{"id":3255,"date":"2024-09-15T22:51:10","date_gmt":"2024-09-16T02:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=3255"},"modified":"2024-09-16T12:00:29","modified_gmt":"2024-09-16T16:00:29","slug":"charles-ives-and-national-understanding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2024\/09\/charles-ives-and-national-understanding.html","title":{"rendered":"Charles Ives and National Understanding"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Charles Ives, 150 years old, is immensely important right now. Why is that? What\u2019s changed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the <\/strong>Ives Sesquicentenary festivals<\/a> currently sponsored by the NEH Music Unwound consortium,\u00a0The American Scholar<\/em> has published an extraordinary online Program Companion<\/a>. In addition to my essay on Ives and Mahler<\/a>, it features contributions by a leading American art historian, a leading American Civil War historian, a prominent magazine editor, and the eminence gris among contemporary Ives scholars. These fresh perspectives not only transport Ives far beyond the modernist decades in which he was once incongruously confined; they propose his music as a vital source of national understanding and hope for the future.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim Barringer is Yale art historian who really knows music. His studies of Frederic Church, the Hudson River School, and the \u201cAmerican Sublime\u201d have transformed our understanding of nineteenth century American visual art. Tackling Ives for the first time, Tim has come up with a array of landmark insights. \u201cBy examining the key American visual media of Ives\u2019s formative years,\u201d he writes, \u201cwe might begin to identify suggestive parallels with his idiosyncratic, vernacular creative practice.\u201d Ives\u2019 \u201cdeep sense of local belonging\u201d was \u201cincreasingly unusual in a country scarred by Indigenous dispossession and political schism, one in the throes of rapid economic and social change.\u201d His music \u201crevisited the scenes of his youth as if searching the pages of a Victorian album, whose sepia photographic prints and stiff . . . portraits could offer a shockingly direct link with lost times and people, with the faces of the dead. Indeed, the very lifeblood of Ives\u2019s works is a vividly immediate affect that we might think of as photographic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim cites an 1892 photograph of the Ives house (reproduced above) and comments: \u201cThe photograph marked a radical divergence from earlier forms of popular representation seen on the walls of Victorian American \u2013 like this 1869 Currier & Lives lithographic print:<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cImages of this kind hover in Ives\u2019s pictorial imagination in the way that Stephen Foster\u2019s songs are ever-present in his musical vocabulary as fondly remembered half-truths of an earlier era. .  . But unlike the print\u2019s sugary idyll, the photograph of the homestead at Danbury (much like Ives\u2019s later scores) incorporates a multitude of incidental, miscellaneous, quotidian details. The lens registered the undulations of worn brick pavement and the soil in the road. . . . the uncanny smack of truthfulness that also marks out Ives\u2019s compositions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Barringer explores what drew Ives to the paintings of J. M. W. Turner \u2013 paintings \u201cthough apparently unfinished, inchoate and hazy\u201d were \u201crooted in a lifetime of close observation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Allen Guelzo, again, is a historian who happens to know music \u2013 like Barringer, a rarity. His essay \u201cBattle Hymns\u201d stresses the continued ubiquity of the Civil War in American memory during Ives\u2019s formative Connecticut years. \u201cOverall, Connecticut sent some 55,000 men into the Union ranks . . . almost a quarter of its white male population.\u201d In the years following, \u201cConnecticut veterans organized Grand Army of the Republic posts with no color line, \u2018as colored and white are united.\u2019\u201d For Ives the Civil War became \u201ca shining moment of moral truth\u201d \u2013 and \u201cthe compositions he wrote to remember it are all lavish demonstrations of a determination to use the American past to understand the present.\u201d Specifically, Ives read the war as \u201cthe Won Cause\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Civil War was for Ives a living cause, the cause of emancipation. This at a time when American writers were either glamorizing the Confederacy and Jim Crow (from Augusta Jane Evans to Thomas Dixon), politely accommodating Southern sensibilities (the American Winston Churchill in The Crisis<\/em>), or feeling sorrowful for the price northerners had paid (in William Dean Howells\u2019s The Rise of Silas Lapham<\/em>) and pretending that the Civil War had been about something other than slavery. In Ives\u2019s use of Civil War songs and marching music, the war served . . . as a symbol of certain eternal verities\u2014about freedom, about race, about the American experience itself. . . . His uses of Civil War music are not meant to entertain or impress, but to draw the listener into the ideals of the conflict itself, the world of Danbury in the full bloom of abolitionist energy, a world that, through his music, he could ensure would never be lost.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sudip Bose, the editor of The American Scholar<\/em>, has undertaken this extraordinary initiative, publishing the Ives Sesquicentenary Program Companion in recognition both of Ives\u2019s importance and of his neglect. Sudip\u2019s essay \u201cA Boy\u2019s Fourth: Listening to Ives in an Age of Political Division\u201d ponders his own experience of Ives\u2019s The Fourth of July<\/em>. He writes: \u201cIn the past several years, with our nation divided, with whispers of civil conflict growing louder and more insistent, with a general anxiety that seems never to relent, I have been hearing in The Fourth of July<\/em> something far more harrowing, menacing even, than I ever have before. That great cacophonous cloud at the center of the movement seems less like an outpouring of joy than a vision of a nightmare, all those quotations of Americana suddenly sounding like snarling, angry taunts, each fragment crying out to be heard above the others, brash and brutal and bullying. I can\u2019t help imagining this terrifying chaos as an apt metaphor for today\u2019s America, one in which the distorted lines of ‘Columbia’ or the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ suggest not nostalgia but something far more sinister. Even the work\u2019s final two measures\u2014which once seemed to me like America\u2019s answer to the Mahlerian ewig<\/em>, a statement on earth everlasting and our place on it\u2014 have been transformed in my ears. Those phrases in the strings, hesitant, unresolved, enigmatic, conjuring up a last trail of dying light in the evening sky\u2014they seem to ask an unsettling, unanswerable question: Where do we go from here?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, J. Peter Burkholder, the most indispensable of present-day Ives scholars, contributes \u201cThe Power of the Common Soul.\u201d Ives, Peter writes, shows us \u201chow to listen to every voice and see the good in everyone.\u201d A core message \u201cis his celebration of the music and music-making of common people . . . He upends the [traditional] hierarchy of taste. . . . Hope is one of the great themes of Ives\u2019s music: a celebration of the past, not as a place to return to, or to feel nostalgia for, but as inspiration for the future . . . Music has always been a kind of social glue . . . When Ives incorporates into a composition a hymn tune . . . , it comes with some of that \u2018social glue\u2019 attached.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Peter\u2019s essay closes: \u201cIn his words for the song \u2018Down East\u2019 (1919), a rumination on \u2018songs from mother\u2019s heart\u2019 that culminates in \u2018Nearer, My God, to Thee,\u2019 he says it plainly: \u2018With those strains a stronger hope comes nearer to me.\u2019 We need that hope today.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charles Ives, 150 years old, is immensely important right now. Why is that? What\u2019s changed? For the Ives Sesquicentenary festivals currently sponsored by the NEH Music Unwound consortium,\u00a0The American Scholar has published an extraordinary online Program Companion. In addition to my essay on Ives and Mahler, it features contributions by a leading American art historian, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3255","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-Qv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3255"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3269,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3255\/revisions\/3269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}