Charles Ives

[karlhenning]

And the Russian adverts on my thread:

[lukeottevanger]

I just kept clicking refresh till it came up again. Here's the page it takes you to: http://www.gotmyringtones.com/ringtone-artist.php?id=Charles%20Ives

but I can't get any further to have my question answered

[lukeottevanger]

And the Russian adverts on my thread:

How cultured! At my thread at the moment it's either the 'perfect lover' (natch) or..... oven gloves:

[karlhenning]

Well, I owe you an apology for inciting the Advert Generator viz. oven mitts, Luke . . . .

Joe, I'm holding out for an Elliott Carter ringtone.

[lukeottevanger]

Joe, I'm holding out for an Elliott Carter ringtone.

If you say it enough times, it's quite likely to happen.

Elliott Carter ringtone

Elliott Carter ringtone

Elliott Carter ringtone

[Guido]

Guido, thaks so much for posting this link. You're right: it's a wonderful resource. I just spent a few minutes listening to the hymn tunes. I feel as though  I've been to church, and we never sang any of these hymns when I was growing up and was made to go to church. (Music at Catholic Masses is uniformly awful.) The more I become familiar with the tunes in their original forms, the more impressed I am with Ives's originality and achievement. He didn't just quote. He transformed. I'm listening to "Kathleen Mavounin" as I type, and I realize how different Ives's reworking in "The Pond" is.

This was precisely the feeling I got Joe - these simple homely tunes are transformed from often rather banal beginnings into such transcendant expressions of beauty, community and the mysteries of the beyond that I too am again bowled over by Ives' achievement.

I'm reminded of I hymn I wrote once. I was outside painting a wrought iron fence, and the church bells nearby starting playing a tune that sounded something like "In the Sweet Bye," though maybe not quite. As I painted, I improvised a few verses to go with it. In keeping with the tradition that the title should have nothing to do with the words ("Nearer My God to Thee" is "Bethany"?), I call it "Galilee." Everybody sing:


1.
There's a place that I know
Where I'm hoping you will go
When the Lord returns to call us home again.
We'll be happy up above
In the land of joy and love,
And you'll be wracked with endless horrid pain ---

Down in hell,
Down in hell.
Yes, the Lord will make you suffer down in hell.
I'll be there among the crew,
As the angels laugh at you,
When the good Lord makes you suffer down in hell.

2.
If you live in guilt and sin,
If you've let the devil win,
If you think that evolution might be true,
You'll learn better really fast
When the devil whips you ass,
And his evil minions beat you black and blue ---

Down in hell,
Down in hell.
Yes, the Lord will make you suffer down in hell.
If you want to stay away,
You'll do everything we say,
Or the Lord will make you suffer down in hell.

3.
If the dogmas of the Lord
Leave you questioning or bored,
You will see your hubris whittled down to size.
We'll just see how smart you are
When you're dropped in scalding tar,
And a stake is driven right between your eyes ---

Down in hell,
Down in hell.
Yes, the Lord will make you suffer down in hell.
You'll be left to sing the blues
As you burn among the Jews,
When the good Lord makes you suffer down in hell.

I always the Falwell people would be interested in it. 

Fantastic! You have a true lyrical gift.

I like the idea of the trumpet theme of the Unanswered question sounding 3 times as a ring tone! might have to do that sometime.

[Guido]

I really want to hear the Julliard quartet's recording of the two quartets - I believe it was rereleased in 2003 but its out of print again. Anyone know where I can get it?

[Joe Barron]

I really want to hear the Juilliard quartet's recording of the two quartets - I believe it was rereleased in 2003 but its out of print again. Anyone know where I can get it?

Guido, I'm not aware it was rereleased. I have a copy on LP, which I'd be willing to transfer to a cassette, if you have a cassette player. I'm not set up for digital.

The Juilliard recording of the Ives is not among my favorites. I prefer the old Kohon set on Vox Turnabout, which I also have on LP, and any of the recent CD releases by the like sof the Emerson or the Leipzig are just as good, IMHO. In any event, it's here if you want it.

