Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 4

“Dear Daddy” — What Kind of Man Was Charles Ives?

What kind of man was Charles Ives? Based on the testimony of those who knew and met him, I would say: a great man. And the greatest such testimonial was left by his daughter, Edie, in a letter she wrote to her father in 1942 on the occasion of his sixty-eighth birthday.

I discovered Edie’s letter thanks to Tom Owens’s Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives (2007). Edie’s tribute is so moving, so illuminating, that I instantly thought to create a concert/playlet around it. The result was “Charles Ives: A Life in Music,” at 50-minute presentation I have many times produced featuring William Sharp – a peerless exponent of Ives’s songs. We use those songs to tell the story of Ives’s life. When we get to Ives’s retirement from business and music – long years of precarious health — we arrive at Edie’s letter. It stuns audiences to tears.

For Ives’s 150th birthday, October 20, WWFM – the most enterprising classical-music radio station I know – produced a two-hour Ives tribute that generously samples “Charles Ives: A Life in Music” as performed last September 30 to launch Indiana University’s nine-day, NEH-supported Ives Sesquicentenary festival. Edie’s letter was read by Caroline Goodwin – and you will find it about 70 minutes into the show. Here’s the text in part:

Dear Daddy,

You are so very modest and sweet Daddy, that I don’t think you realize the full import of the words people use about you, “A great man.” 

Daddy, I have had a chance to see so many men lately – fine fellows, and no doubt the cream of our generation. But I have never in all my life come across one who could measure up to the fine standard of life and living that you believe in, and that I have always seen you put into action no matter how many counts were against you. You have fire and imagination that is truly a divine spark, but to me the great thing is that never once have you tried to turn your gift to your own ends. Instead you have continually given to humanity right from your heart, asking nothing in return; — and all too often getting nothing. The thing that makes me happiest about your recognition today is to see the bread you have so generously cast upon most ungrateful waters, finally beginning to return to you. All that great love is flowing back to you at last. Don’t refuse it because it comes so late, Daddy. . . . 

And don’t ever feel you’ve been a burden to mother or me. You have been our mainstay, our guide and the sun of our world! We’ve leaned against you and turned to you for everything – and we have never been made to turn away empty-handed.

There follows an unforgettable performance of Ives’s song “Serenity,” with Bill Sharp accompanied by Steven Mayer, himself long an eminent Ives advocate. In fact, just before we get to Edie’s letter, we hear a stirring Steve Mayer performance of “The Alcotts,” from Ives’s Concord Piano Sonata.

The tail end of the WWFM show features excerpts from a prior Ives Sesquicentenary festival, at the Brevard Music Festival last July. First we hear the final pages of “Thoreau,” ending the Concord Sonata, performed by Michael Chertock – another astonishing reading.  Then we explore how Ives used Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe” (here sung by Paul Robeson) to eloquently express “sympathy for the slaves” in the finale of his Second Symphony – the rousing climax of which is performed by Brevard’s collegiate Sinfonia (one of three Brevard orchestras) led by Delta David Gier.  

The commentary, throughout, is by me, Bill McGlaughlin, J. Peter Burkholder, and two of the featured performers: Bill Sharp and Michael Chertock. It all happened thanks to WWFM’s David Osenberg, who possesses the energy and enterprise to do things differently. 

Here’s a Listening Guide (click here to access the two-hour WWFM show):

Sung by Charles Ives (1943):

“They Are There”

Sung by William Sharp accompanied by Steven Mayer:

“The Circus Band”

“Memories”

“Feldeinsamkeit” (as set both by Johannes Brahms and Ives)

“Remembrance”

“The Greatest Man”

“The Housatonic at So Stockbridge”

Performed by Steven Mayer:

“The Alcotts” from the Concord Sonata

Read by Caroline Goodwin:

“Dear Daddy”

Sung by William Sharp accompanied by Steven Mayer:

“Serenity”

Performed by Michael Chertock:

“Thoreau” (final pages) from the Concord Sonata

Sung by Paul Robeson:

“Old Black Joe”

Performed by Delta David Gier conducting the Brevard Sinfonia

Ives’s Symphony No. 2 (closing minutes)

“Very Likely the Most Important Film Ever Made about American Music”

During the pandemic, unable to produce concerts, I found myself making six documentary films linked to my book Dvorak’s Prophecy. The most necessary of these was and is “Charles Ives’s America.” The Dvorak’s Prophecy films were picked up by Naxos as DVDs – which almost no one purchases any more. For the current Ives Sesquicentenary, however, Naxos has streamed the Ives film on youtube – so it’s now available for free, right here.

“Charles Ives’s America” features extraordinary visual renderings by my longtime colleague Peter Bogdanoff. The necessity of the film was articulated by JoAnn Falletta, who as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic since 1999 has been a staunch and creative advocate of neglected American repertoire:

“’’Charles Ives’ America” is very likely the most important film ever made about American music. Horowitz moves Ives from the fringes squarely to his position as the seminal composer of our country. The genius of Ives is astonishing, and his creativity without equal. The presentation of his life and world is visually beautiful and deeply moving, but at the center of this film experience is his music. We are amazed by its uncompromising originality, its honesty, its poetic impulse, its clear-eyed humor, and, in the end, its absolute beauty. I fell in love with Ives all over again.”

