Abstract: When a pianist friend recently asked if I was familiar with Charles Ives's Concord Sonata, I admitted total ignorance. He then told me that the sonata's second movement is entitled Hawthorne, and the three others are entitled Emerson, and Although he had often performed those three, he had never mastered the My curiosity piqued, I decided to seek out Charles Ives's Hawthorne. I began by calling on James Willey, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music at the State University of New York College at Geneseo. He sent me home with Gilbert Kalish's recording of the Concord Sonata (the best, he thinks), a copy of Ives's Essays Before a Sonata, and two recent biographies. He also alerted me to other works that I was bound to encounter: Ives's piano phantasy entitled The Celestial Railroad, his Fourth Symphony, and his now missing Piano Concerto. Essays Before a Sonata and The Concord Sonata Ives's prose writing is so much like his music ...--the way his sentences spin out and are a little reluctant to close. They qualify the thoughts and even counterqualify them. The ideas tumble in on one another, and they make a kind of magnificent soaring ascent. (John Kirkpatrick, in Perlis 219) Charles Ives (1874-1954) published the Concord Sonata and Essays Before a Sonata in 1921--though not together, as he had first intended, because such a volume would have been too cumbersome. As he later recalled, the idea of the sonata emerged in September 1911; he completed the movement a month later, then the in the summer of 1912, Alcotts in November 1914, and Thoreau in May 1915 (Memos 329-30). Then in 1919--while recuperating from a serious heart attack--he made ink copy of the entire sonata, sent it to the engraver, and wrote Essays Before a Sonata. At his own expense, both were in print and ready for distribution in January 1921. It was his first major published composition and the only accompanied by published commentary. Ives wrote Essays Before a Sonata primarily as a preface or reason for the (writer's) second pianoforte sonata--'Concord, Mass., 1845'--a group of four pieces, called a sonata for want of a exact name. Even modestly, he said the sonata was an attempt to present (one person's) impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over half a century ago. This is undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic side of (Essays xxv). In his essay on (which as in the sonata follows the and precedes Alcotts and Thoreau), he amplified that last statement. Hawthorne begins with a tumbling stream of self-effacing yet confident assertions: The of is so dripping wet with the supernatural, the phantasmal, the mystical, so surcharged with adventures, from the deeper picturesque to the illusive fantastic, that one unconsciously finds oneself thinking of him as a poet of greater imaginative impulse than Emerson and Thoreau. He was not a greater poet, possibly, than they--but a greater artist. Not only the character of his but the care in his manner throws his workmanship, in contrast to theirs, into a kind of bas-relief. (Essays 39) Ives's delineation of Hawthorne's substance applies equally well to his own scherzo. His conjecture that might have more local color, perhaps national color, than his Concord neighbors prepares the reader for such local and national color in the scherzo as recurrent passages of parade music and patriotic songs, and introduces tightly focussed speculations. Continuing to demonstrate his predilection for comparison, Ives said the work of anyone who lived in Salem was to be colored by the Salem wharves and Salem witches, just as anyone who lived in the Old Manse was likely to muse about the secrets its garret concealed and about the inherited mystery of Concord itself. …
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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