MINORITY MIND: RECONSTRUCTING CHARLES IVES IN THE POSTMODERN AGE — Philip Rice A mong the many and varied approaches to music composition appearing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, none exhibit more incongruity than those employed by Charles Ives.1 Out of an abundance of theoretical models to explain the fragmentation of 20th century cultural paradigms, none is as internally inconsistent as postmodernism.2 Indeed, the name of the theory is oxymoronic:3 how can something be “modern” (i.e. contemporary) and also be “post”? he theory is, as its name implies, predicated on a lack of solutions: de-centering and de-valuing the austere, intolerant formalist models of high modernism in favor of an acknowledgment of multiplicity, diference, and eclecticism. Revisionist Ives biography and widespread postmodern attitudes in the American popular imagination appeared concurrently in the mid-1970s. Also concurrent with these emergences was universal acceptance of Ives’s music in strongly American contexts, notably in nationalistic programming by Leonard Bernstein and more recently Michael Tilson homas. he coincidence of these events can be explained by examining an array of forces afecting the popular understanding, positioning, and ultimately canonization of Ives. However, to imply a fateful relationship—that is to say Ives helped to cause postmodernism—is to belie the post-civil rights era American taste for agency in the form of otherness, especially in an art world supposedly reacting against a fossilized canon irmly rooted in the mainstream. To be sure, in the dichotomous popular imagining of American cultural politics, the performing arts are ot-stereotyped as realms of extreme letist “progressivism.” Stereotypical implications aside, it is problematic to call the contemporary art world “progressive” when its subculture is so 1 Burkholder identiies at least four distinct traditions apparent in Ives’s music: American popular music, Protestant church music, European classical music, and “experimental” music. For more detail on this conluence/synthesis, see J. Peter Burkholder, ed. Charles Ives and His World, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3-34. 2 “[P]ostmodernism is a maddeningly imprecise musical concept. Does the term refer to a period or an aesthetic, a listening attitude or a compositional practice? Is postmodern music still seeking to deine itself, or has its time already passed? Does postmodernism react against or continue the project of modernist music? Is it a positive or a negative force?” Jonathan D. Kramer, “he Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism,” Current Musicology 66 (Spring 1999): 7. 3 Kathleen Higgins, “Nietzsche and Postmodern Subjectivity” in Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, ed. Clayton Koelb (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 189. deined (or let undeined, as it were) by rejection of a totalizing model, and, it follows, a grand narrative. Similarly, the most well-established artistic institutions (major orchestras, art houses, concert halls, etc.) are essentially archives of aged works, and thus can even be seen as retrogressive. Bernstein and homas, despite letist leanings, have done little to reverse this trend; indeed the fact remains that Ives’s music is now well over a century old. Why would a community ostensibly motivated by “progress” and “diference” perpetuate the acceptance of an antiquated canon? here is contradiction here: the word “progressive” turns out to be as oxymoronic in popular implication as “postmodern.” By denoting widespread and public tolerance as a feature of a utopian future, it attempts to place the “other” in the mainstream. What does this all have to do with Ives? In light of progress and contradiction, the question becomes clear: is Ives part of a conservative canon, or is he an outsider? His association with nostalgic American sentiment seems to indicate the former, while his very presence in the art world calls into question potential for a fully conservative identity. he historical Ives, however, is not understood to be a member of the art world: on the contrary, he sought tirelessly to remain an outsider. He was deeply nostalgic and suspicious of progress, longing for a simpler America.4 he fact that his music emerged amid the chaotic and ever-shiting profusion of change in the latter half of the 20th century is entirely inconsistent with his personal and compositional goals, yet entirely consistent with the eclectic aesthetic he ultimately pioneered. hus, a non-causal relationship predicated on contradiction and re-appropriation is observed: and what could be more postmodern? ——— To evaluate why widespread appreciation for Ives coincides with the advent of postmodern thought, it is helpful to explore the diferences between postmodern and other types of analysis as well as the boundary between postmodernism as an attitude and postmodernism as an event. Two questions will lead the way: (1) What are the goals of a postmodern analysis? At the risk of overgeneralizing, we may simply say that postmodernism denies hierarchies and narratives. his is essential to its nature as post, or always already occurring in the wake of a disintegration. (2) When did postmodernism happen? Umberto Eco argues it is always happening; that it is an attitude, not a period in history.5 Because it rejects the 4 “Ives had an acute interest in the past as remembered [...] but driving Ives’s politics and artistic creations is more than remembrance of things past. he second and more powerful force Ives wished to recover was the values of the past. Later in life, Ives saw modern civilization as degenerating, and he responded with self-imposed isolation. [...] Ives yearned for a simpler, preindustrial time,” Michael Broyles, “Charles Ives and the American Democratic Tradition” in Burkholder, ed.,134. 5 Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1984), 67. 2 very notion of progress, it is pointless to identify causation. he deinition of postmodernism relies on the rejection of historical ideals while embracing the past to categorically thwart the notion of progress; to talk about it as a historical phenomenon at all is problematic because it implies causality, and therefore narrative. Postmodernism “simultaneously embrace[es] and repudiate[s] history.”6 Jonathan D. Kramer explicates the implications on music of the late Romantic/ early Modern7 with following contradiction: he best place to search for the origins of musical postmodernism is not, therefore, in the history of music. [...] Postmodernism is a recent phenomenon. It is only now—once it exists, has been experienced, and is to some degree assimilated and understood—that it makes sense to listen to music like Ives’s [...] in a postmodern manner.8 What sense does it make to deny historical placement and in the next breath position the phenomenon as “recent,” a word which denotes historical placement? Kramer is right in reminding that the term has not always existed, and therefore must have temporal location, at least as a type of historicism. Today we are far enough away from the inception of postmodern theory—a distance of at least 30 years—that we earn the right to position it in some sense historically (to be fair, Kramer grappled with these issues in 1999 without some of the temporal distance we enjoy). Indeed, post-postmodernism is now gaining some respect despite its pleonasticity. In this discussion, postmodernism will appear not only as an attitude occurring contemporaneously at several historical moments, but also, and more usefully, as a particular cultural paradigm shit closely connected with American political and social identity in the wake of the civil rights movement, and being currently carried out internationally as inclusivity and tolerance accrue cultural currency throughout the world. If Ives is a bona ide postmodernist, he needs to be reacting against a previous modernism or acting to prevent an impending one (although in the case of the latter he would more accurately be an antimodernist). Lyotard believes that “a work can become modern only if it is irst postmodern”;9 he sees the postmodern attitude as a kind of bufer zone between two modernisms; a new modernism can only be ushered in once postmodernism has ushered out the previous one. Can we say that Ives rejected the Romanticism of Wagner and Mahler and 6 Kramer, 7. 