In a review of all six Dvorak’s Prophecy films in The American Scholar, Mark N. Grant wrote:

“As a group, these videos sweep together a vast canvas of Americana . . . All are interestingly told. The video documentaries eschew the Ken Burns style of rapid montage and instead go into deep focus. Talking heads speak at length rather than in sound bites. The music . . . is not interrupted by hyperkinetic visual montages or multiple voiceovers. It’s the documentary equivalent of ‘slow food’; there is room to absorb and think and remember. . . . The videos should be widely purchased and used by educators and institutions throughout the country to proselytize the unconverted. If classical music is going to survive and thrive, we need zealous advocates like Joseph Horowitz to continue beating the drum.”

My favorite sequence from the Ives film (at 27:30) features The Housatonic at Stockbridge, with the conductor/scholar James Sinclair narrating the magical layering of Ives’s sublime depiction of water and mist. 

The film’s participants, additinal to Jim, are the Ives scholars J. Peter Burkholder and Judith Tick, and the baritone William Sharp – a peerless Ives singer whose live performances (with pianist Paul Sanchez) are heard throughout. The other music comes from Naxos recordings by Sinclair, Kenneth Schermerhorn, and Steven Mayer (whose Concord Sonata was named one of the three best recorded versions by Gramophone magazine). Supplementary funding was furnished by the Ives Society.

Naxos’s commitment to Ives bears stressing. It dates back decades, when I had occasion to  introduce Klaus Heymann – who founded Naxos in 1987 and is an unsung hero of American music — to the late H. Wiley Hitchcock, then a seminal Ives authority. 

Naxos’s “American Classics” series, in which Ives prominently figures, is itself a landmark initiative. Only on Naxos can you hear George Templeton Strong’s hour-long Sintram Symphony (1888) – a high Romantic American opus in the Liszt/Bruckner mold, triumphantly premiered by Anton Seidl in 1892 and subsequently forgotten (Neeme Jarvi considers the slow movement the most beautiful ever composed by an American). Another essential “American Classics” recording is Benjamin Pasternack’s gripping traversal of Aaron Copland’s valedictory: the non-tonal Piano Fantasy. More recently, Arthur Fagin’s Naxos recording of William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony has triggered wide and belated recognition of the most accomplished “Black symphony” of the interwar decades. And Naxos has issued stellar performances of our most neglected composer: the Indianist Arthur Farwell, who comes closer to Bartok than any other American.  

The Naxos Ives catalog totals no fewer than 19 releases, including a fresh set of “Orchestral Works” scheduled for November 1. The novelties on this recording, conducted by James Sinclair, include orchestral transcriptions of Schumann and Schubert that Ives composed while a student at Yale. Sinclair’s completion of an Ives’s torso, a theater-orchestra version of his irresistible song “The Circus Band,” is again irresistible. So is the “March No. 3” incorporating “My Old Kentucky Home.”

Here’s a Listening Guide to the Ives film:

00:00 — Ives the song composer (“The Circus Band” and “Memories”), with commentary by William Sharp

13:00 — Ives at Yale; Symphony No. 1

21:00 — Ives and his wife Harmony; “The Housatonic at Stockbridge”

32:00 — Symphony No. 2 and its sources, with commentary by J. Peter Burkholder

44:00 — “The St. Gaudens at Boston Commons” and sources

55:00 — The Concord Piano Sonata

1:06 — Ives as a “moral force” — not a modernist; Edie Ives extols her father as “a great man”

1:12 — Judith Tick on Ives the Progressive

1:18 — Canonizing Ives as a “self-made American genius”

1:20 — “Serenity”

A Revelatory Visual Rendering of an American Musical Masterpiece

Three Places in New England by Charles Ives – a visual rendering by Peter Bogdanoff

Of the masterpieces of American classical music, among the least appreciated and least performed is Three Places in New England by Charles Ives.

There is an obvious reason: the piece fails in live performance unless it’s contextualized. In particular, the first movement – “The ‘St. Gaudens’ in Boston Common” – makes little impression unless an audience gleans its inspiration: Augustus St. Gaudens’ bas relief of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s historic Black Civil War regiment, most of whose members perished in a heroic assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina. Ives here singularly produces a ghost dirge suffused with weary echoes of Civil War songs, work songs, plantation songs, church songs, minstrel songs. It is an intense patriotic tribute eschewing the stentorian.

Movement two – “Putnam’s Camp” – uncorks a rambunctious July 4 celebration, as processed by an eagerly imaginative child. Movement three – “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” – is the most majestic, most eloquent American musical rendering of the sublime in Nature. It’s all iconic Americana, never glib, never touristic. But it risks sounding esoteric.

A remedy: Peter Bogdanoff’s ingeniously poetic “visual presentation” for Three Places in New England, which premieres on October 5 at the Ives Sesquicentenary Festival at Indiana University/Bloomington as part of an Ives concert by the Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Arthur Fagen. The same concert will incorporate commentary and source tunes for Three Places and Ives’s Symphony No. 2. The visual presentation will next be seen Feb. 22 at an Ives Sesquicentenary concert given by the Chicago Sinfonietta conducted by Mei-Ann Chen. 

For “The St. Gaudens,” Ives furnished a poem reading in part:

Moving—Marching—Faces of Souls!

