world at large. In almost total intellectual isolation, he launched an American musical revolution, either discarding the rules he learned at Yale or reinventing them on his own terms. At times, he unloosed dissonances that rivaled Schoenberg’s. In more carefree moods, he delighted in popular sounds and miscellaneous Americana. His philosophy of music was almost diametrically opposed to his philosophy of insurance; he preferred to imagine a world in which music could somehow circulate without being bought or sold. “Music may be yet unborn,” he wrote in Essays Before a Sonata, the companion volume to his piano masterpiece, the Concord Sonata. “Perhaps no music has ever been written or heard. Perhaps the birth of art will take place at the moment in which the last man who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone forever.”
Once Ives finally launched himself in the public eye, with the publication of the Concord in 1920, a myth began to crystallize around him. Here was an American visionary who had discovered atonality in advance of Schoenberg. When, in 1939, the pianist John Kirkpatrick finally mastered that titanic score and played it in its entirety, Lawrence Gilman of the New York Herald Tribune hailed Ives as “one of those exceptional artists whose indifference to réclame is as genuine as it is fantastic and unbelievable.” Schoenberg himself made an approving note: “There is a great Man living in this Country—a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one’s self-esteem and to learn [sic]. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives.” Later, the legend of Ives the innovator underwent skeptical scrutiny. The author Maynard Solomon wrote a paper alleging that Ives had backdated his scores in an effort to establish his precedence in the race toward atonality. Gayle Sherwood countered by proving that the composer had been tinkering with outlandish harmonies as early as 1898.
What ever the outcome of that debate, Ives’s originality really resides not in his outré chords but in his heterogeneous combinations of American sounds. Like Berg and Bartók, he ranged back and forth between folkish simplicity and dissonance. “Why tonality as such should be thrown out for good, I can’t see,” Ives once wrote. “Why it should always be present, I can’t see.”
In early experimental works such as From the Steeples and the Mountains and The Unanswered Question, Ives created hyperrealistic reproductions of everyday sonic events. In the first piece, bells ring out from multiple village steeples and echo against the mountains. In the second, spells of nervous, dissonant activity are set against a serene, soft swell of strings, evoking the querulousness of stranded human voices amid the indifferent vastness of nature. In the Second Symphony, finished around 1909, Ives opens the old Teutonic form to what the musicologist J. Peter Burkholder calls “borrowed tunes”: American hymns, marches, and ditties on the order of “Massa’s in de Cold Ground,” “Pig Town Fling,” “Beulah Land,” “De Camptown Races,” “Turkey in the Straw,” “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” These swirl together with quotations from Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Dvořák himself, provocatively leveling the European-American balance.
Finally, in mature large-scale works such as the Holidays Symphony, the Concord Sonata, and the Third and Fourth symphonies, Ives forges forms that could do justice to his all-American material. Rather than set forth musical ideas in orderly fashion at the outset of a piece, Ives follows a process that Burkholder names “cumulative form”: themes materialize from a nebula of possibilities, then build toward a brief, blinding epiphany. In the Third Symphony the epiphany takes the form of the hymn tune “Woodworth” singing out crisply at the end. The tumultuous, magisterial Fourth concludes with a thick fantasia on “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”
Three Places in New England, begun around 1914 and finished as late as 1929, is Ives’s deepest meditation on American myth. Coincidentally or not, it is also the work in which the black experience matters most. Ives gave clues to his intentions in the autobiographical Memos and in the book Essays Before a Sonata, both of which touch on the relationship between black and white music. On first reading, the argument may seem predictably prejudiced. Rejecting Dvořák’s program for a Negro-based American music, Ives insists that the spirituals had their origins in white gospel hymns and that the Negroes had “exaggerated” this white material. Ragtime, he writes in Essays Before a Sonata, “does not ‘represent the American nation’ any more than some fine old senators represent it.” One cannot make music from ragtime any more than one can make a meal of “tomato ketchup and horse-radish.”
Then the argument takes an interesting turn. A composer may make use of Negro or Indian motifs, Ives says, if he identifies deeply with the spirit burning in them—“fervently, transcendentally, inevitably, furiously.” One must possess the same passion for truth that drove the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips, who shouted down and shamed a pro-slavery faction at Boston’s Faneuil Hall in 1837. Otherwise, the composer should look to his own heritage. What Ives seems to be saying is that the white hymns are no less fervent than the black; singers of all colors bend notes to express their spirit. In the end, Ives flatly states, “an African soul under an X-ray looks identically like an American soul.”
Ives took pride in the fact that his family had long embraced African-American causes. His grandparents, outspoken abolitionists, had given support to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, an industrial school for Negroes and Native Americans. After the Civil War, George Ives and his parents more or less adopted a black boy named Henry Anderson Brooks and sent him to study at Hampton. Ives evidently heard ragtime early on, perhaps at the World’s Columbian Exposition, which he attended during a summer off from high school. (He seems to have missed the fiasco of Colored People’s Day by a day or two.) He often played spirituals on the piano. At one point he planned a set of pieces dealing with black America; it would have included The Abolitionists, a dramatization of Wendell Phillips’s Faneuil Hall oration.
In the end, this material went into the first movement of Three Places in New England. “The ‘St. Gaudens’ in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and His Colored Regiment)” takes as its subject Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bas-relief sculpture of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, one of the Union’s first African-American regiments, which lost more than one hundred men in an assault on the Confederate stronghold of Battery Wagner in 1863. At the head of the score Ives placed a poem of his own composition, in which he depicted “Faces of Souls” marching through pain toward freedom, led along by the “drum-beat of the common-heart.” Whether any given tune in “St. Gaudens” represents the soul of a black soldier or a white officer is difficult to make out, but the fact that the composer sometimes called the piece his “Black March” suggests that he considered the Colored Regiment its protagonist.
The score of Three Places in New England is held at the Yale University Music Library. A bundle of revisions, additions, and last-minute corrections, it exemplifies the composer’s unruly working methods. One inspiration occurred to Ives late in the game: he decided to insert a soft, cloudy, brooding chord of six notes at the head of the “St. Gaudens” movement. The chord fuses triads of A minor and D-sharp minor, and, as in Salome and the Rite, the tritone gap between them hints at unresolved and perhaps unresolvable conflict—in this case, perhaps the Civil War itself. Out of that mist of sound, a host of hymns and songs emerge, and tunes with African-American associations take precedence. Early on, two Stephen Foster songs, “Old Black Joe” and “Massa’s in de Cold Ground,” make appearances. Later come “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Marching Through Georgia,” a burst of ragtime, and “Deep River.” The “white” tunes are given a relatively straitlaced setting, indicative of the Boston rectitude of Colonel Shaw. “Deep River,” that mightiest of spirituals, sounds in noble, lonely tones on the horn.
The tunes converge in what the musicologist Denise Von Glahn has described as an orchestral reenactment of the Colored Regiment’s suicidal siege of Battery Wagner. A C-major chord is pierced by a dissonant B: Colonel Shaw is struck by a bullet as he cries, “Forward, Fifty-fourth!” The “rally round the flag” motif from “The Battle Cry of Freedom” blares out over a stumbling, collapsing march sequence: Sergeant William H. Carney, the first African-American to receive the Medal of Honor, carries the
