!1
Yankee Doodles: The Music and Politics of Charles Ives
A thesis presented by Jacob Tilton
Presented to The Department of Music and The Department of Government in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree with honors of Bachelor of Arts
Harvard College March 2019 !2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE 3 INTRODUCTION 5 CH. I: IVES’S “YANKEE” PSYCHE & POLITICS 17 Democracy & Memory 18 “The Majority” 21 “Essays Before a Sonata,” Dogma, and Transcendentalism 31 Race, Ragtime, and Musical Borrowing 38 War, Patriotism, Alienation, and Neurasthenia 40 Puritan Versus “Yankee” in Relation to Ives 45 America’s Emasculation 47 Concluding Notes 53 CH. II: A MUSICAL STUDY OF IVES’S THREE PLACES IN NEW ENGLAND 57 The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common 58 Putnam’s Camp 64 The Housatonic at Stockbridge 71 Political, Social, and Philosophical Implications and Questions 74 CONCLUSION, DISCUSSION, AND PERSONAL INTERVENTION 83 BIBLIOGRAPHY 91 APPENDIX I: Facsimile of the Original Manuscript of “Emasculating America” 106 APPENDIX II: Books on Ives’s Shelf & Authors He Cites 116 !3
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have lived in Canton, Connecticut, a town on the border of Hartford and
Litchfield counties, and in the liminal zone of rural and suburban realms, for my entire life. If it weren’t for this upbringing and constant travels around all parts of
New England, from the urban to the most rural, this project would not exist. An oft-overlooked place of culture, tradition, heritage, and pride, the communities, people, and landscapes of this region are unique and have formed who I consider myself to be today.
I would like to thank my father for instilling a sense of pride in my family and genealogy, my mother for instilling a love of nature and a strong sense of self, my entire family for supporting my pursuits, and Professor John Stilgoe for teaching me how to look carefully at my surroundings, and teaching me that having a different perspective at Harvard is a sustainable and admirable thing. Of course, I also thank all my friends who have supported me for ages and put up with my excited ramblings throughout the process.
This work would not have been completed to its full extent without generous funding from the Saloma Fund in the Harvard Government Department.
Finally, I would like to thank Richard Boursy at the Yale Library, Etha
Williams, the archivists at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and
Maestro James Sinclair for assisting me in my research, and Professors Carol Oja and Eric Nelson in the Harvard University Departments of Music and
Government for advising me through the writing process. !4
Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in
an easy chair.
–Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata !5
INTRODUCTION
The world of modernist composer, insurance executive, and visionary,
Charles Ives, is shrouded in enigma. This mystery was described aptly as early as
1954 by his first biographers, Henry and Sidney Robertson Cowell, in the opening of Charles Ives and His Music, where they plainly assert that “nobody today writes like Charles Ives, because no one lives in the same musical and philosophical world he did.”1 He was the model of the “solitary visionary,” as
John Adams expressed it.2 It appears that Ives was in fact a visionary, as a cohort of composers identified by their American nationality, including Aaron Copland,
Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, and John Adams, all draw inspiration from
Ives. Ives remained isolated, not teaching any pupil but Elliott Carter and not founding any school. His works (both music and prose) are distinctive among
American composers and authors to this day. His music is seen as revolutionary and transcendent, yet strangely familiar. It is bold and brave, but based in part on small, colloquial folk tunes.
While Ives’s music has been rather thoroughly studied by a fairly large group of musicologists since the 1970s, Ives’s personal political views and their deep attachment to the local traditions of his home region of the Northeast (more
1 Henry Cowell and Sidney Robertson Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music (Oxford University Press, 1955), 3.
2 John Adams, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (New York: Picador, 2009), 357. !6 specifically, New England) have not been so deeply considered.3 Several of those who study Ives see him as an erratic, flawed enigma who did not fit in with society, because he and his music were overly kitsch, or because he radically flouted norms, sometimes in line with a transcendental spirit, and sometimes out of step with any ideology.
I shall argue, however, that Ives can be understood through one unified lens that explains his music and politics. This lens is suggested by the identity given to him by scholars and defined by the culture and landscape of his region,
New England. In part, it is also based on Ives’s own writings and visions of his place in American music and politics. I will call this identity “Yankee.” It is that of a prototypical rural New Englander, and in Ives’s case, his “Yankeeness” was touched by Progressive era and transcendental ideology, giving Ives a distinct worldview. In Ives’s works, I argue this identity manifests itself in a “progressive conservative” framework: Ives takes the institutions and aura of old New England and adapts them in new ways for the future of music and politics alike, in the hopes of creating a radically egalitarian society.
I must briefly address the word “Yankee.” It is elusive, subjective, slippery, but familiar, meaning many things to many people. In Ivesian terms,
3 While Gayle Sherwood Magee uses similar lenses of analysis in her 2010 book, Charles Ives Reconsidered, her conclusions and points of focus are drastically different from mine, ending with Ives portrayed in a more negative tone. Carol Baron’s “Efforts on Behalf of Democracy by Charles Ives and His Family: Their Religious Contexts” addresses Ives’s religious background and impacts on his political views, instead of viewing Ives through the direct impact of the political institutions surrounding him, as I do. !7 critics usually revere Ives and call him a “Yankee” and his music “American” without pausing to consider the implications of that statement.4 While “Yankee” can mean “white people descended from the Puritans,”5 or as a New England native might say it, of “Puritan stock,”6 in a very literal sense, it remains a word without a proper or agreed-upon definition, an identity, which is neglected and shrouded in confusion among scholars and in colloquial culture alike. Ives’s identity, as presented by musicologists such as Jan Swafford, is wholly American, but also quintessentially “Yankee.” Leonard Bernstein even referenced how Ives
“transmogrifies” quotations of the orchestral tradition to be distinctively Ivesian, or as if spoken with a “Yankee twang.”7 The identity is literally foundational to
America, yet goes so rarely mentioned compared to other, newer social identities.
After all, during and after Ives’s lifetime, many identities (ethnic or otherwise) became more politically-salient, and the “Yankee” no longer represented America as a whole. Contemporary literature barely mentions the “Yankee” to the point that it appears to border on irrelevant in this new age of American identity
4 I must stress that the conflation of “Yankee” with “American” is that of previous authors, which while incorrect, lends credence to the durability, importance, and veracity of the “Yankee” identity, even though in contemporary America, the “Yankee” is by no means the definitive American.
5 Elizabeth Ammons, “The Myth of Imperiled Whiteness and Ethan Frome,” The New England Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2008): 10.
6 Daniel Aaron, Men of Good Hope; a story of American Progressives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 28.
7 Leonard Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein Discusses Charles Ives (Sony BMG Music Entertainment, 1995). !8 politics, where Americans form particular ethnic or social political alliances and gain a sense of political community and selfhood from these increasingly disparate groups. Simply put, group identification on the basis of living in New
England appears to be diminishing as Americans shift to using other identitarian markers, and the idea of unified “Americanism” begins to disappear. Although not traits of a “nation” (in political science parlance), Wilbur Zelinsky argued long ago that the ethos of American culture lies in “1. an intense, almost anarchistic individualism; 2. a high valuation placed on mobility and change; 3. a mechanistic vision of the world; 4. a messianic perfectionism.”8 While this literature is perhaps outdated, I believe that Ives’s New England met the first and fourth criteria elegantly, and Zelinsky offers flexibility in his note that “the importance of these motifs, in both absolute and relative terms, varies markedly within the country and as between historical periods, but not so much as to vitiate their validity.”9 Many Ives biographers appear to hold Ives’s views to contemporary standards without realizing the temporality of Ives’s sensibilities, Ives being a near-contemporary of Zelinsky, both producing the majority of their works before these new identitarian markers were established.
Tracing the evolution of social norms and practices, Ives’s sensibilities lived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shown by references to mankind as “men.” In Ives’s “Emasculating America for Money,” he refers to
8 Wilbur Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States, Foundations of Cultural Geography Series (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 40.
9 Ibid. !9
“Men (that is, women and men),”10 showing equality between the sexes in Ives’s mind, as long as they are tough and have the kind of cussedness that would keep them from emasculation. These sensibilities were much more prevalent before the
Industrial Revolution, and while Ives’s rural “Yankee” sense of being reflected an older way of life and esoteric political sensibility, based upon his experiences in rural Connecticut throughout his life, parts of his thought were equally forward- thinking. Ives’s thought was, in a way, Emersonian and transcendentalist, a relic of the Progressive movement that culminated at the turn of the century in
America, during Ives’s maturation. The “Yankee” identity is now less relevant in a multicultural America, where “American” can mean a variety of ethnic or racial identities living in one congealed mass (or “melting pot”) of Americanism
(although debates about the salience and importance of racial and ethnic identities in multicultural America continue to rage). This means that hints, or traits, of a particular identity can be found, but as regions become more and more ethnically diverse, primarily through urbanization, older cultures become lost, or at least sidelined. This does not make an identity outdated, just less common and less outspoken or visible. Although whiteness studies, essays, and landscape history alike may not present it clearly, there is a strain of this rural “Yankee” sense of being which persists in contemporary rural New England culture. This particular sense of being is no longer so expressly articulated as it was, yet remains relevant.
Ives’s music is a perfect mirror of this identity and its politics, and both his music
10 Charles Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (New York: Norton, 1991), 134. !10 and his politics present the rural “Yankee,” that truly American identity whose central tenets include older, traditional American values, such as grit, outward humility and outspokenness (which can appear as contradictory), mild asceticism, and the old Protestant work ethic.11
The arts reflect life, and by understanding the interplay between Ives’s music and his politics, we can understand both better. Ives’s radically egalitarian, classically democratic, optimistic, and progressive leanings surfaced in his modernist compositional techniques as much as they did in his draft proposal of a
Twentieth Amendment to the United States Constitution (a work that went hand- in-hand with his The Majority (1919-1920), which outlined Ives’s plans for a radically egalitarian society). His Wilsonian-Democratic and Puritanical ideals of masculinity and “grit,” informed by the New England landscape, political institutions, and ethnographic history, also appear simultaneously in his music and his political writings. In fact, Ives named the second movement of his second orchestral set “The Rockstrewn Hills Join in the People's Outdoor Meeting.” His
Transcendental, conservative-progressive leanings come through in his Essays
Before a Sonata (1920), a written companion to his Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord,
Mass. 1840-60, or Concord Sonata. Here, he heaps praise on Emerson,
Hawthorne, Thoreau, and other transcendental heroes, but his prose and thought
11 This thesis remains outside of the realm of sociology, but this understanding of “Yankeeness” is founded in large amounts of literature, as well as the author’s own experiences. These observations work to confirm Ives’s understanding of his environment, rather than to argue them or augment them. !11 remain difficult to internalize today, even as he allegedly composed this piece for the masses. The holistic depiction and individual parts of the Fourth of July celebration at a Revolutionary War campsite in “Putnam's Camp, Redding,
Connecticut” from Ives’s Three Places in New England (1911-1914) are just as modern and difficult to the performer and listener alike as the product is bombastic, nostalgic, patriotic, and egalitarian. As Ives said of its first international premiere, conducted by Nicolas Slonimsky, the composition is “like a town meeting... Every man for himself.”12 Every performer needs grit to perform it. Every section plays over another in a polytonal and polytempic manner. Perfection is not necessarily the end result. Camaraderie, reverence, idealism, and patriotism instead are meant to flow out of the composition.
The people of New England may now be descendants of Irish Catholic or
Italian immigrants that settled in the region in the late nineteenth century,
Chinese, Russian, Brazilian, or Guatemalan immigrants (to name a few) more recently,13 or simply descendants of the original Puritans. They are therefore difficult to stereotype. However, it was taken for granted in Ives’s time that New
England had a unified, mystic soul connected chiefly to its landscape, which directly influenced its people. The most succinct explanation of New England’s
12 J. Peter Burkholder, ed., Charles Ives and His World, The Bard Music Festival Series (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996), 150.
13 “Global Era, 1965-Present,” Global Boston (blog), accessed March 1, 2019, https://globalboston.bc.edu/index.php/home/eras-of-migration/fourth-page-test/. !12 mystic soul that informs rural “Yankeeness” is from Perrin, who defines
“Yankeeness” as:
something inward, something a little cold even, at least that’s how it’s going to strike a newcomer. But something fiercely determined, and even more fiercely protective. Almost relishing discomfort. Able to endure almost any adversity, and just get stronger. The one thing that may sicken it is too much ease and prosperity - which, indeed, I suspect is true for almost every region with a soul.14
Mysticism played a large role for the New England transcendentalists, who focused heavily upon landscape and its influence on spirituality and art.
Showing that Perrin, a contemporary author, chose to use mystic elements in his description of New England shows the durability of the “Yankee” and transcendentalist tradition, and it holds up similarly in Ives’s music and politics.
I will first explore Ives’s political views through primary source material and biography, with brief interludes introducing a wider set of frameworks pertaining to Ives in Chapter I. Then, I will demonstrate the continuities between his music and his politics in Chapter II.
A large section of this thesis must deal with organizing and notating particular intangible or historical facets of New England life, detailed in a selection of literature (found in the bibliography), my own musings, and various figures. These methods of exploration, I hope to persuade you, are appropriate for making sense of Ives’s sensibilities.
14 Noel Perrin, Best Person Rural: Essays of a Sometime Farmer, 1st ed (Boston: David R. Godine, 2006), 129. !13
I will also include as figures in this thesis, photoessays of my visits to each of the three places depicted in Ives’s Three Places in New England, as well as a transcription of original manuscripts of drafts of Ives’s notes from a collection entitled “Emasculating America.” To my knowledge and to the knowledge of
Maestro James Sinclair, a preeminent Ives scholar, no transcriptions of this complete set of notes yet exists, as gleaned through electronic correspondence.
I must also acknowledge that the genesis of this thesis is from my own childhood, and the realization that those whom I could immediately identify as being “of” my rural New England landscape either lived isolated lives or were ignored by the media. These people that I knew were highly educated, rural, lived simply, had dry humor and a tough demeanor, and were of a particular mindset that I saw in Ives once I read his biographies and memos and listened to his music. John Stilgoe, a self-professed “swamp Yankee,” describes rural women of his childhood in the same way I experienced them. They had a particular
“kindness to children, old people, injured wild animals” that “coexisted with a ruthless vitality that sometimes shocked.”15 I strive to articulate both the ineffable elements of my experience and also acknowledge where my experience and Ives’s experiences (or the scholarship I use) differ, but this narrative is difficult to dodge in a topic so closely situated to sociology and narrative.
