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    Salzman on Ives

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    Salzman on Ives

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    11 views2 pages

    Salzman Ives

    Uploaded by

    Liz Quartz
    Salzman on Ives

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    of 2
    1e Avant-garde and Beyond mn The Avant-g Py ively limited group of works of importance; nevertheless, they 7] ater tur of the wheel. Y also ay, ‘in addition to these connections with European modern there are ail more diect connections with the American expt tradition American music has always ben essentially synertie: grt aierging a whole variety of coltural source material, tachyn SE development, non-Western ideas, ethnic sub-cultures, folk and pose ture have all helped form a distinctive American experience whi had continuing signifieance for new music. The global impact of a1, can commercial culture may be a reflection of American economic pont™ but the development of alternatives or antidotes—beyond a mere Sen? into traditionalism—has had a significant testing ground in the net World. Even the young anti-American European radical is, in yo” “American” in his culture. This is really only a way of saying that nt creasingly, we all live ina single super-culture and that we all face gn ‘mon problems. st culture, IVES Charles Ives was the first important Western composer to stand ccsentially outside the mainstream of European culture, and he was the first to propose—with no direct influence of technology—the totality and unity of the human experfence as a subject matter for art. Ives could do this because, although he was brought up on New and Old World cul ture, he kept an essential distance from received tradition and its domi- nant professional activities. This is the essence of Ives’s “amateurism” and the source of hs originality and unique position. Ives worked far from the European centers and, in many exses, years ahead of his European contemporaries. He composed proto-serial {and proto-aleatory music; he invented block forms and free forms; used tone clusters and structural densities; he wrote in poly-meter 1¢ composed spatial music and music that could be realized ity of ways; he anticipated recent improvisatory works-n- progress, assemblages, and “pop-art” ideals—in short, just about every important development of the last sixty years and some of the most notable of the last twenty. Yet Ives was also aware of the past, and he used aspects of Amcrican and European tradition throughout his eret- tive years. In one sense, he stood so far outside of these traditions (al though he understood them perfectly well) that—unlike Schoenberg and " But see discussion at the beginning of Chapter 17. Introductton: Before World Woy 1 isky-he did not have to overthrow the, suv Fle knew and used what he Mea 2 then bor mighay rained Way he used any idea or material that , Nant #0 what he had to say. Ives felt no “ersses SPDOpeate of jon tonality (or anything ele; his muscu OM to i process in the conventional sens; its tendency is a ave Gr even rovels in contradictions. Like Whitman, ves eng absrx himself, he could a multitudes, mld contradict Nothing in haman experience was alien to Tves, but th ean that he was a “primitive.” There is a myth whick qugt °° 2 imatored pioneer in the New England wildemess eit aan YF musical Grandma Moses; a rugged individualist works jet = Kind isolation, utterly lacking in technical skill and sophistication bar eae oxginal in a rough and ready way; a kindof inspited nif pheson sf nature. In actual fact, Ives's father was a wellinown bantnectee ne id many experiments in acoustics and temperament. ver stelhal te ished Horatio Parker. He had extensive practical experience with hi father's band, arranging for it and playing with theater orchestras and on church organs in New Haven and New York. ll of Ives’ mature life and most of his composing years were spent, not in the wildemess, but in New York where he embarked on a double earcer as an extremely sue ‘cessful insurance broker and a composer. Most of his musie was actually ‘written between his arrival in New York in 1898 and the early 1920s; he spent the later years of life arranging, putting in order, and preparing for performance works from the enormous mass of material he had produced None of this is meant to detract from Ives's stature as an innovator or as an individualist; quite the contrary, it should emphasize his real achievement by taking it out of the realm of nature mythology and em- phasizing its origins in conscious decision and choice. For example, Ives was always able to use tradition—classical tonality, sayin exactly the same way he used his own new tonalities, poly-tonalities and non-tonali- tics, as @ kind of special case, as it were, of his total experience of mean: ingful sound, It was this range of activity, this totality of ee a infersted Ives and it was out ofthis tality Se Ge plicity and complexity, coherence and contradiction—that he mate ices, One of is ‘potknown pieces, The Unonacered Queich font shows his technique of deriving a completely new form ovt 7 ST contradictory clements. A small group ofstrings~it can be Mat St uartet—is seated of-stage or away from the other insu | My Vides an obsessive, endless rotation of a simple —- rele aband cant-garde and Beyond i The Acantgarde and Bey On another level, entirely detached from the gt arn specie thythmic co-ordination, a trumpet reijen® a ie Opp flutes (possibly mixed with an ctee 3 a Seer eet a ott ea into a terrible tangle. , in the end, no answer, no resolu sete question unchanged and the distant string “harmony oa spheres” fading out to infinity ean “This tiny conception s fll of prophetic Ivessms: the literary dg which generates a form; the unification of seemingly contradictory mart Tal though the very expltatin ofthe fat of contradiction; the exy perceptible extemal references; the spatial arrangement of the nag?” Frents; the projection of distinct layers of sound with informal verge} arrangements, What is not so obvious i just how all these elements ore together to make an expressive form which communicates on a subi level by no means equivalent to the verbal descriptions (see Appendis, ‘Example 12-1). " ‘The Ivesian view of art and life has to do with the value of poetic idea realized asa human action or activity. In spite of all his pre sumed impracticality (but many of the old difficulties of performance, of notation, and of general comprehensibility have vanished over the year), Ives thought of his music as a kind of non-passive, performance-practice activity; he meant it primarily to be performed, only secoudarily t0 be listened to. He seems to have had the idea that audiences might, at some point, sing along or that someone might jump up with a flute or a har ‘monica and join in. Ives wanted to transform even the passive state of xeception into positive involvement, which accounts in part for the inten tional use of familiar and popular music to produce a shock of surprise or amused recognition. Yet, on the other hand, he hardly even “composed” ‘music in the usual sense. During his creative years, he poured out a con- tinuous stream of musical expression—works for chorus and organ, fe symphonies, four sonatas for violin and piano, two string quartets, many piano works including the massive “Concord” Sonata, a large number of Songs, and extremely important works for chamber orchestra or chamber gremble: the sets of Tone Reads (1911-1915), Three Places in New Ex Hora a, Cental Park in the Dark (1898-1911), Over the Pavements isis, an ‘is no question that Ives knew what he wanted in these ane = to have tried many of his ideas out in practice during Wat he wast d organist days and, by accounts, he could sho often intentional sph sie On the other hand, what he wanted was he played hi ala? OF imprecise, and he himself changed the ¥3Y former in the se at he years. His idea was to involve the pe form 2 Kind of an tot cresting the music, and the works themselves tinuous stream of musical expression, portions triadic harmonies. Introduction: Before World Wer It - sich have coalesced indeed all are still coalescing nto individual S00FCS. 45 disliked and distrusted the conventi jomaking; he wanted to get back to some puna at shout the phil realty of iinmediate and almost tangible experiences-even eperia 588 plexity, contradiction, and incoherence. He wanted a speaking bod

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