Ix Ives’s Use of Musical Materials ‘A TERRIBLY HARD TASTE OF MUSIC’ For most people the really baffling aspect of Ives's music is the multiplicity of simultaneous events and ideas in it. In spite of appearances, this is never a helter-skelter piling up of irrelevant matter; on the contrary, there is always some quite clear concept involved that can be reduced to comprehensible terms, though not always without a little trouble, Particularly in the later, larger works, one is easily lost. Yet no matter how involved the use of musical ma- terials may be, it is always possible to discover unifying factors, unfamiliar and unexpected as applied to music though these often are. yr t iIt is important to remember that just as Ives saw Social problems, his business, and his personal life in the light of his Universalist philosophy, s0 he shaped his musical ma, terials in accordance with that philosophy, In the Essays he gives the clue to this connection: Nature loves analogy and abhors repetition and ex. planation. Unity is too generally conceived of, or too easily accepted, as analogous to form, and form as analogous to custom, and custom to habit. He feels that music, like other truths, should never be immediately understood; there must always remain some further element yet to be disclosed. A complete musical statement, in all its clarity and simplicity, like any absolute truth, is an ultimate, not a beginning. Ives reserves it, therefore, for the culmination of a work. Ives concerns himself first of all with the forms of nature and their mysterious and complex behavior, rather than with any mathematically symmetrical and balanced repeti- tion and permutation; these he believes may lead to dis- tortion. Even vagueness may be, at times, ‘an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.’ He finds one principle of unity in the sonata, because it deals with the resolution of two contrasting themes. The two-sidedness of reality, all the paradoxes of existence, are resent to all Ives's thinking. They often make his ideas dificult reading, his statements hard to follow, and his most casual conversation disconcerting, This is because he believes that full expression of the opposing aspects of any idea whatever is a necessary step on the way to perfect >= since only in this way can the common basis for the integration of these opposites be found. Their contrast- ing facets will ultimately, he believes, be seen as different aspects of the same thing. Ives’s interest is in this process 142 toward integration; with Emerson he abhors the spiritual inactivity that comes from the conviction that one posseses the truth in its final form, He envisages a series of integra- tions of dualities, each of which as it is achieved is seen asa sort of partial or temporary truth, a truth which then becomes only one aspect of another set of opposites which sooner of later must be resolved in its turn, This struggle toward truth and integration is the nearest man can come to absolute truth, in Ives's view; but he feels the very effort required imparts a certain unity and coherence of its own. “Therefore to think hard, and say what is thought, regard- Jess of consequences, isa man's obligation. Comfort, repose, sloth, easy acceptance of the obvious or the customary are the great sins in Ives's lexicon, To achieve beauty in accordance with accepted standards does not interest Ives, because he believes that people's notions of beauty depend upon what they are used to, or whatever will bother them least. ‘Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair.’ Ives prefers to put his hearers’ ears to work, and he points out that the ear can take in much mote than it is used to if it must. To concern one’s self with beauty primarily is to risk ‘pretty music,’ or ‘nice mu- sic,’ or mere sensuous beauty, or some other superficiality that diverts one from the search for spiritual strength and integrity. Besides, ‘dissonances,’ he says, ‘are becoming beautiful Nor does Ives create a work of art for the sake of ex: pressing himself. He has no patience with those who be- lieve themselves qualified as composers because they are ‘full of turbid feeling about themselves — the Byronic fallacy.’ “The nearer we get to the mere expression of emo- tion, the further we get away from art . . . Should not the intellect have some part?’ 43—— Ives is often supposed devoted to program music he. cause of the anecdotal nature of his own accounts of bi smusic, Actually, it never follows stories nor imitates suns literally for more than a moment. These extramusical ideas are rather a jumping-off place, an observation point for the behavior of things in the universe. For Ives the meaning of an event seems to lie in the behavior of the elements that create it, and when he wants to convey an emotion about something, he reproduces the behavior of the sounds that are associated with it, their approach and departure, their pace and drive, interweaving and crossing —all this by analogy, which seems to be the way he ap- proaches reality, rather than by description or literal i tation. He puts the wedge formation of a football team onto score paper to see how it would sound as music, for in- stance. Often he does reproduce several aspects of reality ashe first observed them, but from their behavior he estab- lishes the musical treatment, carrying the ideas gained from this kind of observation forward to make a system of musical behavior out of something first perceived on a quite differ- ent level, Examples may make this clearer. The germ of Ives’s complicated concept of polyphony seems to lie in an ex- perience he had as a boy, when his father invited a neigh- boring band to parade with its team at a baseball game in Danbury, while at the same time the local band made ‘its appearance in support of the Danbury team. The parade was arranged to pass along the main street as usual, but the two bands started at opposite ends of town and were assigned pieces in different meters and keys. As they ap- proached each other the dissonances were acute, and each ‘man played louder and louder so that his rivals would not Put him off. A few players wavered, but both bands held together and got past each other successfully, the sounds 144 of their cheerful discord fading out in the distance, Ives fas reproduced this collision of musical events in several tvays: From it, for example, he developed the idea of com- pining groups of players (sections of the orchestra) to create Gimultaneous masses of sound that move in different shythms, meters, and keys. Thus his polytonality may be lyharmonic, each harmonic unit being treated like a Engle contrapuntal voice (as the bands played two separate tunes, each with its own harmonic setting); and it may also hythmic. aoa Tves was impressed and moved, as a boy, by the magnificent outpourings at camp meetings, when several hundred people, many of them quite tuneless in the ordi- nary sense, sang ‘praises unto the Lord’ with their whole hearts. He felt that all the sounds had a certain consistency of behavior and so, instead of reproducing the single melody line that was the technical intention, he reproduced what actually went on. He has several times surrounded a plain melody with a wide band of tones, sounding faintly all the pitches close to the tone of theoretical musical intention, ‘This reproduces the intense effect of mass singing in which some people sharpen the pitch involuntarily, while the stolid temperaments never do get up to the actual pitch of the tune at all. This technique produces chords in groups of seconds, which he then occasionally uses in other ways, free of any extra-musical connection. The same idea had occurred to him earlier, when he tried to reproduce the sounds of the drum on the piano. Triads wouldn’t do it Properly, but small clusters of adjacent tones suited him and he used them occasionally thereafter as a percussive device. io A situation his father had to cope with at one time in the Danbury Band amused and intrigued Charles Ives, and Proved fertile for later musical treatment on a larger scale. 145