I is for Ives

Charles Ives

Almost a default victory. Not a ton of Is to choose from and among the ones I've even heard of, the only one I've ever listened to intentionally for longer than a few minutes is Ives. Truth be told, I'm not a huge Ives fan. He's interesting and I can see how some people would really dig what he does but not me. He's a novelty and like most all novelties, you grow tired of them soon enough.

He's grown a bit mythical over the years. There's a lot of stories about his musical prowess and where his ideas came from. My favorite "fact" I've heard about Ives is that he was able to keep 7 independent rhythms going in his body at once: left hand snap, right hand snap, left foot tap, right foot tap, left eye blink, right eye blink, and sing the the last rhythm. How's that for the ultimate musical freak show? But that kind of story outlines what people think of as his major contribution to 20th century music.

Ives was a big fan of poly-. I leave it blank because he liked polyrhythm, polytonality, polypieces? That last one is having two different songs going at once; don't know if there's a technical term for it. But Ives liked to mash up sounds into something new and fresh in ways that no one would think feasible. Surprisingly enough he has way more successes than he has failures in this regard. There's no disputing that there is some magic that seems to keep his pieces on track when every force of nature seems to want to let the wheels fly every direction.

He's another American composer and his choice of material reflects this. He has done a lot of old standard song arrangements along the lines of Stephen Foster (Oh, the Camptown ladies sing this song, etc.) and along with that the influence of hymns. He has a few blatantly patriotic pieces and a few pure music pieces, but all retain a flavor of New England in them.

Variations on America - A nice and easy piece to start with. It is what it says it is (America the song, not the country).

A Symphony: New England Holidays - A bit more advanced, but in the same ballpark as Variations on America. You get a bit more conflicting tonalities and pieces overlapping each other.

Though I haven't heard many, I do enjoy his song settings. He made one large collection of pretty much all of them called 114 songs. I'm going to research that one a little bit more myself.

Actually there are quite a few Ives/Youtube finds. Here are a couple.

A movement from 3 Quarter Tone Pieces. I like the section from 1:00-2:00 the best.



Say what you will about it's musical merit, it's at least interesting.

Here is something a little more digestible. I don't know for sure, but I assume it's from 114 Songs. Here you can hear both the odd harmonic turns he liked to take right along side some very straight ahead triadic writing in the spirit of Stephen Foster.



And with that I leave you again. This time for Budokan. Be back on Sunday with J.