flexible to allow for the greatest degree of variety of individual interaction. He could be tolerant when it came to performances of his own music; provided that the music was attempted with sincerity and simplicity of purpose, he did not mind too much if it did not come out exactly as he wrote it—hence his famous comment on an early well-intentioned but botched performance of Three Places in New England—“Just like a town meeting—every man for himself. Wonderful how it came out!” One wonders, in fact, whether he would have liked some of today’s recorded performances by the same kind of superstar conductor and instrumentalist as those who once pronounced the music unplayable, so smoothly and perfectly co-ordinated; in their very technical proficiency they are regressing towards the mean of European music, and the quality of adventure which he treasured is lacking from the experience.
In the multiplicity of his sources, from Beethoven to American folk tunes, gospel hymnody and ragtime, in the protean variety of his musical styles, from straightforward tonal harmony (regarded by him as only one of an infinite number of expressive means) to polytonality, polyrhythm and polymeter, proto-serial music, spatial music, Ives introduced something completely new into western music, which has become an increasingly important factor in it, especially to those Americans who succeeded him. In European music we obtain a hint of this all-embracing quality only in the work of Mahler, and in his famous remark, made to Sibelius, that “A symphony must be like the world; it must contain everything!” In the music of Ives, in fact, the work of art becomes not just an expression of nature or of an attitude to nature; it becomes a part of nature, flowing along in the flux of time as much as a rock or a tree. Like a natural object it contains not one but many meanings; the extraction of meaning requires more work on the part of the hearer, but the music allows the hearer to enter in and find his own meaning, rather than have it presented to him ready-made, depending on the aspects of it on which we concentrate our attention. This, for example, is what he says of the pieces which he calls Tone Roads:
The Tone Roads are roads leading right and left—“F.E. Hartwell & Co., Gents’ Furnishings”—just starting an afternoon’s sport. If horses and wagons can go sometimes on different roads (hill road, muddy road, straight, hilly hard road) at the same time, and get to Main Street eventually—why can’t different instruments on different staffs? The wagons and people and roads are all in the same township—same mud, breathing the same air, same temperature, going to the same place, speaking the same language (sometimes)—but not all going on the same road, all going their own way, each trip different to each driver, different people, different cuds, not all chewing in the key of C—that is, not all in the same key—or same number of steps per mile … Why can’t each one, if he feels like trying to go, go along the staff-highways of music, each hearing the other’s “trip” making its own sound-way, in the same township of fundamental sounds—yet different, when you think of where George is now, down in the swamp, while you are on Tallcot Mountain—then the sun sets and all are on Main Street.19
And elsewhere in the Memos he discusses the structure of a piece and comments, “This may not be a nice way to write music, but it’s one way!—and who knows the only real nice way?”20
In his multiplicity Ives draws together many threads of American music and brings them to the surface from where they had lain, submerged and neglected, for more than a century. He celebrates the fact that what people play or sing is not necessarily the same as what they think they are playing and singing, and acknowledges their right to sing or play as they wish; indeed, given the right attitude in the listener, the result can be just as beautiful as more accurate or more formally disciplined music making.
Ives seems never to have seriously considered studying in Europe; those who did go to Europe either before or after him came back imbued with European attitudes, no matter how “American” they believed themselves to be. The music of Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, even of Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt, remains European-style concert music with an American accent, not unlike the nationalist concert music of such nineteenth-century composers as Smetana, Dvorak, Greig, whose national accents (this is not to deny their many virtues or even genius) remain mere dialects of the prevailing European polyglot. Of the generation following Ives, only Henry Cowell showed anything of Ives’s bent for uninhibited experimentation with sound, free from harmonic preconceptions. Cowell’s early pieces for piano, using tone-clusters (a term which was in fact invented by him) and plucked and rubbed strings may have been naïf (some were published while he was still in his teens) but their spirit was the same as had animated the eighteenth-century tunesmiths, and is directed towards liberating the inner nature of the sounds themselves. If his later work falls back into the European concert-music manner, albeit with an exotic seasoning, he had opened up some important new resources, and, as editor of the journal New Music, he became, in the words of John Cage, “the open sesame for new music in America … From him, as from an efficient telephone booth, you could always get not only the address and telephone number of anyone working in a lively way with music, but you could also get an unbiased introduction from him as to what anyone was doing. He was not attached (as Varèse also was not attached) to what seemed to many the important question: Whether to follow Schoenberg or Stravinsky.”21 The last is an important point; to be aware of the essential irrelevance of both Schoenberg and Stravinsky (obscured by the fact that both composers were resident in the United States, Schoenberg since 1934 and Stravinsky since the 1940s) to the growth of a genuinely American tradition was a state which Cage himself reached only in later life.
It is in fact in the music and the writings of Cage that the tendencies we have been observing over the three-hundred-and-fifty-year history of American music finally become explicit. His first confrontation with European concepts of harmony seems to have occurred when he was studying with Schoenberg, that most committedly European of all twentieth-century composers. He tells the story as if he were unaware of its significance, a fact that testifies to the depth, albeit perhaps unconscious, of his feeling. When he had been with Schoenberg for five years the master said that to write music one must have a feeling for harmony. “I told him,” says Cage, “that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’”22 Schoenberg, from his own point of view and that of the European tradition was of course right, but in fact Cage has felt no such necessity; going ahead as if western concepts of harmony and the associated ideas of linear time and climax had never existed, he has found in rhythm the organizing principle for which harmony served in traditional western music. “Sounds, including noises, it seemed to me, had four characteristics (pitch, loudness, timbre, and duration) while silence had only one (duration). I therefore devised a rhythmic structure based on the duration, not of notes, but of spaces in time … It is analogous to Indian Tala (rhythmic method) but it has the Western characteristic of a beginning and an ending.”23 The first sentence here seems to take Cage close to the position of Webern in the thirties; the last two emphasize how far from that position he actually was.
A piece by Cage, in fact, rarely develops, rarely works towards any kind of climax or apotheosis, but deals in what is known in Indian aesthetic theory as “permanent emotion” (one ancient work of theory lists these as Heroic, Erotic, Wondrous, Mirthful, Odious, Fearful, Angry and Sorrowful)—a single emotional state that persists through the piece. The music may thus be boring to some; once it has made its point, many feel, there seems little purpose in continuing it. Virgil Thomson, for example, says, “The Cage works have some intrinsic interest and much charm, but after a few minutes very little urgency. They do not seem to be designed for holding the attention and generally speaking they do not hold it.”24 This is the verdict of a western composer accustomed to the concept of music as drama, but it may also be a just criticism; it could be, as used to be said of Berlioz, that Cage just has not enough talent for his genius.
He has taken the denial of the European spirit even further than the simple rejection of harmony, and has attempted to eliminate as completely as possible the imposition of the composer’s will upon the sounds,
