Essays After a Sonata

For the past few weeks I've been living with Kyle Gann's new book, Charles Ives's Concord: Essays After a Sonata, an exhaustive study that combines literary history, musical analysis, and aesthetic philosophy. It's an endlessly fascinating resource and a book I'll be returning to often.

Analyzing a favorite piece of music is, for me, rather like describing a mental state in terms of neural activity. It's necessary, I suppose, but does little to capture the quality of the experience. As detailed and daunting as Gann's vivisections can be, however, they do us the service of exposing the planning and intelligence -- the artistry, if  you will -- that Ives lavished on his Second Piano Sonata. The underlying unity of a composition is "not a selling point that would have impressed Ives," Gann says. Still, it impresses me. And although Ives downplayed the value of form -- what he would call "manner" -- in evaluating a work of art, it is also true that after self-publishing the Concord in 1920, he devoted the better part of three decades to revising, editing, and tweaking the score until he arrived at a form that satisfied him. And even then it didn't, quite.

Gann's chapters on the Essays Before a Sonata, the short volume Ives published as a companion to the Concord, are more fun, though less essential to understanding the music, and they go a long way toward rehabilitating Ives as a thinker and prose stylist. Ives was not the first to judge art from a moral standpoint, or in terms of a fundamental duality. In both respects, Gann argues, he owes a large, mostly unacknowledged debt to John Ruskin. Gann admits, however, that "in the end, Ives's treatise on substance and manner may have to remain for us, no practical typology or description." In other words, it doesn't offer much of a guide on the best places to spend our entertainment dollar. To my mind, dualisms like substance and manner can create a useless diversion, entangling the listener in endless parlor games about which pieces conform to the standard and which don't. They also deny us our right to determine our own response to a work of art. A song or a symphony may be enjoyed for any number of reasons, no one of which is deeper or more authentic than any other. To paraphrase Ives's father: Don't pay too much attention to substance. If you do, you may miss the music.

I've listened to the Concord Sonata countess times over the years, and I've seen it performed live more often than any other piece. Now I'm hearing it again with fresh ears, picking out details that had grown almost inaudible through repetition. I am grateful to Gann for reintroducing me to a piece I thought I knew well, and for loving Ives as much as I do.

(I should also mention the book includes a concise, helpful chapter on Ives's First Piano Sonata, a remarkable work that is often overlooked beside the Concord. This week,  I listened to it again, in Donna Coleman's fiery recording, and with Gann's notes in mind, I was able to navigate its conflicting cross-currents without once losing my bearings.)

Ives Uncaged

The microtonalist composer and theorist Johnny Reinhard invited me to his New York apartment Sunday to hear a new recording, which he is producing, of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. There must be dozens of recordings of the piece. What makes this one unique is that it involves two pianists ― the young powerhouses Gabriel Zucker and Erika Dohi ― playing separate instruments tuned according to what Johnny calls an “extended Pythagorean” system, or “the spiral of fifths.”

The tuning creates 24 tones per octave and, Johnny says, comes closer to what the composer must have had in mind when he wrote the sonata. In this score, as in others, Ives distinguishes between tones that in equal temperament are enharmonic ― placing, for example, an F sharp beside a G flat in the same measure. To his copyists, this was just bad notation, and it drove them batty. In the Pythagorean system, however, the tones are distinct, and Johnny insists that with his version, he is merely taking Ives at his word.

He also finds justification for his approach in this paragraph from the Epilogue of Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata:

In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones ― when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now ― perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe the music is not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may be a transcendental language in the most extravagant sense. Possibly the power of literally distinguishing these “shades of abstraction” ― these attributes paralleled by “artistic intuitions” (call them what you will) ― is ever to be denied man for the same reason that the beginning and end of a circle are to be denied.

The century Ives predicted, Johnny said, is now. The circle has been broken, swept up into a spiral of fifths.

Of course, the proof of any theory is in the listening, and I have to say, there are many stunning, ear-stretching moments in this recording. The word that kept recurring to me throughout the 40-minute running time was “liberated.” The dense, complex “Emerson” movement, in particular, gains a new power and resonance. The music seems propelled by a long-pent-up energy, like a tiger suddenly let loose  from a cage. The fresh charge comes at a cost, however, as the last two movements, in which Ives progressively thins out the textures, lose some of their accustomed flavor. “The Alcotts” sounds less naive, “Thoreau” less transparent, with the flute solo at the end (performed sensitively enough by Erin Keppner) struggling to break through the haze. But these are initial impressions, derived perhaps from a lifetime of familiarity with standard performances ― if any performance of the Concord may be called “standard.”  With repeated listening, I expect I might find new values to replace the old.

The two-piano version did not require any form of re-arrangement, Johnny said. All he did was take two copies of the score, black out some of the notes in each, and highlight others. The problems of coordination for the two musicians must have been staggering, but Zucker and Dohi rise to the challenge with astonishing precision. The performance is seamless.

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Tuning for the two-piano, microtonal Concord Sonata:

Piano I (Zucker)

  C#   D#         F#    G#   A#

C    D     E     F     G      A     B

Piano II (Dohi)

   Db   Eb            Gb    Ab    Bb

B#   Cx    Fb    E#    Fx    Gx   Cb

Another Concord

For reasons I won’t go into, the Italian pianist Roberto Ramadori found me online and sent me his recording of Ives's "Concord Sonata." It's an exciting, thoughtful performance, and it was especially refreshing coming after my disappointment in Jeremy Denk's clotted, overpraised version. Where Denk bangs away as though Ives were an American Liszt, Roberto approaches the "Concord" almost like Bach — not in a way that dries it out, but in way that clarifies the textures and equalizes the independent voices. I was especially impressed with his treatment of the Hawthorne movement, which has in general been my least favorite of the four.

The timings are longer than on most other recordings. Roberto brings in the piece at just 12 seconds shy of any hour &# an almost epic duration — and the music only accumulates power as it goes on. I have at least a dozen recordings of the "Concord," and I can see myself spending more and more time with this one.

It is not available in the US, but it can be found at Amazon Italy. At 13 euros, it’s a steal.

The little yellow stripe in the upper corner of the booklet touts this CD as the "first Italian recording." I don't know why that should make any difference. When the first Latvian recording appears, I'll know we've arrived.

Don't forget to tune in to Marvin's Rosen's Classical Discoveries 21st century marathon at 10:30 a.m. EST on Saturday, Dec. 29, when I'll be introducing Carter's Cello Concerto. WPRB is at 103.3 on the FM dial in the Princeton area. The show may also be heard online at WPRB.com.

Ah, now that's more like it

Received my copy of Donna Coleman's performance of the Concord Sonata in the mail today and have been listening to it for the last hour. I won't compare it favorably to other recordings — we are all involved in the common Ives project, and therefore all on the same side — but I will say I like very much the clarity of Coleman's playing, which keeps the themes in the forefront no matter how thick the textures get. I also like the way she distinguishes between passages of differing mood, sometimes simply with a long pause. There's a song-like quality to the playing, particularly in the Alcotts movement, when in a few spots Coleman seems to take on the role of Bronson Alcott's daughter Beth, idly picking out tunes for her own amusement on the "little old spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children," as Ives describes the scene in his Essays Before a Sonata.

This is an insightful performance that tells a story, as opposed to making a big noise, and it made me remember why I care about this music. If you're in the mood to acquire yet another recording of the Concord, I would recommend it.

The CD also includes fine readings of the Three Page Sonata and the rarely heard Emerson Transcriptions, brief, muscular distillations of material from the Concord Sonatas first movement. As Coleman says in the booklet, Ives couldn't leave this music alone.