Marked with generations of pain,

Part-freers of a Destiny,

Slowly, restlessly—swaying us on with you

Towards other Freedom! . . . 

Moving—Marching—Faces of Souls!

Ives’s own program note for “Putnam’s Camp” reads:

Once upon a “4th of July,” some time ago, so the story goes, a child went there on a picnic. Wandering away from the rest of the children past the camp ground into the woods, he hopes to catch a glimpse of some of the old soldiers. As he rests on the hillside of laurel and hickories, the tunes of the band and the songs of the children grow fainter and fainter;—when—“mirabile dictu”—over the trees on the crest of the hill he sees a tall woman standing. She reminds him of a picture he has of the Goddess Liberty,—but the face is sorrowful—she is pleading with the soldiers not to forget their “cause” and the great sacrifices they have made for it. But they march out of camp with fife and drum to a popular tune of the day. Suddenly a new national note is heard. Putnam is coming over the hills from the center,—the soldiers turn back and cheer. The little boy awakes, he hears the children’s songs and runs down past the monument to “listen to the band” and join in the games and dances.

(At the forthcoming IU performance, “The St. Gaudens” will be preceded by a reading of Ives’s poem by William Sharp; “Putnam’s Camp” will be preceded by a reading of Ives’s note, again by Bill; “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” will be preceded by a performance of the song by Bill and Steven Mayer. In the video above, Ives’s song is performed by Bill and Paul Sanchez.)

Supported by the NEH Music Unwound consortium, the Indiana University Ives Sesquicentenary Festival (Sept. 30 to October 8) is curated by J. Peter Burkholder and myself. Participants include pianists Steven Mayer, Jeremy Denk, and Gilbert Kalish, the Pacifica String Quartet, university ensembles, and scholars from a variety of disciplines. All concerts are free. For further information – and a 50-page Program Companion – click here.

The Downfall of Classical Music

If you’re in the mood for a rollicking conversation about the downfall of classical music in the US, check out this podcast conversation I recently had with the terrific conductor Kenneth Woods (who’s based in the UK rather than the US, in which he deserves a music directorship of consequence).

My favorite sentence:

“Those chickens that are now coming home to roost are the chickens I’ve been writing about since the 1980s [in Understanding Toscanini], for which I was initially vilified. But now that I’ve turned into a prophet, I’m simply ignored.”

These, in sequence, are the topics at hand:

1.The grim situation of the arts in the UK right now: no money.

2.My visit to South Africa, and how classical music there is evolving with notable Black leadership (thanks in part to Nelson Mandela).

3.My ruthless analysis of the interwar popularization or “democratization” of classical music in the US, which anointed Arturo Toscanini “the world’s greatest musician” even though he wasn’t a composer. This was a commercial operation headed by David Sarnoff (RCA/NBC) and Arthur Judson (the managerial powerbroker who declared that “the audience sets taste”). Dead European masters — easiest to merchandize — were prioritized. Amateur music-making was discouraged in favor of broadcasts and recordings by the experts.

4.A barrage of pointed questions and observations from Ken attempting to figure out Toscanini’s primacy (“why he won”). Toscanini’s appeal to mass taste.

5.Ken proposes a thought experiment – subtract Toscanini from the story of classical music and what do you get? You get Serge Koussevitzky and Leopold Stokowski. And where might that have led? I marvel in passing: “Stokowski didn’t care about integrity, it wasn’t part of his vocabulary.” 

6.Dmitri Mitropoulos, and why his 1940 Minneapolis Symphony premiere recording of Mahler’s First seems to me the most remarkable Mahler recording ever made – and unthinkable today (with choice audio examples)

7.Ken asks: What if Leonard Bernstein had been appointed Koussevitzky’s successor in Boston in 1950, rather than winding up at the New York Philharmonic (which had no pertinent tradition of espousing American music)? Ken answers himself: “It would have changed the repertoire of all American orchestras.” 

8.My own favorite thought experiments:

— What if Gustav Mahler had premiered Ives’s Second Symphony with the New York Philharmonic?

— What if George Gershwin had lived as long as Aaron Copland?

Either would have fundamentally changed the trajectory of American classical music.

9.What if Anton Seidl – who was bigger than Toscanini or Bernstein in New York City – had not died in 1898 at the age of 47? There would have been an annual Wagner festival in Brooklyn as pedigreed at Bayreuth – limiting the damage inflicted on Wagner by Hitler and Winifred Wagner.

10. “I can’t imagine life without cultural memory, although we’re beginning to get a glimpse.” Today’s “makeshift music,” sans lineage or tradition – “eagerly acquisitive and open-eared.”

Today’s famous instrumentalists sans lineage or tradition –vs Sergei Babayan and Daniil Trifonov, who perform Rachmaninoff “in full awareness of a tradition of Russian composition and performance.”

11.The Metropolitan Opera’s “worst ever” Carmen

12.Leonard Bernstein’s capacious vision, revisited today. 

