tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449697140204377101.post3769379077358415994..comments2023-04-22T10:55:19.894-04:00Comments on Liberated Dissonance: Jeremy Denk on IvesJoe Barronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16638252347181688694noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449697140204377101.post-44933003571149353772014-06-28T08:47:24.275-04:002014-06-28T08:47:24.275-04:00A similar trend is visible with new books about J....A similar trend is visible with new books about J.S. Bach, which seem to look for reasons to tear down his reputation. This phenomenon also reminds me of an old story about violinist Jascha Heifetz; Carnegie Hall audience members took scores of the music Heifetz would play to their seats. Their collective purpose was to discover a mistake in his playing, any mistake. But they never did. The issue is about genius and its transmission. Writers about Ives simply don't understand the bigger picture, preferring to angle up to him and to pour his essence as found into a premeditated vessel.Johnny Reinhardhttp://www.stereosociety.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449697140204377101.post-71192954364191987472014-06-23T08:37:08.169-04:002014-06-23T08:37:08.169-04:00You ask, re my Ives biography, "did you find ...You ask, re my Ives biography, "did you find writing about Ives a depressing experience?" <br />Not in the least, and this is coming from someone who can be as gloomy as the next writer. On the contrary, I hated to finish this project, I was having such a fine time having Ives as part of my life. He was such a fascinating study as a person, he led such an unusual creative life, and trying to understand what made him tick and where his incredible musical vision came from was always interesting. The tragedy of his life was all apiece with his genius — you can't separate them. But ultimately I come away incredibly inspired by the integrity, individuality, and deep humanism of the man. -- Stephen BudianskyAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449697140204377101.post-54882616425765866632014-06-21T23:15:47.821-04:002014-06-21T23:15:47.821-04:00I'm not sure I would agree with Jeremy that it...I'm not sure I would agree with Jeremy that it's "hard for classically trained musicians to hover between popular and learned styles." Ives was far from the first serious composer to incorporate popular idioms into his music. One needs a feel for jigs, marches, waltzes and laendler if one one is going to perform the classical repertoire with any real feeling. Perhaps, with Ives, the line musicians find hard to walk in is the one between prankishness and sublimity. (Haydn straddled that line, too, though perhaps he never juxtaposed the two as closely as Ives does.)<br /><br />As for Ives's compositions being "disjunct" (what a pretentious word): I had a music professor years ago who comment once that if you cleaned Ives up, he wouldn't be Ives anymore.<br /> Joe Barronhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16638252347181688694noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449697140204377101.post-40769411843520565722014-06-21T13:32:01.948-04:002014-06-21T13:32:01.948-04:00Golly, I didn't think anyone read this blog. I...Golly, I didn't think anyone read this blog. I have to ask: did you find writing about Ives a depressing experience? I've found that reading about him can be. I've had that reaction to both your book and Gayle Sherwood's. (I got the feeling she didn't like him very much.) By the end of each I found myself growing unaccountably sad. Maybe it was the slow physical decline. Maybe it was the dementia, or the professional frustrations, or the suggestion that his music is so personal to him that listeners must inevitably fail to grasp it. It's mystifying: Ives had a successful marriage, a devoted daughter, and friends who stood by him all his life. People simply loved him. And yet with each new book, we delve ever more deeply into his failures and failings. It makes for a difficult course of study. Thanks for your comments. Joe Barronhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16638252347181688694noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4449697140204377101.post-79166720827566020932014-06-21T10:35:02.943-04:002014-06-21T10:35:02.943-04:00Thanks for your interesting observations about my ...Thanks for your interesting observations about my new biography of Ives, <i>Mad Music,</i> and Jeremy Denk's recent review in the <i>New York Review of Books</i>. I can clear up the mystery about Wilson vs. Page: Jeremy Denk was correct that I misstated the attribution of that dig about Ives being a "basement tinkerer." While that accusation against Ives does appear in a 1987 <i>New York Times</i> article by the critic Tim Page that I cite, it was an article in which Page invited a number of musicians to nominate the "most overrated" and "most underrated" composers, and it was one of those musicians, the flutist Ransom Wilson, whose words Page was in fact quoting. (This will be corrected in the second printing of my book).<br />But just to be clear, Page without a doubt agreed with those views himself. Page, a longtime music critic for the <i>Times</i> and the <i>Washington Post</i>, regularly referred disparagingly to Ives's songs as "ditties" and wrote in another 1987 review that he found most of Ives's compositions to be "sloppy and disjunct."<br />To me, that shows just a magnificent inability to even to begin to grasp what Ives was doing -- rather like complaining that Tolstoy's sentences were too long or Jackson Pollock's paintings showed a lack of symmetry.<br /><br />On another note, I wonder if Jeremy Denk's passing comment about Ives's music "fall[ing] flat in performance" wasn't an allusion to Hilary Hahn's recent attempts to play the violin sonatas, in which she plays every note "nicely" without much of a clue as to what it is all supposed to be about. Denk notes that is it "hard for classically trained musicians to hover between popular and learned styles," which is exactly the problem with Hahn's performances.<br />-- Stephen BudianskyAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com