7 Not to be confused with “early modern period.” Here, “early Modern” means the beginning of the era deined by Modernism, not the period following the Middle Ages. 8 Kramer, 11. 9 Jean-François Lyotard, he Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geof Bennington and Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 79. 3 ushered in the Modernism of Carter and Cage? Maybe. Postmodernism in music as deined by Kramer makes easy work of identifying it in Ives. His music its all the criteria: it is eclectic, ironic, challenges class distinctions, utilizes fragmentation, and engages multiple temporalities.10 Indeed, by this rubric, Ives’s may be the most postmodern music of all. Surely this is the explanation for the dizzying incongruence within Ives’s work: he acted as a bufer between two eras—a Romantic postmodernist. But there is one glaring problem: if Ives were a harbinger of Modernism, shouldn’t his music have enjoyed universal acceptance amid the high Modernism in the 1940s-50s? It didn’t; instead, his music only became popular as Modernism began to crumble in the late 1960s, coming to prominence only as the era it supposedly induced came to a close. So Ives must be a Modern postmodernist—a major player in the postmodernism of the 1970s from which the theory of postmodernism draws its inspiration. Only he wrote no music ater 1927 and died in 1954. Recent scholarship on Ives is largely a response to the concurrent spike in his music’s popularity. here was very little biographical work on Ives predating about 1975.11 Prior writing on the topic of his work tends to deal with it in technical terms, comparing it (oten unfavorably) with music of contemporaries. Conversely, the advancement of New Musicology ater the 1970s produced exclusively discussions of his work in biographical terms, explaining away seemingly inexplicable music by examining “Ives” and “his world,” namely his personality traits, education, political leanings, and philosophical goals. Two signiicant Ives texts currently in publication are by J. Peter Burkholder12 and Stuart Feder.13 10 “[Postmodernism in music] (1) is not simply a repudiation of modernism or its continuation, but has aspects of both a break and an extension (2) is, on some level and in some way, ironic (3) does not respect boundaries between sonorities and procedures of the past and of the present (4) challenges barriers between “high” and “low” styles (5) shows disdain for the oten unquestioned value of structural unity (6) questions the mutual exclusivity of elitist and populist values (7) avoids totalizing forms (e.g., does not want entire pieces to be tonal or serial or cast in a prescribed formal mold) (8) considers music not as autonomous but as relevant to cultural, social, and political context (9) includes quotations of or references to music of many traditions and cultures (10) considers technology not only as a way to preserve and transmit music but also as deeply implicated in the production and essence of music (11) embraces contradictions (12) distrusts binary oppositions (13) includes fragmentations and discontinuities (14) encompasses pluralism and eclecticism (15) presents multiple meanings and multiple temporalities (16) locates meaning and even structure in listeners, more than in scores, performances, or composers,” Kramer, 10-11. 11 he Cowells’ 1955 biography is the irst biography of Ives, and there are no other books devoted entirely to his music prior to 1969 except the so-called “Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue” of John Kirkpatrick (Yale, 1960). Geofrey Block, Charles Ives: A Bio-Bibliography, (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 367-369. 12 Burkholder, ed. 13 Stuart Feder, Charles Ives: “My Father’s Song”: A Psychoanalytic Biography, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 4 he former is a comprehensive collection of essays mostly concerned with defending the work as the musically coherent product of an intelligent, reasonable, and honest, albeit misunderstood man. he latter is a “psychoanalytic biography” that does posthumous Freudian analysis on Ives, explaining his idiosyncratic music as an outgrowth of a damaged relationship with his father. Feder’s biography stands in a lineage started by Frank R. Rossiter whose 1975 book14 broke a 20year silence in Ives scholarship by presenting a luminous, though less-than-comprehensive picture of Ives’s music as closely connected with a conlicted personality and environment. In general, looking at Ives “the man” seems to consistently reveal three generalities: (1) that he was either a transcendentalist or a modernist, (2) that he pined for an older America, and (3) that he probably had psychological “issues” that potentially elucidate his iconoclastic personal convictions. his kind of critical biography may seem the only means to legitimize the canonization of a body of work that has been so long under-appreciated. But this mode of inquiry is misstep in discovering why his music suddenly made sense to audiences at the end of the last century, and continues to do so in the current one. Getting “inside the composer’s head” 100 years ago is of little value when posthumous reception was Ives’s saving grace. Beardsley/Wimsatt’s inluential essay, he Intentional Fallacy, addresses the problem of using “author intent” as a point of analytic departure. Beardsley/Wimsatt argue that a work must irst be successful at communicating meaning to an audience apart from “outside knowledge” before a personal inquiry of the author’s motives and creative process can be useful. An investigation solely of those motives and processes cannot be the crux of a legitimizing interpretation. he kind of “author psychology” employed by Feder and Burkholder results in what Beardsley/Wimsatt call “inspirational promotion,”15 which reveals the critic’s desire for more widespread appreciation of the author’s work, but does nothing to directly illuminate that very work. Although Feder’s agenda is not conspicuous because his analysis tends toward clinicality, it is precisely Burkholder’s aim to “promote” Ives by discouraging pathologization of him—supplying generous amounts of excusatory commentary alongside argument for Ives’s relative normality—legitimizing the work by legitimizing the man. In 2013, David C. Paul published a brilliant reception history of Ives.16 Although I largely disagree with Paul’s conclusions (which still position Ives as either a transcendentalist or a modernist), his approach to how Ives’s music was received (or not received), especially during and ater the Cold War, is insightful and far more illuminating than Burkholder’s biographical apologetics. 14 Frank R. Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America, (New York: Norton, 1975). 15 W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, “he Intentional Fallacy,” in he Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, (London: Methuen & Co., 1954), 10. 16 David C. Paul, Charles Ives in the Mirror, (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 5 However, calling Ives a postmodernist does no more to legitimize him, and thus is not the point of this paper. Eco playfully warns against the tendency to apply the term “postmodern” to “anything the user happens to like.”17 Nevertheless, the intentional fallacy is a fallacy of poetry criticism, not historical analysis. In the case of pure biographies, it can be excused as a necessary evil. But it has a special stink in a postmodern inquiry because it reinforces the composer as agent of a passive work—it airms a hierarchy with the composer at the top of the artistic food chain and it necessitates a causal lineage of composer ↔ inluences → work. Popularizing analytical approaches that make lagrant use of the intentional fallacy is also generally problematic for music because musical performance requires collective agreement on interpretation. It is this focus on the “composer’s intent” that catalyzed self-congratulatory “performance practice” movements that pervaded the early-music scene of the early postmodern, which, ironically, earned popularity not as a sonic restoration (ater all, who could remember what music sounded like in 1750?) but a newness of sound that refreshed antiquated works. A further irony is that this desire for “authentic” and “historically informed” musical performance grew out of the postmodern attitude itself—that is, a rejection of the normative way of performing older music in favor of solutions from a time and place “other” than one’s own.18 It is harmless enough to conlate authenticity and cultural relativity when dealing with four-century-old German cantatas for which we actually have relatively little historical data.19 To apply liberal amounts of composer’s intention on Ives’s music runs the risk of limiting any popular relevance his work may have to contemporary American culture, and is one very good reason why his music was not popular until ater 17 Eco, 65. 18 “[T]he rise of period instrument performances ma[de] old music seem new (and arguably a replacement for the new),” Derek B. Scott, “Postmodernism and Music,” in he Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 183. 19 On the other hand, it might not be harmless. he view of artist as omnipotent genius is a romantic notion, and is in some ways out of phase with the way music of the Renaissance or the Baroque functioned. In the former, a classicist model demanded that form take precedence and communicate beauty and truth on its own: the highly restrictive polyphonic technique of the 15th and 16th centuries virtually expunged unique personal style in all but the most rebellious of composers. In the latter, a focus on rhetorical musical persuasion meant that a work needed to immediately communicate meaning with clarity (what Beardsley/Wimsatt call “efectiveness”). In this sense, to perform works from any period other than the Romantic with a primary focus on composers’ intent is actually historically uninformed. he high speciicity of modern musical notation made composers’ intent a less quarrelsome issue. For Ives, a composer whose extant works are in some cases as fragmented and in need of “reconstruction” (both in print and in practice) as early music, the question of “what he intended” becomes a search for informed performance. But unless we are prepared to call Ives a romantic, this urge must be quelled. Make no mistake: “the intentional fallacy is a romantic one,” Beardsley/Wimsatt, 6. 6 1954, when his personality exited the scene. To be sure, if Ives had his way, no one would listen to his music. I will argue that champions of Ives—both Bernstein and homas—not only downplayed the composer’s intent, but disregarded it in order to appropriate the work to contemporary American relevance. To disassociate both composer and audience from the work frees it from the fetters of fallacy and clears the air for three alternative modes of consumption: (1) the work itself as a free agent, (2) the composer, or rather the conception of him in the popular imagination, as a free agent, and (3) the public as a free agent, fully permitted to make “wrong” assumptions about and “mis”appropriations of (1) and (2). Beardsley/Wimsatt assert that poems should belong neither to critics nor poets, but instead “belong to the public.”20 I will take this a step further and argue that Ives’s music not only belongs to the public in social terms, but also is “temporally public,” that is, it also belongs to time. It is the traditional “historical eras” approach that has led historians to mistakenly associate Ives with Transcendentalism or Modernism. In the rare case that a composer does not it the model (e.g. Monteverdi or Beethoven), such historicism may suggest that he was “ahead of his time” and/or that he was in some way responsible for triggering chain reactions that occurred in his atermath. But Ives neither belongs to his own time nor was he “ahead” of it. he gap of silent years where his music was neither performed nor appreciated testiies to the fact that Ives was not to be moved by the inluence of his own culture, nor was he to be deined by a past or impending one, nor was he to initiate a paradigm shit. His music is united with another time (ours) in a non-linear entanglement. While Beardsley and Wimsatt, as modernists, focus on the absolute autonomy of the work itself, this discussion will autonomize not the work as self-suicient, but its reception as self-deining.21 To fully appreciate the asynchronous relationship between Ives and America, the following is an investigation of his music in three periods: post-Reconstruction era, the high Modern, and the postmodern. II Ives was actively composing and studying music from early childhood until the middle of the 1920s when he suddenly stopped composing. By his own account, he “gave up music” in 1902,22 though much of his work is dated ater this time 20 Beardsley/Wimsatt, 5. 21 Beardsley/Wimsatt would probably take issue with this analysis, citing their companion essay, he Afective Fallacy. However, this is an analysis of culture and identity, not of musical form. Here the intentional fallacy is unwelcome only because it inhibits the audience. he afective fallacy, on the other hand, is most welcome. 22 J. Peter Burkholder, et al., “Ives, Charles.” Grove Music Online, (Oxford University Press, accessed December 30, 2013), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/ music/14000. 