“The Housatonic at Stockbridge” — Ives’s Four-Minute Masterpiece Extolling the Sublime

This weekend’s “Wall Street Journal” includes a piece of mine reading Charles Ives’s four-minute masterpiece “The Housatonic at Stockbridge.” Composed in the 1910s, it’s both an orchestral work and a song. No other American composition known to me so bears comparison with the famous Nature reveries of Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner. My essay reads in part:

Ives was a reader, a thinker, a writer philosophic yet unpretentious. Evoking a personal memory [of his courtship, strolling the meadowland along the Housatonic River], he would not have consciously set out to evoke the sublime in Nature. He well knew Beethoven and called him “in this youthful world the best product that human beings can boast of.” Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the “Pastorale,” famously evokes the sublime in Nature in both its guises: the crashing thunder and lightning of the fourth movement “storm,” the sun-kissed vales of the finale’s “thanksgiving.” Later composers — Romantics like Berlioz in his Invocation to Nature from “The Damnation of Faust,” or Liszt in “Les préludes,” or Wagner in his Good Friday Spell from “Parsifal”– magnificently embellish this trope of existential Nature amplifying the human experience. . . .

Beginning with an unprepossessing New England stream, culminating with an oceanic surge, “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” supremely embodies the sublime in Nature in all of four minutes. In American visual art, the gigantic Hudson River School canvases of Frederic Edwin Church furnish its closest equivalent. But Ives is the more capacious, more protean painter. . . . The result is a shifting, incorporeal landscape, grounded in the bass, trembling and oscillating atop. . . . Then – an ecstatic moment . . .  — the quivering ether feeds upon itself in a rush toward the majestic Atlantic; or toward the heavens and hereafter. . . .

Though some writers have compared this sonic feat with the iridescent water-music of Debussy and Ravel, Ives eschews Gallic clarity. In “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” the culminating oceanic surge is suddenly and densely cacophonous. A frame of reference surer than Debussy’s “La Mer” is the painter Ives seems most to have admired: J. M. W. Turner, whose visionary canvases translate a lifetime of close observation into impressions sublimely imprecise and suggestive. . . .

The mastery of this exercise in concise musical portraiture confutes enduring stereotypes of Ives as a hit-and-miss experimentalist. . . .

Charles Ives deserves to sit atop the American cultural pantheon alongside such kindred self-made originals as Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Under-performed, insufficiently understood, he retains a double taint – that he was a gifted amateur; that his music is “difficult.” Might the present Ives Sesquicentenary Year make a difference? If so, “The Houstatonic at Stockbridge” would be an ideal point of departure.

The upcoming Ives Sesquicentenary festival at Indiana University includes the premiere of a visual rendering, by Peter Bogdanoff, of “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” and its two neighboring movements in “Three Places in New England.”

Charles Ives and National Understanding

Charles Ives, 150 years old, is immensely important right now. Why is that? What’s changed?

For the Ives Bicentenary festivals currently sponsored by the NEH Music Unwound consortium, The 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, 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. 

Tim Barringer is Yale art historian who really knows music. His studies of Frederic Church, the Hudson River School, and the “American Sublime” 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. “By examining the key American visual media of Ives’s formative years,” he writes, “we might begin to identify suggestive parallels with his idiosyncratic, vernacular creative practice.” Ives’ “deep sense of local belonging” was “increasingly unusual in a country scarred by Indigenous dispossession and political schism, one in the throes of rapid economic and social change.” His music “revisited 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’s works is a vividly immediate affect that we might think of as photographic.”

Tim cites an 1892 photograph of the Ives house (reproduced above) and comments: “The photograph marked a radical divergence from earlier forms of popular representation seen on the walls of Victorian American – like this 1869 Currier & Lives lithographic print:

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“Images of this kind hover in Ives’s pictorial imagination in the way that Stephen Foster’s songs are ever-present in his musical vocabulary as fondly remembered half-truths of an earlier era. .  . But unlike the print’s sugary idyll, the photograph of the homestead at Danbury (much like Ives’s 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’s compositions.”

And Barringer explores what drew Ives to the paintings of J. M. W. Turner – paintings “though apparently unfinished, inchoate and hazy” were “rooted in a lifetime of close observation.”

Allen Guelzo, again, is a historian who happens to know music – like Barringer, a rarity. His essay “Battle Hymns” stresses the continued ubiquity of the Civil War in American memory during Ives’s formative Connecticut years. “Overall, Connecticut sent some 55,000 men into the Union ranks . . . almost a quarter of its white male population.” In the years following, “Connecticut veterans organized Grand Army of the Republic posts with no color line, ‘as colored and white are united.’” For Ives the Civil War became “a shining moment of moral truth” – and “the compositions he wrote to remember it are all lavish demonstrations of a determination to use the American past to understand the present.” Specifically, Ives read the war as “the Won Cause”:

“The 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), or feeling sorrowful for the price northerners had paid (in William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham) and pretending that the Civil War had been about something other than slavery. In Ives’s use of Civil War songs and marching music, the war served . . . as a symbol of certain eternal verities—about 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.”

Sudip Bose, the editor of The American Scholar, has undertaken this extraordinary initiative, publishing the Ives Sesquicentenary Program Companion in recognition both of Ives’s importance and of his neglect. Sudip’s essay “A Boy’s Fourth: Listening to Ives in an Age of Political Division” ponders his own experience of Ives’s The Fourth of July. He writes: “In 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 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’t help imagining this terrifying chaos as an apt metaphor for today’s 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’s final two measures—which once seemed to me like America’s answer to the Mahlerian ewig, a statement on earth everlasting and our place on it— 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—they seem to ask an unsettling, unanswerable question: Where do we go from here?”