15 John R. Stilgoe, Old Fields: Photography, Glamour, and Fantasy Landscape (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 241. !14
I believe that the application of my analytical lenses of landscape history, essays, explicit address of the colloquial term “Yankee” in an Ivesian context, application of the “progressive conservative” mindset in musical composition to politics, transcription of Ives’s “Emasculating America” manuscript, and compilation of books from Ives’s shelves that likely inspired his political thought are all new and original contributions to the literature of Ives and American studies. Carol Baron discusses Ives’s political convictions in relation to his religious ones, but does not address institutional traditions of political expression in New England and their impacts upon Ives. Denise Von Glahn has written about
Charles Ives and his sense of landscape in her article, “A Sense of Place: Charles
Ives and ‘Putnam's Camp, Redding Connecticut,’” which sparked my interest in utilizing these particular analytical lenses. However, the rural “Yankee” identity has not been as thoroughly explored (especially not in dialogue with Ives).
Perhaps the text on Ives that comes closest to my mission of explaining Ives through the culturally-American frame of understanding is Rosalie Sandra Perry’s
Charles Ives and the American Mind. However, my work differs from hers in that it utilizes the term “Yankee,” and emphasizes folk and cultural context, rather than philosophical ones. My work also contextualizes Ives’s life and background in different threads than all but Von Glahn and few others have done.
As will be clear by now, this thesis is not a traditional work on music theory, history, biography, landscape, literature, political science, or political theory. Rather, it is an attempt to combine these disciplines to form a clearer !15 picture of Ives’s music and politics, as well as their origins and relevance. Proper investigations are relevant investigations, and as I study a non-elite, vernacular
“Yankee” identity and Ives’s work, my uncommon modes of analysis tie my multi-pronged investigation together. The result of my approach reaffirms many findings in these fields, while also connecting them, furthering their conclusions, and giving new, refined meaning to the term “Yankee.” !16
...beware of new forms of music, which are likely to affect the whole system of
education. Changes in styles of music are always politically revolutionary.
–Plato, The Republic. !17
CH. I: IVES’S “YANKEE” PSYCHE & POLITICS
Society and institutions imprint on the psyche, and Charles Ives is persuasive evidence of this, shown by his art and writing alike. This concept remains relevant today. Michael Lind claims that the patriotism that ordinary
Americans feel is related to “family, neighborhood, customs, and historical memories [rather] than with constitutions or political philosophies.”16 Ives felt as though his world was passing him by, so it should come as no surprise that he composed as nostalgically as he did to express those particular items Lind notes.
Understanding Ives’s music requires an intimate understanding of the institutions and society Ives took part in, remembers, and expresses in his works. This chapter will examine Ives’s political sensibilities, as evidenced by his writings, other contemporaneous works, and other pieces of Ives scholarship, specifically exploring democracy and memory, race, patriotism, war, alienation, anxiety,
Puritanism, and the Progressive era. By laying out Ives’s politics in full view, we can begin to understand the underlying connections between his “Yankee,” identity and his progressive conservative politics, in turn allowing us to better understand the intent behind his music.
Ives’s New England was punctuated by social, demographic, and political upheaval. His views were clearly those of a radical Athenian democrat, a view shaped by his experiences in the small New England village of Danbury, before it
16 Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1996), 7. !18 became an industrial center. He wanted to recreate these micro-scale institutions on a national scale, as described in The Majority, just as he recycled older materials to create the musical avant garde. The rationale for his progressive conservative leanings are laid out in his Essays Before a Sonata, creating the lens through which we understand Ives’s music and his politics.
DEMOCRACY & MEMORY
While Ives grew up rather wealthy and with enough clout and influence to attend Yale, his democratic ideals were shaped by his and his family’s history in the community of Danbury, Connecticut, and its democratic institutions. The democratic roots of town meeting have been mired in controversy and debate over class, representation, and community engagement since their inception.17 Higher class families had more representation and therefore saw no reason why the system did not work for the communities that abandoned it. Today, only a small number of municipalities practice town meeting, in parts of Massachusetts,
Vermont, and Connecticut today, which in itself can be attributed to these issues and social evolution since Ives’s time.
As town meetings (a style of local governance where budgets are drawn, taxes are levied, and general public business is conducted in one communal
17 David C. Paul, Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer, Music in American Life (Urbana ; Chicago ; Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 150. !19 meeting space by citizens themselves, as it was under Athenian democracy18) were run by select families engaged in the Church, and today remain run by those with the time to dedicate to format of the meeting, Ives’s ideals were shaped by a particular amount of privilege found in the community, a sort of aristocracy from both his and his wife’s family (the father of Ives’s wife, Harmony, was Joseph
Twichell, friend of Mark Twain and prominent member of the Hartford,
Connecticut community). Ives was set up from an early age to occupy space comfortably within his community, and was more than able to retain this role, solidifying his radical democratic project, one that embraced past institutions, which he idealized, and for good reason, from Ives’s point of view.
These supposed egalitarian institutions Ives idolized were most practically practiced in rural communities where a sense of civic community could exist among everyone and everyone could hold everyone else in a community accountable. Ives felt that America could yet return to the egalitarian roots he felt his (rural) America once had (even if the egalitarianism he felt was, in fact, a falsehood or idealization). Yet, Ives appeared to have some subconscious awareness of the necessity of small communities to his project. After all, the ire in his letters was directed primarily toward urban and consumerist institutions, just as his scathing diatribes against the Playground and Recreation Association of
America and (oddly enough) Twyeffort, Inc. English Tailors demonstrate (also
18 “Interview with Frank M. Bryan, Author of Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works,” accessed March 8, 2019, https:// www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/077977in.html. !20 found in Appendix I).19 Yet, Ives never appears to directly cover geographic diversity and its influence on his politics to the American public.
On the subject of memory and community, not mentioning the impact of
Ives’s father would be to ignore a vast body of present biographical literature.
George Ives was an underdog, and a “Yankee tinker.”20 He was the failure of the old, elite Ives family, not attending college, and facing court martial for destroying his cornet and abdicating duty during the Civil War.21 Yet, Ives idolized his father. While Stuart Feder and Maynard Solomon wrote Freudian analyses about the relationship between the two (this approach now being outdated, with modern psychology now rejecting many of Freud’s concepts about parental relationships), I argue that Ives’s worship of his father and loss suffered at his passing shows how important George’s personality, the full embodiment of an adventurer and “Yankee,” was to him. His engagement with the local community and great character impacted Ives’s thought and views of traditional institutions. George was the ultimate musical democrat, experimenting with democracy much like Ives aimed to experiment with democracy in The Majority.
The musically-democratic principles that Ives embraced came directly from his father’s experimentations with community bands, the town church, and other civil
19 Ives, Advertisement from Twyeffort, Inc. Tailors, Charles Ives Papers MSS 14, Box 25, 7.
20 Stuart Feder, Charles Ives, “My Father’s Song”: A Psychoanalytic Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 4.
21 Paul, Charles Ives in the Mirror, 189. !21 society organizations in the village space, and his experimentation was bold, progressive, and held all sound and all music equal. It is well known that George would experiment with quarter tones and try to mimic the timbre and overtones of the church bell. It is even said that George arranged two village bands to march against one another,22 and the ensuing cacophony inspired Ives’s polytonal works.
Although the more intriguing and vogue explanation for fatherly adoration is certainly oedipal and Freudian,23 George’s “Yankeeness” likely formed Ives’s idealizations of his father. To Ives, George democratized music. He did not make value judgements based on musicianship, and taught young Charlie to experiment and hold each musician and piece of music with value, even if it was not “pretty.”
Democracy and memory served hugely important roles in Ives’s young life, and his father was a large part of that memory.
“THE MAJORITY”
The Majority, as defined by Ives, is a coalition of all common people who act as one and act with Godly values, rather than baser human ones, to exercise a collective conscience. He sees “lower” leaders mainly as demagogues who have completely human values and have historically been “under-average men with
22 Maynard Solomon, “CHARLES IVES: SOME QUESTIONS OF VERACITY,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 40, no. 3 (October 1987): 443– 470, 448.
23 There is a startling dearth of acknowledgement of Ives’s mother in his written works and journals. !22 skins-thick, hands-slick, and wits-quick.”24 They are firmly part of the Minority, or oppressive, monied, dim-witted, con-men. Ives wishes for the people (the
Majority), or the common people without money or gluttony for power to gain power, yet his terminology and divisions of society are esoteric, or by contemporary standards, outdated.
His views of power, values, and leadership all were in line with the transcendental tradition, but Ives articulates issues that resonated in his day, and continue to today, in The Majority. He acknowledges that there ought to be a natural, subconscious questioning of the fact that so few people can wield so much property, power, and money in a democracy,25 that schoolteachers make a pittance,26 that prejudice threatens social progress,27 that miscarriages of public opinion prevail as parties no longer perform their original intent,28 and that soldiers suffer in wars run by the Minority.29 Ives saw these as public policy issues to be decided by the Majority.
Ives’s argument includes political and economic policy that is based on ideological and social convictions, surmised to stem from natural and
24 Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata ; The Majority ; and Other Writings (New York: WWNorton, 1999), 160.
25 Ibid, 169.
26 Ibid, 183.
27 Ibid, 160-161.
28 Ibid, 191.
29 Ibid, 176. !23 transcendentalist philosophy.30 The political aspect of The Majority is a proposal to create a governmental system in which Congress is made up of civil servants
(who must pass a civil service examination instead of being elected territorially31) who act as an advisory to the ballots passed to the Majority. The Majority then votes on a ballot (with thresholds of success determined by the Majority itself32) and enacts the plan for a pre-determined amount of time. Ives claims that even if the Majority makes a wrong decision for themselves that the act of having made their own decision through direct democracy in itself validates the choice,33 and
“a mistake admitted is a mistake half-corrected.”34 He applied this set of arguments to war as well, asking in his “Stand by the President and the People,”
“shall we stick by the President and fight this war out in a democratic way, even if less efficient, or shall we let the country slide back and stay in control of property?”35 The economic aspect of his plan goes hand in hand with his social and ideological musings. His essential posture is a skepticism toward concentrated power and therefore the wars that produce it. He thinks leaders are opportunists who see a chance to lead as a chance to make profit,36 and who do
30 Ibid, 151.
31 Ibid, 186.
32 Ibid, 164.
33 Ibid, 163.
34 Ibid, 177.
35 Ibid, 137.
36 Ibid, 159. !24 not live by over-values, as associated with the Emersonian over-soul, as these over-values are expressable only by the Majority.37 This skepticism leads him toward notions of economic redistribution, to rid the Minority of their control. His economic plan is not wholly redistributionary, but rather focuses on individuals working toward maximizing their share of a public fund, where their return is allotted from a set maximum return.38 This system would exist to ensure that
“surplus” cannot be accumulated by the Minority, or the property-hoarding enemy of the Majority. Property also has a similar system applied to it, with just enough to raise a family and for contingencies allotted.
Ives’s anti-(excessive) property sentiment and holistic ideology as expressed in The Majority is also couched in accountability (he even goes as far as to advocate for publishing individual salaries as Finland does today39). Through a Marxist lens, he wishes for the proletariat to register their consciousness40 and wishes to reduce alienation to government and from labor, and return economic power and social accountability to the people rather than a faceless market or government. The latter stance is also reminiscent of small New England villages, where again, the town green (the place of main intersections of turnpikes) served as a gathering place for small towns, and town meeting-style local governments
37 Ibid, 160.
38 Ibid, 173.
39 Ibid, 174.
40 Ibid, 147. !25 meant that most people in each community knew one another, including occupation and income. Ives simply applied his experiences in New England to contemporary frameworks to achieve a political product free of dogma or stiff ideology. Ives explicitly addresses his avoidance of dogmas in Essays Before a
Sonata.
To be sure, Ives misread history from time to time. He claimed, for instance, that the founding fathers of the United States created a republican system of government because at the time a fully-direct democracy was not achievable,41 whereas in his own day it was. This is incorrect, as any reader of
Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton knows. The makeup of the United States government, as laid out in the Constitution, was designed to protect the demos from their own under-educated, under-informed selves by having elected officials transmit or override the will of the people as appropriate to create better policy for the people, and to avoid radical and hasty change in institutions. Achieving direct democracy was an important concept to Ives, having been raised in a small, tight- knit community where town meetings ruled the civic scene. Ives had Arnold
Bennett Hall's Popular Government; An Inquiry Into the Nature and Methods of
Representative Government on his bookshelf, according to the exhibition at the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. In this book, one of the central arguments was that the public must be educated to achieve the ideal of direct democracy, as
41 Ibid, 161. !26 they must know accurately and wholly the policies they vote on. Ives’s New
England was typically well-educated and was founded by the well-educated.42
Ives uses the made-up character of “Rollo” in his writings to represent a citizen who had simple musical tastes, an unfortunately prototypical American.43
“Rollo” was created by a Maine reverend and was simply borrowed by Ives,44 who avoided appeasing simpletons like “Rollo” in his own works. Ives’s music does represent the genesis of American musical modernism (with stylistic elements difficult to process, even for contemporaries) to many, after all.
However, this is not derisive to the common person. “Rollo” exists as a commentary on the current political and artistic tastes and sensibilities. Ives’s optimism is in the notion that the people can be raised to a higher level.
I claim that Ives attempts to infuse an everyman “Yankee” sensibility in conversation with his elite background, academically and professionally, and stays true to his perceived cultural, political, and geographic roots, colored by the landscape of his life. Yet, Ives’s anti-elite attitude can help explain his derisive attitude toward present common tastes and logically couch “Rollo” in a dialogue with Ives’s optimism for social progress. Ives sees musical mediocrity as being perpetuated by musically-conservative critics and academics from the European
42 Alexis de Tocqueville, Gerald E. Bevan, and Isaac Kramnick, Democracy in America: And Two Essays on America, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 2003), 42.
43 Felsenfeld, Daniel. 2004. Ives and Copland: A Listener’s Guide. Parallel Lives Series, no. 1. Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus Press. 131.
44 Ives, Memos, 26. !27 tradition, many of whom he refers to in derisive (to Ives), feminine terms.45 They are his “Rollos,” not Ives’s conception of the people. From their pulpit, these critics influenced the direction of music, and they certainly did not do Ives’s music any favors, near-universally panning it. So, Ives’s “Majority” was led by a
“Minority” of tasteless critics that did not represent the whole. Ives’s faith was still in the people, as he hoped that they would become enlightened and move music and thought into a brave new future.
Ives showed himself as a radical classical democrat in his drafted twentieth amendment to the Constitution of the United States (somewhat of a companion to The Majority) calling for direct democracy and the conversion of
Congress into a technocratic body that simply made policy suggestions which the people would vote on. William Howard Taft gave his own shocking rebuke to
Ives’s proposal, saying that he is “very much opposed to approve such an amendment,” claiming that would be “impracticable and would much change the form of our Government. It would be introducing a principle of the referendum, which I think has already been demonstrated to be a failure in securing the real opinion of the people.”46 Ives certainly did not think so.
