Ruskin’s reputation had fallen because he “invariably introduced a social, moral, or religious interest into the brilliant but dictatorial criticism of pictures.” Henry Ladd, The Victorian Morality of Art: an Analysis of Ruskin’s Esthetic (New York: Ray Long and Richard Smith, 1932); quoted in Teukolsky, The Literate Eye, p. 26. Plus, of course, the painter Whistler’s 1878 libel suit against Ruskin had made the latter look stodgy and a little ridiculous to the younger generation at the time.
16 Ruskin, Modern Painters (edited and abridged by David Barrie), (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), p. 266.
17 Emerson, “The Sovereignty of Ethics,” p. 179.
18 Hegel, though, with respect to musicians, provides a dissenting observation: “we often enough see very great expertness in musical composition, as also in execution, subsist along with remarkable barrenness of mind and character.” Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, p. 32.
19 Ives, Essays, p. 253.
20 Ruskin, Modern Painters (edited and abridged by David Barrie), (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), p. 238.
21 Ruskin, Lectures on Art: III: The Relation of Art to Morals, §72.
22 Mary Ann Stankiewicz, “The Eye Is a Nobler Organ,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer, 1984), pp. 55-56.
23 Budiansky, Mad Music, p. 232.

All material copyright © Kyle Gann 2014

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Had some previous book or article alerted me to this Ruskin-Ives connection, I would quote and footnote it with an obsequiousness that would make your head spin. But I had to come up with this myself.

Stay tuned, if interested, for more soon.

One of the things my Concord Sonata book is being criticized for is that all I do is analyze the music. Apparently I’m supposed to be bringing in multidisciplinary approaches: I dunno, historiography, reception history, gender studies. Musicology has moved on from the mere analysis of music, and by analyzing a piece I must be implicitly asserting that all I care about is the glorification of Dead White Males and the Great Western Canon. I am accused of a “music in a vacuum” approach (I thought that was called music theory) – and seriously, that’s being taken as a reason to prevent publication of the book. But as I say in the book, you have to see what something is before you can compare it to everything else in the world, and a lot of nonsense has been written about the Concord because no one’s ever written a close textual analysis of it. And what if analyzing music is what I’m trained at, and what I’m good at? Really, musicologists? To ply the trade I was academically trained in makes me a racist and sexist troglodyte? No good insight can some merely from close examination of a complex score? Even if I’m not trained in those other fields, even if other people are already doing that work, I have to do it too? As Larry Polansky once said to me, “Composers are now doing the work that musicologists used to do, while the musicologists are all off doing gender studies.” And now composers aren’t even allowed to do that in books anymore.

I was recently at a reception where I found myself among three other authors who had written admirable, major books on American music. Every one of them said he or she was thinking about putting their next book on the internet, specifically to avoid the peer-review process. I empathized completely. I’m going through it now with my Concord Sonata book, and I’m committed to it one more time, for my Arithmetic of Listening book with U. of Illinois Press, and, because microtonalists are so argumentative, I’m already dreading that ordeal. It’s mission creep: peer review is supposed, one assumes, to prevent the publication of misinformation, to verify that an author knows what he’s talking about, but anonymous readers take the opportunity to tell you how they would have written the book and push you towards conformity with their opinions. “I can’t recommend publishing this book until the author rewrites it to agree with my views!” And it’s insidious: a phalanx of scholars who have decided that a certain reading of the facts is the only legitimate one can prevent a writer who disagrees from being published; enough like-minded book reviewers can succeed, for a time, in stifling dissent. Peer review’s effect is to discourage all would-be writers except for the most sycophantically conformist. I find that just mentioning peer review is often enough to make a colleague’s face wrinkle in disgust.

