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 flag above the fray. In the hush that ensues, “Old Black Joe” and “Massa’s in de Cold Ground” play once more, leading into a brief, bluesy lament for solo cello. At the end comes a hazy “Amen”—perhaps a funeral procession going up the steps of a church.
What are we hearing? Is Ives seriously suggesting that black soldiers in the Civil War sang “Hear dat mournful sound” as they went into battle? Presumably not. As the title indicates, the work is inspired not by the battle itself but by Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture in honor of it. This is Shaw’s regiment, as seen by Saint-Gaudens, as seen again by Ives. We are looking back through the eyes of a turn-of-the-century Yankee who cannot sing as the black soldiers sang. When he thinks “Negro,” Foster tunes come to mind, as well as anachronistic strains of ragtime. Even so, by shattering these trite associations into fragments, Ives draws closer to the source. The movement seems to look ahead to black music of the near or distant future: the jagged country blues of Skip James, the dreaming chords of Ellington’s symphonic jazz, John Coltrane’s “sheets of sound.” Such resemblances may be nothing more than accidents, but Ives’s whole method was to plan accidents. He was incapable of asserting a monolithic point of view; instead, he created a kind of open-ended listening room, a space of limitless echoes.
The Jazz Age
Ives wisely waited until 1920 before trying seriously to publicize his modern Transcendentalist style. Ten years earlier, his work would have made little sense to listeners reared on the courtly values of the Gilded Age. But in the period of the Roaring Twenties there emerged what the scholar Carol Oja has called a “marketplace for modernism,” an audience more receptive to disruptive sounds.
Cawing trombone glissandos defined the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s 1917 track “Livery Stable Blues,” the first jazz record to capture national attention. Around the same time, audiences were cheering the immigrant Ukrainian pianist-composer Leo Ornstein, a.k.a. “Ornstein the Keyboard Terror,” who offered up savage discords and slam-bang virtuosity. Ornstein’s most startling effect, co-invented with the California experimentalist Henry Cowell, was the “cluster chord,” in which three or more adjacent notes are struck with the hand, the fist, or the forearm. Somehow, Ornstein succeeded in generating an early form of the mass hysteria that would later greet Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, and the Beatles. One crowd was said to have “mobbed the lobbies, marched at intervals to the stage, and long clung there to walls, to organ-pipes, pedal-base, stairs, or any niche offering a view.”
American music had grown from a well-behaved Eurocentric childhood into a rambunctious adolescence. Oja, in her book Making Music Modern, compares several leading composers of the period to “commuters who emerge baffled from the subway, peering in all directions to ground their location.” Some adopted the strategy of avant-garde assault, firing off dissonances and percussive timbres that outdid the most unusual sound combinations of Stravinsky and the Viennese. They were dubbed the “ultra-moderns.” Others aimed to ingratiate themselves with the concert-going public, garnishing opera and symphony with dollops of jazz. On the other side of the shaky popular-classical divide, young Broadway masters like Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin copped devices from grand opera and modern music, on their way to creating a new type of through-composed music theater. They, too, were part of Manhattan’s “modernist marketplace,” as Oja calls it. Meanwhile, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet, Fletcher Henderson, Bix Beiderbecke, and Paul Whiteman, among others, were determining the fundamentals of the art of jazz. Almost all the above-named were born in the years just before or just after 1900, and they would dominate American music for decades to come.
Edgard Varèse, chieftain of the ultra-moderns, later recalled: “I became a sort of diabolic Parsifal, searching not for the Holy Grail but the bomb that would make the musical world explode and thereby let in all sounds, sounds which up to now—and even today—have been called noises.”
Varèse, born in 1883, came to New York from the Paris avant-garde, where he patronized some of the same occult Rosicrucian gatherings that had intrigued Debussy and Satie. After writing for a time in a style that evidently fell somewhere between Debussy and Strauss—his early scores were subsequently destroyed in a fire—Varèse took an interest in Italian Futurism and its “art of noise.” In 1915, having been released from the French army on medical grounds, he decided to try his fortunes in New York City. There, he fell in with a cosmopolitan group of artists, both native and expatriate, who were forging a distinctively American avant-garde, visceral in impact and exuberant in tone. Among them were Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, who made art from everyday objects and eroticized the machine. The American critic Paul Rosenfeld, an orotund advocate of avant-garde music in the twenties and thirties, identified these artists as avatars of “skyscraper mysticism,” by which he meant a “feeling of the unity of life through the forms and expression of industrial civilization, its fierce lights, piercing noises, compact and synthetic textures; a feeling of its immense tension, dynamism, ferocity, and also its fabulous delicacy and precision.”
Varèse’s music owes much to the cruel harmonies and stimulating rhythms of the Rite, but any trace of folklore or popular melody has been surgically excised. His first major American work was, appropriately, Amériques, or Americas, a gargantuan orchestral movement composed between 1919 and 1922. It echoed the sounds and rhythms of New York along the Hudson River and around the Brooklyn Bridge—the noise of traffic, the wail of sirens, the moaning of foghorns. The orchestra consisted of twenty-two winds, twenty-nine brass, sixty-six strings, and a vast battery of percussion requiring nine or ten players. Like Schoenberg in his early atonal period, Varèse broke down language and form into a stream of sensations, but he offered few compensating spells of lyricism. His jagged thematic gestures, battering pulses, and brightly screaming chords seem to have no emotional cords tied to them, no history, no future.
An