Ives claims that the United States only needs mere tweaks to support direct democracy,47 he also stakes his claim on a certain faith in the American people
45 Ives, Memos, 242-244.
46 Ives, Letter from William Howard Taft, Charles Ives Papers, MSS 14, Box 25, 1.
47 Ives, Essays Before a Sonata ; The Majority ; and Other Writings, 162. !28 and their educational ability, as well as the recognition of the vast expansion of modern infrastructure. He also states that Switzerland is led by referendum well.48
In his “Stand By the President and the People,” Ives claims that now, the “state of communication, transportation, and education makes a change from representative to direct government possible.”49 He also claims that thanks to societal advances over the past millennia, today’s average person would have formerly been an aristocrat in Lycurgus’s time,50 meaning that today’s common people are just as well-equipped to think and register their voice as the classical aristocrats were, perhaps an expression of his own intellectual New England roots. Ives believes in the farmer’s ability to understand his own plight, and use self-expression (by means of the ballot) to participate in democratic fixes to his problem. Not only this, Ives also thinks that this hypothetical farmer should also have just as much of a say in the railroad industry, for instance, as a wealthy senator.51 He thinks highly enough of people to assume that they silently consider pressing issues regularly.52
He also claims that mob action is a “miscarriage of true expression” because mechanisms of expression are under-developed,53 when mob action is a true and
48 Ibid, 163.
49 Ibid, 136.
50 Ibid, 159.
51 Ibid, 180.
52 Ibid, 155.
53 Ibid, 159. !29 real form of common people gathering and acting. It appears as though he calls for civility in discourse, tacitly putting faith in the people to act accordingly.
Ives also suggests a sample questionnaire to circulate as a ballot (which, ironically for being meant for the masses, is verbose and dense), which is worth covering as it illuminates his personal commitments and shows his stances. This questionnaire addresses desires for direct democracy, abolition of the army and navy (conditional upon other nations doing the same), establishment of a world police, pursuing “more natural and equal opportunity,”54 enabling free commerce and speech between people across all races, religions, and industries, and policy points on instating a wage cap and maximum wage return. It also takes up several pages and is quite verbose, again solidifying the dichotomy between accessibility and high expression Ives appears to struggle with in both his music and politics, as it is doubtful that even common people of well-educated New England were as intellectually engaged as Ives was.
As the original manuscripts from the Ives collection show, Ives was also concerned with pride, although this section did not make it to the final edition published by Howard Boatwright. According to Ives, pride stops men from giving in once conscience tells them an action is wrong. The original manuscript says that “pride begets a cowardly courage,” and that pride is a large part of
54 Ibid, 151. !30 accumulating property.55 Pride is another trait, such as incivility that goes against the Puritan-style asceticism that Ives and “Yankees” appear to engage in publicly.
Ives supports his policy approach in a transcendental way. He utilizes nested appeals to spirituality and religion, but also supports his case with logic and evidence, even as the latter are littered throughout paragraphs dense with blustery hyperbole and allegories relating to world histories of Russia, Germany, and other equally-tangential topics. This style makes his writing easy to identify, but difficult to read, resulting in The Majority (as well as Essays Before a Sonata) being ironically inaccessible to the common-person audience he aimed to empower, much as his music was and is.
Ives’s call to spirituality and his unwavering optimism in both the human race and in social progress alike are in line with a particular idealism he expresses of New England, especially made blatant in his pride that the Brook Farm experiment in communal living occurred in New England.56 While musical examples, such as the nostalgia and laments expressed in Three Places in New
England might suggest to the casual listener that Ives was a bitter, nostalgic traditionalist, nothing could be further from the truth. Ives’s basis for his policy positions was faith in a recent past and excitement for the future. He simply wished to see what he saw as right about his past to be adapted for the future. He
55 Ives, Charles. The Majority. Manuscript. From Charles Ives Papers at the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University. MSS 14, Box 25, 1.
56 Ives, Essays Before a Sonata ; The Majority ; and Other Writings, 149. !31 is bitterly anti-traditionalist,57 but solidly nostalgic. He selects which past institutions are worth maintaining without dogma. He flies in the face of convention because he sees both elements of the future and the past as the route forward. It is this rejection of dogma that makes him enigmatic. He does not remain comfortably pigeonholed in one political position. He picked what he saw work and left what he saw fail in hopes that a more enlightened and different society would emerge.
“ESSAYS BEFORE A SONATA,” DOGMA, AND
TRANSCENDENTALISM
Examining the texts that Ives himself read reaps dividends for understanding Ives the intellectual, man, and composer. Although I do not claim that Ives read all of the books I describe in this section, nor will I say that Ives necessarily agreed with the arguments laid out in these books, the correlation between Ives’s views and the books on his shelves is strong. For instance, the thesis of Ramsay Muir’s 1918 book National Self-Government, its Growth and
Principles (according to David S. Muzzey), which was found on Ives’s bookshelf, is that nationalism creates self-governance.58 This principle of self-governance can be equated to independence and the achievement of stable representative
57 Ibid, 192.
58 David S. Muzzey and Ramsay Muir, “National Self-Government, Its Growth and Principles.,” Political Science Quarterly 34, no. 2 (1919): 344–47, https:// doi.org/10.2307/2141454: 347. !32 institutions,59 but to Ives, it meant increasing direct democracy, and decreasing hierarchy in government itself.60 Obviously, this spoke to Ives, as did many of his other books, cataloged in Appendix II.
Ives also was a Wilsonian Democrat following the 1912 election, since he regarded Wilson’s victory as foreshadowing his two major political writings,
Essays Before a Sonata and The Majority. Wilson’s Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 effectively trustbusted and returned labor to a non-commodity status, elevating its status to a good.61 However, shortly after, Wilson attempted to strip unions of power to avoid railroad strikes, and Ives was distressed by this attempt to jam the spokes in the wheel of progress, or what he saw as a social evolution towards direct democracy. Ives considered those with excess “capitalists,”62 so the natural extension of his principle was a socialist egalitarianism in tandem with direct democracy. The Majority shows Ives as forward-thinking and optimistic about the state of the common folk, with plenty of socialist subtext, but not as tied to any of the socialist dogma of his time (he apologizes for any appearance of dogma in this
59 Ibid, 344.
60 Baron, Carol K. 2004. “Efforts on Behalf of Democracy by Charles Ives and His Family: Their Religious Contexts.” The Musical Quarterly 87 (1): 6–43, 14.
61 Ibid, 25.
62 Ibid, 26. !33 work63 and notes eloquently that “it is not the “closed shop” that makes the trouble, but the closed mind”64).
Ives despised dogma, or as I interpret from his works, the militaristic adherence to particular ideologies and ideas that create frameworks which limit the acceptance of particular ideas, be they philosophical, political, or musical. He associated such rigidity with a lack of mental fortitude or enlightenment. Even of the Puritan stock from which he himself descended, Ives claimed that “the religion of Puritanism was based to a great extent, on a search for the unknowable, limited only by the dogma of its theology.”65
The most explicit outcry against dogma Ives produced was in his Essays
Before a Sonata. Here, he discusses his transcendental heroes in the context of opposing dogma. Of Thoreau and his deep, spiritual focus on nature, Ives is quick to point out that “the study of Nature may tend to make one dogmatic, but the love of Nature surely does not.” Thoreau’s religion was “a religion of Nature, as some say,—and by that they mean that through Nature's influence man is brought to a deeper contemplation, to a more spiritual self-scrutiny, and thus closer to
God.” He goes on to summon the example of a schoolteacher that has a burning desire to pigeonhole transcendentalists as “Classics” or “Romantics,” and notes
63 Ives, Essays Before a Sonata ; The Majority ; and Other Writings, 165.
64 Ibid, 148.
65 Ibid, 17. !34 that this teacher “apparently forgot that there is no such thing as ‘classicism or romanticism.’”66
Politically translated, an Ivesian view means that adherence to one ideology blindly closes the mind to new thought and does not allow consideration of the most correct position. Ives’s radical sense of direct democracy and forward- thinking globalism (likely inspired by books such as America and the New World-
State, found on his bookshelf, as noted in Appendix II, and written about in Ives’s
“A People’s World Nation”) was couched in a rural world influenced by
Puritanism, an anachronism, and can be considered vaguely cosmopolitan, again seeming to further a nostalgic, progressive conservative framework. Yet, Ives would have obviously seen rejections of his ideas as dogmatic and regressive. To him, progress could be conservative, much as he saw Emerson’s work. Ives saw
Emerson’s radicalism as
...greater than all its formal or informal doctrines—too advanced and too conservative for any specific result—too catholic for all the churches—for the nearer it is to truth, the farther it is from a truth, and the more it is qualified by its future possibilities.
Hence comes the difficulty—the futility of attempting to fasten on Emerson any particular doctrine, philosophic, or religious theory. Emerson wrings the neck of any law, that would become exclusive and arrogant, whether a definite one of metaphysics or an indefinite one of mechanics. He hacks his way up and down, as near as he can to the absolute, the oneness of all nature both human and spiritual, and to God's benevolence. To him the ultimate of a conception is its vastness, and it is probably this, rather than the "blind-spots" in his expression that makes us incline to go with him but half-way; and then stand and build dogmas.67
66 Ibid, 25.
67 Ibid, 13-14. !35
These paragraphs are essentially a manifesto that exposes the genesis of
Ives’s political leanings as a progressive conservative “Yankee.” Ives is unbound by ideology and doctrinal dogmas and therefore closer to truth, in his eyes. His truth transcends what have been considered natural laws in favor of real and metaphysical, spiritual interrogations of the soul and the world alike. Yet, Ives knew these views would reman controversial, and people would build dogmas to avoid difficult truths and cover their own “blind-spots.” While this vision appears transcendent and prophetic, it explains the intent behind many of Ives’s writings and compositions, even the clumsy and confusing ones.
An inelegant application of Ives’s anti-dogmatic progressive conservatism is found in Ives’s replies to receptions of his music. He chortles at a negative review of Three Places in New England by Philip Hale, calling Hale a “nice old lady,” going on to say that “Mr. Hale has quite the philosophy of Aunt
Maria–‘When you don’t understand some’m, scold some’n.’” ... “One of the easiest things for some men and most ladies to do, is to make predilection, prejudgement, and feebly examined premises resemble statement of facts. Does
Mr. Hale know all of this music he knows so much about?”68 Obviously, Ives’s calling Hale a “nice old lady” is meant as an insult, but is certainly based in Ives’s traditional, misogynistic thought. Yet, the very subject of his defense, Ives’s music, is radical and forward-thinking, based in maintaining and advancing a
68 Ives, Memos, 14. !36 political and social future based in historical institutions, sketched out in Three
Places in New England.
Although appearing heterogenous, Transcendentalism had a clear path toward Progressive politics through the liberal Protestantism of Connecticut. As
Richard Wightman Fox observes, secular and religious elements further
“‘immanentization’–for want of a better word to describe the abandonment of a
God conceived primarily as a transcendent judge, and the embrace of the world itself as the prime locus of salvation–a project on which liberal Christianity had by the early nineteenth century already embarked.” American secularization saw itself as “a religious process”69 in itself, because religious principles were brought to local and federal institutions. Prototypical Unitarian Horace Bushnell preached to Ives’s father-in-law (Joseph Hopkins Twichell), and Bushnell abandoned original sin and predestination. Ives’s great-great grandfather also was pushed from his pulpit for holding these same views.70 This undoubtedly influenced members of the Ives family.71 In fact, Ives calls Bushnell a “saint.”72 Ives saw his vision of Christianity (not at all Puritanical or Calvinistic) as rational,73 rationality logically deduced as opposed to dogma. By furthering engagement with the spiritual daily and breaking down the divide between the everyday and the divine
69 Baron, “Efforts on Behalf of Democracy by Charles Ives and His Family,” 8.
70 Ibid, 14.
71 Ibid, 9.
72 Ives, Essays Before a Sonata ; The Majority ; and Other Writings, 20.
73 Baron, “Efforts on Behalf of Democracy by Charles Ives and His Family,” 10. !37 on earth (in earthly objects and institutions), the United States stood a better chance of fully democratizing, according to Ives and the thought of his time.
Other links between the Progressive era to Transcendentalism are subtle, yet clearly seen through Ives’s obvious Progressivism and the way he embodies the “Yankee.” One way Ives’s “Yankeeness” peeks through is in strong adherence to his system of morality outside of his church, in a way which contemporaries might now call “Puritanical.” As Henry Adams saw and Tocqueville announces,
Americans had a moral code “far more strict [there] than anywhere else.”74 Ives was married just once and adopted his daughter Edith. He also abandoned Sidney
Cowell once allegations of pedophilic behavior were levied against him.75 Ives admired Hawthorne, whose “art was true and typically American–as is the art of all men living in America who believe in freedom of thought and who live wholesome lives to prove it,”76 and tried to live in the transcendental mold
Hawthorne left behind. Ives was a tolerant man, one who denounced prejudice in all its forms. He certainly acknowledged its existence, but he was raised in an abolitionist family, and mourned the entrance of prejudice into New England life as he grew older.77
74 Murray, Charles A. 2013. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. First paperback edition. New York, N.Y: Crown Forum, 134.
75 Feder, Charles Ives, “My Father’s Song,” 344.
76 Ives, Charles. 1999. Essays Before a Sonata ; The Majority ; and Other Writings. New York: WWNorton, 46.
77 Baron, “Efforts on Behalf of Democracy by Charles Ives and His Family,” 20. !38
Ives’s moralism, emphasis on discovering truth, nature-based Unitarian spirituality, and Athenian democratic values all coalesce in his fight against dogma. While he felt isolated from his people and his labor (to use Marxist terminology) in a changing environment, his ideals still held intellectual weight and value, even as his ideas were becoming less and less mainstream. Examining
Ives’s transcendental and strongly-held older American values and how they interacted with his contemporary community brings order to the surface-level chaos of his political ideals. Ives’s devotion to avoiding dogma allowed his mind to take twists and turns that were just as creative as his music.
RACE, RAGTIME, AND MUSICAL BORROWING
While whiteness studies certainly appear relevant to my investigation, I must emphasize heavily that Ives’s New England was quite racially homogenous, more so than mine and contemporary America as a whole, so race was not as large of an issue to Ives as it may seem to a new generation of interconnected
Americans. His writings on race are scant, and often his remarks appear as asides to normal topics of discussion. The “St. Gaudens” movement of Three Places in
New England, which I will cover in the next chapter, is one of his furthest explorations into the subject.
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Underwood Johnson also paid tribute to the all-African American regiment immortalized in the St. Gaudens sculpture in
Boston Common that Ives depicts musically, so Ives’s obvious heroes also appear to fall into a pattern of progressive and emancipatory political thought. !39
Ives’s own thoughts on race can be understood using ragtime as a vehicle.
