Jeremy Denk
At 150, Charles Ives Still Reflects the Darkness and Hope of America
This pioneering composer is not the easiest to love. But while he explores the poison of American nationalism, his music also offers an antidote.
By Jeremy Denk in The New York Times
Sunday is the 150th anniversary of the composer Charles Ives’s birth, and the most fitting way to celebrate would be to bang your fists on the table and rail against the damned closed-mindedness of classical music, with its lazy dependence on a predictable canon. But honestly, that’s old news; a lot of the classical community is already doing that. Would Ives be satisfied by the current state of things? Hard to say. Improvements have been made but not, I suspect, enough.
Ives, a Connecticut Yankee, straddled tumultuous and defining eras of American life; he was born in the shadow of the Civil War and lived almost a decade after World War II. He had no shortage of grand visions, whether for music or for his quite successful insurance business. He conceived influential strategies of estate planning and formulas for coverage. He dreamed that music would evolve into “a language, so transcendent, that its heights and depths will be common to all mankind.” (This didn’t pan out, unless you count Taylor Swift.) And, in the first two decades of the 20th century, he dreamed up a radically original American musical voice — an enviable triumph that came bundled with failure. It was a voice many people didn’t want to hear, and still don’t.
It is easy to understand the doubts of audiences, befuddled by under-rehearsed and under-enthused orchestral performances of Ives’s work. It is harder to forgive this neglect in professional musicians. Not long ago, I was in a car with a distinguished British cellist who admitted he knew just one Ives piece: the cheeky satire “Variations on America.” When I mentioned the anniversary, he said that Ives was “cute,” but that was it. This condescending opinion, offered in near-perfect ignorance, made me want to dump every last ounce of British tea into the nearest harbor.
Concert presenters don’t seem super keen this anniversary, either. Thankfully, the writer Joseph Horowitz took initiative and obtained grants for events at Indiana University, Carnegie Hall and elsewhere. Pam Tanowitz cleverly curated and directed a program at the Juilliard School that traces Ives to other experimental artists. But that seems to be the extent of Juilliard’s commitment.
The BBC Proms in Britain were more festive than most. (Cancel that tea party!) As a pianist, I’m trying to do my bit by performing the “Concord” Sonata, including at the 92nd Street Y New York in December, and releasing a recording of the violin sonatas with Stefan Jackiw on Nonesuch. But there doesn’t seem to be a groundswell of demand. It’s more like a bunch of passionate Ives nuts are standing at a street corner, begging the world to care.
Some of this is Ives’s fault. If he wasn’t antagonizing people, he would have felt he was on the wrong path, not bold enough in challenging listeners’ tastes and minds. But the Ives problem is also tied to his origin story as an inventor of distinctively American music; his work is hard to separate from the complications of nationalism.
Parts of Ives’s nationalism have enduring appeal: the desire to create anew, to break the rules and tell the habits of composition to go to hell, to declare that music’s greatness doesn’t belong to the educated or trained, least of all the stuffy professor. All this feels like a happy package of Yankee pride and self-reliance that I was sold as a child in school, without dwelling on the dark sides.
Ives’s writings, full of bitterness and spleen, reveal plenty of that darkness. It is sad to read some of this, though much of the most problematic writing comes after his health had deteriorated around 1920. He bashes Europe with glee. He hurls sexist and homophobic epithets. Chopin, for example: “one just naturally thinks of him with a skirt on, but one he made himself.” A string quartet concert: “a whole evening of mellifluous sounds, perfect cadences, perfect ladies, perfect programs, and not a dissonant cuss word to stop the anemia and beauty.” Most of all, he denounces the lamestream musical media through the invention of a recurring nemesis called Rollo. Nicknames, misogyny, attacking the media — an awfully familiar cocktail of behavior.
Let’s concede that Ives is not the easiest man or composer to love. At his worst, he shows us some of the poison in the American psyche. But the essential argument for Ives is that his music also offers us the antidote. Its animating idea is generous: a restless search to find more in America than we thought, or even hoped, to find.