Notes On Doubt

In a review of Stephen Budiansky’s new biography of Charles Ives, Jeremy Denk discusses how doubt informed the composer’s work:

Many of Ives’s most important pieces are about blurred or doubtful perception. The beloved song “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” depicts a morning walk in haze and mist, while hearing a hymn from a church across the river. The loss of information, the disintegration of the tune, is essential to the beauty, like the crackle and hiss of old recordings: a failure that connotes authenticity. Toward the end, the river heads to the sea (a gigantic mass of notes) but this climax is followed by a wonderfully quiet afterimage, a remnant of the hymn—an ending that disputes the very idea of ending. Most of Ives’s works end with beautiful but undermining echoes, instead of audience-pleasing affirmation.

Ives turned doubt to artistic insight, but the doubt turned back against him.

He was an unusually insecure pioneer. When he published the “Concord” Sonata, an act of supreme confidence, he also released a companion book (Essays Before a Sonata) as a preemptive defense. It’s hard to imagine Beethoven supplying a program note to his late quartets. Ives also had serious doubts about notation—unfortunate, since that is more or less the foundation of Western music: “After you get an idea written down it’s no good. Why when I see the notes I write down on the page and think of what I wanted it to sound like—why—it’s dead!” Budiansky describes the difficult process when, in the flush of fame, it came time to make a revised edition of the “Concord”:

An eight-year saga…. Ives’s deteriorating eyesight and his endless agonizing…drove the editors at Arrow Press to distraction…. Harrison Kerr at the press told [the pianist John Kirkpatrick, who gave the first full performance] in despair in 1940 that “Mr. Ives had been putting in sharps and flats and taking them out again all summer.”

It is just there—where the classical composer is supposed to “land” his move, to crystallize the work into a masterpiece—that Ives seems most uncertain, most ambivalent. As a result, many of his works deserve asterisks; they retreat away from the final, single form toward a set of possibilities.