7 (1902 seems to be the time when Ives gave up on the idea of music as a career). America at the turn of the century was amid the throes of two great projects: rebuilding ater the Civil War, and exploring and industrializing the remainder of the continent. Music was a strong unifying force in America during this era; indeed, he Star Spangled Banner was inducted as the national anthem in 1889. he marching/military band came to symbolize American sentiment during this time: it embodied unity and common purpose through choreographed step and strict musical form, heralding the homestead through utility of materials and practice. he band members march together, playing in strict tempo; there is no schism here, no chance of secession. he instruments are constructed out of industrial metals—they are sturdy, weathered, and brawny like the American men who played them. John Philip Sousa’s 1896 Stars and Stripes Forever is surely the most famous march from this era, and is still widely recognized as the anthem of American strength and dignity. Stars and Stripes is not only American for its subtext, however. Sousa himself penned lyrics to many of his marches, and published them in piano/vocal arrangements in an 1898 edition. In the second strain of Stars and Stripes, the lyrics expressly address both reconstruction and frontier: Other nations may deem their lag the best And cheer them with fervid elation But the lag of the North and South and West Is the lag of lags, the lag of freedom’s nation.23 Ives was no stranger to the march, his father having been a marching band leader in the Civil War.24 Unlike Sousa, however, Ives’s marches lack the clarity and poise that aforded the march cultural utility. In fact, it may seem as though Ives went to great lengths to avoid such an agenda, instead favoring an ad hoc sarcastic, satirical, at times downright slapstick treatment. To say that Ives didn’t have enough distance from the dearly-held tradition to parody it is an understatement; he composed the bizarre Overture and March 1776 in 1904, just eight years ater Sousa’s Stars and Stripes and notably just two years ater he “gave up music.” Overture and March is a wild ride through composed “mistakes” amid a sea of disparate textures and tonal areas all of which thwart the dauntless nature of the march. Scored for orchestra rather than marching band (though surviving more famously in an arrangement for band), the instrumentation already belies the function of the form itself—there is no such thing as a marching orchestra. In igure 2, the trio section of the march, there are at least four distinct and 23 John Philip Sousa, Sousa’s Great Marches in Piano Transcription: Original Sheet Music of 23 Works, (1898; repr., Mineola: Dover, 1975), 74. 24 Burkholder, et al. 8 bb C Ï ™ & b j Ï But the { ú b C úúú b b ? bb & b ú { West b Ï ?b b 29 Ï™ ú flag Ï Ï™ Is ÏÏ Ï bÏ Ï > ÏÏ j Ï Ï the Ï J of ÏÏ Ï Ï the >Ï ™ flag of flags, ú ú North Ï Ï J Ï The Ï Ï Ï Ï bÏ Ï > > ÏÏ Ï flag of Ï ÏÏ ú and South ÏÏ Ï Ï and ÏÏ Ï j Ï w Ï™ Free - dom’s na ÏÏ ú ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï - ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ tion. ÏÏ Ï Figure 1: Sousa, he Stars and Stripes Forever, (second strain, mm. 28b-36). somewhat conlicting layers in a complex texture. In the topmost voice (lutes), a descant wheels above the main tune25 which is played by two trumpets in parallel minor seconds. his supposedly “parodies the disastrous yet amusing error of two trumpets getting their A and B-lat crooks mixed up”26 Accompanying the trumpets is a “patch” of string triplets rife with accidentals, and under that ield drums and piano strike aperiodic rhythmic chords which may have been inspired by Ives’s habit of “piano drumming”27 Syncopation and lack of consistent downbeat accents make marching to this music nothing more than a humorous thought experiment, though Ives’s association of this piece with American topics is intentional. He used the middle “march” section later in his orchestra work, he Fourth of July, and the outer, slower, “overture” music for “Putnam Camp” in hree Places in New England. To say that music in two (or three, or four?) keys does little to promote an agenda of reconstruction is perhaps to state the obvious. he music is still at war with itself. Unsurprisingly, Overture and March was not premiered until 1976, though the aforementioned works which borrowed from it were premiered earlier. Ives wrote other marches which adhere more strictly to march form (Overture and March is in a large ternary rather than the typical AABBCC march form), the most beloved of which is he Circus Band, composed in 1894. Ives’s more conservative approach could be chalked up to the earlier date of composition, but he 25 According to James B. Sinclair’s 1976 preface to the score for Overture and March, Ives made mention in 1932 (ostensibly published in Memos, though no citation is given) to this being a quote of “he Red, White and Blue.” I have thus far had no luck inding the source of any sonamed tune that Ives could have borrowed. 26 Charles Ives, Overture & March “1776” for heater Orchestra, ed. James B. Sinclair, (Bryn Mawr: Merion Music, Inc., 1976), 3. 27 Ives, Overture, 3. 9 b 4 Ï™ & b 4 úú n Ïj úb Ïú 42 { bÏ™ n ÏÏ Ï bÏ Ï 3 b4 Ï Ï Ï nÏ bÏ bÏ & b 4 n Ï Ï # Ï n Ï n Ï b ÏÏ Ï b ÏÏ Ï n ÏÏ bn ÏÏ Î 3 3 b4 ?b 4 ∑ Ï Ï Ï‰ ÏÏ Ï ‰Ï Î 12 Î 8Ï ÏÏj J ÏÏj ‰‰ ‰‰ J nÏ Ï Ï nÏ™ Ïj n ÏÏ ™™ nb ÏÏ# ÏÏ b ÏÏ ™™ J n Ï n Ï n Ï Ï nn Ï n Ï bÏ bÏ b Ï b Ï # Ï # Ï Ï n Ï nb ÏÏ n Ï b ÏÏn Ï nb ÏÏ bn ÏÏ ^. ^ ÏÏÏÏ. ÏÏÏÏ. ÏÏÏÏ. #b ÏÏÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ n ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï‰j Ïj™ ‰ ‰ Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï‰j Ïj™ ‰ ‰ Ï Î Î Ï# Ï Ï Ï b Ï ™ Ï n ÏÏÏ nn ÏÏÏ bn ÏÏÏ™# ÏÏÏ n ÏÏ ™ Ï Ï ™ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ n Ï b ÏÏ ÏÏ ™™ # ÏÏ ÏÏ # ÏÏ ÏÏ n Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï b b ÏÏ ÏÏ# ÏÏ #n ÏÏ & J J J J J ^ ^ ^ ^Ï. ^Ï. ^Ï. ^ 3 . . . . . . . bÏ Ï b ÏÏ ÏÏÏ ÏÏ b ÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ b # ÏÏÏ ÏÏÏ ‰ ‰ÏÏÏ # ÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Î # ÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï b ? ÏÏÏ ÏÏÏ J Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï j j ‰‰ Î j j ‰ ‰ fij j ‰ ‰ j j ™ Î ÏÏ ‰Ï ÏÏ Ï ‰Ï ÏÏ ‰‰ ™ Ï ÏÏ ‰ Ï ÏÏ ‰ Ï Ï ÏÏ Ïω‰ ™ ÏÏ Ï Ï‰ ÏÏ Ï ‰Ï ÏÏ ‰‰ ‰‰ Ïfij Ï™ ‰ ‰ Î Î Î J J Ï Ï Ïn Ï Ï Ï Ï Ïj Ïj b Ï Ïj Ï Ï nÏ b ÏÏ ™ b Ï # ÏÏ#n ÏÏ ÏÏ nn ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏJ ÏÏ ™ #n ÏÏ#n ÏÏnn ÏÏb ÏÏ# ÏÏ n# Ïn ÏÏ nn ÏÏÏ ÏÏÏ n Ïn n ÏÏ ú Ï Ï b Ïn Ï b Ï & #n ÏÏ ÏJ ú J ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^. 3 ÏÏÏÏ. ÏÏÏÏ. ÏÏÏÏ. #b ÏÏÏÏ. ÏÏÏÏ. ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ. #b ÏÏÏÏ. ÏÏÏÏ. ÏÏÏÏ. ÏÏÏÏ. #b ÏÏÏÏÏ b ‰ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ‰ ? b ÏÏÏ J Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ ÏÏ n ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ n ÏÏ ÏÏÏ j j ‰‰ j j‰‰ jj ‰ ‰ jj Î j j‰ ‰ ÏÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏÏ Ï Ï ‰ ‰ Ï ‰Ï ÏÎ ™ Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï‰ ÏÎ ™ Ï ‰Ï ÏÏ Ï ‰Ï Î ÏÏJ ÏÏJ ‰ ‰ Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï‰ ÏÎ ™ Ï ‰ Ι { { Figure 2: Ives, Overture and March “1776,” (trio section, mm. 42-49). Circus Band is in some ways actually more subversive than Overture and March. Although the harmonies and textures are relatively stable compared to Overture and March, there is still too much syncopation to facilitate marching, and the accompaniment lacks a consistent ostinato bass that is so typical of the military march. Like Sousa, Ives penned lyrics to he Circus Band and published it in song format in his monumental 114 Songs. Unlike Sousa’s, Ives’s lyrics do not address American impulses, but are rather the crazed ramblings of a starry-eyed circus-going adolescent. he circus, unlike the lag, is of little symbolic signiicance in rebuilding a nation—on the contrary, the circus is itself a hodgepodge—an exhibition exotic by deinition. he circus is home to outcasts, foreigners, and freaks; a menagerie of disassociated sideshows meant to entertain with shock and horror. One can argue that he Circus Band is not meant to be a patriotic 10 piece and only serves to evoke the memory of the titular reference. But why, then, would Ives choose to compose the piece as a strict