{"id":3362,"date":"2024-12-18T22:43:59","date_gmt":"2024-12-19T03:43:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=3362"},"modified":"2024-12-18T22:44:02","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T03:44:02","slug":"abraham-lincoln-ragtime-and-charles-ives-on-npr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2024\/12\/abraham-lincoln-ragtime-and-charles-ives-on-npr.html","title":{"rendered":"Abraham Lincoln, Ragtime, and Charles Ives on NPR"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jeremy Denk<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n
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Allen Guelzo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Excerpts from <\/em>my most recent \u201cMore than Music\u201d show<\/a> on NPR: \u201cFinding the Common Good \u2013 Charles Ives at 150\u201d:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ives is a self-made Connecticut Yankee, born in 1874, who\u2019s all about seeking common purpose, common sentiment, common good.  So at a moment when our nation seems to be coming apart, Ives speaks to us about the things that hold us together \u2013 or used to. And yet this year\u2019s Ives Sesquicentenary \u2013 remarkably \u2013 is mainly being celebrated abroad, by European orchestras. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m recently back from a nine-day Indiana University festival<\/a> —  by far the biggest Ives celebration here in the US, with two and three events daily. Among the participants was the pianist Gilbert Kalish, still going strong at the age of 89. Back in the 1970s, when the music of Ives was being discovered half a century after he composed it, Kalish was a key figure in a great awakening. At a public forum on Ives\u2019s piano music, I asked him to reflect upon the fate of Charles Ives in the US today. He suddenly fell into a crestfallen mode and said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u201cIt\u2019s a kind of cultural tragedy in a way \u2013 if you think of it.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why would losing touch with Charles Ives seem a \u201ctragedy\u201d for Americans? It\u2019s not just because he\u2019s our most remarkable concert composer. It\u2019s because he embodies what we\u2019re losing touch within the American arts today: cultural memory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s a perspective on Ives from a distinguished Civil War scholar, Allen Guelzo:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIves fills a great blank in the experience of a lot of Americans. We exist in an environment that is so immediate, that is so rootless, which lacks so much in the way of cultural ballast, that we feel sometimes like we\u2019re floating weightlessly. In that respect we live downstream from the cultural shift that occurred in Ives\u2019s lifetime. And Ives responds to it by trying to provide for us ballast in the form of the past and the experience of the past. And that\u2019s different from the way other American composers have come at it. Because a lot of American composers who want to invoke the past really do it almost in a decorative fashion. It\u2019s almost like walking into an antique store. That is not the case for Ives.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ives, Guelzo says, negotiated a \u201ccultural shift\u201d at the turn of the twentieth century, when American lives were challenged by new technology, and by a decline in the authority of religion and other sources of moral authority. That reminds him of today. And Allen Guelzo is also reminded, by Charles Ives, of Abraham Lincoln. They both feasted on American memory. They both furnished the kind of cultural ballast<\/em> with which we\u2019re losing touch. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLincoln constantly surprises me. I keep finding entirely different ways of looking at the man and how the man looked at things. I am impressed by his sense of historical capacity, and how the history of the country weighed<\/em> on him, almost as a burden. He felt a kind of responsibility, especially in 1861 to 1865, that everything was balanced on a pinhead, and he was determined to keep that balance the way it had been designed. He\u2019s determined to do that because the future depends upon it. Not only the future of the country, but the future of the very idea of democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Ives, Allen Guelzo says, shared a capacity to inhabit<\/em> American history. And they rallied people \u2013 in their different spheres of government and the arts — to participate in that, and discover common roots. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some respects Ives parallels his European contemporary Gustav Mahler<\/a>, intermingling high and low — the philosophic with the everyday. Ives\u2019s Concord<\/em> Sonata closes with a transcendental Nature reverie remembering Thoreau playing the flute on his doorstep overlooking Walden Pond. But an earlier movement of the same work triggers a blast of ragtime<\/em> to evoke Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s fanciful short stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It cannot be coincidental that two of the most notable exponents of the Concord Piano Sonata also relish rags by Scott Joplin and his progeny. One is Steven Mayer, who we\u2019ve been listening to. The other pianist is Jeremy Denk, who\u2019s just released an Ives album on Nonesuch including all the piano and violin sonatas. Ragtime was the rage beginning in the 1890s, when Ives was at Yale and pounded ragtime in theaters and taverns. In fact, ragtime was an essential catalyst for what Denk calls \u201cthe whole universe of American popular music.\u201d And he continues:  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRagtime is a way of taking a pre-existing tune and syncopating it and giving it a new life; it\u2019s an act in which you revive something that\u2019s square and stale.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

European composers, and also American<\/em> composers, attempted to \u201charness\u201d jazz \u2013 and shackled it with quotation marks. Ives, by comparison, is never slumming or condescending. His deployment of ragtime is torrential, impolite, elemental. Denk experiences in Ives \u201ca tremendous homage\u201d to ragtime, an \u201coppositional\u201d  and \u201cimprovisational\u201d abandon. And he cites as a case in point Ives Third Violin Sonata, begun in 1905. It\u2019s one of five works on his new Nonesuch Ives Sesquicentenary release, in which he\u2019s joined by the violinist Stefan Jackiw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s a LISTENING GUIDE to the whole NPR show \u2013 which you can access here<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3:00 — Allen Guelzo on Ives and “cultural ballast”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4:50 — The parade down Main Street: William Sharp and Steven Mayer perform “The Circus Band”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

7:00 — “The Alcotts” and the “human faith melody”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

12:00 — The sonic sorcery of “The Housatonic at Stockbridge”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

22:30 — Jeremy Denk, Ives, and ragtime<\/p>\n\n\n\n

30:00 — Slavery, “Old Black Joe,” and the Second Symphony<\/p>\n\n\n\n

39:30 — Edie Ives on why her father was “a great man”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

42:30 — Allen Guelzo on Ives and Lincoln<\/p>\n\n\n\n

44:00 — William Sharp and Steven Mayer perform “Serenity”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Excerpts from my most recent \u201cMore than Music\u201d show on NPR: \u201cFinding the Common Good \u2013 Charles Ives at 150\u201d: Ives is a self-made Connecticut Yankee, born in 1874, who\u2019s all about seeking common purpose, common sentiment, common good.  So at a moment when our nation seems to be coming apart, Ives speaks to us about the things that […]<\/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-3362","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-Se","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3362","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=3362"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3374,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3362\/revisions\/3374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}