Ives incorporates snippets of ragtime for effect, yet does not embrace it as a genre for his music, and sees that
Ragtime has its possibilities. But it does not ‘represent the American nation’ any more than some fine old senators represent it. Perhaps we know it now as an ore before it has been refined into a product.78
Ives’s “Yankee” did not yield to popular trends, and was not diverse in race. Class diversity is also difficult to broach, as many “Yankees” hid their wealth, harkening back to ascetic Puritans. Even wealthy “Yankees” lived in farmhouses, with whitewashed sides and well-hayed fields.79 That being stated,
MacDowell, Beach, and other prominent American artists turned to African
American spirituals for their music, whereas Ives did not.80 Ives may or may not have been enlightened enough to realize the follies of borrowing from traditions not his own, the above quotation makes me hesitate to say that Ives discounted the legitimacy of ragtime as a genre. Garrett notes that Ives’s use of ragtime fits into the fourteen species of borrowing in Ives’s music pointed out by Burkholder,81 and while Ives’s public writings reflected upon his hesitance to adopt ragtime fully into his works, he would privately burst into ragtime,82 and play it in his
78 Ives, Essays Before a Sonata ; The Majority ; and Other Writings, 94.
79 I remember this even from my own childhood, again one of the primary reasons I felt compelled to write this thesis.
80 Garrett, Charles. 2008. Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century. Berkeley : University of California Press, 18.
81 Ibid, 20.
82 Ibid, 19. !40 spare time in beergardens.83 His private persona therefore reveals a fascination with and acceptance of ragtime, but his public persona stays resolute in the
“Yankee” tradition. Ives’s public appearance is worth studying, as it shows Ives’s idealism about the genre he carved out and championed for America and for New
England. There is a remarkable continuity in the themes of his private and public writings, even if the content of his private musings is not as polished or professional as his public ones. I have been privy to both, having studied his private writings in the Charles Ives Papers collection at Yale University.
WAR, PATRIOTISM, ALIENATION, AND NEURASTHENIA
Three Places in New England was undoubtedly influenced by the military tide of Ives’s day. World War I raged from 1914 to 1918, and Ives edited his manuscript from the end composition date of 1914 through 1929. Ives was also born less than a decade after the end of the Civil War. In his time, Americanism became full-fledged, rally-‘round-the-flag patriotism, and the 1916 election was a critical turning point, as a “referendum on Americanism.”84 Ives copiously uses the word “liberty” in his program notes, as detailed in chapter 1, a term that became a nationalistic rallying cry in World War I.85 His pride in his country and patriotic fervor reflects in this composition, on the surface and beyond. Two
83 Rosalie Sandra Perry, Charles Ives and the American Mind (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1974), 13.
84 Gayle Sherwood Magee, Charles Ives Reconsidered, Music in American Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 125.
85 Ibid, 126. !41 movements are composed as reflections of war scenes, and all movements are reflective of a particular America that Ives recollects, cherishes, and pays tribute to, not unlike other American artists such as Emerson and Underwood Johnson.
Despite his patriotism, Ives was alienated from his community in multiple ways. Evidence of this comes in the form of his retroactively diagnosed
“neurasthenia” (the term being synonymous with what we know today as major depressive disorder), which he even attempted to treat via a long vacation in the southern United States, under the guise of a “rest cure.”86 As Stuart Feder and
Gayle Sherwood both suggest in their post-Freudian analyses of Ives, he suffered from major depressive disorder, perhaps related to his father’s death.87 Rosalie
Sandra Perry discusses the impression that Henry and Sidney Cowell had, that
Ives’s nervousness and physical breakdowns coincided with World War I, and the mechanization and complete halt of human progress and peace broke down other utopian Progressive thinkers alike.88 It is important to note that neurasthenia was also, at the time, connected to capitalism, banking, machinery, and overwork, all of which Ives was exposed to, as an insurance agent.89 Furthermore, one book in
Ives’s studio, Denton Snider’s The State (1902), deals with the psychological
86 Ives, Correspondences, The Charles Ives Papers, MSS 14, Box 45, Folder 8.
87 Gayle Sherwood, “Charles Ives and ‘Our National Malady,’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54, no. 3 (October 2001): 556.
88 Perry, Charles Ives and the American Mind, 17.
89 Sherwood, Gayle. 2001. “Charles Ives and ‘Our National Malady.’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54 (3): 559. !42 implications of the state, more specifically how power interacts with the Self.
“Neurasthenia” as a term may be antiquated, but remains temporally important to
Ives’s life. In a Marxist view,90 Ives was alienated from his labor in late-stage capitalism. Furthermore, after Yale, Ives moved into “Poverty Flat” (his apartment in New York City) with several roommates from Yale, who followed traditional paths to success. Ives was the only vestige in the apartment, sticking around for longer than any of his flatmates had.91 He struggled to find success, and longed to experience a sort of “rural consciousness,” such as one that Katherine Cramer describes in rural Wisconsin.92 Ives was fed up with modern norms, and modernization led him to long for a past he had not experienced, except for vicariously through his father. This modernization was both physical and cultural.
Rural people such as Ives continue to decry industrialization, and Ives himself developed neurasthenia over the spread of urban structures that blinded civil society and crowded structures,93 as well as crowded out the space that art music inhabited,94 which in turn crowded out certain civic events, such as the camp meeting (obviously nowhere to be found in New York City). He groused about
90 Ives’s bookshelves contained secondary sources about socialism (interestingly enough, even by Yves Guyot, a classical liberal by any measure), but as Appendix II shows, Marx was not directly found on Ives’s bookshelves.
91 Sherwood, “Charles Ives and ‘Our National Malady,’” 566-567, 574-575.
92 Cramer, Katherine J. 2016. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Chicago Studies in American Politics. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press.
93 Sherwood, “Charles Ives and ‘Our National Malady,’” 559.
94 Ibid, 576. !43 children not growing up with the same environment and ceaseless political fervor that he had as a child, even writing a grumbling, tone-deaf, and scathing reply on a solicitation from a representative of the Playground and Recreation Association of America, where he seemed to say that if all men had a personal property right
(I assume to larger tracts of land), then all children would have “more adequate opportunities in all endeavors without [the Association’s] help.”95 A city can be an artistic and business mecca, as the Ives-aligned Daily Worker newspaper shows in advertisements for conductor-less orchestras,96 for instance. But, Ives was not fond of that idea. Again, Ives saw beauty in the practical and in his own community. A small, rural New England village can feed itself, but a cityscape cannot,97 and Danbury was quickly becoming less of a village and more of a suburb of New York, but one simultaneously being transformed into a hub of manufacturing (specifically for hats), in a process that left economic inequality and growing population in its wake.98 In Ives’s lifetime, the population of
95 Ives, Letter from the Playground and Recreation Association of America, Charles Ives Papers, MSS 14, Box 25, 1.
96 “The Daily Worker,” The Daily Worker, June 30-December 30, 1930.
97 Stilgoe, John R. 2015. What Is Landscape? Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 163.
98 Baron, “Efforts on Behalf of Democracy by Charles Ives and His Family,” 19. !44
Figure 1 - Population of Danbury, Connecticut, 1870-1960, and Charles Ives’s Major Health Episodes 40000 39382
30000 30337 27921 26955
23502 20000 22325 19473 19474
10000 11666
8753 Second and First “Heart Third “Heart Birth, 1874 Attack,” 1907 Attacks,” 1918 Diabetes, 1930 Death, 1954 0 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 Year Population (People)
Danbury grew by roughly 400 percent,99 as shown in “Figure 1 - Population of
Danbury, Connecticut, 1870-1960, and Charles Ives’s Major Health Episodes.”
Rural landscape became a commodity (as Emerson noted)100 and a blank canvas
for development. Yet, Thoreau claims that beauty comes to those who see farms
“not as individual economic units, but as constituents in a larger visual order.”101
Considering that Ives would return to his farm to tend to animals and chop wood
99 “Population 1830 - 1890.” n.d. CT.Gov - Connecticut’s Official State Website. Accessed February 7, 2019. http://portal.ct.gov/SOTS/Register-Manual/ SectionVII/Population-1830---1890. “Population 1900-1960.” n.d. CT.Gov - Connecticut’s Official State Website. Accessed February 7, 2019. http://portal.ct.gov/SOTS/Register-Manual/ SectionVII/Population-1900-1960.
100 Stilgoe, John R. 2015. Landscape and Images. University Of Virginia Press, 237.
101 Ibid. !45 on a daily, scheduled basis,102 transcendental-style self-reliance was obviously a value Ives held dear, formed by the landscape he elected to continue to surround himself in. Practicing this lifestyle in an environment where the population around him became increasingly difficult. His major health episodes, discounting his second and third “heart attacks,” appear curiously correlated to times of population growth. While nearly impossible to prove causation on a purely scientific and statistical level, Gayle Sherwood Magee’s work shows that most of
Ives’s health episodes stemmed from anxiety (“neurasthenia”), a root cause of which was the changing dynamics of his environment caused by population growth and its negative externalities.
Despite his maladies, Ives remained optimistic for positive social evolution (as shown by his political works, primarily The Majority), even after his anxieties caught up to him, causing mysterious stroke-like “heart attack” episodes which left him with tremors and dampened compositional fervor.
PURITAN VERSUS “YANKEE” IN RELATION TO IVES
The Puritan, a religious identity with regional overlap to the “Yankee” not to be conflated with the “Yankee,” helps inform the "Yankee" identity that Ives adopts. More specifically, Ives’s political identity is drawn in part from his religious identity, that of “nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism, specifically in the branch of Connecticut Congregationalism that had broken with Calvinist
102 Charles Ives Studio, New York: American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2018. !46 orthodoxy and, in Massachusetts, in Unitarianism.”103 Yet, the dogmatic and narrow-minded Puritan (that ruled Massachusetts as a theocracy)104 is not a nineteenth century, Ivesian “Yankee,” who is more religiously tolerant than the
Puritan.105 Ives adopted a frosty, bitter, asocial, and somewhat ascetic ideal, which de la Fuente argues is emblematic of the Puritan and the modernist alike.106
Ives adopted a Weberian view of capitalism contrary to Puritanism (that it can work for good, and accumulation of wealth is not necessarily indulgent and therefore bad) in his personal business, and did not adopt a view of raw, pure aestheticism, despite the outward appearance of his homestead.107 Even in his business, he saw the act of selling insurance to people of more and more classes and races as a noble deed and a service. He even sold one of the first insurance policies sold to an African American family.108 He is heavy-handed in his analogy, imagery, and experimentation, believing that this sort of “difficult,” not overly sensitive music was in fact artistically proper and in accordance to his value system. “Putnam’s Camp” is not a piece of music easily unwrapped by any but the most well-trained ear, especially not on the first listen. Ives pursued seriousness
103 Baron, Carol K. 2004. “Efforts on Behalf of Democracy by Charles Ives and His Family: Their Religious Contexts.” The Musical Quarterly 87 (1): 7.
104 Ibid, 8.
105 Ives, Essays Before a Sonata ; The Majority ; and Other Writings, 19.
106 Ibid, 193.
107 Ibid, 196.
108 Garrett, Struggling to Define a Nation, 23. !47 and truth as the Puritans did, his music and himself finding truth in the “useful,” not the “beautiful.”109 Seeing patriotism, truth, and a strong sense of identity as moral imperatives, Ives’s music advances select tenets of Puritanism under an overall umbrella of “Yankeeism.” In this iteration of the “Yankee,” Puritanism becomes kitsch and fully conservative, without Ives’s progressive elements.
AMERICA’S EMASCULATION
“Emasculating America” (after 1934)110 is found in bits and pieces in chapter 54 of John Kirkpatrick’s edited edition of Ives’s Memos. However, its original manuscript has not been transcribed, to either my knowledge or Jim
Sinclair’s. Transcription of the original manuscript reveals a private Ives who had begun to become unhinged after his first three “heart attacks” (again, most likely psychological in their root), and who had just contracted diabetes. In Kirkpatrick’s edition, it should be noted that some incendiary terms appear to be censored. He replaces the term “pussy” with “lollers,”111 for instance. The Ives here railed strongly against emasculation, claiming that
The Puritans may have been everything that the pussy call them, but they weren’t “pussies”: they may have been hard-minded rock eaters, but they were not “effeminates.”
109 Ibid, 200.
110 Ives’s Memos, page 135, footnote 7 notes that as part of his manuscript, Ives mentions a concert that occurred in 1934. Footnote 4 clarifies his correspondences with Carl Ruggles, whom he respected tremendously and wrote about in his manuscript, as well. Ives and Ruggles appear to have met in 1930. The manuscript that Kirkpatrick edited therefore originated after 1934.
111 Memos, 134. !48
This editing certainly does tone down some of Ives’s vitriol against
America’s emasculation and selling out, but I note again that Ives’s conflation of emasculation and gumption does not necessarily show vitriol toward women, as the two are separate concepts examined in separate time periods. Ives’s focus on emasculation in this context advocates toughness by the people, particularly through direct governance.
Kirkpatrick’s edition of “Emasculating America” makes no mention of
“government.” The original manuscripts do, though. Ives mentions that
...there would be no U.S. if our fore-fathers had been soft like that.--& let all "minorities"--put it all over them--this politicians, this money-making group--that commercial-minded corporations, It's about time, if there are enough men with enough wits, courage to say to hell with [Government?] for them to get up & run their own affair--i.e. the Government of the people"--let the people make their own mistakes--instead of letting the politicians [?] it [farther?] Let them make their own fool [moves?] --& have things go wrong --let them make themselves miserable themselves--instead of this party or that party do it for them--& then gradually they will get more & more proficient in running their non-business--and their governing will be a Government for the people, of the people & by the people-- instead as it is today--of politicians--for politicians--by politicians!112
He notes that modern-day politics became the practice of those with
“small minds,” and conniving personalities, calling them “Professional
Politicians.” He further states that the Professional Politician is to government what
...paint on a woman's face is to her health...1. = personal vanity 2. pleasure of forcing their whim opinion & ways on the people 3. When they get there & get enough publicity they will get a better job.--get appointed something, judge, member of [?] Pres of Ins Co. or a director in a [?] as soon as he is elected he becomes one. There always are a few up [right?] -- in [?] Lincoln
112 Transcribed with the assistance of James Sinclair. !49
etc, but some of best are not pure exception. The people could get strong over win out them.113
Ives obviously is no fan of the pandering politician, that covers up the flaws of government and uses it to further their own personal pursuits, rather than that of the people, and appears to think that the people rising up are the solution to this problem, not highly dissimilar to today’s political paradigm. The difference is that he expressed this in caustic, rambling, and frustrated tones.