Finally, J. Peter Burkholder, the most indispensable of present-day Ives scholars, contributes “The Power of the Common Soul.” Ives, Peter writes, shows us “how to listen to every voice and see the good in everyone.” A core message “is 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’s 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 ‘social glue’ attached.” 

Peter’s essay closes: “In his words for the song ‘Down East’ (1919), a rumination on ‘songs from mother’s heart’ that culminates in ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ he says it plainly: ‘With those strains a stronger hope comes nearer to me.’ We need that hope today.”

Ives and Schoenberg Turn 150 — and the Road Not Taken

Charles Ives and Arnold Schoenberg, both of whom turn 150 years old this year, are the most important composers of their generation produced by Austro/Germany and the US.  

Though Ives was said by some to “know his Schoenberg,” he plausibly denied it. Schoenberg, however, paid sufficient attention to Ives to have written a magnificent encomium: “There is a great man living in this country – a composer. He has solved the problem of how to preserve one’s self and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise of blame. His name is Ives.”

Ives shared with Schoenberg a condition of neglect. He did not share the 12-tone method of composition which Schoenberg anticipated would insure a robust musical future. But Schoenberg admired him anyway – at least for his pride and self-assurance.

Both composers responded to an acute twentieth century challenge with a radical innovation. For Schoenberg, the challenge was spent tradition: the seeming exhaustion of tonal harmony, and a trajectory that anticipated its extirpation. For Ives, the challenge was the absence of tradition: he lacked New World forebears of sufficient consequence to fashion a distinctive American idiom. He invented a strategy deploying American memory shards complexly intermingling with one another and with the Germanic template. 

Schoenberg’s innovation – composition with 12 tones – proved a wrong move, but fatally popular. Ives’s innovation was a right move, but fatefully ignored.

I posed an obvious “what if” in my book Dvorak’s Prophecy:

“It is believed that during his New York Philharmonic tenure Gustav Mahler encountered Ives’s Third Symphony in score, took an interest, and might have premiered it with the Philharmonic had he not died in 1911 at the age of 50. Imagine that the score Mahler found was instead Ives’s Second and that he led the premiere performances at Carnegie Hall sometime before the Great War. The discovery of Ives’ songs and Concord Sonata would have been accelerated. American classical music would have acquired a past linking to the vernacular, and to writers and painters of consequence. No interwar commentator – not even Virgil Thomson – could have claimed that all pre-1910 American composers were faceless European clones. The spasmodic odyssey of American classical music could have acquired a pertinent ongoing shape.”

Instead of Ives, it was Aaron Copland who created an American style: sleek, streamlined, Francophile – and not nearly as protean, not nearly as resonant. It is Ives, not the interwar modernists, who connects to the American past, to the Civil War, to the Transcendentalists, to the quintessentially American self-made “unfinished” genius: Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, William Faulkner.  

A few weeks ago, scripting my NPR show on Leonard Bernstein, I revisited William Schuman’s American Festival Overture (1939), which Bernstein programed alongside Ives’s Second on his first subscription concert as music director of the New York Philharmonic. Re-encountered today, it’s already a relic, almost a caricature of the wrong road taken. 

To read a blog about the one Schoenberg 12-tone piece I still adore, click here.

Mahler, Ives, and Today’s Cultural Memory Crisis

In celebration of the Charles Ives Sesquicentenary, I’ve written a long piece on Ives and Gustav Mahler for The American Scholar. The topic is not new: these composers quite obviously have in common a radical propensity to juxtapose the quotidian with the sublime – parade bands and tuneful ditties with the most rarefied metaphysical strivings. But my perspective is, I think, new – and pertinent to the fraught times in which we live.

The American experience is today ever more crippled by a condition of pastlessness. More than any previous composers, Ives and Mahler are obsessed with the act of memory. Mahler’s memories typically stem from his childhood years in Iglau, Ives’s from his Danbury childhood. What is more: Ives virtually curates the American past — the Revolutionary and Civil Wars; the Transcendentalists. No less than Mark Twain, no less than Herman Melville, he is an American icon — and yet remains mistrusted and misunderstood. That at the same time he is for many the supreme American creative genius among concert composers must say something about America and Ives both: as ever, we’re not sure who we are. 

Not so long ago, Ives was misclassified as a prophetic modernist. An obsession with “who got there first?” pigeonholed him as an intriguing historical oddity rather than an expressive genius. It placed him firmly in play, but proved essentially patronizing. Once the modernist criterion of originality dissipated, however, it became possible to resituate Ives as a complex product of a dynamic period of  American growth itself undergoing revision. 

Hence the sesquicentenary opportunity at hand, celebrating the 150th birthday of this most volatile cultural bellwether. With Ives ensconced in a pervasive fin-de-siecle moment, we can at last thrust him onto the international stage he deserves and inquire: what about Charles Ives resonates with musical developments abroad – not as a possible harbinger of Arnold Schoenberg or Bela Bartok, but as a precise contemporary of the European composer he most striking resembles? 

