Music of Charles Ives

Charles Ives--Yale man, insurance salesman, transcendentalist, composer--surely one of the most unusual figures in the history of music. Danbury Conn. was his musical matrix. In the solid German academic tradition, he was steeped in Handel, Bach, and Beethoven, as well as in the Puritan and Victorian hymns, minstrel tunes, and "sentimental drawing-room ballads" of late nineteenth-century America. Yet Ives was a composer far ahead of his time, employing radical devices such as polytonality, metrical modulation and tone clusters long before they appeared in the European musical spotlight.

Ives wrote most of his music between 1890 and 1922. Logically, he should have been the father of a whole school of progressive American composers. In fact, his music was rejected by his contemporaries and did not begin to receive performance and recognition until the late 1930's. Even with the Ives revival of the past decade, performances of his works are still relatively infrequent.

The Music Club outdid itself Friday night in presenting a two-hour concert devoted solely to the music of Ives. One is usually lucky enough to hear a program containing but one of his works, which then has to be appreciated in isolation. But here was a veritable smorgasborg of Ives, ranging from the Grieg-like First Quartet (performed by string orchestra) to the more modernistic songs and the enigmatic Unanswered Question for strings, solo trumpet, and concertino of woodwinds. The audience had the rare opportunity of experiencing Ives' music in all its ambivalence: intense and earnest yet caustic and derisive, ardently Schumannesque yet aggresively modern and American.

The level of performance Friday night was generally high. The pick-up orchestra had its tentative moments but was otherwise enthusiastic and attentive. Soprano Dorothy Crawford and pianist Daniel Hathaway gave an excellent rendition of six Ives songs, and there were outstanding performances by David Archibald, clarinet, and D. Allan Shewmon, piano. The height of the evening was the massive Piano Trio (1904-1911), whose second movement bears the indication "TSIAJ" ("This Scherzo is a Joke"). This is one of those pieces that has to be heard live to be appreciated. The sight and sound of Shewmon and 'cellist Fran Uitti ripping their way through their parts was something not to be missed.

The man responsible for the entire concert was music-major Jan Johnson, '68. Conductor, page-turner and general impresario, Johnson showed a keen appreciation of Ives and did an admirable job of bringing his music to life. A "hats off, gentlemen" from Eusebius was certainly in order.