Ives also is disturbed at over-reliance on machinery (not mentioned in the
Kirkpatrick edition) and the brain-softening effects of the radio (as well as the combustion engine and “Photoplay movie-machine”) and the commercial, low art he felt they peddled.114
It's machinery, especially the combustion engine & radio & Photoplay movie machines making America "saps"! Our forefathers had to stand up get up & go out & do something themselves -- today--men (& ladies) sit down & let something else do it for them So climb a mountain--just turn on the Gas-- Mabel! Have Press a nice little button lie back in your easy chair--& have it done for you passed this nice & easy regular sandotized stuff to your mouth to your "ears" "eyes" & mind--"or if whatever muscles there is left in it" an left [hambrain?] gone soft.115
Ives did not want to see Americans fall into softness and stupidity (much like how in contemporary terms the 2006 Mike Judge film Idiocracy portrays).
Yet, he also wanted something further, something more radical and more imperiled than just brains; he wanted Americans to
113 Transcribed with the assistance of James Sinclair.
114 Ives, Memos, 134.
115 Transcribed with the assistance of James Sinclair. !50
Stand up for your rights--Don't be Saps. How long are you going to let this group or that group put it over on. So that they can make money easier. Then many things you can make better do in [turn?] & need your attention now. One thing is to kill public nuisances. The noise of private 7 commercial air planes is you wouldn't let a big business man put walk in to "Boiler factory" in your Bedroom without your permission--Another to grapple The Radio--hoc--[?] Also kill passing through in wall under the "sap" When you want to be free from it think for yourself--The movie "sap" willing to emasculate America your children for money. (over) Wake up men of America! Be men not mollycoddles. A time for action is coming!116
He also discusses (quite literally) space-age issues of ownership of air and sky over the U.S., demanding that it be the people’s, showing his knack for futurism, despite his nostalgic grounding. This note may be seen in Appendix II.
Kirkpatrick’s edition certainly does a good job of conveying Ives’s disdain toward the modern “Rollo” and his taste for the easy and the “pretty,” though. He praises Beethoven, Brahms, and Ruggles (over the former two) by calling them
“strong.”117 Ives then jests that he does not imply, but rather knows, that his music is “greater, less emasculated, and more to the point than any of the so-called great masters,” only conceding that “if some of the poor musicians” ... “should agree with me, then I’d begin to think I was wrong.”118 Ives knew what he had achieved, and knew that he needed to stand up for his work when it was so radical and controversial. His frustrations, likely exacerbated by his health problems, were a result of a bygone era passing him by faster than he wished it. His environment was changing, and he was not.
116 Transcribed with the assistance of James Sinclair.
117 Ives, Memos, 135.
118 Ibid. !51
I do not lay blame on Kirkpatrick for potentially neutering these manuscripts. Ives himself made multiple revisions of the manuscript, as evidenced by the fact that multiple pages of manuscript start the same way (with some sort of prodding question about America’s emasculation) and continue similar arguments. The Yale library also lists multiple versions of the manuscript, and it is certainly possible that Kirkpatrick took versions of the manuscripts that were either not fully available to me, or used what he considered to be the most polished manuscripts that Ives would have wanted the public to see. Furthermore, many of these manuscripts are simply unreadable, and I would not doubt for a moment that even lifelong Ives scholars would have difficulty wrestling with them. I have only claimed above what I am certain I read correctly, or what has been transcribed with the help of James Sinclair. All sections I have quoted are also found in Appendix I for scholars to cross-reference. Richard Boursy at the
Yale library was not able to trace any record of exact dates of this Ives manuscript, nor was he able to say which versions of the manuscript Kirkpatrick used (or what other manuscripts he may have accessed to make his edition).119
This aside, though, the more important point is that there is certainly a disconnect between the public and private Ives, as his use of ragtime (detailed earlier in this chapter) shows. Ives was still meticulous about what he wished to project of himself onto the public. By understanding Ives’s processes, however, we gain a better understanding of the man and begin to demystify him.
119 James Sinclair, email message to author, February 19, 2019. !52
Yet, for all of Ives’s own alleged machismo (embodied by his exclamation at criticism of Carl Ruggles’s music, “Don't be such a God-damn sissy. When you hear strong masculine music like this, get up and try to use your ears like a man!”120), he is a pacifist, and the appearance of machismo is really a conflation of manliness with American ideals of freedom and liberty (freedom to experiment and produce, as I see it for Ives). It is emblematic of the progressive and modern struggling to coexist. Ives, the ever-conflicted modernist, and a sophisticated posthumous leader in American art, has to contend with modernization stifling his idealistic nostalgic recreation of identity. Yet, which movement was truly progressive in the strictest sense of advancement for the purpose of genuine improvement of the human condition, is disputable.
On the manuscript of “Putnam’s Camp,” Ives gets riled up and writes that he wants “more independence—more gumption!”121 proclaiming his endorsement of Taft in the 1908 Presidential election. This could be considered progressive, especially in the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressives. This is in the same note that Ives speaks of the tall goddess of liberty and composition which includes polytempos, note clusters, and dissonances galore (“Putnam’s Camp” being a prime example of what we know as Ivesian, and will be covered in the next chapter). While today we may construe different meanings to Ives’s music, prose,
120 Solomon, “CHARLES IVES: SOME QUESTIONS OF VERACITY,” 466.
121 Paul, Charles Ives in the Mirror, 191. !53 and actions, he was certainly a product of his time, yet one struggling with both modernization and progressiveness.
CONCLUDING NOTES
Ives cannot be successfully studied in isolation. The way he developed
“Yankee” traits based on his own experiences made him an anachronism in his own time and place. Those biographers who paint him as erratic or hold him to contemporary standards of discourse and political thought miss the forest for the trees. His self-reliance and love of rural areas and institutions based in small- population villages led him to neurasthenia when positioned in his changing environment. His transcription of transcendental values onto Progressive era politics made him a political aberration on a larger national landscape. His embrace of the modernism and experimentation being couched in traditional values was not contradictory (as I have shown), yet produced work so far ahead of its time honoring the shape of older institutions that it created mass cognitive dissonances even in contemporary audiences.
Even politically, Ives was ahead of his time. Ives had several books on
Oliver Wendell Holmes on his shelves, and mentioned him in Essays Before a
Sonata. Part of Holmes’s jurisprudence was marked by his theory that the
Constitution was an experiment,122 and Ives’s political experimentalism knew no bounds. While his creativity knew no bounds, its lack of boundaries was in itself a
122 Holmes’s famous deference to elected bodies appears to align with Ives’s politics, as well. !54 limit imposed by the transcendental embrace of the natural and shirking of dogmas. Ives’s political stances embodied a certain progressivism that looked onto institutions and philosophies from a bygone era for its inspiration, particularly those of the “Yankee” tradition.
Yet, he was also a product of his times, decrying homosexuality, and making comments that can be considered as derisive towards women.
Unfortunately, this was par for the course in his time. Modern historical lenses scrutinize those from previous time periods with entirely different social norms in ways that are perhaps unfair. That being offered, Judith Tick treats Ives fairly, in my eye. She viewed his rantings as of the time, and more characteristic of an
American attempting to shirk European musical traditions,123 and as a true reluctant modernist, with time and context left to judge his holistic progressiveness. She throws off Solomon and Feder in doing so, claiming again that his frustration was with the musical centers of power, primarily in Europe. I am inclined to agree. Of course, this position is highly subjective and debatable.
The lenses I have used for my analysis lend themselves to agree with Tick, in my personal view.
In the process of attempting to translate those institutions on a larger scale, institutions that Ives felt a strong, nostalgic, emotional, and almost physiological connection to, he alienated previous scholars working in a system that was not used to the institutions, landscapes, relationships, position, time period, or class
123 Paul, Charles Ives in the Mirror, 202. !55 that Ives inhabited. The Ives enigma is not quite an enigma, then, it is the destination of a path not often trodden. !56
Once a nice young man ... said to Father, “How can you stand it to hear ... (the best stone-mason in town) sing?”... Father said, watch him closely and reverently, look into his face and hear the music of the ages. Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds–for if you do, you may miss the music. You don’t get a wild, heroic ride
to heaven on pretty little sounds.
–Charles Ives, Memos. !57
CH. II: A MUSICAL STUDY OF IVES’S THREE PLACES IN NEW
ENGLAND
Like much of Ives’s music, his first orchestral set, Three Places in New
England, is a nostalgic composition that draws from patriotic themes and idealizes recollections of traditions and events in his life. Specifically, it is a recollection of three different events in three different places, two scenes of which are purely fantastically abstracted from his recollections of a sculpture (“The ‘St. Gaudens’ in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and His Colored Regiment)”) or particular landscape (“Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut”), and one of which is based more purely in a grounded perception of his memory of a particular place and time (“The Housatonic At Stockbridge”). This orchestral set presents music through quotations and is emblematic of the musical potpourri Ives is known for, while giving a window with which to peer into Ives’s psyche. It also follows deeply in the transcendental tradition, sentimentalizing nature and the landscape built around it. Ives’s embrace of nature and the way his landscape was built around it, politically and musically, was of his time, and Ives’s participation in this regional tradition is inarguable. !58
THE "ST. GAUDENS" IN BOSTON COMMON
Figure 2 - Plaque About St. Gaudens Figure 3 - Rear of Sculpture
Figure 4 - Front of Sculpture !59
“The ‘St. Gaudens’ in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and His Colored
Regiment),” the first part of Three Places in New England, follows Ives’s own interpretation of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s regiment of African American soldiers during the Civil War. It is a reflection upon Ives’s own imagining of
Augustus St. Gaudens’s sculpture of this historical group in Boston Common, as seen in Figures 2-4. While the setting of the sculpture is urban and the scene of war foreign to Ives’s own experiences, it is indicative of how Ives was progressive for his time, but as I will later clarify, this progressivism stemmed from traditional
“Yankee” values. Ives’s self-penned opening program note is a poem, bookended with the phrase “Moving,–Marching–Faces of Souls!” The program note is itself a highly rhythmic poem in stark contrast to the melancholy movement itself.
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! The man on horseback, carved from A native quarry of the world Liberty And from what your country was made. You images of a Divine Law Carved in the shadow of a saddened heart– Never light abandoned– Of an age and of a nation. Above and beyond that compelling mass Rises the drum-beat of the common-heart In the silence of a strange and Sounding afterglow Moving–Marching–Faces of Souls!
Thematically, it is sensitive to the historic plight of African Americans, acknowledging that the African American experience was “marked with !60 generations of pain.”124 Yet, these soldiers tugged along and fought the rest of
America relentlessly towards accepting their freedom and granting them increased liberty. One particular note of interest is Ives’s edit of his original manuscript for these program notes. The original line “Slowly, restlessly - swaying us on unto you” was edited, in Ives’s hand, to say “Slowly, restlessly - swaying us on with you”125 [emphasis mine]. I believe this to be of note, as it appears telling of a particular emancipatory and progressive state of mind. Ives seems actively and acutely aware of the importance of active emancipation efforts, “with” connoting that “us” (non-Black America) need to work hand-in-hand for emancipation, rather than take a passive role in reaching this “other Freedom.”
Ives conveys a sort of relentless and insipid hopefulness throughout the poem, using trite analogies of light prevailing over darkness and shadows to demonstrate that mettle prevails over cruelty. Above that cliché, Ives gushes that the “drum-beat of the common-heart” rises above the battles fought and the shadows to unify humanity before bookending the poem, symbolic of the relentless determination he sees necessary for progress for African Americans and for all. When Charles’s father, George, “returned to Danbury from his stint as a
Civil War soldier, he brought with him the young son of an African American
124 Ives, Charles. 1935. Three Places in New England : An Orchestral Set. [U.S.A.]: Mercury Music Corp.
125 Ives, Original Manuscript of Program Notes to Three Places in New England, Charles Ives Papers, MSS 14, Box 24A, 8. !61 army maid, Henry Anderson Brooks, to be raised and educated by his parents.”126
While Appendix 14 of Ives’s Memos verifies the central claim that George Ives took an African American boy under his wing and the Ives family sent him to be educated, it should be noted that Henry Anderson Brooks did also work for the
Ives family, but relations appeared congenial between the two entities, with
Brooks writing George Ives frequently.127 Sarah Ives, Ives’s grandmother, also fundraised for the same school in Virginia that this young boy was later sent to, meant to be the first integrated school in the South.128
Holistically, the piece shows reverence for the fight for abolition. True to the descriptive nature of the orchestral set itself, the form of this section is a narrative form, or tracing Ives’s own depiction of a particular story associated with the sculpture itself, that of marching, defeat in battle, and then mourning, chronologically speaking. This makes itself clearer with each passing “piú moto” marking, found as the movement continues, the tempo continually increasing until the end of the movement. However, a few important themes give this first movement continuity. The opening melodic minor third in the flute and piano give the first important theme away right off the bat. Bouncing minor thirds in the bass part in section A and in the cello solo three measures before section J begin giving a subtle continuity to this section, as well. Yet, these descending minor thirds
126 Baron, “Efforts on Behalf of Democracy by Charles Ives and His Family,” 15.
127 Ives, Memos, 250-252.
128 Baron, “Efforts on Behalf of Democracy by Charles Ives and His Family,” 16. Score Ives Snippets
bœ. œ bœ œ œ. bœ œ #œ nœ bœ bœ œ œ œ. œ j j j j 4 J 9 bœ œ œ. œ #œ œ œ 4 & 4 8 J J J œ œ bœ #œ 4 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
œ œ 9 ≈œ j j j j‰ bb 4 ˙ #œ œ œ œ œ œ & œ œ œœ#œ œ œnœ 8 #œ œ #œ œ œ œ 4 œ œ œ œ œœœ œ œ
j j j j b œ œ œ œ. œ œ œ œ ˙ œ œ. w n & b #œ ˙ œ!62 œ ˙ #œ œ. w n J J J primarily work to add melancholy Andanteto the movement animato as (about a whole. 96= However,) it is the q œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ flute theme three measures before sectionœ C that is theœ first really clearœ and œ œ œ & ≈ R ≈ ‰ ≈ J ‰ ∑ ∑ ∑ memorable theme, and continuesπ to permeate the movement until its end. The
& œ #œ. œ œ#œ œ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑
Figure 5 - Main ThemeF in “The St. Gaudens...” (Flute) overall mood presented by this theme is gloomy and stoic, due to the utilization of & ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ the flute’s lower register, melodic content (descending minor thirds), and largo march feel (feeling almost dirge-like). Sections I and J continue the previously- described flute theme, continuing as the movement gains slightly more momentum with each passing section.
