Yankee Doodles: the Music and Politics of Charles Ives

!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.

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