So far, I have only been a reviewer in the cases of young, inexperienced scholars on their first book. They tend to make typical mistakes. The ambitious young scholar (the male especially) is eager to show off how smart he is, yet paradoxically convinced that his readers have read all the same up-to-date books and articles he has, and so he makes confoundingly elliptical reference to abstruse concepts and obscure writers that haven’t yet entered public currency. That was exactly me, at age 29. And my role as reader has been mostly to say, “You seem to know your business, but I have no idea what you’re talking about, and since I don’t want to read all those other books before I can read yours, will you please unpack your references and provide some context?” I tell them what I can’t understand as a reader, but I would never presume to tell them how to write the book, nor what opinions to express. But then, this isn’t really peer review, because I’m an old, experienced writer looking at a first-timer. And I insist that when scholars who have published less than I have are reviewing my work, that’s not really peer review either, but the less experienced taking potshots at the more experienced. I think by the time you’re on your fifth or sixth book and still in good academic standing, publishers should pay you the compliment of skipping the process.

I really shouldn’t complain about the readers’ reviews for my Concord Sonata book, because they were broadly complimentary and willing to attest that the path I had taken was both sound and original, and for once they didn’t even cavil about my colloquial writing style. (Perhaps my blog harangues are having some effect.) But their stern admonition du jour is that my writing shows “insufficient engagement with work in the field.” I’ve been studying the Concord since 1969, and 99 percent of what I have to say about it I learned on my own, but apparently if I mention a chord on page 17, and another author mentioned the same chord in a book written in 1994, I’m expected to preface my remark with, “As Professor X has aptly pointed out….” – lest the reader think I am arrogant enough to speak on my own authority, or – saints preserve us! – that I must not have read Professor X’s book!

Let me say at once that I quote many, many Ives scholars in the book, to an extent that guiltily felt, to me, like I would be perceived as going overboard to flatter my colleagues. I usually write books about topics that hardly anyone else has written about, but I knew what would be expected of me in this well-traveled terrain and gamely tried to comply. And yet, apparently, I should have done ten times more in this regard. I was directed toward an exemplary journal article, which I read, and saw what my reader meant: every paragraph contained quotations from other writers, strings of such quotations in series, a veritable quodlibet of borrowed scholarship, written in the apparent conviction that the juxtaposition of these familiar gems from the Ivesian literature would add up to some new and revealing picture. But since I had already read every book and article quoted, the essay gave me no new information, just the ersatz glow of a trip down memory lane. What would conceivably compel a scholar to collect so many sentences from other writers to bundle up in new packages? Outside of an upcoming tenure review, I can’t imagine. Can’t a person stand up in public and speak his or her own mind? I’m curious to know what the writer thinks.

A quotation is an ornament to a piece of writing when the quoted phrase is so striking and memorable that the author couldn’t have come up with anything as evocative himself. But if I can state an idea clearly (and little academic writing is as readable as mine), why would it carry more authority if put into a sentence I stole from another writer? If what I say is false, and its falsity has been demonstrated in a previous publication, then I should be told to do my homework. But if what I say is demonstrably true, what does it matter whether someone else has said it before? We are not medieval monks, that we fear to record the fact in front of us unless we can find a citation for it in Aristotle.

The hard truth, which perhaps they suspect, is that I sometimes ignore a book or article because I find it wrongheaded and uninsightful. (Perhaps the reviewer even wrote one of those books.) I have no reason to create new enemies by criticizing the argument of some journal article that my reader may not have read. If my argument diverges from Professor X’s, the reader can judge which is more convincing without my trying to downgrade Professor X. Part of my reason for writing the book, as I detail in the preface and footnotes but try not to bore the reader with, was my strong dissatisfaction with tendencies in recent Ives scholarship, and it was my gentlemanly strategy to set a superior example rather than engage others in intellectual combat; I was a critic for decades, and I’m tired of arguing. Books I read and disagreed with are listed in the bibliography along with the rest. If you decide to assume that because I didn’t refer to one I must not have read it, so what? And then, I don’t always disagree with everything I don’t quote. Occasionally I will say to myself, “Well, that’s a clever insight, but I didn’t come up with it, and there’s no need for me to partly obviate the reason for reading her book by reprinting its best idea elsewhere.” Sometimes an author is right, but his sentences are too clogged with jargon to be of use to me. I’m really good at analyzing music, and I read hardly anything analytical about the Concord that I hadn’t already figured out myself: if I had the insight independently, why quote someone else?