military march? Furthermore, why embedded in the melody at the opening are fragments of Ives’s beloved tune, America (see igure 3)? It seems that Ives sees the circus not as outside or even beside the American experience, but rather as essentially or even quintessentially a part of it—an assortment of misits, a melting pot of otherness—an image of America that would neither become a reality nor be fully embraced as a core value for over 50 years. Ives was not a social visionary a la Martin Luther King Jr., however. In fact, his views on minority rights were downright antediluvian even for his own time. he marches tell only one story: Ives’s vision of America was divorced from contemporary musical needs. he marches doubtlessly thwart Burkholder’s assertion that Ives was writing carefully with a particular audience in mind.28 How can music that deies even a premiere be mindful of its audience? It is rather precisely evident what Ives was not doing, but in exactly what kind of America Ives hoped or believed cannot be surmised from the music alone. hat knowledge requires an exploration of extra-musical sources. Ï Ï & ### ú Cw . . . ### Ï Ï Ï C w & mf . Î Ï Î ### C Ï w ? Ï ì ### ú ™ try & # # # >ú ™ & úú ™™ ’bout { ? ### 28 ì My coun - try mf All { Ï úú ™™ ú™ Ï™ j Ï tis of [...] ú w . sum - mer Ï úú ú . . . Ï Î ÏÏ Î ÏÏ Ï ú ú Ï Ï My coun- long, . . . . we Ï Ï Ï Ï w w > . . Î Ï Î Ï Ï Ï Ï. ú Ï ú Ï w Ï™ j Ï Ï ì Ï tis of thee, Sweet land Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ >úúú ™™™ Ï Ï ÏÏÏ joys! dreamed úú ™™™ ú úú ™™ ú™ Of [...] ú. Ï ú™ . ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï #Ï cir - cus > ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï úú Ï Ï ú™ ÏÏ ÏÏ >úúú ™™™ Ï Ï boys Ï Ï > > > ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï big Ï Ï ú w w Down Main Ï Ï Ï Ï j Ïfi Ï. Î street, Î ú comes . ú j #Ï ™ Ï ú ú fi nÏ Ï J . . Ï Î ÏÏ Î ÏÏ Î ú w . ÏÏ . ÏÏ 11 the . . ÏÏ ÏÏ . Î ÏÏ ú Figure 3: Ives, he Circus Band, (irst strain, mm. 9-20). Burkholder, ed., 29. ú Ï band, j # Ïfi #ú Oh! úú # # úú. ú bú > Ï. Î ú III God is on the side of the Majority (the People) [;] He is not particularly enthusiastic about the Minority (the Non-People). […] he Majority should have the opportunity of not being over-inluenced. […] here isn’t such a thing as the proletariat until it registers its consciousness. One group has no moral right to expression, or at least no social value in its expression, unless it is a part of the Universal Consciousness and acts with the consent of the Majority.29 How long before the few, the group, the hog-mind, the lower value, the Minority, will see the stupidity, the futility, of opposing this God-given power, and learn in accepting it to do a man’s share in the world, the Majority, the People, nearer a truer inheritance?! he world’s greater minds have always been of the Majority—not in the Majority, but always of it.30 It should come as no surprise that Ives and Copland were not friends. Copland, in many ways, can be seen as the perfect anti-Ives: a minority in race, sexual orientation, and politics. A great irony is that even amid McCarthyism, America favorited Copland as the “good ol’ boy” while forgetting Ives, the actual “good ol’ boy” (a Yale-educated big-businessman, and unlike Copland, very white, very straight, and very Christian). It is here where the irony of Ives reception truly begins: amid high Modernism. Modernism can be thought of as an ultimate apotheosis of the industrial revolution: function trumps form, and in doing so form is elevated to the Platonic. Utility as common denominator equalizes art and industry in an unprecedented concord. Musical trends relect this, with American composers at the fore: Carter, Cowell, Cage, Crumb, Copland (the great C’s) all foster styles dictated largely by functional processes—matrix, math, operators, equations, etc. Carter and Cowell both were intimately familiar with Ives’s music, Cowell and his wife coauthoring the irst biography of Ives in 1955, and promoting his music throughout the duration of his career. Carter was also friends with Ives and wrote extensively about the him, though not without some reservation. His long life permitted tremendous breadth of perspective, looking back on Ives’s life and career from a half-century’s distance. He ventured to explain both why Ives’s music deserved attention and why it ultimately had failed to succeed. I have always been [...] perplexed at times by the disturbing lack of musical and stylistic continuity, caused largely by the constant use of musical quotations in many works. To me a composer develops his own personal language, suitable 29 Charles Ives, “he Majority” (1920), in Essays Before a Sonata, he Majority and Other Writings, ed. Howard Boatwright, (New York: Norton, 1970), 144, 147. 30 Ives, Essays, 156 12 to express his ield of experience and thought. When he borrows music from another style and thought than his own, he is admitting that he did not really experience what he is presenting but has to borrow from someone else who did. [...] It is, to me, disappointing that Ives too frequently was unable or unwilling to invent musical material that expressed his own vision authentically, instead of relying on the material of others.31 While the above quote is perhaps more telling of Carter’s position as a modernist than illuminating of Ives’s diicult position, it reveals that Ives’s work was perplexing even to those closest to him and most qualiied to decipher it. Carter indicated in other writings that he believed Ives to be “typical of an earlier time” owing to his “religious convictions [and] fervent patriotism,”32 also addressing the possibility that Ives’s was an “early precursor of ‘modern’ music,” though he discounts this option, concluding that Ives rightly “belonged to the 1890-1920 period with a strong retrospective view of the transcendental-Civil War period.”33 his assertion is problematic for two reasons. First, it is redundant to state that Ives belonged to the period during which he was actively composing. Second, and as illustrated above, Ives’s sentiments are entirely maligned with a Civil Warera America; unless Carter is suggesting that Ives’s music was meant to promote the war (a solution I seriously doubt), this attempt to historically pigeonhole Ives falls short. Copland’s musical style is the least “functional” of the American modernists, though it’s no secret that he also experimented with serialism and other enumerative forms. Nevertheless, Copland’s more aesthetically concerned style upholds the tenets of modernism in other ways. Its function arises not from a theoretical model (as in trigonometric “functions”) but is functional in a colloquial sense: it was popular. It had a cultural agenda that was all-American—a sophisticated industriousness. It functioned so well in this capacity that it remains known today as denotative of the so-called American Dream.34 Its structure, though not mathematical, coheres with a unity and clarity that marks it as modernist—it is not eclectic. Fittingly, Copland said of Ives’s 114 Songs, he irst impression, on turning to the one hundred and fourteen songs themselves, is bound to be one of confusion. For there is no order here—either of 31 Elliott Carter, “Charles Ives Remembered (1974),” in Collected Essays and Lectures, 19371995, ed. Jonathan W. Bernard, (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 107. 32 Carter, “An American Destiny (1946),” in Collected Essays, 94. 33 Carter, “Charles Ives Remembered,” 103. 