Author: William Shanks

The Orchestra Now (TŌN), conducted by Leon Botstein, performed a set of works by modernist American composer Charles Ives at Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall, on Thursday, November 21^st.

The evening concluded a Bard College Ives festival, one of four Ives festivals supported this season by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The concert highlighted pieces in which Ives used themes from famous American tunes, each work being preceded by a mini-lecture by J. Peter Burkholder. Snippets of the original pieces were also played on piano by Donald Perlman and sung by William Sharp.

The opening piece, The Fourth of July from A Symphony: New England Holidays, begins with a whispering and sighing of strings, a kiss of cymbals. Just when the audience has been tricked into thinking it can relax into this performance, Botstein is suddenly waving his arms and driving the orchestra into crashing crescendo.

Like the other pieces played in the first half of the concert, The Fourth of July falls into the ‘modernist’ classical genre associated with musical innovation away from rigid classical principles. (Jazz can be considered a modernist art form.)

In practical terms, Ives modernist work eschews such stuffy principles as ‘playing in time’ and ‘playing notes that sound good together’, in favor of less conventional means of constructing themes and musical ideas. Towards the end of the piece one feels that some part of the orchestra or another has lost the beat – the percussion is ahead, or no, the strings are behind, or, oh no it’s all falling apart! – until all of a sudden Botstein slams on the brakes. An exhausted sigh seems to emanate from the stage and all is – briefly – silent.

Then tolls, from somewhere in the back, an impish bell – just once. The audience is reminded that Botstein and his players, recreating the kind of wild and competitive soundscape of a parade, were in control the whole time. Just how is hard to say.

This is followed by Central Park in the Dark, a 7-minute tone poem about what one might hear during a steamy summer’s night in Central Park at the start of the 20th Century. We are invited to consider the mixture of sounds Ives might have heard before, according to the composer himself, “the combustion engine and radio monopolized the earth and air.”

The piece begins with a slow, painful lament by the string section, described in the program notes by Haley Maurer Gillia, TŌN violinist, as representing “the omnipresent heat and the surrounding nature” that Ives might have felt.

After the strings comes, from somewhere uptown maybe, a piano. But this pianist must not have been listening because now – vying with the sad, dissonant strings – we have ragtime?! And if that’s not enough, in chimes a trumpeter, warming up in a different key in the parlor of a nearby apartment.

Balancing these different instruments, allowing them to pierce into our attention so suddenly and violently at times, must be somewhat novel for an orchestral conductor. Botstein’s day job presumably involves balancing the parts of an orchestra, letting soloist augment, without overwhelming, the accompanying musicians. Here, it feels as if the very point of the work is to accentuate this competition between sounds, all the more redolent for its clashing nature.

The music cannot readily be described as beautiful, but it is so much more rewarding for its being challenging. Ives was not widely recognized in his time (other than for being a successful proto-finance bro), but there is a freedom, a playfulness to the performance which is hard to find elsewhere in classical music.

But where were we? – the whole thing seems to have veered off course again: what Ives has put down on the page just can’t be, the whole thing is just becoming too literal, too wonderfully overwhelming. Once again Botstein has to wrest back control, exhorting his percussionists to beat some order into the rest of the orchestra. Back we find ourselves in the original theme, those sweet, hot, sticky violins on a warm night.

The final performance before the interval is of Orchestral Set No. 2, which features themes from popular American hymns such as Bringing in the Sheaves by Knowles Shaw and George Minor (a ‘sheaf’, if for some reason you didn’t know, is a bunch of cereal crop tied together after a harvest).

The piece is opened by double bass and timpani – an ominous pairing. Listening to Ives’ work requires you to open your ear in a different way. In this kind of music, no use looking out for the violins or the oboes; better not try to contrast the clarinets and French horn with one another. The dissonance and, at times, lack of discernable rhythm invite you to listen to the thing as a whole, as a monolith.

The work therefore seems challenging to play, the musicians needing to shed their desire to play notes from conventional chords and at the same time. How one actually plays this, let alone conducts it; how the whole thing falls together just right – these are questions I am not qualified to answer.

Today there is a reasonable acknowledgement of the legitimacy of ‘borrowing’ ideas in music: from sampling to vernacular folk musics to – well, just about any ‘genre’ you care to name. Yet it is though hard to tell what Ives means through his musical borrowing.

Most of the songs he borrows from are innocent, patriotic, simplistic pieces of music: Fourth of July parades, Protestant harvest hymns etc. Yet Ives’ work feels as much written with the hammer at the anvil than with the pencil at the bureau. Simplistic, balanced phrases are melted down and violently annealed into dissonant, chaotic ideas. Is there something irreverent about Ives’ use of old-school Americana? What drove Ives to work like this?

After the interval, the final set of works is Ives’ Symphony No. 2. This is a return to more ‘conventional’ musical forms and, refreshments in hand, the audience can relax a little – no more errant drum rolls or angry trumpet notes flying overhead. I suspect that some members of the orchestra feel a little more relaxed now too.

The symphony is honey-sweet, Ives passing the silken memories of his New England youth through the loom into perhaps the most indulgent art form around, the orchestral symphony. As with the rest of the performance, TŌN’s musicians handle the work with love and care and Carnegie Hall is, of course, a wonderful place to hear this. (At one point I was certain that the harp was being plucked not on stage but somewhere over my head. It is a magical experience.)

Whether Charles Ives was an iconoclast or a proud patriot; whether he achieved his goal of writing the first Great American Symphony – these questions are not really relevant. Even though Ives was an innovator, his contemporaries chose not to enjoy his music in the way TŌN and Botstein treated us to in 2024. Their loss.