grow up (or, passing mood)

the more i grow up, the less i’m able to tolerate ives’s puritanical bullshit. 

and it’s too bad, because it was ives’s music that first invited me to the dance as a teenager when i scarcely knew what modern music was. and it’s too bad, because in college i fought tooth and nail for special-admittance to a course on ives’s music, studying and writing about it in-depth under the guidance of one of the world’s foremost ives scholars. and it’s too bad, because i went on to perform and speak about ives’s music in all fifty states, telling his story with the same myth and pathos that had first enchanted and carried me through a near-decade of autumn-tinged ives fantasia. 

but now? as in right now, this moment, today, as i read (for the who-knows-how-manyieth time) the rather famed letter ives’s wife wrote to the wife of carl ruggles about henry cowell—cowell, who was ives’s first (and at first, only) ally, and who was at the time locked up in a 4-foot san quentin jail cell—the picture painted of ives is not of the mysterious and tragic father of american music, but rather that of a couch-fainting drama queen, a child, naive to the point of absurdity, throwing a nelly temper tantrum while turning a blind eye to the numerous faggots to whom he solely owed his reputation as a composer.

i should be well used to this by now, and i thought i was, but today it just doesn’t fit. not for me, not anymore. nor does it really feel “of the time” or any of that other nonsense. ives’s lame-brain drag act has finally, for me, begun to also drag down his music. 

and it’s too bad, because suddenly that music’s gnarliness doesn’t strike me as audacious, but rather as kind of annoying, and its sweetness, which once knotted my stomach and quivered my cheeks, comes across as the irritating nostalgia of a very rich man fetishizing a very imaginary postcard. oh, danbury… 

have you been to danbury? 

i used to weep for ives, not to mention defend and excuse him, but today it seems so foolish. then again, there’s always tomorrow, and i guess, like many of the pianists who have championed his music, i was in the closet once, too.