This uneasy feeling of a slowed-down, sad march continues throughout the movement, as seen 1 measure after section G, where a slow, tortured
“Reveille” call is played by the trumpets, right after a secondary climactic section
© at section F. This section accentuates the struggle of African Americans, as correlated with the program notes - their war is gloomier and more painful than the rest of America’s.
Perhaps the most striking part of the movement is the final measure. After three quarters of a beat of silence, the final sonority sounded is a C# major triad, the first recognizable major sonority in the movement, but certainly not reminiscent of a typical Picardy third. This is primarily since over the C# major tried in the strings, the first viola and piano alike play a descending minor third !63 over a b minor tonality, this polytonality is a method typical of Ives’s music.
However, this descending melodic minor third provides the same thematic statement introduced at the beginning of the movement, echoing the opening program note in providing a thematic bookend. The bittersweetness of the polytonality in the final measure also is potentially representative of the battle undertaken by African Americans to gain freedom, transcended by the “drum-beat of the common-heart” that Ives mentions in the program note, although Ives’s notes on his manuscript are scant.129 Both of these details in the final measure further the argument that the structure of the movement is based on fictional narrative sparked by Ives’s own experience and fictionalization of the scene depicted at the St. Gaudens statue in Boston Common.
129 Ives, Original Manuscript of Program Notes to Three Places in New England, Charles Ives Papers, MSS 14, Box 24A, 8. !64
PUTNAM’S CAMP
Figure 6 - Row of Camp Fireplaces Figure 7 - Sculpture of Putnam on Horseback
Figure 8 - Entrance to Ives’s Redding, CT Figure 9 - Dirt Road Near Redding, CT Home !65
Figure 10 - Entrance to Putnam’s Camp State Figure 11 - Obelisk in Putnam’s Camp Park
Figure 12 - Hillside Scene in Putnam’s Camp Figure 13 - Grave in Putnam’s Camp
Figure 14 - Road in Putnam’s Camp Figure 15 - Soldiers’ Hut in Putnam’s Camp !66
“Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut,” the second part of Three Places in New England, follows a fantastical tale of faerie, a term defined as “...the perilous realm. ...typically rural, long abandoned, almost overwhelmed by nature,” typical of New England scenery and tradition.130 This movement is set in the Putnam Memorial State Park in Ives’s Redding (as seen in Figures 6-7 and
10-15 above). Scenes of fantasy and faerie from this setting as mentioned in the program notes include an apparition of a goddess and fire scenes. Ives’s program notes describe similar settings to those I found in my research, including “long rows of stone camp fire-places still remain to stir a child’s imagination,”131 also shown in the above figures. It is not uncommon that visions are seen in fires, adding to the enchanted landscape. Furthermore, the theme of a patriotic flame is analogous to fervor and blends the program notes, style of the movements, and its themes into one cohesive unit. Ives, too, wrote about the fantastical scenes Stilgoe claims are steeped in New England forests. His “Hawthorne” movement in the
Concord Sonata is steeped in Hawthorne’s “wilder, fantastical adventures into the half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal realms.”132
According to Ives’s own program notes, in this movement, a patriotic young boy crawls away from a picnic at a park, hosted by that spiritual center of
130 Stilgoe, Old Fields, 5.
131 Ives, Three Places in New England.
132 Ives, Essays Before a Sonata ; The Majority ; and Other Writings, 47. !67 civil society, First Church, to the crest of a hill covered in laurel and hickory, only to find
...a tall woman standing. She reminds him of a picture he has of the Goddess of 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.133
The “tall woman” is particularly curious. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s The
Wizard of Earthsea, the young protagonist conjures a tall woman with a face that is “beautiful, and sorrowful, and full of fear” that is warranted, as darkness rapidly and frighteningly replaces her.134 Ives’s woman reminds the boy in his program notes of an image he recalls of the Goddess of Liberty, and appears as a genius loci of the place. Ives’s conjuring of this woman also falls eerily in line with fantasy symbolism. In Ives’s music, this dark section where this woman appears shows the disappearance of liberty, and the darkness associated with it. The boy in
Ives’s program notes is shaken awake. So, while the Goddess of Liberty is tall and strong, she is also likely a warning against tyranny, and shows Ives’s careful construction of metaphors in his writing, as unruly and difficult as it may appear.
This “unreality of reality” (the marks of the surreal and transcendent in Ives’s own reality) is a modernist concept that Ives embraces to convey a particularly important political message.
133 Ives, Charles. 1935. Three Places in New England : An Orchestral Set. [U.S.A.]: Mercury Music Corp.
134 Le Guin, Ursula K. 1984. The Wizard of Earthsea. A Bantam Spectra Book. New York: Bantam Books, 61. !68
The boy is then easily distracted by the fife and drum, and runs back to the celebration, back to the sound of “a new national note,” listening to the band and joining back in with the children’s games. Ives closes his program notes by lamenting the lack of purely American “national airs,” noting his interest in a
1779 patriotic meeting at the Congregational Church in Redding where a captain in one of Putnam’s regiments first put “British Grenadiers” to words. Ives’s mission to describe this “new national note” through older "Yankee" society and mystical nostalgia for old New England through his music is clear, and is one that sets up an analysis of his identity. Obviously full of odd, overlapping images and accurate, poignant details that show an acute awareness of politics and folklore of landscape, Ives’s program notes deliciously encompass so many of the odd constructions of his “Yankee” identity, which has remained mostly unexplored and loosely defined.
The narrative structure of the movement as outlined in the program notes
(just as important as the movement itself to my forthcoming analysis) alludes to a ternary form, and indeed upon analysis, the form of the movement is somewhat ternary, starting and ending simpler (and with the boy returning to the celebration), with complications in the middle, following the narrative structure of
Ives’s program notes. While Ives is known for being prolific, the originality of the content used is in question. After listening to enough Ives, I realized that the bookend A sections are mainly recycled from Ives’s “Country Band
March” (below), for instance. Based on my listening, the intriguing, dreamlike, Score Ives Snippets !69
bœ. œ bœ œ œ. bœ œ #œ nœ bœ bœ œ œ œ. œ j j j j 4 J 9 bœ œ œ. œ #œ œ œ 4 & 4 8 J J J œ œ bœ #œ 4 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
4 œ œ 9 ≈œ j j j j‰ bb 4 ˙ #œ œ œ œ œ œ & œ œ œœ#œ œ œnœ 8 #œ œ #œ œ œ œ 4 œ œ œ œ œœœ œ œ
8 j j j j b œ. œ œ œ ˙ œ. w & b œ œ #œ œ ˙ œ œ œ ˙ #œ œ. w J J J Figure 16 - Country Band March Quotation in the Opening to “Putnam’s Camp” 12 Score b Ives Snippets and& primarilyb ∑ original∑ content∑ is found ∑in the B section,∑ starting∑ between∑ m.53-54∑ and continuing through m.107 before returning to the “Country Band March” 20 quotations.b bœ. œ bœ & b ∑ ∑ œ. ∑bœ œ œ∑ œ bœ ∑ œ ∑œ œ ∑ j ∑j 4 J #œ nœ œ 9 bœ bœ œ œ. œ #œ j j 4 The B section& 4 suggests a dark reflection onto8 theJ stateJ of œpatriotism,œ œ œ andœ œ 4 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ 28 J bœ #œ b the& oldb American∑ identity (the “Yankee”∑ strain descended∑ from Puritanism)∑ slipping away to time. Folk tunes and 9marches are quoted almostj overwhelminglyb 4 ˙ œ & œ œ œœ#œ œ œnœœ œ 8 ≈œ j j jœ ‰ œ b 4 #œ œ œ œ œ œœœ œ œ in this section of the piece. The old march themes#œ œ wind#œ downœ into the lower œ œ œ œ strings, and at m.65, the flute gives a mournful, andante quote of “Reveille,” j j j j b œ. œ œ œ ˙ œ. w n tormented& andb nearlyœ unrecognizable.œ #œ œ The˙ B section alsoœ createsœ œpolytempos,˙ #œ œ. w n J J J Andante animato (about 96= ) © q œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ & ≈ R ≈ ‰ ≈ J ‰ ∑ ∑ ∑ π Figure 17 - Flute “Reveille” Quote transitioning into a march where strings give an ethereal introduction to General & ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑
& ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑
© !70
Putnam’s marching troops, standing to the side, rather than giving the full, proper fife and drum orchestration to the “British Grenadiers.” The flute promptly joins in, as the regiment walks by into cacophony, yet it all clears in one blissful moment, returning to the Country Band March trio. The music serves narrative, rather than form. However, that does not mean that Ives ignores form. He believes that coherence (the main reason for the existence of form) is found in the music itself, rather than the molds it fits. He argues that each individual piece of music itself creates its own forms that subconsciously present themselves to the listener, creating a formal unity in a very transcendental way,135 a method of thinking that applies to all of Ives’s experimental techniques, such as polytonality.
135 Perry, Charles Ives and the American Mind, 32-33. !71
THE HOUSATONIC AT STOCKBRIDGE
Figure 18 - Stockbridge Fuel & Grain Figure 19 - Bridge Over the Housatonic River
Figure 20 - Signs Warning of Contamination Figure 21 - Railroad Tracks Next to H. River
Figure 22 - Elevated Walking Path by H. River Figure 23 - Fenceposts by H. River !72
This final and shortest movement from Three Places in New England is the only one from this orchestral set that does not have Ives’s own writing as the program note, instead reprinting a poem by Robert Underwood Johnson that Ives sets to music in his lyrical song setting of “The Housatonic at Stockbridge.”
Echoing the compositional techniques of the first movement, this final movement utilizes a language of different intervalic relationships that maintain a continuity throughout the movement, including use of descending thirds, such as the descending, emotive melodic minor thirds in the main theme (“con-ten-ted ri- ver...” in the vocal version of the movement), and stepwise motion that does not serve a particular tonality, but rather, a mood of slight natural chaos, such as the swirls of water found in the liminal zone of an eddy formed by a rock barrier in the Housatonic. As typical with Ives’s music, the descending melodic minor thirds here show something else equally as important: they are how Ives interpreted the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony into a transcendental context, as he does in the third movement of his own Symphony No. 2,136 as well as in the “St.
Gaudens” section of this very composition, as discussed. Despite shirking his
European predecessors and teachers, Ives clearly saw potential in the power of the melodic minor third, an interval that makes its way into some of Ives’s most expressive music.
As made evident by the descriptive and poetic program notes, this movement is based on clear memories of Ives’s experiences at the Housatonic
136 Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein Discusses Charles Ives. !73 river in Stockbridge, Massachusetts (photographs from this area are found in
Figures 18-23), praising the Housatonic’s natural, churning beauty in a transcendental ode, rather than extracting an idealized or fantastical image of a landscape or memory, although now the landscape has shifted so much that Ives’s retelling becomes even more of a memory and less of a reality.
The movement mainly consists of two larger textures, a rustling background, and a foreground melody. The rustling, cacophonous background, consisting of multiple 10-tuplets and similarly undulating, rapidly-changing atonal phrases, depict the swirling eddies and ripples of the river, distinct melodies from the town church, as well as the mist over the river Ives discusses in his Memos.137 The foreground is the instrumental setting of Robert Underwood
Johnson’s poem, which, in typical Ives fashion, he adopts for another piece as well, the lyrically-set “Housatonic at Stockbridge,” part of his 114 Songs.
Closing the movement and the orchestral set as a whole on a completely unresolved F#9 chord creates a tension that Ives did not use in the closings of the other movements. While the first movement ends on a melancholy note, it feels more resolved than the end of this movement, due to its transition to a major tonality that fits the theme of the text and the music. The second movement ends on deliberate bombast, whereas this final ending does not emphasize the final line, it seems to limply echo the minor third from “con-tent-ed ri-ver” one final time, although the violins cross-voice to achieve this weak melodic fragment. While the
137 Ives, Memos, 87. !74 purpose for this vaguely frustrating ending is not clear, one possible answer to the lack of resolution here, when coupled with the general unease, gloom, and call to action created by all of the movements is that the patriotic mission, reflected by the movement, is never done. Certainly, though, Ives’s disdain for strict adherence to musical tradition, individuality in composition, and creation of phantasmal, creative, historical, and non-literal scenes all work to create an idealized America reflective of all of Ives. Landscapes and experiences of his life shaped his holistic vision as a composer, more so than many of his other works, which do not tend to reference landscape and memory (crucial in formation of identity) as blatantly as this movement does.
POLITICAL, SOCIAL, AND PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS AND
QUESTIONS
Three Places in New England is a particularly apt place to begin peering into Ives’s headspace and making sense of a very regionalized, New England identity, engaging with the content in the most descriptively powerful medium
Ives knew. It is a well-positioned subject of this investigation, emblematic of Ives deeply engaging with environments and ideologies on a level close enough to the material and non-spiritual realm to make sense of it in the contexts of landscape, people, and experiences that the majority of this thesis expounds upon. By utilizing Three Places in New England out of all of Ives’s works, we witness most directly the interactions between identity, music, and politics. !75
Given Ives’s nationalistic and exceptionalistic sensibilities and the music at hand, it makes sense to examine scholarly, non-jingoistic literature on civil society, a characteristic well-established as crucial to "Yankee" character and
American success. This thesis was first established by Tocqueville138 and elaborated upon and reflected upon Putnam (as a neo-Tocquevillian139). As a basic idea, Tocqueville and Putnam both theorize that the prevalence of American civil society in all spheres of society, with relevant examples to Ives, from the
Freemasons to community bands (or as Ives might have called them,
“calathumpian bands”140), help ensure the stability of American democracy.
Tocqueville notes that several factors led to the stability of American democracy: a strong judiciary and executive alike, local self-government (a-la new England town meeting), prevalence of religion, educated and independent women,141 and freedoms of both association and press. While Tocqueville was not directly found on Ives’s shelves (as Appendix II shows), nor did he directly reference
Tocqueville in his works, Ives read a wide variety of secondary sources on
American history from reputable academics (as shown in Appendix II), and
138 It should be noted that none of Tocqueville’s volumes are found on Ives’s bookshelves, yet Ives collected summary and secondary sources of American thought and history in great number, so probabilistically, it is unlikely that Ives avoided Democracy in America.
139 Berman, Sheri. 2007. “How Democracies Emerge: Lessons From Europe.” Journal of Democracy 18 (1): 28–41.
140 Hans Kurath, A Word Geographie of the Eastern United States, 4. print (Ann Arbor, Mich: Univ. of Michigan Pr, 1970), Fig. 154.
