CHARLES IVES AND DEMOCRACY: ASSOCIATION, BORROWING, AND TREATMENT OF DISSONANCE IN HIS MUSIC Chelsey Lynne Hamm Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University December, 2016 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Doctoral Committee ______________________________________ Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, Ph.D. ______________________________________ J. Peter Burkholder, Ph.D. ______________________________________ Blair Johnston, Ph.D. ______________________________________ Andrew Mead, Ph.D. December 8, 2016 ii Copyright © 2016 Chelsey Lynne Hamm iii Acknowledgements This introduction is just put in, now and later, to be more polite. –Charles Ives, Memos1 A dissertation is not the product of one scholar alone. A large number of people, organizations, and institutions have helped me to produce this work, and I would like to set forth my acknowledgement of and sincere thanks for their help. First, I would like to thank the Ives scholars who have helped to shape the questions asked and the answers sought in this dissertation. Working with Professors Timothy Johnson, Denise Von Glahn, and J. Peter Burkholder in each stage of my academic career—my undergraduate, masters, and doctoral programs respectively—has been enormously influential on how I think about Ives and his music. Second, I would like to thank Indiana University, the Jacobs School of Music, and the music theory department at IU for their sponsorship of my scholarship and conference travel throughout the first four years of my doctorate. Without this sponsorship, I would have not have been able to complete my Ph.D. coursework or examinations. I would also like to thank Kenyon College and my colleagues at Kenyon for taking a chance on a young and inexperienced scholar and for providing me with full-time employment for the last two years of my doctorate. My time at Kenyon was wonderful, and I greatly enjoyed writing in such a supportive and amicable environment. Third, I would like to thank Indiana University’s Graduate and Professional Student Government (the “GPSO”). I applied for numerous competitive grants through the GPSO during my doctoral studies, and was awarded several. The most significant 1 Charles Ives, Memos (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1972), 26. iv grant that I received was a GPSO Research Award in the spring of 2014. This award allowed me to travel to New Haven to complete the archival research necessary for my dissertation. During my time in New Haven I received invaluable assistance from the wonderful staff at the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University. Richard Boursy, the Music Library archivist, was an incredible resource, and was extremely patient with answering my questions. Suzanne Eggleston Lovejoy, the Assistant Music Librarian for Public Services, was also incredibly helpful and enthusiastic about my work. It was conversations with Suzanne and Richard that sparked several of the ideas in this dissertation. I would also like to thank the student workers who helped me while I was at the Music Library, including Megan Francisco, Emily Ferrigno, Kevin Dombrowski, and Batmyagmar Erdenebat, all of whom were very polite and accommodating. During my time in New Haven, I also met with Ives scholar James Sinclair on several occasions, who is the Executive Editor and a member of the Board of Directors for the Charles Ives Society, as well as the Music Director of Orchestra New England. Conversations with Mr. Sinclair were invaluable while studying in the Music Library, and he was very generous with his time and encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank some of my personal acquaintances who have provided support throughout the dissertation process, especially my friends and graduate student colleagues Matthew Boyle, Alyssa Barna, Margaret Fay, Paul Sherrill, Devin Chaloux, Juan Mesa, Simon Prosser, Paul Child, Calvin Peck, Nate Mitchell, Nathan Blustein, Craig Duke, Michael McClimon, Bruno Alcalde, Ethan Edl, Knar Abrahamyan, and Diego Cubero. I am grateful to the members of my committee, including Professors Blair Johnston and Andrew Mead for their questions and assistance, and Professor J. v Peter Burkholder for his support and his commitment to and demand for excellence. I would also like to thank my most important supporter and advocate, my advisor Professor Marianne Kielian-Gilbert. I am incredibly grateful for all that she has done: for her questions and advice, her belief in the value of my work, and for helping to shape me into the scholar that I am today. vi Preface Everyone should have the opportunity of not being over-influenced. –Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata1 I have been asking questions about Ives and his music since taking an undergraduate special topics course on Ives in 2007 at Ithaca College. Since then I have benefited not only from being exposed to a variety of opinions on Ives and his music, but also from encountering several different methodologies at different institutions. Having worked with both musical theoretical and musicological experts on Ives, I learned to ask questions not only about the structure of Ives’s music, but also about meaning and historical and biographical contextualization. The double nature of this dissertation reflects my past training and subsequent interests; it is a blend of historical and theoretical approaches and queries. This dissertation is neither solely music theory nor musicology; it is a marriage of the two fields, reflecting an opinion I have come to believe: that musicology and music theory are essentially “the same field approached through different methods, and I see my own [research] task as hopeless unless I use both of them.”2 When I started this project, I began with different questions about Ives and his music, questions mostly related to the meanings of recurring borrowings throughout his compositional output. While researching these questions, I completed several months of archival work in MSS 14, The Charles Ives Papers, in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. During my time working on The Charles Ives Papers, I found 1 Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999), 94. 2 J. Peter Burkholder, “Music Theory and Musicology,” The Journal of Musicology 11, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 11–23. The quotation is from p. 12. vii myself becoming fascinated by manuscripts that I had not even known existed. I became especially interested in the manuscripts of “Sneak Thief,” an unpublished song that was probably written in October 1914, and in the crude marginalia that lined its manuscripts. Reading Ives’s unpublished marginalia first sparked my interest in and curiosity about Ives’s treatment of dissonance. I began rereading primary source materials, especially the Memos, Essays Before a Sonata, Selected Correspondences, and Charles Ives Remembered, which contains oral accounts of Ives’s life. It is from many readings of these sources, as well as my study of Ives’s manuscripts and the other documents in the Charles Ives Papers that I have produced the theories and ideas found in this dissertation. My beliefs that dissonance acts as a constructive force in Ives’s music and that Ives’s dissonantly-set musical borrowings can act as the fruitful basis of an analytical methodology to help explain and develop the listening experiences of modern analysts were drawn from recurring statements in Ives’s writings and reappearing musical structures in his compositions. I found that such statements and musical structures could be categorized in meaningful ways and with constructive implications for experiencing, thinking about, and analyzing Ives’s music. viii Chelsey Lynne Hamm CHARLES IVES AND DEMOCRACY: ASSOCIATION, BORROWING, AND TREATMENT OF DISSONANCE IN HIS MUSIC I interpret meanings in Charles Ives’s uses of musical borrowings through the perspective of his treatment of dissonance. Drawing on archival research and primary documents, I study two aspects: first, how one might reconstruct his thoughts on connections between democracy and dissonance (“Association”), and second, how one might understand his musical dissonances constructively in terms of analysis and experience for the present-day listener (“Treatment”). Ives’s writings that discussed features of dissonance—especially extramusical or expressive associations—are ubiquitous, and his writings support the main theoretical ideas of this study. I theorize that, for Charles Ives, dissonance was evocative expressively and extramusically, and that the compositional makeup of his works reflects this aesthetic orientation. Many of Ives’s references to dissonant musical structures fall into a web of associations that I describe as “Democratic.” In writings that discussed “Democratic” dissonances, Ives associated aspects of dissonance with strength, freedom, and/or democratic principles. By contrast, he regarded music whose dissonant potential was underutilized as lacking the capacity to evoke strength and freedom. Ives also associated aspects of consonance and/or late nineteenth-century musical theories regarding tonal music with autocracy, slavery, and/or “German rules” during and after the Great War. In addition to reconstructing Ives’s associations of dissonance, I explore the ways in which Ives treated “Democratic” dissonances musically,