Charles Ives

Ives’ “The Gong on the Hook and Ladder” (“Firemen’s Parade on Main Street”): An Experiment in Rhythm

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Born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, Charles Ives conceived of a brash, previously unimaginable kind of 20th century music. He experimented with collages of sound and rhythm in brief chamber music fragments which he called “sets” or “cartoons.” One such experimental work is The Gong on the Hook and Ladder, or Firemen’s Parade on Main Street. The music originated as a section of Ives’ Pre-Second String Quartet, composed between 1904 and 1906 and …

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“Songs My Mother Taught Me”: From Dvořák to Ives

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Songs My Mother Taught Me is the fourth and most famous of Antonín Dvořák’s seven-song cycle, Gypsy Songs, Op. 55. Composed in 1880 at the request of the Viennese tenor, Gustav Walter, the texts are from a collection of poems by Adolf Heyduk. Songs My Mother Taught Me highlights the timelessness of music, and enduring truths, passed lovingly through generations: Songs my mother taught me in the days long vanished, Seldom from her eyelids were …

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Ives’ “Adeste Fideles” in an Organ Prelude: Inversion and Bitonality

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Charles Ives (1874-1954) led a fascinating duel life as a Yale-educated insurance executive and a maverick composer. By the age of 14, Ives was also a professional church organist. Between 1889 and 1902, he “held a series of six posts as an organist or organist-choir master at Congregational, Baptist, Episcopal, and Presbyterian churches in Danbury, New Haven, Bloomfield (New Jersey), and New York.” (James B. Sinclair) The virtuosity of his organ playing …

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Ives’ “Central Park in the Dark”: Sound Pictures of the Night

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In his program note for the brief and atmospheric 1906 tone poem, Central Park in the Dark, Charles Ives wrote, This piece purports to be a picture-in-sounds of the sounds of nature and of happenings that men would hear some thirty or so years ago (before the combustion engine and radio monopolized the earth and air), when sitting on a bench in Central Park on a hot summer night. Originally titled, A …

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Ives’ “Decoration Day”: Lingering Ghosts

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In his Essays Before a Sonata, first published in 1920, Charles Ives reflected on a vivid memory from his Danbury, Connecticut childhood: In the early morning of a Memorial Day, a boy is awakened by martial music—a village band is marching down the street, and as the strains of Reeves’ majestic [Second] Regiment March come nearer and nearer, he seems of a sudden translated—a moment of vivid power comes, a consciousness of …

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All Aboard! Five Pieces Inspired by Trains

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Music reflects the sounds of the time. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, music was centered around the human voice and the motion of the body through dance. Music of the eighteenth century emerged from the pastoral sounds of nature, hunting horns, and the bugle calls of the battlefield. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, music got louder and more discordant amid the mechanized roar of the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps electricity and computers inform …

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The 2021 Classical Grammys

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The 63rd Annual Grammy Awards ceremony took place in Los Angeles Sunday evening. Here are excerpts from the winning albums in the classical categories: Best Orchestral Performance “Ives: Complete Symphonies” — Gustavo Dudamel, conductor (Los Angeles Philharmonic) This album features the four numbered symphonies of Charles Ives. The “New England Holidays” is not included. We sense an exciting artistic progression from the relatively conservative Symphony No. 1, completed in 1902 in response …

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