141 Tocqueville, Bevan, and Kramnick, Democracy in America. !76
Tocqueville’s influence would have been difficult to escape. Danbury enjoyed a robust civil society, the bandstand a fixture in Ives’s early life. Furthermore, the very idea that George Ives belonged to a community band is somewhat foreign today. In fact, even progressive thinkers such as Michael Lind long for civil society of old.142 Putnam theorizes that the lack of local civic organizations, such as bands, have led to a decline in social capital. After all, main streets have replaced the town green in many places outside of New England, and even old
New England town greens are designated as historic and out of use. It should also be noted that from a constructivist viewpoint of ethnicity and identity, as Kanchan
Chandra theorizes,143 social and political factors lead to benefits when adopting ethnic identity. In homogenous areas such as New England, a strong sense of identity, heritage, and spirit could also be used to explain Ives’s nostalgia for stronger civil society and group identity. As salience of identity decreases, alienation increases. Marx’s theories of labor alienation144 also prove to be important here. If one feels disconnected from their work, and feels their very nature has been wronged, of course issues of regional identity will become tangible and salient as people turn to coethnics in their cohort in times of
142 Lind, Michael. 2018. “Classless Utopia versus Class Compromise.” American Affairs, May 20, 2018, 13.
143 Chandra, Kanchan. 2012. Constructivist Theories of Ethnic Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. http://nrs.harvard.edu/ urn-3:hul.ebookbatch.GEN_batch:EDZ000010740620160623.
144 Tucker, Robert C., Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, eds. 1978. The Marx- Engels Reader. 2d ed. New York: Norton, 133-135. !77 opposition. Ives felt alienated from his community, politically, artistically, and socially, this we know. The reflections of these alienations are evidenced throughout his works, both prose and musical.
Ives’s selection of scenes, musical “borrowing” from a variety of traditions, multiple settings of the same works, and program notes all reveal an artist unequivocal in his perception of his own identity with strong direction for his art. Yet, to the thoughtful contemporary listener, questions arise that must be addressed. The great debate over exoticism and the use and correctness of musical borrowing and adapting cross-culturally is a debate not out of the scope of criticism of Ives or other prominent American composers, yet would take a separate book to address fully. This problem remains salient in America today, where the distinctive ethnic and cultural potpourri of the country informs different expectations and criticisms than French modernists such as Debussy.
It is crucial and more relevant to the scope of this thesis to discuss the political and philosophical implications of Ives’s instrumentation. Three Places in
New England is created as an “orchestral set,” yet intuitively, the music might be better served by a band arrangement. Why has Ives chosen to deliver such an intimate look at the feeling of patriotism, civil society, and community bands he shares a connection with through an entirely separate orchestration, traditionally associated with European classical music, which he typically disdained, as shown by his feeling stifled by traditionalism at Yale? Why does Ives insist on writing in the sonata, orchestral, and chamber mediums when ragtime reached so many !78 more people? Ives resisted such assimilation over time, evidently shirking the
European sensibilities imparted unto him through studies with Horatio Parker. He instead changed them, learning to integrate his own experimentation and particular motives over time, such as those from “Country Band March” or the main brass motif from “The Unanswered Question,” one important representation of this being “Putnam’s Camp,” especially when put into conversation with Ives’s traditionally European Symphony No. 1. It seems as though Ives wishes to move the people to him, rather than to compromise on his own ideals. One could posit that Ives hybridizes the high and the low deftly, bringing an awareness of his blue-collar "Yankee" identity to the adopted upper echelon of society that he inhabits. One could posit that Ives attempts to bring art music to the masses. The exact purpose of his instrumentation, especially in relation to class considerations, is difficult to ground, especially as Ives hardly seems to refer to himself as inhabiting lower rungs in the class ladder throughout his writings, championing dilettantism (calling Thoreau a great musician because he did not go to Boston to listen to the Symphony145), writing songs such as “Majority,” and championing socialist policies, yet remaining a successful businessman. He was in step with his contemporary businessman and Weberian thought that saw the supplantation of the statesman and minister by the businessman as a projector of values.146
Although he may not have been ostentatious in his wealth, choosing to live on a
145 Ives, Essays Before a Sonata ; The Majority ; and Other Writings, 53.
146 Aaron, Men of Good Hope; a Story of American Progressives, 41. !79 small farm rather than a large estate (which he certainly could have afforded), his wealth still remained in stark contrast to the policies he espoused and music he wrote, perhaps problematic to some. Ives quipped after the premiere of Three
Places in New England, which conductor Nicolas Slonimsky thought was shabby, that the performance was “Just like a town meeting – every man for himself.
Wonderful how it came out.”147 However, Ives’s ideals were just that: ideals.
These ideals certainly help make sense of Ives, but remain at odds with Ives’s realization of those ideals and contemporary attempts at biography.
Experimentation is crucial to American music and modernism, and Ives applied this paradigm to his music (as well as to his politics, discussed in the previous chapter), even allegedly editing his earlier works to make them appear more dissonant, according to Solomon’s seminal rebuke of Ives, a point of contention among Ives scholars but less relevant to my particular investigation. Of course, setting Robert Underwood Johnson’s poem in the third section of Three
Places in New England as well as the creation of a separate song setting for the same poem can also strike some as lazy or disingenuous. These sorts of revisions can be construed as dishonest, as Solomon claims, but I state that it is an act of asserting identity, consistent with Ives’s anti-dogmatic shirking of musical norms and throwing off the constraints of expectations and prior training. The postmodernist amalgamation of low music into high music and modernist re- evaluations of historical content, as presented through American music,
147 Burkholder, Charles Ives and His World, 150. !80 specifically the American rejection of the aesthetics of European art music.148 Ives was at the vanguard of both these trends. Quoting songs such as “Yankee
Doodle,” “Reveille” (also quoted in Ives’s “They are There!”), “British
Grenadiers,” and a snippet of Ives’s own “Overture and March 1776,” speaks to tradition and reverent enthusiasm, while maintaining a modern musical context.
The music is nostalgic without being kitsch. An anthology or amalgamation of various traditional tunes in the context of Ives’s music has totally different meanings than if the tunes stood alone. In this context, it helps create a specific
American form of art music.
In a different context, classical architects, urban planners, and environmentalists consider space differently from contemporaries.149 The
Classical student of political landscape considers the political roles of shrines, public squares, fences, and trees, in relation to one another and to the broader landscape, whereas the contemporary architect focuses on the phenomenological implications of space.150 From poverty to family feuds to political reverence, a political history can be gleaned from the landscape if one expands their vision and trains their eye from both a classical, pragmatic viewpoint, as well as a contemporary, phenomenological approach, as I have attempted in my analysis of
148 de La Fuente, Eduardo. 2004. “Max Weber and Charles Ives: The Puritan as Cultural Modernist.” Journal of Classical Sociology 4 (2): 202.
149 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984), 32.
150 Ibid, 34. !81
Three Places in New England. The classical approach allows us to determine the layout of Ives’s life as well as the types of institutions Ives and Danbury held so dear, while the contemporary approach is temporal and based in determining the impact of interactions with structures on Ives. For instance, a flagpole and civil war monument mark the center of a civic space vertically.151 Yet, the implications of the activities once undertaken in this space, the memories created, and institutions upheld are just as relevant as the monuments themselves. Ives’s Three
Places in New England undertakes this modern quest and gives the contemporary landscape historian fodder and validation in retracing how the built environment impacted Ives.
This chapter has discussed patriotism, regionality, memory, history, race,
Transcendentalism and its ideals (such as the “Common-heart” and emphasis on nature), dilettantism, civil society, capitalism, and the impact of landscape on most of the above. Impressively, all of this subject matter was derived from one orchestral set, Three Places in New England. Such depth and artistic brilliance shown in the piece makes it a brilliant mirror for Ives’s psyche and politics to be presented for further examination. I will couple the result of my examination of
Three Places in New England with outside literature (later with Ives’s writings) to demonstrate how the “Yankee” identity coalesces near-perfectly to Ives’s own works (political and musical) and psyche.
151 Stilgoe, John R. 2015. Landscape and Images. University Of Virginia Press, 42. !82
...you don’t want to be the first to fly in the face of custom.
–Thornton Wilder, Our Town !83
CONCLUSION, DISCUSSION, AND PERSONAL INTERVENTION
Ives was deeply committed to a radical democratic project that shaped his sensibilities, and he expressed this mission through strong ideas and vision shown in both his music and his politics, best interpreted through a “Yankee” refractive medium, as Ives understood it to be.
Ives’s Three Places in New England is a well-constructed high art reflection of the intangible, and of what I have tried to summarize. I picked this piece for its artistically-strong address of Ives’s own identity, even compared to
Ives’s other excellent works. Maintaining a completely uniform ideology in his body of work would have been more herculean of a task as writing his literature and musical compositions was in the first place. Addressing shifts in expressive and ideological intent over time through Ives’s works is a worthwhile pursuit, but has been a lifelong pursuit for Ives scholars. I make no bones about the fact that
Ives is not a particularly easy figure to study, and he was not a perfect man. While objectively brilliant and talented, much of his life was marked by tragedy, loss, and medical issues, including developing neurasthenia that had negative, impactful physical effects. Just following one path in Ives’s life leads to a multitude of branches that lead in disparate directions, and Ives scholarship should not rest on its laurels.
The same principle applies to studies of regionality. New England has historically been difficult to live in, and the picture painted throughout history of it appears diametrically opposed. To some (such as Van Wyck Brooks) its !84 austerity and regionalized poverty is bleak. To leaf peepers and skiers, the landscape is perfect. It is esoteric in several other ways, as well. New England’s scenery is difficult to photograph, its rolling hills, hollows and thick forests
(which are thick enough to create illusions)152 with subtle color variations are difficult to accurately capture and portray on a cell phone with a small imaging sensor and display that might otherwise catch Western mountain vistas, or large elevation changes and grand scenes with ease. Perrin asserts that the New
England landscape presents itself differently with each turn in the path and can keep you lost,153 and the difficulties of photographing the region reflect this: the landscape obscures itself from one’s own view and makes it difficult for strangers who haven’t visited the land to appreciate it. Its aura is not easily discovered.
Vistas are often hidden, and the landscape is “introverted. It is curled and coiled and full of turns and corners.”154 Since photography cannot accurately depict the region, it is fitting that Ives tries his best to with music, a powerful expressive medium, especially for expressing the New England landscape, as Ives succeeds in his mission, in my opinion.
Although perhaps as difficult to describe in words as the New England landscape, the rural New England “Yankee” lives on to this day. The inspiration for this thesis was a lifetime surrounded by self-reliant, community-oriented,
152 Stilgoe, Landscape and Images, 241.
153 Perrin, Best Person Rural, 127.
154 Ibid, 125. !85 freedom-loving, rural, cranky, hardy, and intelligent individuals in my hometown of Canton, Connecticut who never seemed to be acknowledged by the press, politicians, or literature. These individuals that I have known have lived in quiet
New England their whole lives, despite the fact that many have the means to move elsewhere. They helped shape me into the person I am today, and endeared
Ives’s music to me. Once I was able to appreciate Ives, his music spoke to me. It sounded familiar yet distant, fun yet somber, but certainly not as foreign and enigmatic as contemporary Ives biographers and modern audiences would have one believe. I do believe in its descriptive and emotive power, and truly believe in the durability of Ives’s thought and his art.
“Yankee” has strangely been untouched by academia, not meaning much of anything concrete to anyone at all. Even Ives uses it ditheringly, using it in hyperbole to signify an active and in-command type.155 This thesis appears to take a large semantic leap by assigning “Yankee” to people living in and from inland, rural New England, as Ives believed himself to be such a person. However, as a colloquialism adopted by media and academia (as shown in this thesis), it is the most appropriate word that can be assigned to this oft-ignored group. Certainly, then, Van Wyck Brooks’s 1940 analysis (seemingly the most current seminal analysis of the “Yankee”) in New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 that the
155 Ives, Essays Before a Sonata ; The Majority ; and Other Writings, 197. !86
“Yankee” had lost its relevance, “shut out humanity,” and lost all of its power is incorrect.156
Holistically, the subjects of this thesis are in serious need of deeper address. I have deeply covered who Ives was and who he considered himself to be. However, not much effort has been spent on the sociological inquiries of why
Ives was who he was or how that identity has transformed over time. Regional identity, musical interpretation, and biography are all subject to multiple modes of analysis and require other methods and voices to join the conversation for a deeply rich understanding of the subjects. Land use and changing landscapes,157 durability of “Yankee” institutions (such as congregational churches, town meetings and small civil society groups) isolation versus development, landscape, and community makeup and integration are worth examining, in a political context. Is the population of New Englanders who would refer to themselves as rural declining? As more power shifts to urban centers, do they align themselves to rural voters and identities in other parts of the country to regain power? As the
Massachusetts Bay Colony once was a Puritan bastion, will younger generations change the identity of the region as radically as it changed from the Puritanical times to the transcendental years? How does American whiteness interact with other American groups, and are the “Yankee” traits I describe also applicable to
156 Stilgoe, Old Fields, 231.
157 Ruskin himself was influenced by nature, as were the transcendentalists Ives idolized, so examining landscape appears particularly relevant to investigating Ives. !87 the greater American community at large? Finally, is there not a better identity to project onto Ives?
While I believe I have laid out a conclusive and coherent argument, I freely admit that using other methodologies and resources can be beneficial.
Quantitative methodology is vogue today, and could be used to analyze datasets such as regional party registration over time, larger-scale patterns of migration in and out of the region, and demographic considerations of urban and coastal areas, where cultures vary significantly from the inland rural culture of New England and the Northeast as a whole. Furthermore, searching more colloquial and scholarly literature to chase the implied definitions of “Yankee” over time could be of significant value to expanding this thesis, as could taking field notes from more rural locales. However, as Zelinsky aptly notes, “there is as yet no rigorous, objective method for arriving at the nonmaterial culture core of an ethnic group.”158 I instead use the methods that best reflect the experiences I have had that guided me to this topic and to my conclusions.
Some other questions that remain to be addressed within the scope of this thesis include legitimate issues about Ives’s wealth and artistic sincerity to the
American colloquial legacy. What makes "Yankee" music representative of
American music? If Ives was writing to represent common American values, why were the majority of his works for orchestra? Wouldn’t the bandstand play wind ensemble repertoire? In this particular sense, what makes Ives more “American”
158 Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States, 40. !88 than John Barnes Chance? How effectively does Ives’s music preserve an identity, given the relative obscurity of art music today, particularly to the rural types Ives honored with his music?
There also appears to be an inherent issue of accessibility in Ives’s music.
While he writes of the “Rollo” with simple tastes and has high hopes for the people and their ability to comprehend his musical and political expression, it is important to remember that Ives was not particularly embraced by anyone but a few on the musical vanguard during his lifetime. Ives scholarship commenced in earnest after his death. The inherent cognitive dissonances shown between creating high art and appealing to the “Majority” troubled and frustrated Ives, and it is clear that Ives studied others in similar predicaments. Books about John
Ruskin, for instance, found their way onto Ives’s shelves, Ruskin’s works characterized by a transformation into more accessible communication, as was mentioned as a possessor of “over-values” beyond the human in The Majority.159
So, it may be worthwhile to examine Ives in conversation with other modernists that blended the low with the high and were deeply troubled with questions of accessibility.
