The Life and Times of Charles Ives Takau Yoneyama (Professor of Insurance History)
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The Life and Times of Charles Ives Takau Yoneyama (Professor of insurance history) Prologue: the origins of prejudice against Ives Ives is often described as a ‘great composer and shrewd businessman’. There are a number of criteria for evaluating the ‘greatness’ of a composer; in the sense of a composer with a secure place in the history of music then Ives is certainly deserving of the title. If a ‘great’ composer is defined as having a large number of works frequently performed in concerts, then one would hesitate to call Ives ‘great’. On the other hand, while it is true that he ran a successful insurance agency, there is little evidence which proves that he was shrewd, but we can only imagine that he must have been as it is said that he reformed the insurance business. However, it appears that his image problem as a ‘great composer and shrewd businessman’ is not in itself the source of the most important misconceptions about Ives, rather it is in the fact that these two seemingly conflicting elements coexisted within him. While the fact that he was one of America’s most important composers despite being a successful businessman can on the one hand highlight his greatness, it has also led to a somewhat negative appraisal of him as an amateurish ‘weekend composer’. That he was a successful businessman does not make him a great composer, and by the same token, the fact that the works were composed by a successful businessman does not make them ‘amateurish’. The ‘miracle’ of the coexistence of these two conflicting elements has led to huge variation in the evaluation of Charles Ives. I will give two examples of typical misconceptions. Misconception No. 1: “Ives went to Yale to study composition but he decided not to go down that road when his teacher Horatio Parker1 disapproved of his compositions”. There are two major mistakes in this statement. The first is that Ives did not go to Yale to study composition, and the second is a misunderstanding of the influence Parker had over Ives’s musical activities. Just before he went to Yale, Ives wrote to his father: “The first thing I’m going to get the best of is the harmony and counterpoint, which I ought to get through with out taking much time to it with Dr. Stoekel. There is some kind 1 of music course in college which I will look up. I think it can be taken with out any extra charge and may be substituted with other things”.2 J. Peter Burkholder states that it is not credible that he was not aware that had he intended to study composition Parker would have been assigned to him as his composition teacher from the start of the upcoming semester. It is perhaps more accurate to say that Ives did not go to Yale to study composition, but a chance meeting with Parker gave him a strong motivation to compose. Ives recalled that compositions from his youth, written when he lived in Danbury, Connecticut, were rejected by Parker, who told him never to bring anything like that again. But this does not mean that we must only dwell upon the negative role Parker played as Ives’s music teacher. As we shall see in Timeline II, Parker gave Ives a thorough grounding and training in traditional musical techniques such as harmony and counterpoint. The results of this are immediately obvious from String Quartet No. 1 and Symphony No. 1. Parker was an extremely important contributor to Ives’s mastery of traditional musical techniques. Misconception No. 2: “Ives gave up on the idea of becoming a full-time composer and went into business”. We can see that this is inaccurate if we look at the four years between Ives’s graduation from Yale and his 1902 decision to focus entirely on business. During these years he was employed by an insurance company and also worked as an organist at the Central Presbyterian Church in New York. It’s not that he gave up on the idea of becoming a composer in order to go into business, rather he gave up his job as an organist to focus entirely on business. In other words, he gave up both his job as an organist and as a composer of “practical music” in the widest sense of the term, including church music. But he never stopped composing for himself. Ives’s role model during the first four years after his graduation from Yale was Parker. He saw his work as an organist, the cultivation of a good reputation for his compositions and a University teaching job like that held by Parker as ways to continue his musical activities. It was with this ambition in mind that he began to compose his cantata “The Celestial Country” in 1898. According to Burkholder, the work was performed just a week before Ives announced his resignation as organist. Burkholder also explains that “Ives had identified himself to the newspaper as Parker’s student and had clearly 2 modelled both text and music of his cantata on Parker’s oratorio ‘Hora novissima’, which had helped to secure for Parker his appointment at Yale”.3 Judging from reviews of this work, it may have been much discussed but it was not particularly successful. The abovementioned performance was not enough to secure a performing-teaching position like that held by Parker. There is no concrete evidence for this but it is highly plausible that the failure of the work prompted Ives to give up the music profession and devote himself entirely to the insurance business, a field in which he achieved great success later on.4 To sum up, after graduating from Yale, Ives worked as an organist for four years, alongside his work at the Mutual Life Insurance company, a period during which he aspired to live a life similar to that of Parker, his role model. He aimed to continue his musical activities, including composition, by finding a job as a performer-teacher. However, the failure of “The Celestial Country” prompted his decision to focus on business. His resignation as organist highlighted his commitment to this decision, but the irony of this decision is that it provided him with ample time, both after work and at weekends, to compose music for himself. We will examine Ives and his music along two axes – time and space. Time axis I: periodization There were several turning points in Ives’s musical career. Burkholder’s division of Ives’s life into six periods gives us a better understanding of his music. Period I (1874-1894): Ives’s youth in Danbury, Connecticut. Period II (1894-1902): Yale and the first four years in New York. Period III (1902-1908): resignation as organist and focus on business. A period of solitary composition work. Period IV (1908-1917): a period of maturity starting with Ives’s marriage to Harmony in June 1908 Period V (1917-1926): reduction in compositional activity due to a heart attack in 1918 Period VI (1927-1954): encounters with people who championed his music. A period of adaptations and musical revisions. Study of Ives’s musical development shows that it was deeply intertwined with his 3 circumstances and personal health. His father, George Ives was highly influential during Period I. As he later recalled, “what my father did for me was not only in his teaching, on the technical side, etc., but in his influence, his personality, character, and open-mindedness, and his remarkable understanding of the ways of a boy’s heart and mind. He had a remarkable talent for music and for the nature of music and sound, and also a philosophy of music that was unusual. Besides starting my music lessons when I was five years old, and keeping me at music in many ways until he died, with the best teaching that a boy could have, Father knew (and filled me up with) Bach and the best of the classical music, and the study of harmony and counterpoint etc., and musical history. Above all this, he kept my interest and encouraged open-mindedness in all matters that needed it in any way.”5 George’s role in the formation of his son Charles’s character is beyond doubt. A further point which has not been emphasized by anybody is that he may well have contributed to Charles’s success in the insurance business. George’s death shortly after Charles arrived at Yale, and the encounter with his music teacher Parker, greatly influenced his music. Burkholder calls Period II Ives’s ‘apprenticeship’. Works such as Symphony No. 1 and String Quartet No. 1 were composed during this period. Period III is a ‘period of innovation and synthesis’ during which he lived in New York and worked for a life insurance company, but he sat down at the piano after work and wrote a large number of sketches. According to Burkholder, “he returned to vernacular styles, showing an increased interest in ragtime, and began to incorporate into the longer classical forms he had learned from Parker the techniques he had first tried in his experimental and highly dissonant church music, producing a series of chamber and orchestral works based on hymn tunes and on the music he had written for church.”6 Period IV, which begins with Ives’s marriage to Harmony Twitchell7, is a period which saw a succession of ambitious works and which can be called a period of maturity from a compositional point of view. He reduced his composition workload in 1918 after suffering a heart attack, an event which ushered in a period during which he brought together earlier hastily scribbled sketches and worked on completing works which had been left unfinished.