Charles Ives

Ives’ “The Unanswered Question”: Perennial Mysteries in a Cosmic Expanse

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The fifth installment of Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Harvard lecture series, The Unanswered Question, takes on “The Twentieth Century Crisis.” Drawing upon linguistics and its subcategory of phonology, Bernstein outlines an aesthetic crisis: the gradual over-saturation of ambiguity which, amid increasing chromaticism, stretched tonality and 19th century Romanticism to the breaking point, resulting in the twelve-tone music pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg. Underlying the aesthetic crisis is a deeper and more terrifying reality: With the …

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Ives’ “Elegie”: A Yankee Take on the French Chanson

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Charles Ives’ 1901 song, Elegie is haunting and hypnotic. Its gloomy and forlorn text, a setting of a poem by Louis Gallet, expresses the heartache of a narrator whose beloved is forever gone. The blue skies and birdsongs of springtime are replaced with late autumnal chill. The vocal line rises over an unrelenting rhythmic ostinato which begins to render time infinite and unmeasurable. French composer Jules Massenet wrote a song using the …

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Ives’ “Calcium Light Night”: Sounds of a Nineteenth Century Fraternity Party

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For years, “Calcium Night” was a boisterous tradition at Yale University, where Charles Ives was a student between 1894 and 1898. Students wishing to join a fraternity paraded around the campus, singing their fraternity’s song under the glow of a calcium light, the “limelight” used on theater stages before electricity. (The calcium light was so blinding that it was used during the American Civil War to illuminate artillery targets, and on navel …

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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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