Despite these questions, I have defined connections between “Yankee” traits, Ives, and Ives’s perception of himself. His self-reliance and individualism, love of liberty and freedom, progressive conservativeness rooted in perfectionism and transcendentalist adoration of nature, toughness (in his case, what could
159 Ives, Essays Before a Sonata ; The Majority ; and Other Writings, 160. !89 potentially be seen as “toxic masculinity” by contemporary standards), love of his boyhood village of Danbury and its local bands and traditions of civic engagement, introversion, and choice to live humbly all paint him as a prototypical “Yankee,” as demonstrated through a wide variety of his writings and musical compositions, including The Majority, Essays Before a Sonata, and Three
Places in New England. While Ives may have seen himself as “American,” his definition of what this meant was wholly that of old New England.
It was highly evident that both a private and public Ives existed. He was, in “Yankee” fashion, a very private person. Part of this thesis also aims to shed light on Ives’s processes and his private self (rather than just performing a surface-level evaluation of his art), alongside connecting his public-facing music and politics through one vision. Ives’s private gushing to his wife, Harmony, bouts of ragtime, meticulous manuscript edits, not publishing “Emasculating
America,” pride in his abolitionist roots, and ethical business practices all establish a vision of an anxious man of old habits, who simultaneously knew that he was at the vanguard. He was aware of the struggles of being at the vanguard and was fiercely nostalgic for a bygone era, but was careful to project only the most persuasive, yet “correct” arguments for his unified vision during his time, with a fanatical eye.
As Carol Baron refreshingly states, a large portion of Ives scholarship paints Ives as mentally unwell, conniving, and lost; a cultural anachronism that produced a large body of influential works. These “biographical distortions” are !90 easily debunked and also miss the point. They miss the connection between Ives’s compositions, and his person, including his politics. Baron is clear that examinations of Ives’s primary materials introduce “roots and models for many of the composer's political positions” and “places his ideas squarely within a community of people with whom he shared ideas, values, and a vocabulary that” ... “is certainly similar.”160 Baron avoids using the term “Yankee,” but this community she speaks of, one whose concerns are “situated within the realm of progressive philosophy and politics,” appears an awful lot like the “Yankee” this thesis describes. Ives was wholeheartedly a member of this community, and not quite the intellectual, musical, social, or academic pariah that so many biographers describe.
Music is crafted by experience, and Ives’s art and commentary have shown us as much. Ives’s music and writings themselves are very accurate, honest, and reliable reflection on who he was, and give us resources for examining what the “Yankee” truly is. Ives’s music and his politics especially can speak to all Americans, and his love of country and strong regional identity still quietly touch Americanism at its core. I truly believe there is a case for Ivesian progressive conservatism for America’s future, one free of dogmas and incivility, and with moralism, truth, mettle, and respect for all.
160 Baron, “Efforts on Behalf of Democracy by Charles Ives and His Family,” 7. !91
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APPENDIX I: Facsimile of the Original Manuscript of “Emasculating
America”
The following appendix contains un-annotated pages from Ives’s original transcript of “Emasculating America.” Many of these pages did not make it into the Kirkpatrick edition of Memos. In fact, the Kirkpatrick edition appears to be based on entirely different manuscripts than the Yale library provided for this appendix. In a cursory reading, some of the material in the Kirkpatrick edition did not surface in the manuscript provided to me by the Yale library.
This appendix is included for reference, as Ives’s handwriting was, at this point in his life, nearly illegible. As part of the transcription process, I digitally annotated each page. These annotations crowded the page, and overwrote Ives’s original words. I wished to include facsimiles in this thesis, so the original manuscripts provided by the Yale library are instead provided. The reader can refer to the sections I quote and make their own judgements as to the strength of my translation, based on the original manuscript.
This selection is (in my opinion) the most crucial of the 29 pages received from the Yale library, and the order of the pages is arbitrary. The captions below each page of manuscript are explanatory. As cited in the first chapter of this thesis,
James Sinclair helped finalize many of these transcriptions. !107
First page of manuscript. Contents of this page made it into pp. 134 of the
Kirkpatrick edition of Memos. !108
Ownership of air and sky - not common objects of contemplation in Ives’s time.
Professional politicians and politics as a “magnate” [sic] for small minds. !109
Crude drawing of Ives’s adapted “Rollo” character. !110
“...people, NOT politicians...” !111
“Stand up for your rights–Don’t be saps.” !112
Another early manuscript revision, with an emphasis on machinery. !113
More on machinery. !114
Letter from Twyeffort, Inc. English Tailors, annotated by Ives. !115
Reverse side of the aforementioned letter from Twyeffort, Inc. English
Tailors, annotated by Ives. !116
APPENDIX II: Books on Ives’s Shelf & Authors He Cites
Important (in the eyes of the author) Selections From the “Charles Ives Studio
Collection Database,” as taken from the Ives Studio Recreation at the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY.161 Notes after title and author are of the archivist at the Academy.
Music and Society. Wilfred Mellers. 1950 Second edition.
Economics. Scott Nearing and Frank D. Watson. 1908. Charles Ives and J.S.
Myrick business card affixed to inside cover. First edition.
Autobiography of Mark Twain. Charles Neider. 1959.
A New Aesthetic of Music. Ferrucio Busoni. 1911. Important book. [Emphasis of
the archivist at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.]
Mysticism of Music. R. Heber Newton. 1915. Though this book appears to be a
first edition (there are no indications that it had been published before
1915), the author only lived until 1914. Therefore, it must either be a
reprint, or it was published posthumous.
The Church and Its Organization. Walter Lowrie, M.A. 1904. With inscription.
first edition
Sectionalism Unmasked. Henry Edwin Tremain. 1908. With inscription from the
author. First and probably only edition.
161 “Charles Ives Studio Collection Database.” 2012. American Academy of Arts and Letters. !117
Ultimate Conceptions of Faith. George A. Gordon. 1903. first and probably only
edition.
Yankee From Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen. 1944. Not a first edition.
The Partisan. W. Gilmore Sims. 1890. First edition.
Life of Ruskin. E.T. Cook. 1911 First edition.
The Democracy of Art. Isaac Edwards Clark. Letter from Isaac Edwards Clark
glued to the front page. First edition.
The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas. Arthur Cushman McGiffert. 1922. Labeled
Harmony Ives inside cover.
The New England Leaders. Williston Walker. 1901. Inscription on inside cover
reading- "Rev. Joseph H. Twichell With the Regards of the author-
September 20, 1901." First and probably only edition.
Life of Voltaire. James Parton. 1881. Inscription from H.J. Blake to illegible
recipient. June 13, 1881. 1st ed.
The Pilgrim Hymnal. 1912 First and probably only edition.
The Mission Hymnal. 1913. Inscription- "From my sister Mrs. C.E. Ives. West
Redding Conn. Aug. 29th 1928."
The State. Denton J. Snider, Litt. D. 1902. Inscription- "Ives, Redding CT" First
and probably only edition.
Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays. Thomas H. Huxley. 1894. Possibly a first
edition. Innitially [sic] given as a series of lectures by Huxley.
Foundations of Political Economy. William Bell Robertson. 1905. First edition. !118
The Education of the American Citizen. Arthur Twining Hadley. 1901. With
handwriten [sic] notes. First and probably only edition.
Reality: A New Correlation of Science and Religion. Burnett Hillman Streeter.
Inscription- "H.T. Ives. Jan. 1928"
Feeling; Psychologically Treated and Prolegomena to Psychology. Denton J.
Snider. 1905. Inscription- "C.E. Ives. Redding, CT." First and probably
only edition.
Elements of Political Economy. E. Lev Asseur. 1905 First and probably only
edition.
National and Social Problems. Frederic Harrison. 1908. First edition.
An Introduction to Political Economy. Arthur Latham Perry, LL.D. 1877.
Inscription- "Courtlandt Palmer with author's regards, A.L. Perry." First
edition.
Governments and Parties in Continental Europe. Vol. 1. A. Lawrence Lowell.
1900.
Governments and Parties in Continental Europe. Vol. 2. A. Lawrence Lowell.
1900.
National Self-Government: It's [sic] Growth and Principles. Ramsay Muir. 1918.
Inscription- "C.E. Ives. 120 East 22nd Street" First edition.
Literature and Dogma. Matthew Arnold. 1883. Inscription-"L.D. Brewster."
Possibly first edition. !119
Social Evolution. Benjamin Kidd. 1895. Inscription- "Given to me by aunt [name
illegible], 1920. C.E.I. Redding, CT."
Experiments in Industrial Organization. Edward Cadbury. 1912. First and
probably only edition.
Political Economy. Francis A. Walker. 1888.
Economics. Arthur Twining Hadley. 1896. Inscription- "E.S. Woodruff, 99'." First
edition.
History of The Intellectual Development of Europe. Vol. 2. John William Draper,
M.D., LL.D. 1904. Not a first edition.
History of The Intellectual Development of Europe. Vol. 1. John William Draper,
M.D., LL.D. 1904. Revised edition.
Mediaeval Philosophy. Frederick Denison Maurice, M.A. 1857. Cabinet edition
(special edition)
Oliver Wendell Holmes. William Sloane Kennedy. 1883. First edition.
Popular Government. Arnold Bennett Hall, J.D. 1921. Inscription- "C.E. Ives"
First edition.
Our Social Heritage. Graham Wallas. 1921. Inscription-"Charles E. Ives.
Redding, Conn. 1922" First edition.
Democratic Ideals and Reality. H.J. Mackinder, M.P. 1919. Inscription-"C.E. Ives
Redding,CT" First edition.
Applied Evolution. Marion D. Shutter. 1900. Inscription illegible. First edition. !120
Some Influences in Modern Philosophic Thought. Arthur Twining Hadley. 1912.
Card affixed to the cover reading "With the compliments of the Author-
June 2nd, 1913" First edition.
The Limits of Evolution and Other Essays. G.H. Howison, LL.D. 1901.
Newspaper clipping glued to the front cover. First edition.
A System of Natural Philosophy. J.L. Comstock, M.D. 1846. Incription [sic]
illegible.
Culture & Anarchy. Matthew Arnold. 1883. Inscription-"L.D.Brewster"
Modern Philosophy. Rev. Frederick Denison Maurice, M.A. 1862.
Inscription-"L.D. Brewster" First edition.
Problems of To-Day: A Discussion. Richard T. Ely. PH.D. 1888. "New edition"
The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. Vol. 3. 1848
The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. Vol. 2. 1848
Discourses. William Ellery Channing. 1832. Envelope enclosed.
Letters and Addresses of George Washington. Jonas Viles, 1908. First edition.
Very important set of plays by a very important playright [sic]. In my
opinion, very valuable.
The Pilgrim's Progress. John Bunyan.Old crushed up flower found inside the
book.
Lincoln's Devotional. Carl Sandburg, 1957.
The Nation: The Foundations of Civil Order and Political Life in the United
States. E. Mulford, 1870. First edition. !121
The Problem of Human Life. Rudolf Eucken, 1914. No date of publication
written.
Modern Political Institutions. Simon E. Baldwin, LL. D., 1898.
Social Equality. William Hurrell Mallock, 1882.
The Decay of Capitalist Civilization. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 1923. First
edition.
Experiences of Art and Nature. Henry Ward Beecher, 1855. First edition.
Human Nature in Politics. Graham Wallas, MCMXXI. Inside back cover is a
newspaper clipping about Graham Wallas.
Socialistic Fallacies. Yves Guyot, 1910. First edition.
Poverty and Richies [sic]: A Study of the Industrial Regime. Scott Nearing, Ph. D.,
1916. First edition.
The Menace of Privilege. Henry George, Jr., 1905.
Ultimate Democracy and Its Making. Newell L. Sims, A.M., Ph.D., 1917. No
publication date written.
America and The New World-State. Norman Angell, 1915. Possibly first edition.
The Philosophy of Modernism. Cyril Scott. Illegible handwritten note on inside
back cover. Second edition.
The Sabbath Hymn Book, 1854. First edition.
Authority in the Modern State. Harold J. Laski, MDCCCCXIX. First edition.
Music and Morals. Rev. H. R. Haweis, M.A.
The Philosophy of Music. William Pole, F.R.S., Mus. Doc. (Oxon.), 1924. !122
Human Economics. Arthur H. Gibson, 1909. First edition.
Our American Music. J. T. Howard, 1931. No date of publication indicated.
Universal Law and the Democratic Principle. Charles H. Kauffman, D. O., 1943.
First and probably only publication.
Music and Nationalism. Cecil Forsyth, 1911. First edition.
Music in England. Frederic Louis Ritter, 1890.
What is Good Music? W.J. Henderson, 1905. First edition.
History of European Morals. William Edward Hartpole Lecky, M.A. Vol. I. 1913.
Third edition.
Education and Service Sermons and Addresses. President Alfred Tyler Perry.
1912. First and probably only edition. Hand written note in front page.
The High Cost of Living. G. H. Gerber, 1915. First edition.
Many works by W.D. Howells are also on Ives’s shelves.
Carol Baron’s “Efforts on Behalf of Democracy by Charles Ives and His Family:
Their Religious Context” mentions:
Henry Ward Beecher - Prayers from Plymouth Pulpit, Plymouth Collection of Hymns and Tunes for the Use of Christian Congregations,162 Federal Council
Bulletin: Journal of Interchurch Cooperation163
162 Baron, “Efforts on Behalf of Democracy by Charles Ives and His Family,” 11.
163 Ibid, 12. !123
Essays Before a Sonata mentions: Plato, Cotton Mather, Petrarch, Emerson,
Thoreau, Hawthorne, Voltaire, Rousseau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schelling,
Charles Kingsley, Marcus Aurelius, Whittier Montaigne, Paul of Tarsos, Robert
Browning, Pythagoras, Channing, Milton, Sophocles, Swedenborg, Francis of
Assisi, Wordsworth, Garrison, Plutarch, Ariosto, David, Rupert Brooke.
The Majority mentions: Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Emerson, Isiah,
Carlyle, Voltaire, Goethe, Aurelius, Paul, Plutarch, Confucius, Buddha, Petrie’s
“The National View of Civilization,” and The Revolutions of Civilisation (London and New York, 1911)164
As shown above, it is likely that the majority of Ives’s references in Essays Before a Sonata and The Majority likely stem from secondary sources Ives read, rather than primary sources.
164 Ives, Essays Before a Sonata ; The Majority ; and Other Writings, 158.