The creative act, however understood, is therapeutic: a conversation with the self. For Mahler, for Ives, shards of memory proved an exigent mooring ingredient. Their occurrence is made to seem involuntary, unpremeditated, unwilled. In Mahler, a signature memory swath is public rituals of mourning written into the dirges of his symphonies. The funeral mode may intrude at any moment — as when the clarion fortissimo opening of the sanguine Third instantly dissipates to the wailing winds and searing trumps cries of a pianissimo processional. In Ives, a distinctive memory swath is of sounds heard over water, which may (as in the song “Remembrance”) evoke his father, or (as in the song “The Housatonic at Stockbridge”) his courtship. In Ives’ “The St. Gaudens on Boston Commons,” the memory of Civil War songs is spectral: a haunting of the present.

My American Scholar essay concludes: If Nietzsche, processing decades of bewildering flux, diagnosed a condition of  “weightlessness,” today’s affliction is pastlessness. Our world of social media and mounting, ever multiplying gadgetry swims in bits and pieces, in disconnected dots, in superficia and ephemera. Processing the lapse in cultural memory evident all around us, we should fear losing touch with the arts – with civilization – as a renewable reservoir. 

Leonard Bernstein’s recovery of Ives’ Second Symphony in the 1950s — widely reported and acclaimed – should have secured Ives a firm foothold in the American symphonic repertoire. Bernstein broadcast and recorded Ives. He espoused Ives on national television. He took Ives abroad. He laid the groundwork – but it never happened. Incredibly – tellingly — the present Ives Sesquicentenary is mainly being celebrated abroad. In the United States, it will be commemorated most ambitiously not by any orchestra or music director, but by the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University/Bloomington, which in October hosts nine days of cross-disciplinary exploration supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Who else — what institutions of education and performance – will remember Charles Ives in years to come? It is not an idle question. It is now 78 years since Lou Harrison unforgettably wrote:

“I suspect that the works of Ives are a great city, with public and private places for all, and myriad sights in all directions . . . . In the not-too-distant future it may be that we will enter this city and find each in his own way his proper home address, letters from the neighbors, and indeed all of a life, for who else has built a place big enough for us, or seen to it that all were equally and just represented? Such is the work of Ives And if we here, in the United States, are still really homeless of the mind, it is not because men have not spent their hearts and spirit building that home . . . but simply because we refuse to move in.”

A side topic in my American Scholar essay: No other American composer connects more explicitly with the ragged New World arts species epitomized by Herman Melville. Both Melville and Ives eschewed finishing school in Europe – the treasures and literary traditions of Italy and France; the conservatories of Vienna and Berlin. Concomitantly, both embraced a democratic ethos. Melville’s schooling was obtained on the South Seas among sailors of every race and stripe. Ives insisted that his second vocation – selling life insurance – enhanced his musical vocation; “Get into the lives of the people!” he thundered.  Melville’s masterpieces are proudly unkempt. So it is with Ives: a frontier trait. If Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno are peak American achievements in large and smaller forms, so are Ives’ fifty-minute Concord Piano Sonata and four-minute “Housatonic at Stockbridge.” And an early Ives composition, his Second Symphony, parallels Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: fearlessly mining American vernacular speech and song, they are kindred landmarks in appropriating the European novel and symphony. In short, the pantheon of the self-created, “unfinished” American genius – the high canon of Emerson, Melville, and Twain, also of Walt Whitman, George Gershwin, and William Faulkner – is Ives’ rightful home. And yet he remains less known, less widely appreciated. 

The forthcoming Ives festival at Indiana University – possibly the most ambitious Ives celebration ever mounted — devotes an afternoon to “Ives and American Literature.” Other topics in play include Ives the man, Ives and the American band, Ives in performance, Ives and Nature, Ives and the Gilded Age, Ives and hymnody, and Ives and the Civil War. All the concerts and talks will be free of charge, and they’ll all be live-streamed. For further information, click here. 

The newest online edition ofThe American Scholar (whose editor, Sudip Bose, deserves an Ives Medal) includes my Ives/Mahler piece alongside four additional Ives Sesquicentenary essays — by Peter Burkholder, Allen Guelzo, Tim Barringer, and Sudip himself — that comprise a 50-page Ives Sesquicentenary Program Companion. I’ll shortly be posting a blog pondering the significance of these fresh musical and extra-musical perspectives.

The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” — Take Four: What Happened to Charles Ives?

In 1951, Leonard Bernstein, age 32, led the New York Philharmonic in the belated world premiere of Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2 – music composed half a century earlier. The performance was nationally broadcast and widely noticed. Seven years after that, Bernstein began his tenure as the Philharmonic’s music director with Ives’ Second Symphony. In all, he performed Ives’ Second twenty times during his Philharmonic decade. He also recorded it. He devoted a nationally televised Young People’s Concert to Ives. For the Ives Centenary, in 1974, he led Ives’ Second on July 4 in Danbury, Connecticut – Ives’ hometown. In short: he rescued from oblivion a great American symphony and followed that up with a sustained act of advocacy.  

I remember the Ives Centenary. It included a major conference which resulted in an important book. The notion that Ives was the supreme creative genius in the history of American classical music gained a lot of traction. The Ives cause had in fact steadily mounted since the discovery of his Concord Sonata – the summit of the American keyboard literature – in 1939. It was widely assumed that the Ives crescendo would continue. But it didn’t. So far as I can tell, this year’s Ives Sesquicentenary is being ignored by American orchestras. It is in fact far more noticed abroad. And, what’s more – what’s worse – none of this is very surprising.