34 hough in recent years the Coplandian “dream” has been ironically commandeered by right-wing conservatives who have used the music to symbolize an older America; to postmodern ends this could be interpreted as looking back to the patriarchal modernist days of steel and 13 chronology, style, or quality. [...] Songs of every character and description, songs bristling with dissonances, tone clusters and “elbow chords” next to songs of the most elementary harmonic simplicity. All thrown together helter-skelter, [...] without the slightest key or guide for the beneit of the unsuspecting recipient. [...] Ives apparently not only had no public in mind when printing this book, but he hardly had even the “few friends” of whom he speaks in mind. he truth is that he had only himself in mind.35 It is clear that Copland did not appreciate Ives for his eclecticism, though his remarks are not all derisive. Copland felt solidarity with Ives, calling his quandary uniquely American, “this small drama [...] is by no means the drama of Ives alone, but in a larger sense is that of every American composer.”36 he crux of Copland’s qualm with Ives lies in how he viewed Ives aesthetically, in spite of his perceived social or economic (as in economy of reception, not inance) ignorance. “Although the above-named songs are ‘modern’ for their time, they are by no means revolutionary,”37 he says midway through the review. Known for his progressive political leanings, Copland couldn’t have chosen a more biting insult. He twists the knife with the clever turn of phrase, “‘modern’ for their time.” He implies that Ives’s works have an expiration date; that while one might take them to be modern at irst glance, make no mistake; like Carter, Copland saw Ives as conined to a historical moment. Perhaps a later moment than Carter thought, but a moment nonetheless. For a modernist composer concerned with clarity and audience to call the works discontinuous and confusing is practically to call them worthless; to call them dated is to devalue them explicitly. And yet, Copland’s and Ives’s musical choices were oten similar, sometimes only difering in subtle, novel ways. Take, for example, Ives’s setting of At the River, appearing in the 114 Songs (so Copland surely saw it). he source tune, a hymn of the same name, is pure Americana—words and music composed by a Baptist minister in Brooklyn at the end of the Civil War. Ives’s setting is typical of his songs, he treats the tune rather freely but not beyond recognition. skyscrapers. Alex Ross comments on the recent presidential election, and the irony of using Coplandian music in right-wing campaigning, “[w]hile [Rick] Perry bemoans the fact that openly gay men and women are now allowed to serve in the American armed forces, the soundtrack gestures toward the “Americana” style of Aaron Copland.” Alex Ross, “Copland and the Republicans,” Alex Ross: he Rest Is Noise: Books, articles, and a blog by the music critic of he New Yorker (blog), December 10, 2011, http://www.therestisnoise.com/2011/12/copland-and-therepublicans.html. For a more detailed analysis of conservative appropriation of Copland, see Sarah Tomlinson, “Beef, Cowboys, and Republicans: he Rugged Aaron Copland?” (Michigan State University: unpublished, 2013). 35 Aaron Copland, “114 Songs retrospective review, 1934,” in Burkholder, 309. 36 Ibid., 312. 37 Ibid., 310. 14 12 Ï ™ Ï Ïb Ï Ï Ï Ï b ú ™ J J J &8 14 Yes, we’ll ga - ther at the ri ú™ the Ï™ that ver ÏÏ ™™ ‰ b ÏÏ ™™ ÏÏ ™™ ÏÏ ™™ ÏÏ ™™ ÏÏ ™™ Ι Î Ï™ Ï™ bw™ God. - ver j j Ï b Ï b Ï ÏJ n Ï # Ï flows bb ÏÏÏ ™™™ bn ÏÏ ™™™ b Ï ™ b ÏÏ ™ Ï™ by the throne of ÏÏ ™™ ÏÏ ™™ n#n ÏÏÏÏ ™™™™ Ï™ Ï™ ∑ > > Ï™ ## ÏÏÏ ™™™ nn ÏÏ ™™ n Ï ™ U > ™ ™ Ï Ï ™ n # Ï ™ n Ï ™ n ÏÏ ™™ # ÏÏÏÏ ™™™ # Ï ™ nÏ ™ ∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏ #Ï ™ # Ï™ ‰ ∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏ Ï™ Ï™ > Ï ™™ # ÏÏÏ ™™ ÏÏ ™™ b ÏÏ ™™ Ï™ ∏∏∏∏ #Ï™ # Ï™ ∏∏∏∏ ∏∏∏∏ Ι ¥>” > #Ï ™ ‰ ### ÏÏÏ ™™™ #n ÏÏÏÏ ™™™™ ∏∏∏∏ & Î Ï ‰ Î ∏∏∏∏∏ - ∏∏∏∏∏ ri ∏∏∏∏∏ ÏÏ ™™ ‰ b ÏÏ ™™ ga - ther at ri bÏ™ Î ‰ b ÏÏÏ ™™™ Î ‰ úú ™™ bÏ ™ ú ™ Ï nÏ Ï Ï J 2 Î ‰nb úÏ ™™ b ú Ï ™ Óú ™ b ú™ ™ bú ™ ú™ p a tempo & bú ™ ? Ï™ bú ™ ∏∏∏∏∏ Î we’ll ? bú ™ { ™ b ÏÏÏ ™™ Î ‰ Ï™ Ï nÏ Î ‰ J Ï j Î ‰ nÏ bú ™ Ï Ï bÏ Ï Ï Ï bú ™ J J J Ï™ ∏∏∏∏∏ { The beau - ti - ful, the beau - ti - ful ÏÏ ™™ ÏÏ ™™ ™ Î ‰b ÏÏ ™ ÏÏ ™ ÏÏ ™™ ™ Ι Ï™ Yes & ver, p a tempo 12 ? 8 bú ™ & ÏÏ ™™ ÏÏ ™™ - ∏∏∏∏∏ ∏∏∏ ∏∏∏∏∏ ∏∏∏∏∏ { ∏∏∏∏∏ ÏÏ ™™ ™ 12 Î ‰b ÏÏ ™ 8 & bú ™ j j j j 2 Ï ™ Ï Ï bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ú ™ Figure 4: Ives, At the River, (mm. 14-22). Harmonies meander from quartal/quintal territory to triadic polytonality and rapidly de-centering tonalities. It is itting for the text, which describes an otherworldly river where departed souls gather around; the overall efect is not particularly jarring, but it’s not exactly church music either. he sounds are puzzling, dreamlike, stirring, and most of all especial to Ives. Copland also composed a setting of At the River, years later, in his second set of Old American Songs, completed in 1950, just four years before Ives’s death. Copland uses the same overall key center (E-lat), the same tessitura for the singer, and almost the same measuration. he similarity ends in that Copland mostly forgoes accidentals, keeping to a pandiatonic treatment of pitch, and tying the piece together with pervasive motivic unity of regal double-dotted rhythms, perhaps indicative of the “throne of God” described in the text. 15 bcÏ &b b 12 p Yes bcú &b b ú { ú sub. p bc ?b b Ï ™ Ï ÏJ ™ ÏR ÏJ ™ Ï ú R we’ll ga- ther by the ri úú ú úú ú ú ú - ver, the beau - ti - ful, the beau - ti - ful úú ú úú ú Ï ™™ b ú & b b úú úú ú b ? b b Ï ™™ r -Ï Ï ™™ { b &b b w bbb God. by the ri Ïúú ú - Ï ver nÏ úú { ver, úú ú úú ú j Ï Ï j r Ï™ Ï Ï Ï Ï by of That flows Ï Ïúú Ï ú Ï úúú Ï ú ú ú ú ∑ r -Ï -Ï Ï ™™ R the throne ∑ cresc. jÏ j Ïúú Ï Ïúú ™ Ï Ï ™ Ï úú Ïúú ™ Ï Ï ™ Ï Ïúú Ï Ïúú ™ Ï Ï ™ Ï Ïú Ï ú ú ú Ï Ï Ï Ï Î Î Ï Î Î b Î Ï Î Ï Ï Ï Ï ú ú ú ?b b ú ú Ï Ï Ï Ï ú ú ú ú ú & - r Ï ™™ -Ï r -Ï ú Ó ri -Ï R Ï ™™ Ï™ r ™™ -Ï Ï ú úú ú -Ï Ï ™™ R b Ï™ Ï Ï™ Ï Ï™ Ï Ï™ Ï ú J R &b b J R J R Ga - ther with the saints ú j j r j r j r Ï™ Ï Ï™ Ï Ï™ Ï Ï™ Ï Ï™ Ï ú Ïú ú j Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï j Ï Ï > Figure 5: Copland, At the River, (mm. 12-22). here is nothing any more “revolutionary” about Copland’s setting than Ives’s, in fact by many estimates it is less so. But it is “modern” for all time, and can never be understood as anything but modern—it is plain, almost featureless, instantly recognizable yet unplaceable. Much like Marcel Breuer, who took already featureless steel rods and shaped them into equally featureless chairs to create timeless designs, Copland took an already timeless song and shaped it only very slightly to create a timeless (albeit almost featureless) music. Copland stands in ideological opposition to Ives, who while leaving his source materials fundamentally intact, melted, mixed, chiseled, and churned them judiciously to greatly idiosyncratic efect. ——— Despite incongruence with modernist aesthetic goals, Ives’s status as a household name in the art music world was conceived in the 1950s, and born in the 1970s. 16 David C. Paul identiies social and political forces at work in the Cold War that re-framed Ives’s isolationism and nonconformity as anti-communist. Paul posits that Ives was not only seen literally as individual (indeed he was a successful businessman, and opposed to communism38) but also metaphorically as a “maverick” who asserted his individuality through innovation and disregard for the mainstream.39 Paul shows that this