[Joe Barron]

Had an e-mail this morning from Jonathan Elkus, editor of the critical edition of Charlie's Second symphony. I read in Gayle Sherwood's new book that the final, dissonant chord of the symphony dates from 1950 or '51, while the work was being readied for performance, and it might have been suggested or even written by Henry Cowell. I wrote Gayle asking if there was a manuscript page for the chord, and she suggested I contact Elkus about it. Here is our exchange (with the typos corrected):

Dear Dr. Elkus,

As a lifelong Ivesian, I was most interested in Gayle Sherwood's new
book about the composer. We've been emailing back and forth about it, and
when I had a question about the Symphony No. 2, she suggested I contact
you, since, she said, you edited the Ives Society's critical edition. The
question, as I put it put it to Gayle, is this: "You say the big tone
cluster at the end of the work was composed in the early 50s and might
have been the work of Henry Cowell. Is there any way to be sure? For
example, is there a manuscript page for the final tone cluster? And if
so, whose handwriting is it? I would think that by 1950, Ives was barely
able to pick up a pen."

All she said in response was that no manuscript page for the final chord
exists. If that's so, then, where did the chord come from?

BTW, I love your arrangements of Ives for band. The Marine Band recording
on Naxos is one of the best recent recording of Ives' work that I've
heard. 

All the best,

Joe Barron

*******

Dear Mr. Barron,

Belated but heartfelt thanks for your kind words on my Ives
transcriptions. (A more recent one--a set of songs, this time with
vocalist--is streamed on the Marine Band website.) There is no manuscript
source for the final chord of Ives's Second Symphony; my suggestion is
to get hold of a copy of the new Ives Society score and check the
references to it in the front and back matter. (Ives could evidently
pick up a pencil on "good days" even in 1950, or he could have dictated
the chord to Cowell, possibly from the keyboard. As you'll note in the
edition, the chord was sent to Harrison for scoring.) The only "source"
for the chord is the 1951 printing of the full score; I'm confident that
written sources for this score survive, but (if so) are in an unknown
private collection.

Anyway, I do hope this may help.

Sincerely, Jonathan Elkus

I am rereading Gayle's book now and will try to post a review over the weekend.--JB

[karlhenning]

Curious. Thanks for sharing this, Joe.

[Guido]

http://www.musicweb.uk.net/Ives/RR_String_Quartets.htm

Hi Joe - this is the one I wa referring too. At the moment I have the Leipzig and Blair quartets. Do you think I need any others? He seems to have a rather higher opinion of the Julliard than you do. I guess every Ivesian has his own tastes. He is at least right on his top recommendation for the Piano Trio - the Ma/Kalish/Lefkowitz is easily my favourite version on record.

Thankyou very much for the offer. I will hunt around a bit more, then may take you up on it. Thanks again,
Guido

[Joe Barron]

http://www.musicweb.uk.net/Ives/RR_String_Quartets.htm

Hi Joe - this is the one I wa referring too. At the moment I have the Leipzig and Blair quartets. Do you think I need any others? He seems to have a rather higher opinion of the Julliard than you do. I guess every Ivesian has his own tastes. He is at least right on his top recommendation for the Piano Trio - the Ma/Kalish/Lefkowitz is easily my favourite version on record.

Thankyou very much for the offer. I will hunt around a bit more, then may take you up on it. Thanks again,
Guido

Wow, I never saw that CD. It came and went without my knowledge, which is rare.

[Joe Barron]

Well it's available at Amazon.de for 39 euros, which is about 40 bucks.  Happy hunting.

[Joe Barron]

He seems to have a rather higher opinion of the Julliard than you do.

I guess I'll have to listen again, since I agree with him about the Walden recordning as well. I have always disliked the Cleveland recording, which takes the finale much too fast in my estimation.

