Until the early 20th century, the US was tied to European music. Indeed, our national songs were borrowed from England: My Country, 'Tis of Thee is based on the national anthem of the United Kingdom, God Save the Queen, and The Star-Spangled Banner is an adaptation of a British drinking song, To Anacreon in Heaven. It took over a century to stir together the cultures of Europe, Africa, Asia and Native Americans to create a uniquely American music culture. The twentieth century marks the beginning of truly American music, the most influential music culture in recent history.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States was influenced by immigrant composers like Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Bartok, and visits of European composers such as Dvorak, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky. These composers taught and influenced generations of US musicians. European technique and American creativity yielded amazingly innovative and original music.
Visionary composer and New England insurance executive, Charles Ives (1874-1954), was noted for use of polyrhythms, polytonality, quarter-tones, andaleatoric techniques. He created astonishing sonic snapshots of Americana, pioneering techniques unheard of until decades later. Ives was the first truly American composer of the twentieth century and one of the most original spirits of his time.
Early Education
Ives received his early musical training from his father, a bandmaster, who taught the value of "manly" composers like Handel, Beethoven and Brahms. He helped Charles "stretch his ears" by exposing him to quarter tones and having him sing in one key while accompanied in another key. These lessons left an indelible mark on his musical personality and propel Ives away from the tried and true.
Charles Ives in 1893 (left) | Ives was an all American boy: Yale graduate, millionaire and lover of baseball, marching bands, small towns and church. | Gilmore Music Library of Yale University
Yale
After graduating from Yale with a music composition degree, Ives eschewed a music career, stating he could keep his music "stronger, cleaner, bigger and freer." Furthermore, "if a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?" Ives was uncompromising in artistic principles and family priorities, and so began his insurance career.
Many musicians begin careers with an unrelated day job, hoping to succeed in music and eventually quit the day job. Ives had no such illusions and was a creative and successful businessman: within twenty years he owned the largest US insurance agency, invented estate planning and wrote a popular insurance text.
Composing
Ives composed evenings, weekends and holidays, working in isolation from the mainstream, but producing the most advanced and adventurous works of his era, anticipating techniques and ideas popular decades later. He was rich enough to hire the New York Philharmonic to play his music for private performances, but most of his scores accumulated unheard in the barn of his Connecticut farm.
The music of Ives was autobiographical, programmatic and nationalistic insomuch as he evoked the sounds and sights of his childhood in small town America: classical traditions, hymns, brass bands, camp meetings and patriotic holidays.
Ives loved his memories of marching bands playing different music simultaneously from the corners of the town square. He liked standing in the middle and listening to all the bands at once. As he walked about, the spatial presentation of the bands changed. This experience accounts for his use of polytonality (simultaneous keys), polyrhythms (layers of independent rhythm), chord clusters (tightly packed pitches), multiple orchestras and spatial presentation (notes moving across an orchestra).
Failing Health
Ives suffered a heart attack in 1918, just before his forty-fourth birthday. Neither he nor his music completely recovered. Although he lived thirty years longer, Ives stopped composing by the mid-1920s. Instead, he promoted his output to little avail. Musicians of the time shunned Ives, thinking him ignorant of rudiments. Why else would somebody write music so unconventional and non-European?
In 1939, at the age of sixty-five, Ives witnessed the first public performance of his piano work, Concord Sonata. At seventy-seven he achieved significant public recognition with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic's performance of his Second Symphony. The prospect of hearing a piece he wrote fifty years earlier agitated him so much he refused to attend the performances.
New England | The northeastern US—Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island—are called New England. | Wikimedia Commons
Three Places in New England
The music of Ives displays stylistic traits beyond simple assaults on tonality and increased dissonance. Indeed, his works feature extreme elements of musical violence and distortion—scorning Classical and Romantic ideals of beauty and expression. Audiences were supposed to be disturbed from their complacency. You'll soon hear these unsettling traits in the bombastic and rollicking dissonances of Three Places in New England (1903-29).
Three Places in New England is both an example of program music and American nationalism. Although not popular during Ives' lifetime, this is one of his most often performed works today. It bristles with his signature traits: layering of textures and meters, multiple, often simultaneous melodies; hymn and marching tunes; tone clusters and bitonality; and abrupt textural contrasts. There are three movements, each steeped in American history and culture. Ives aimed to make listeners experience the atmosphere of each place.
1. The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment)
2. Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut
3. The Housatonic at Stockbridge
We'll listen to the second movement, Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut. Ives writes that Putnam's Camp is about the Fourth of July as seen through the eyes and ears of a boy growing up in late nineteenth century America:
"Near Redding Center, Connecticut, is a small park preserved as a Revolutionary Memorial; for here General Israel Putnam's soldiers had their winter quarters in 1778-79." One Fourth of July, "a child went here on a picnic held under the auspices of the First Church and the village cornet band. Wandering away from the rest of the children past the camp ground into the woods . . . As he rests on the hillside of laurels and hickories the tunes of the band and the songs of the children grow fainter and fainter. He falls asleep and dreams of a "a tall woman standing . . . the Goddess of Liberty . . . pleading with the soldiers not to forget their 'cause' and the great sacrifices they have made for it. But they march out of camp with fife and drum to a popular tune of the day. Suddenly, a new national note is heard. Putnam is coming over the hills from the center—the soldiers turn back and cheer. The little boy awakes, he hears the children's songs and runs down past the monument to 'listen to the band' and join in the games and dances."
Ives draws heavily on musical quotation of popular American songs to evoke both the time and place of this work:
The Star-Spangled Banner
The British Grenadiers
Marching Through Georgia
The Girl I Left Behind
Arkansas Traveler
Massa's in the Cold Ground
The Battle Cry of Freedom
Yankee Doodle
Columbia, Gem of the Ocean
Hail, Columbia
Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!
Americans during the first half of the twentieth century likely recognized all the tunes, helping render a vivid and nostalgic picture of the Fourth of July in their minds. I grew up in the second half of the twentieth century and only recognize six of the ten quotes. My best students may recognize only one or two.
Putnam's Camp is in ternary form: A B A' with each section corresponding to the main sections of the story above. The A section, marked quick step time, evokes marching bands, screaming kids and Fourth of July festivities. After a chaotic and dissonant introduction, a straightforward march theme appears in the strings:
As groups of instruments rage and compete with one another, the mood intensifies and surges between extremes of multiple marching band textures to off-key quotes of popular songs such as Yankee Doodle:
The chaos of the A section grinds to a halt and the B section begins softer and darker, depicting the child's dreams of the Revolutionary War. The Revolutionary War images intensify with offbeat drum beats, sounds of merging marching bands and quotes of patriotic songs, including The British Grenadiers.
The child awakens and the A section returns—but modified to A'—symbolizing the chaos of picnics, yelling sergeants and marching bands as the child wanders back to the parade grounds. The final two measures quote America's national anthem and resolve to an unexpectedly dissonant and fortissimo chord cluster.
Three Places in New England: 2. Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut (1903-29) | Charles Ives (5:35)
Vocabulary
Charles Ives, polytonality, polyrhythms, chord cluster, Three Places in New England
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European Influences
Early Education
Yale
Composing