Is it not obvious how vanity-driven all this is? A friend of mine in the philosophy department says that to get published young philosophers have to quote articles by the editors of the journal they’re trying to get into; this is not intellectual discourse, but a petty brand of payola. Is the scholar’s life really so meager of reward that we have to ostracize the writer who fails to scatter enough crumbs of citation for his fellows on every page? Do we let external readers blackmail authors into mentioning their books? I will confess, when I see a new book on American music, to sometimes looking first in the index to see how often I’m cited, but I don’t think we should warp the discourse by catering to this; the absence of my name stings for a second, and then I forget about it. About a year ago I read an article that quoted me so many times that I felt rather more plagiarized than flattered, and wondered why the author couldn’t have come up with his own ideas. A wise and mature person will not take offense every time a subject he’s written about is written about again without paying him obeisance.

I did not write a book to flatter my colleagues, but to give a truer picture of the Concord Sonata than has been given before. I am already ashamed of the extent to which I went obsequiously fishing for quotations beyond the ones that leapt to mind as felicitous. Like Thoreau, I’m always regretting my good behavior. If we’re stuck with the peer-review process, as we seem to be for now, we could all contribute to making it a cleaner, more honest experience. It should not be an opportunity for getting ego strokes at the author’s expense and settling professional grievances. The author of five books does not need to be told how to write a sixth. Is the logic clear? Are the statements arguably true? All else is vanity.

From Bernard Shaw’s January 25, 1893, review of Dame Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D:

Whenever I hear the dictum, “Women cannot compose,” uttered by some male musician whose whole endowment, intellectual and artistic, might be generously estimated as equivalent to that of the little finger of Miss Braddon or Miss Broughton, I always chuckle and say to myself, “Wait a bit, my lad, until they find out how much easier it is than literature, and how little the public shares your objection to hidden consecutives, descending leading notes, ascending sevenths, false relations, and all the other items in your index ex-purgatorius!”

…Since women have succeeded conspicuously in Victor Hugo’s profession, I cannot see why they should not succeed equally in Liszt’s if they turned their attention to it.

Shaw’s review of Smyth’s noble and impressive if conservative mass was somewhat condescending, though he preferred it to the choral music of Dvorak and Brahms, with a suggestion that that was faint praise. Upon convalescence from minor surgery, I’m contemplating a course on woman composers. I don’t even dare make a public repertoire list for fear of controversies.

From one of the anonymous readers’ reviews of my Concord Sonata book:

There was a time when scholars would have dismissed an informal, personal tone for a work of scholarship, but I believe that those days are gone. Frankly, Gann has earned some license to write in whatever style he prefers. And even when the prose is technical and dense, it is a model of clarity.

It is ludicrous how difficult it has been to advance in academic circles the principle that clear, unpretentious, readable prose, even in the discussion of technical topics, is a feature, not a bug.

The news is so disgusting these days I try not to follow it. But I have followed the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, MO, closely. Because we are all Michael Brown.

UPDATE: Look, before anyone else writes in, I did not mean to say that we are all literally Michael Brown. I, for instance, am Kyle Gann. But in 2004, some of my students peacefully protested the election and were physically harassed by the cops, one girl pushed to the ground and injured for having “stepped over the white line in the street.” Some local cops pulled a gay gentleman out of a public meeting, a business leader of the community, and beat up on him just because he was gay. I myself have been treated with unwarranted rudeness by local police, all of whom are Republican and at least some of whom hate Bard as a liberal bastion. You don’t have to be black to get mistreated by the police, though it certainly helps. My students were deeply affected by the verdict, and left class early today to attend a vigil on campus, with my blessing. So I am going to express my solidarity with the victim, and, because I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of my doing so, close comments.