conception of Ives persists to the current day, citing marketing and programming devices used by Michael Tilson homas at the turn of the 21st century that depict Ives as a kind of American hero. But this conception of Ives is anecdotal in that it ignores the obvious, more typical depiction of him in the popular and colloquial imagination. Indeed, Paul illustrates this less shiny version of Ives in the opening of his book, “[Ives’s name] is likely to conjure up images of a man in old age, bearded, clutching a cane, perhaps his bald pate exposed, but more likely hidden beneath a dilapidated old hat [...] typically [...] star[ing] of into some middle-distance, lost in thought.”40 his hardly seems like the swashbuckling steed-mounted gunslinger that Paul would have us believe is the Ives of today’s America. On the contrary, the “maverick” image would more appropriately be assigned (albeit also falsely) to Copland,41 who is already understood to be antithetical to Ives. So what, then makes Ives so American? How can the inherent contradiction in the fact that he is oten classiied with Copland be reconciled? he answer lies not with a hearty, old-fashioned “Ives as cowboy,” but with the another gay Jew—one largely responsible for the popularization of Ives at the end of the Cold War. IV Bernstein’s interest in Ives’s music dates at least as early as his student years at Yale, where in 1939 he completed his thesis on the role of race in forming an American musical style.42 he very topic shows that even in the early stages of his career, Bernstein was focused on the appropriation of minority music as an important American stylistic practice. Indeed, Bernstein’s own compositions show a range of ethnic inluences and use race as an emulsiier for depicting a diverse American experience (e.g. West Side Story). Bernstein would later become known as a great 38 To be fair, Ives’s views on capitalism vs. communism are murky. His essay, he Majority explicates this somewhat, though it tends toward denouncing both. As Henry & Sidney Cowell put it, “[h]e rejected socialism, syndicalism, communism, and anarchism as urgently as he did capitalism, for he felt they represented ‘minority thought’.” Henry Cowell and Sidnew Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 95. 39 Paul, 207-220. 40 Ibid., 1. 41 For more on Copland’s ersatz “cowboy” image, see Tomlinson. 42 Leonard Bernstein, “he Absorption of Race Elements into American Music (1939),” in Findings, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 36-99. 17 eclecticist, helping to usher in the postmodern age; furthermore, his philosophy as it relates to Ives marks his conception of Ives as irrefutably postmodern. Bernstein’s thesis provided an analysis of the Concord Sonata in which supposed “Negro” elements were identiied, leading him to conclude that the sonata was “practically a piece of jazz”43 Although Bernstein conceded that “if any racial style can be called predominant, it is German,” he was utterly convinced that the Hawthorne movement employed “American syncopative rhythms” that must have been “arising from Ives’s conscious efort to suggest certain Negro episodes from Hawthorne.”44 Bernstein admitted that in the end, the music doesn’t “sound like jazz,” but that it ultimately “feels American,”45 owing in large part to the racial elements he believed acted as signiiers in the music. he objective validity of these claims is tenuous; Ives was reluctant to admit incorporating even ragtime into his music, especially in speciic to the Concord. More problematic is his denial of the possibility of its connection with any racial, much less American identity—this revelation comes into direct conlict with Bernstein’s assertions when it appears in Essays Before a Sonata. Someone is quoted as saying that “ragtime is the true American music.” Anyone will admit that it is one of the many true, natural, and, nowadays, conventional means of expression. [...] Ragtime has its possibilities. But it does not “represent the American nation” any more than some ine old senators represent it.46 Bernstein was not as much concerned with Ives’s intentions47 as he was with the “absorption” of syncopated rhythms as a distinctly American musical marker, one which he believed Ives (and other composers) had consciously or unconsciously appropriated from African American traditions. But Ives did not see musical borrowing as a kind of appropriation as Bernstein saw it, and as we typically see it today. Ives was operating within a much earlier Transcendental (perhaps cosmopolitan) conception of things where objects belonged to the world or the “Over-Soul,” and could not possess ethnic ownership or signiication in the sense that Bernstein understood. For Bernstein, race elements were connected to a race—belonging to a particular population and thus able to be semantically connected to a particular facet of American identity. Philosophical incompatibility aside, Ives published the Concord in 1919, so it is unlikely that jazz, still in 43 Bernstein, 97. 44 Bernstein, 93-94. 45 Ibid., 97. 46 Ives, Essays, 95. 47 “But it matters very little in the end whether or not Ives was moved to these rhythms by programmatic impulses. he fact is that in the second movement there are frequent and extended passages [of syncopation].” Bernstein, 94. 18 Figure 6: Leonard Bernstein, chart of chordal voices showing syncopations in the Concord, third movement, second page, third system. its infancy, was truly exerting an inluence. Of course, one can argue that there is precedent for Ives’s music containing modern elements that foreshadow their own widespread appeal, but to say that he was involved in the artistic meteorology leading to the explosion of popular jazz is probably far fetched. Whether or not he was passively inluenced by it is anyone’s guess, but Geofry Block aptly remarks that “Bernstein was the irst (and perhaps also the last) to conclude [that the Concord contains jazz elements].”48 Faults in Bernstein’s analysis notwithstanding, the fact that he chose to include Ives in a discussion of American music and race is telling. It reveals undeniably that Bernstein saw Ives’s work—at the meristem of his understanding—as expressive of America not in spite of, but because he believed it was connected with eclectic minorities. hroughout his career, Bernstein would also give special attention to Copland as an American voice (despite similar lack of race elements in his music), though it goes without saying that their esprit de corps ran deeper than simply shared citizenship. Bernstein’s championing of Copland, in light of his interest in an eclectic America, cannot be seen as isolated from Copland’s multifarious minority identities. In this way, Bernstein’s conceptions of Copland and Ives could be linked in an ersatz correlation.49 Bernstein was responsible for major milestones in Ives’s journey to canonization including the world premiere of Symphony No. 2 in 1951, and his interest in Ives ran deeper than simply musical innovation—he was engaged with the 48 Geofry Block, “Bernstein’s Senior hesis at Harvard: he Roots of a Lifelong Search to Discover an American Identity,” College Music Symposium 48 (2008): 59. 49 A search of the New York Philharmonic’s digital archive returns seven concert programs featuring the music of both Copland and Ives. Four were conducted by Bernstein, including the only tour program. Two more were conducted by Lucas Foss, and one, surprisingly, was conducted by Copland, featuring Ives’s New England Holidays Symphony alongside Copland’s own works. http://archives.nyphil.org/. 