An undated {photograph} of composer Charles Ives (1874-1954). Pianist Jeremy Denk says “The crusty American composer had no scarcity of utopian visions.”
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Bettman/Bettman/Getty Photos
100-fifty years in the past, a mild-mannered insurance coverage man was born within the small Connecticut city of Danbury. On nights and weekends, he composed music, most of which went unperformed in his lifetime. His title is Charles Ives, and after he died in 1954, his status slowly grew as America’s first actually unique composer.
To mark the anniversary, pianist Jeremy Denk has launched the album IVES DENK, with violinist Stefan Jackiw. It incorporates Ives’ 4 violin sonatas and his two huge piano sonatas — among the composer’s most private, thorny, confounding and exquisite music.
Ives was a free thinker who wrote music that sounds many years forward of its time. His wildest concepts had been inherited from his father George, a musical jack-of-all-trades and Danbury’s bandleader who instructed his son to sing songs in a single key and play the accompaniment in one other. In his memoirs, dictated to a secretary in 1930, Ives remembers his father saying, “If you know the way to jot down a fugue the proper means, then I’m keen to have you ever strive the unsuitable means.”
A lot of Ives’ music sounds, not less than at first listening to, prefer it was certainly composed the “unsuitable means.” Ives challenged conventional music idea. In his Violin Sonata No. 2, performed with a singular managed frenzy by Denk and Jackiw, the hymn “Come thou Fount of Each Blessing” barges in, ecstatic, above a piano gone bonkers.
Ives was obsessive about the entire music round him. You by no means know when snippets of in style church hymns, circus marches, parlor songs or ragtime ditties may weasel their means into a chunk. In Ives’ day, his listeners may need thought he was merely taking part in off in style tradition, however in his singular, rugged means, Ives is telling us these songs are a part of the gravel that pours into the inspiration of American music. Within the ramshackle, ragtime-inflected center motion of the Violin Sonata No. 3 you possibly can hear Ives tinkering with the music, stopping and beginning as if he’s attempting out concepts on the spot.
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His concepts didn’t at all times land favorably. In regards to the First Violin Sonata, which premiered in San Francisco in 1928 at a live performance sequence designed by Henry Cowell, Ives recalled the day when he invited an acclaimed violinist to his house to carry out the piece. “He didn’t even get by way of the primary web page,” Ives wrote in his memoir. “He was all bothered with the rhythms and the notes, and he received mad. He mentioned, ‘This can’t be performed. It isn’t music. It is not sensible.’” Denk locations the sonata amongst Ives’ most aspiring works and describes its eerie central motion within the album liner notes as “a jagged musical reflection on the Civil Conflict.”
There’s a form of freewheeling, “Watch me construct it,” swagger in Ives’ music that sounds unmistakably American. Though these items had been composed over 100 years in the past, they sound surprisingly up to date.
Ives started engaged on his Piano Sonata No. 1 round 1915, but it surely must wait one other 34 years for its public debut. The crepuscular opening motion sounds harmless sufficient, like one thing Brahms may need written had he lived one other dozen years. Ives quotes each a hymn and a cowboy music — in Ives the sacred and profane usually collide. Some 25 minutes later, simply earlier than the ominous last motion, the music couldn’t sound extra opposite because the hymn “Bringing within the Sheaves” stumbles in, dangerously belligerent. Denk’s efficiency is deliciously unhinged.
Ives believed within the utopian prospects of music. So it’s no shock that his Piano Sonata No. 2, subtitled “Harmony, Mass., 1840-1860,” is impressed by American transcendentalists. It’s a mammoth, all-encompassing work — separate portraits of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorn, and the Alcotts.
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But frequent threads are woven by way of. Proper off the bat, on the opening of the “Emerson” motion, there’s a nod to Beethoven’s fifth heard low within the left hand. That da-da-da-daaa theme will ultimately evolve into a few of Ives’ most tender music within the motion titled “The Alcotts.” At one other level within the sonata’s “Hawthorn” part, Ives specifies {that a} slender picket board, precisely 14 -3/4 inches lengthy, be used to depress a number of keys without delay. The result’s a mysterious cloud of notes in the proper hand that floats in opposition to a melody of arpeggiated chords within the left. It might have been only a gimmick, however Ives makes it work superbly.
These performances by Denk and Jackiw are each delicate and muscular –like Ives’ music, which is stuffed with contradictions, failure, grace and imaginative and prescient. And it could be troublesome to search out extra satisfying liner notes than these by Denk, whose 2022 memoir Each Good Boy Does Tremendous presents the identical mix of notion and wit. For this album, he sums up the composer for us in 2024, saying that Ives is “optimistic however at all times messy, at all times falling aside on the seams. His music suggests America will simply need to muddle by way of, and wrestle with its personal failure.”
An album of Ives music, particularly one as effectively performed and thought upsetting as Ives Denk, is value partaking with at any time, whatever the sesquicentennial. That it has been launched throughout an election season fraught with opposing views of what it means to be an American provides a definite gravitas.