I subtitled my 2005 tome Classical Music in America “A History of Its Rise and Fall.” At a noisy session of the American Symphony Orchestra League conference that year, a longtime orchestra CEO ridiculed my premise that classical music in the US was rapidly fading to the margins; I did not cite a single statistic, he smugly observed. Seventeen years previous to that, I published a book even more reviled: Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music.

The basic premise of both books was that classical music in the US was and is incurably Eurocentric. I had attempted to figure out how that happened. In the process, I discovered that things were very different before World War I. It was once widely assumed that the US could acquire a symphonic and operatic canon of its own, that American orchestras and opera companies would eventually mainly give American works. As of 1900, no one of consequence imagined that the umbilical cord would remain intact. 

The core topic here is the popularization of the arts during the interwar decades. A “new audience,” populated by the “new middle classes,” was born. It represented both an opportunity and a challenge. Both were botched. A key factor was a commercial strategy pursued via radio and recordings by NBC and RCA. They marketed what they could best sell: masterworks by dead Europeans. They extolled (I am not making this up) passive consumption by amateurs – let the professionals do the work. Virgil Thomson dubbed it all the “music appreciation racket.” I use the term “the culture of performance,” sidelining the composer. (In my cultural Cold War book The Propaganda of Freedom, I glance at the Soviet Union and discover an interwar popularization strategy emphasizing making music in homes and factories, and privileging native repertoire new and old.)

Was it inevitable? I mull the role of leadership. David Sarnoff, masterminding NBC and RCA, was a visionary with a parochial musical vision. Arthur Judson, the Robert Moses of American classical music, was a powerbroker, a music-businessman. Running Columbia Artists Management and the New York Philharmonic, he decreed (explicitly): the audience sets taste. Concurrently, Sarnoff and other broadcasters defeated proposals for an “American BBC” (which would have made a difference).

If you’re looking for leaders in American classical music, look before World War I. They were omnipresent. The two most formidable were Theodore Thomas, whose itinerant Thomas Orchestra toured the hinterlands, and Henry Higginson, who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony. They set taste. And so did Anton Seidl and Oscar Hammerstein in New York, and Laura Langford in Brooklyn. In later decades, Serge Koussevitzky, Leopold Stokowski, and Dmitri Mitropoulos, in Boston, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis, were exceptions proving the rule outside the Judson orbit. Then Judson hired Mitropoulos to lead the New York Philharmonic, whose pedigree was sinking. My favorite Judson story: when Mitropoulos conducted the Philharmonic in the American premiere of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, Judson insisted that it be replaced with the Gershwin Piano Concerto for the Sunday broadcast – Gershwin, Judson maintained, would be more suitable radio fare and also sell more tickets at home. In response, Mitropoulos wrote Judson “to beg you, almost on my knees” to change his mind. “It would be a crime not to give this New World [broadcast] premiere of this great and exciting symphony . . . It would be a great event from which we have nothing to fear and from which to expect no less than the highest gratitude of all the musical artistic world in the United States.” He added that he awaited Judson’s response “with anxiety.” Judson said no. 

And this is why Leonard Bernstein mattered and matters still. Of the dozens of blogs I’ve posted in recent years, the most read, by a wide margin, deal with institutional leadership – at the San Francisco Symphony, the Boston Symphony, and the Metropolitan Opera. And they cite a couple of inspired institutional leaders I knew: Harvey Lichtenstein at BAM and Speight Jenkins at the Seattle Opera. Imagine, if you can, a leader of Bernstein’s stature today at the helm of an American orchestra or opera company.   

As for Charles Ives: the NEH-funded “Music Unwound” initiative I’ve directed for a dozen years mounts cross-disciplinary festivals dedicated to signature topics in American music. The most necessary of those, I would say, is “Charles Ives’ America.” The humanities-infused strategy is to contextualize the Second Symphony, the Concord Sonata, and Ives’s songs and chamber works. We challenge the misimpression that Ives is esoteric.  

“Ives’s America” has been produced by the Buffalo Philharmonic, the South Dakota Symphony, and the Brevard Music Festival, with three more coming up: the Chicago Sinfonietta in collaboration with Illinois State University, Bard’s The Orchestra Now (including a Carnegie Hall performance), and – very possibly the biggest Ives festival ever mounted – Indiana University at Bloomington. I pitched NEH-subsidized “Music Unwound” Ives festivals to two major orchestras and got nowhere. An Artistic Administrator asked rhetorically: “How would I sell it?” This is not a question I heard from JoAnn Falletta in Buffalo, Delta David Gier in Sioux Falls, Jason Posnock in Brevard, Blake Anthony Johnson in Chicago, or Leon Botstein at Bard. (At Bloomington, the concerts will be free.) 

Back in the day, when I undertook projects for the New York Philharmonic (where “Music Unwound” was actually born, thanks to Matias Tarnopolsky), there was a photograph of Leonard Bernstein directly over the elevator exiting the administrative offices. Perhaps it’s still there. I never passed under it – not once – without experiencing piercing sadness and incredulity that the Philharmonic was no longer his.  

For a schedule of upcoming NEH-supported Ives Sesquicentenary festivals, click here.

To read previous blogs in this Bernstein series, click here, here, and here.

