1926, Vol. 12 Just As Mark Twain Had Been the First Writer to Create an Indigenous American Style In
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A Year in Classical Music: 1926, vol. 12 Just as Mark Twain had been the first writer to create an indigenous American style in literature — the first American author who wasn’t just a transplanted European — Charles Ives was the first composer to create an indigenous American style in classical music. His music is experimental and aggressively Modernist, so it’s not as immediately agreeable as Duke Ellington or Aaron Copland, but it evokes the American experience with an eloquence and candor that few other classical composers have matched, and none have exceeded. Ives’ most productive years had been from 1902 (just after he completed his Second Symphony) until 1916 or ’17 (when he completed his Fourth Symphony). After that, with the exception of a number of songs, the Orchestral Set no. 3, and the Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for Two Pianos of 1924, he abandoned any further efforts to conceptualize and begin new works. Into the ’20s Ives spent his composing time revising and improving upon scores he’d begun years earlier. Then, towards the end of 1926, Ives came downstairs from his study with tears in his eyes and told his wife he was no longer able to compose music. “Nothing went well” anymore, he told her. “Nothing sounded right.” The last composition Ives finished was his 1926 song Sunrise, for voice, violin, and piano. Sunrise is a great example of the composer’s late “sublime style”: ethereal, reflective, tranquil. The poem is by Ives himself, set to music that includes light writing for the piano and a violin part that spends much of its time providing an ostinato for the voice. I think mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford makes a strong case for the piece with her recording on Naxos, on volume 5 of their cycle of Ives’ songs. Ives himself was unhappy with the piece, though. He wrote self-critical remarks in the score: at the end he says, “not a good job — the words are no good, but better than the music.” It was soon after he finished Sunrise that he told his wife he couldn’t compose anymore. Was he right to be so self-critical, or by the age of 52 had he simply lost the intellectual capacity to conceive complex music? The other of Ives’ pieces that belongs in a discussion of his work in 1926 is the Orchestral Set no. 3. Ives had started work on it in 1919, and of his three orchestral sets it’s the only one that he conceived as a cohesive three- movement piece from the beginning. Ives never completed the Orchestral Set no. 3, but very likely it’s what he was working on the day he told his wife he couldn’t compose anymore. The first of its three movements he had mostly finished by ’26, but the second and third movements had to be completed by two Ives scholars: David Gray Porter and Nors Josephson. Their work allowed Naxos to recorded a world-premiere realization of the piece, on a 2008 album by the Malmö Orchestra of Sweden with conductor James Sinclair. It’s a very exciting album for Ives enthusiasts, containing all three of Ives’ orchestral sets, and the realization of the Orchestral Set no. 3 is good, it sounds like it belongs with the other two sets. All three sets use a slow-fast-slow construction in three movements. In the Orchestral Set no. 3 the two outer movements have much the same atmosphere as the Sunrise song, in the vein of Ives’ late-period “sublime style,” and the middle movement contains a good deal of the popular tune collage and rowdy cacophony that’s familiar in Ives’ orchestral music. My favorite composer of this sort of music (by which I mean highly dissonant, free-form orchestral tapestries) is Henri Dutilleux. Dutilleux came two generations after Ives, and while I’ve found no indication that Ives directly influenced him, we can certainly view Ives as a pioneer, and Dutilleux as the inheritor of a well-developed and established genre that Ives had helped to create. So Ives and Dutilleux were to this kind of music what Haydn and Brahms were to the symphony. That’s how I hear it: a Dutilleux piece like Timbres, Espace, Mouvement “La Nuit Etoilée” is more intricate and complex than an Ives orchestral set, and I would say more sophisticated, but the Ives is steeped in the creative energy and joy that come with the first explorations of a new territory in music. England had first recognized Gustav Holst as a major composer in 1918, with the premiere of his now-famous orchestral suite The Planets. In those days he had divided his time between composition and teaching, as the director of music at Morely College in downtown London, and at the St. Paul Girls’ School at Hammersmith, just west of downtown. But in the early ’20s, as he reached the age of fifty, Holst had been forced to become less active so as to look after his health, which had begun to decline. In 1925 he retired from most of his teaching, which left him more time for composing. Holst’s 1926 composition project was The Golden Goose, which he described as a “choral ballet.” The Golden Goose is a Brothers Grimm fairy tale in which a young man who does a good deed is rewarded with a goose whose feathers are made of pure gold. Other people try to pluck feathers from the goose but are magically stuck to it, and to each other. The young man goes about his business with the goose under his arm, without paying any attention to the people who are stuck to it and have to follow him around. Eventually the young man leads them all to the city where the king lives. The king has a daughter who has such a serious attitude that no one has ever been able to make her laugh. So the king has promised her hand in marriage to the man who can make her laugh, and when she sees the procession of people stumbling along, stuck to the golden goose, she laughs until she cries. The young man marries her, inherits the kingdom, and everyone lives happily ever after — except, possibly, for the golden goose and all the people who are stuck to it… we never find out if they get un-stuck. In any case, the story was adapted and turned into a ballet, for which Holst composed the music. He was pleased with his score, pleased enough that he began to have it performed as a concert piece, without the dancers. Holst had always followed his imagination wherever it led him, not worrying about satisfying the appetites of the public who, understandably, wanted to hear more music like The Planets from him. The Golden Goose sounds nothing like The Planets. By the 1920’s Holst had moved away from the heavy and powerful Wagnerian style, which had been so much a part of the inspiration for The Planets. The Golden Goose is simpler stuff, in the style of English folk music. Listen to the recording by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Richard Hickox. It was the last recording Hickox made before he died; it’s a fine album in its own right, but it’s especially dear to fans of the prolific champion of British classical music. As for The Planets, though, Holst conducted a recording of the work in 1926 that’s still available today. These podcasts are generally concerned with music composed in a certain year, not recorded then; but in this case Holst’s work as a conductor and recording artist are of interest. Holst had first conducted a recording of the The Planets in 1923, when the recording technology was all mechanical, using big sound-catching cones. His 1926 recording of The Planets was captured with new, state-of-the-art electronic recording technology, with its newfangled microphones, speakers, and mixing consoles; it was one of the earliest electronic recordings ever made. Electronic recording improved recorded sound quality, but it also reduced the playing time of the discs. So to fit the music onto the records in 1926 Holst had to use faster tempos than he had in 1923. If you’re interested, I’ve put links to both the ’23 and ’26 recordings up at ayicm.com. The sound quality is definitely much better on the ’26 recording, but it’s still a long way from the high-fidelity recordings we’ve been used to the last fifty or sixty years. Still, with either the ’23 or ’26 recording, it’s interesting to hear Holst interpret his own music. We opened the program with Charles Ives, who lived in New York City in 1926 — also living in New York at the time was Sergei Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff had been born into the landed Russian aristocracy in 1873. His grandfather had been a skillful pianist and composer, having studied with Chopin’s predecessor, the Irish pianist and composer John Field. Both of Rachmaninoff’s parents were amateur pianists, and Rachmaninoff himself, of course, became one of history’s greatest pianists. But after 1917 the Bolsheviks confiscated the Rachmaninoff family property, after a good deal of looting and destruction at the family estates in the violence of the revolution. Rachmaninoff was then made to join the collective, forced to attend the mandatory committee meetings, forced to carry a rifle and stand on guard duty at night. He fled with his family to America at the first opportunity, adding his name to the long roster of “white émigrés.” These were the “white” rather than “red” Russians, those who did not support the Bolsheviks, fleeing into a Russian diaspora.