[Joe Barron]

Below is an enlightening post from Kyle Gann that I just came across while doing a google search. It dates from 2005. I hadn't kown about the letter he writes about, and I wish someone would publish it. I recently had an unpleasant run in with Gann on his blog site (I have a lot of unpleasant run ins, but I find this post well done:

Ives the Non-Homophobe
The myth of a homophobic Charles Ives has gained traction, to the point that it sometimes seems that if a person knows only two things about Ives, one is that he wrote music and the other is that he hated gays. I alluded to this in my post about Ives the other day, and I received the usual questions. Let me set a couple of things straight.

The image of Ives as homophobe rests on two pillars: Ives's abandonment of Henry Cowell after the latter was sent to San Quentin on a homosexual morals charge; and his regular use of effeminacy as an insult, calling people he didn't like "sissies" and "old women in pants."

To take the first charge: In 1997, during the Henry Cowell Centennial Conference at Lincoln Center, there was an exhibition of Cowell's correspondence. One exhibit was a letter from Charles Ives, written to Cowell at San Quentin. It was warm, supportive, sympathetic, with no hint of disapproval. As I recall, it was written in Ives's handwriting, which was odd, because by the late 1930s his wife Harmony was writing most of his letters for him. A bunch of American music scholars and I stood around wondering at this letter, which so flew in the face of the legend that Ives cut Cowell as a friend after the homosexual incident. We theorized that perhaps it wasn't Ives who had trouble with Cowell's homosexuality, but Harmony - which would explain why this was a rare Ives letter not in her handwriting. I have never yet seen this written about - perhaps some Ives scholar is saving it for a new book - but thus fell down to dust one leg of the Ives homophobia myth.

Parenthetically, I've always wondered why this myth reflected so much worse on Ives than on Cowell. After all, Cowell was charged with corrupting the morals of a minor, and I think most of my friends and acquaintances would agree that having sex with an underage person is a bad thing (at least morally bad), regardless of the sexual orientation involved. Why couldn't Ives (or Harmony) have very reasonably disapproved of Cowell seducing a minor, if he had believed that's what happened, without a charge of homophobia? Why is it assumed that Ives would have felt just dandy about Cowell and a 16-year-old girl? As it happens, Cowell seems to have been, if not completely innocent, more innocent than charged, and got screwed over by a vindictive DA. In any case, he was later given a full pardon, and the evidence against him was acknowledged as faulty. In my experience, everyone seems willing to believe poor Cowell was innocent - yet Ives continues to be blamed for an abandonment that, according to the evidence I've seen, never happened. In any case, Cowell remained Ives's friend and wrote a fine biography of him in 1954, and if Ives didn't do anything Cowell couldn't forgive him for, I don't see that the rest of the world has any business not forgiving him as well.

The second case is more difficult to make, and many will not be convinced by it - but I'm going to make it anyway. Like Ives, I grew up in a culture in which charges of effeminacy were a standard insult. In Texas in the 1960s, we called guys we didn't like "sissies," "girlie-men," taunted them by saying they should be wearing a dress. This had nothing to do with homophobia. It had to do with our own fears of failing to live up to the unrealistic image of manhood impressed on our insecure imaginations, and to overcompensate we ascribed such failure to our enemies. (Ives, whose father was an impecunious musician in a family of solid businessmen, was probably acutely susceptible to this psychology.) For one thing, we were so ignorant of homosexuality that we thought it might be a one-in-a-million condition, something we would never encounter. I went into college talking this way, found that homosexuals were far more common than I'd been led to believe, and learned with a shock that the way I was used to expressing myself might be misinterpreted as disparaging gays. Of course, I cleaned up my speech immediately - I had no desire to offend any group of people for being who they were, and many of my new friends were gay. Calling people "sissies" was admittedly a graceless and ugly way of expressing ourselves - but to label it homophobia is to retrofit an anachronistic standard into a culture that wouldn't have understood the charge. (Why hasn't Arnold Schwarzenegger been vilified as homophobic for his "girlie-men" comment? What did Ives say worse than that?) Nor was it misogynistic: in the macho John Wayne world I grew up in, men were supposed to be men, and women - rather idealized and installed on pedestals - women. It was an unfortunate world in a lot of ways, and I suffered from it and continue to. But homophobia and misogyny played no conscious part in it.