To listen to an NPR “More than Music” exploration of “The Bernstein Odyssey,” click here.   

The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” — Take Three: Bernstein, Furtwängler, and Saying What You Think

According to a well-worn anecdote, Johannes Brahms was heard to say: “I’ll never write a symphony, you have no idea what it feels like to hear the footsteps of a giant behind one” – the giant being Beethoven. And Brahms was all of 43 years old when he finished his First Symphony, whose finale alludes to Beethoven’s Ninth. If Brahms in fact felt intimidated by his mighty precursors, he was assuredly fortified as well: there would be no Brahms symphonies, as we know them, without the forebears he knew and studied.

In the case of Leonard Bernstein – the topic of a previous blog and NPR feature – the weight of the past was a constant topic. It imposed expectations and Olympian standards. But mainly Bernstein worried that cultural memory was a resource that risked being squandered or diminished over the course of the twentieth century. And I believe Bernstein’s anxiety was all too prophetic.

Scripting my NPR show, I returned to Bernstein’s 1973 Norton Lectures, and differently reacted to his discomfort with the course of music in his time. He was a musician whose purview was always unusually broad. Not only because it embraced a variety of genres, but because – as a diehard pedagogue – his explorations of past achievement fed never-ending questions and concerns about the fate and purpose of the arts. His discomfort with the state of music once seemed to me anachronistic. I would now call it courageous.

Another discovery I made, scanning the web, was a one-hour interview with Bernstein about conductors he had known. He expressed pride that “all these conductors were my friends.” In relation to his contemporaries, he was typically inquisitive and acquisitive. He studied – simultaneously — with Serge Koussevitzky and Fritz Reiner, who had virtually nothing in common as technicians or interpreters. He was also influenced by Dmitri Mitropoulos, who was remote from Koussevitzky and Reiner both. And, in the interview (with Paul Hume), one learns that he valued his personal relationships with Arturo Toscanini, George Szell, and Karl Bohm. Bernstein was famously eclectic – and this is nothing if not an eclectic list.

But the most riveting moment in the interview, by far, is a story about Wilhelm Furtwängler. (Go to 35:00.) In the late forties, Bernstein conducted a Mahler symphony at the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam. He arrived to discover that, the night before his concert, Furtwängler would lead Brahms’ First with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. It was Bernstein’s first (and only) opportunity to hear Furtwängler in concert – he had to go. But his European manager told him this was out of the question. The hall would be picketed by demonstrators denouncing Furtwängler as a Nazi (which he was not). And Bernstein, being Jewish, would attract attention. 

Bernstein managed to enter the hall via backstage and sit in a stage box unobserved. “I’d never seen anything like it, I’d never heard anything like it,” he remembers. “I was in tears. I thought, ‘I’ve got to go back to meet him.’ But I was told – ‘you can’t do that. It would be embarrassing for him; it would be embarrassing for you.’’”

Many years later, Furtwängler’s secretary mailed Bernstein a page from his diary. “It said: ‘Tonight I heard the greatest conductor in the world, and I was prevented from meeting him.’ Furtwängler had done the same thing. He had been in that same stage box for my concert. And he asked to go backstage to meet me. We were not allowed to shake hands with one another on two successive nights because of public opinion.”

(Of my older blogs, the ones dealing with Furtwängler continue to be accessed, the most popular being “Furtwangler in Wartime”.)

Among the responses to my first Bernstein blog, one in particular, from the horn player Christopher Caudill, bears pondering. It reads:

“Western Culture has been demonized by the Social Justice Bolsheviks as irredeemably racist and genocidal. Our contemporary St. Justs and Robespierres do not feel the need to learn about Tradition, because they have identified it as a mere catalogue of injustice and oppression.  Young people are being robbed of their own heritage; this fall at UNC Chapel Hill the music history requirement for students has been done away with, after being taught for generations. It’s time for sincere artists to speak up for the integrity of Western Culture without fear; as Heather MacDonald pointed out in her City Journal article (https://www.city-journal.org/article/classical-musics-suicide-pact-part-1) the vast majority of arts leaders and educators have remained shamefully silent in the face of this decay and disintegration.  Bernstein would have boldly spoken out, cigarette lit, whiskey in hand.  Bless him and his crazy genius, and may his memory inspire American artists to “feel the fear’ and do it anyway.

“Your Bernstein article, and the comments of Thomas Hampson in particular, hit me hard with a feeling that we are losing ground as human beings through the ‘calamitous failure of American cultural memory.’  I spent two years with Michael Tilson Thomas at the New World Symphony, and through him I perceived the tremendous artistic power that Bernstein wielded; a kind of uncompromising sincerity and commitment to the beauty of music. Understanding the incredible musical vitality of post World War II America is impossible without including Lenny — the idea that his legacy might be ignored through basic ignorance is horrible to contemplate.'”

As I have repeatedly observed, Bernstein’s tenacious advocacy of Dmitri Shostakovich, in the midst of Cold War propaganda portraying Shostakovich as a Soviet stooge (not to mention Western cultural propaganda espousing 12-tone orthodoxy), says a lot. We do not much encounter this kind of fearlessness today. Have a look at our political arena. A conductor of my acquaintance adds:

“One sure way to stay unemployed as a conductor is to get known for your political views. “

To read my previous blog on Bernstein and the FBI, click here.