Anarchist vision of America still troubling: NPR

One hundred and fifty years ago, a mild-mannered insurance man was born in the small town of Danbury, Connecticut. On nights and weekends, he composed music, most of which had never been performed in his life. His name was Charles Ives, and after his death in 1954, his reputation as America’s first truly original composer slowly grew.

To celebrate the anniversary, pianist Jeremy Denk released the album Ives DinkWith violinist Stephane Jaquio. It contains Ives’s four violin sonatas and two monumental piano sonatas—some of the composer’s most personal, thorny, confusing, and beautiful music.

Ives was a free thinker who wrote music decades ahead of its time. He inherited his wilder ideas from his father, George, a multi-professional musician and Danbury bandleader who instructed his son to sing songs in one key and play the accompaniment in another. In his memoirs, dictated to his secretary in 1930, Ives recalls his father saying: “If you know how to write a fugue the right way, I’m willing to try the wrong way.”

Much of Ives’ music sounds, at least on first hearing, as if it was composed “wrong”. Ive challenged traditional music theory. In the Violin Sonata No. 2, which Dink and Jackieu play with a uniquely controlled madness, the hymn “Come, Fount of All Blessing” blares ecstatically over the maddened piano.

Ives was obsessed with all the music around him. You never know when excerpts from popular church hymns, circus marches, saloon songs, or ragtime anthems might make their way into a piece of music. In Ives’ time, his listeners might have thought he was simply manipulating popular culture, but in his unique, raw way, Ives tells us that these songs are part of the grit that lies at the foundation of American music. In the ramshackle, ragtime-influenced middle movement of Violin Sonata No. 3, you can hear Yves playing with the music, stopping and starting as if trying out ideas on the spot.

His thoughts were not always positive. About the First Violin Sonata, which premiered in San Francisco in 1928 in a concert series choreographed by Henry Cowell, Ives recalled the day he invited a famous violinist to his home to perform the piece. “He didn’t even look at the first page,” Ives wrote in his memoirs. “He was completely disturbed by the rhythms and the notes, and got angry. He said, ‘You shouldn’t play with this. It’s not music. It doesn’t make any sense.'” Dink places the sonata among Ives’s most ambitious works and describes its eerie central movement in the album’s liner notes as “a rough musical reflection of the war Eligibility.”

There’s a kind of swagger in Ives’ music that sounds unmistakably American. Even though these pieces were composed over 100 years ago, they sound surprisingly contemporary.

Ives began work on the Piano Sonata No. 1 around 1915, but had to wait another 34 years for it to be performed publicly for the first time. The auroral opening movement sounds innocent enough, like something Brahms might have written had he lived another twelve years. Ives quotes a cowboy hymn and song—the sacred and the profane often collide in Ives. After about 25 minutes, before the ominous final movement, the music could not have seemed more incongruous as the dangerously aggressive “Bringing in the Sheaves” hymn emerged. Dink’s performance was deliciously unhinged.

Ive believed in the utopian possibilities of music. So it is not surprising that the Piano Sonata No. 2, titled “Concord, Massachusetts, 1840-1860,” was inspired by the philosophy of American Transcendentalism. It is a massive, comprehensive work—separate portraits of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Alcott.

However, there are still common threads woven together. Immediately, at the opening of the Emerson movement, there is a reference to Beethoven’s Fifth heard low in the left hand. The da-da-da-daaa theme would eventually evolve into some of Ives’ more delicate music in the movement titled “The Alcotts.” At another point in the “Hawthorn” section of the sonata, Ives specifies that a narrow wooden board, exactly 14-3/4 inches long, can be used to press multiple keys simultaneously. The result is a mysterious cloud of notes in the right hand that floats against a melody of arpeggios in the left. It could have just been a gimmick, but Ives made it work beautifully.

These performances by Dink and Jackio are sensitive and powerful – like Ives’ music, full of contradictions, failure, grace and vision. It would be difficult to find more satisfactory liner notes than those of Dink, whose 2022 memoir Every good boy does good It offers the same combination of perception and intelligence. For this album, the composer sums it up for us in 2024, saying that Ives is “optimistic but always messy, always falling apart at the seams. His music suggests that America will just have to get by, grappling with its failure.”

An album of Ives’ music, especially one that’s well played and thought provoking Eve Dinkis worth dealing with at any time, regardless of the next centenary. That it was released during an election season fraught with conflicting views about what it means to be an American adds a distinct gravity.