Thus it was that when I read Ives's Essays Before a Sonata at age 14, nothing about its language jarred me - that's how people I knew talked. One of the wonderful things about Ives's prose writing is how much of the vernacular slips into his high-toned philosophical discourse. The unfortunate flip side of this is that some of that vernacular, in hindsight and from the point of view of a civil rights era, now has a nasty ring to it. Since I come from a part of the country whose enlightenment level creeps along more slowly than the average, my upbringing in the 1950s was probably on some kind of cultural par with Ives's in the 1880s. Ives called critics "sissies" and "Rollos" when they were hidebound and conventional in their thinking - which are not characteristics associated with gays. In any case, if you're going to charge Ives with being a homophobe, then you might as well charge me with having been one for the first 20 years of my life, and I alone know how misguided such an interpretation would be.

Ives assigned the royalties for his Third Symphony to Lou Harrison, who conducted its premiere in 1946 (and gave him half of the Pulitzer Prize money he won from the work). I don't know how "out" Lou was by that point, but I find it difficult to believe that Ives was in complete ignorance of his sexual orientation. In short, I have never seen any evidence that Charles Ives ever in his life discriminated against a gay person, or insulted one, or avoided one, or even that he hated gays. He did hate people who were intellectually timid and conventional, and in disparaging them he employed an old-fashioned vernacular idiom that no educated person would ever use today, because it now sounds homophobic. That's unfortunate. Ives's music enjoyed a big surge in popularity in the 1960s, and a lot of people who thought it undeserved have picked away at Ives's minor personal faults with a tenacious schadenfreude that seems all out of proportion. Ives's alleged homophobia should not be one of the first things anyone learns about Ives. In fact, it needn't be brought up at all - unless someone has some evidence.

[Guido]

Fascinating Joe. Thanks!

[Guido]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ives-Variations-on-America/dp/B000SKJQT8/ref=sr_1_35?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1221254389&sr=1-35

I have been toying with the idea of getting this Ives CD for a while, but haven't got it as they're all arrangements and I have the originals of all of them already... Anyone recommend for or against?

EDIT: just read the review *ordered*

[bhodges]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ives-Variations-on-America/dp/B000SKJQT8/ref=sr_1_35?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1221254389&sr=1-35

I have been toying with the idea of getting this Ives CD for a while, but haven't got it as they're all arrangements and I have the originals of all of them already... Anyone recommend for or against?

Haven't heard the CD, but for what it's worth, the band is terrific: I've heard them live a couple of times.

--Bruce

[Guido]

Haven't heard the CD, but for what it's worth, the band is terrific: I've heard them live a couple of times.

--Bruce

Hi Bruce. Yes I just read Scott Morrison's review (a current or ex GMGer?) on the same page I linked to. Sounds like good stuff. It's sort of sad that I have heard virtually everything by Ives now... I still crave more!

[bhodges]

Hi Bruce. Yes I just read Scott Morrison's review (a current or ex GMGer?) on the same page I linked to. Sounds like good stuff. It's sort of sad that I have heard virtually everything by Ives now... I still crave more!

Scott does post here now and then--he's a good writer. 

Yes, when you realize you've heard every last thing by a given composer, isn't that just a little sobering!  You're ahead of me, I think: there are still Ives things I don't think I've heard yet.  But I can understand the craving: at one point years ago, he was probably my favorite composer (if there can be such a thing as a "favorite," given all the incredible music around to hear). 

BTW have you heard Vol. II of the songs, by Gerald Finley and Julius Drake?  I haven't yet, but plan to get it soon.

--Bruce