19 concept of Ives’s identity as contributing to the singularity of American musical style and the future of classical music in general. His famous Norton Lectures, given at Harvard in 1973, which explore the nature of music and language, and, among other things, the future of art music, were dedicated to Ives his titular choice: he Unanswered Question, ater Ives’s orchestral work of the same name. In his closing remarks, Bernstein recites a “credo” which heralds impending postmodernism with stark veracity. I believe that a great new era of eclecticism is at hand—eclecticism in the highest sense—and I believe that it has been made possible by the rediscovery—the re-acceptance—of tonality, that universal earth out of which such diversity can spring.50 In one sentence, Bernstein marks himself and his conception of Ives as irrevocably postmodern in three important ways. (1) He believes “eclecticism” is nigh— indeed, in 1973, it was—and (2) that a “rediscovery” or “re-acceptance”—a retrogression of sorts—will (3) lead to an outgrowth of “diversity.” Ives’s music is nothing if not eclectic, but it was this very eclecticism that had undermined its acceptance by Modernist culture. he second point is also patently Ives: we know that he identiied with a pre-industrial America, and that modernist composers like Carter incriminated him by positioning him as temporally backward. Lastly, the idea that diversity could be connected with Ives is largely unfounded from an intentional perspective, but it is clear that Bernstein nevertheless saw him in this light, as evidenced not only by his thesis topic, but also his decision to—even as a minority himself—program Ives’s music throughout the 1960s and 70s while America was in the thick of cultural revolution for minority rights. In the decades that followed, as American civil rights expanded to address issues of gender and sexuality in addition to race, New Musicology generated revisionist biographies that used Ives’s prejudices as a point of departure, depicting him as personally conlicted and sexually repressed. Rossiter began the trend in 1975 with a biography that broke new ground both for Ives studies and musicology in general by locating gendered connotations as indicative of a cultural climate that efeminized music. Ater Rossiter’s untimely suicide in 1989 (due in no small part to social and professional pressures on him as a gay man), Judith Tick took up the mantle by further discussing the music0-cultural implications of Ives’s homophobic and misogynist tendencies,51 and later Nadine Hubb, whose 50 Leonard Bernstein, he Unanswered Question (1973), YouTube, http://youtu.be/ OWeQXTnv_xU?t=2h53m7s (accessed 27 December 2013). 51 Judith Tick, “Charles Ives and Gender Ideology” in Musicology and Diference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 83-106. 20 book takes a similar approach in addressing Ives, showing how he viewed music as inherently crippled by carrying feminine implications.52 David C. Paul problematizes the sphere of inluence of these new biographical approaches, suggesting that they were responsible for fragmenting the cultural perception of Ives.53 By dispelling certain myths about him (the transcendentalist interpretation, for example) and creating new ones fueled by interest in “gender, sexuality, race, and class,”54 they placed him in a “middle ground between academia [...] and the broader, more public arena.”55 his is only pejorative if the preferred vision of him is as the strong, stalwart, stern “maverick”; if, on the other hand, our understanding of Ives is postmodern, seeing him as haphazardly “other” becomes preferable—and the weirder the better. In a post-civil rights (or at the very least mid-civil rights) America, a sexist, homophobic Ives becomes a circus freakshow to which audiences lock, with his music in centre ring. Feder’s earlier psychobiography and Burkholder’s recent taxonomic work are also distinctly postmodern; the former for the same reasons cited above, albeit in a more clinical sense (othering Ives by pathologizing him) and the latter for praising the ad hoc nature of the music. In Made of All Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing,56 and similarly in Charles Ives and His World, Burkholder highlighted Ivesian eclecticism not as a shortcoming as Carter and Copland did, but as the singular redeeming and enduring quality of the music. ——— he endgame of this new cultural perception—whether better or worse for Ives— is in the framing of him not only as non-normative within the art world, but as a true outsider to it. “Outsider art,” as it came to be called in 1972 with the publication of Roger Cardinal’s book of the same name,57 is art created by persons who for one reason or another exist outside public cognizance, yet create works of artistic merit. Historically, there has been interest in the work of the insane,58 particularly drawings or paintings, and even poetry.59 Such works require a “discovery” to extricate them from the limiting forces of the artist’s isolation, placing 52 Nadine Hubb, he Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 53 Paul, 107-227. 54 Ibid., 197. 55 Ibid., 207. 56 J. Peter Burkholder, Made of All Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 57 Roger Cardinal, Outsider Art, (London: Studio Vista, 1972). 58 Ibid., 16-23. 59 Christopher Smart (1722-1771) is one popular example, whose poetry was written while he was in the notorious “Bedlam” madhouse, and has been set to music notably by Benjamin Britten. 21 Figure 7: Henry Darger, illustration from he Story of the Vivian Girls. them into public arenas such as art galleries or print publications. Ironically, Cardinal’s survey neglects the most celebrated of American outsider artists because the work was discovered a year ater Outsider Art was published. Henry Darger, a janitor from Chicago, secretly produced hundreds of paintings and a “novel” exceeding 15,000 pages. he illustrated book, called he Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, hardly needs any explanation apart from the title—the story is centered around battles between children and malevolent adults/aliens/creatures embroiled in a religious conlict of epic proportions. he accompanying drawings frequently contain depictions of young girls (or androgens or hermaphrodites) in the nude with primitive weaponry and quasi-American lags, ighting against armored adults wielding guns and bombs (see igure 6). he work is eclectic in toto, brimming with conlict and violence, depictions of religious wars and mythical creatures, all rendered in splendid, colorful array: elaborate collages of multimedia construction including newspaper cutouts, xerographed photographs, watercolors, and ink. he subjects are oten gender-confused, depicted with mismatched genitalia or apparent androgyny, leading posthumous biographers to conclude that Darger himself had only a rudimentary knowledge of sex, or was sufering from sociopathological conditions that afected his understanding of it. Like Ives, scholarship attempting to explain the richness of Darger’s work tends toward psychobiography; the index to John 22 MacGregor’s lavish tome, Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, contains 137 references to words beginning with “psych-” (“psychoanalysis,” “psychological conlict,” “psychopathology,” etc.).60 Like Feder’s psychoanalysis of Ives, MacGregor’s of Darger suggests a Freudian complex related to paternal relationship, “so many aspects of his day-to-day existence as an adult were modeled on the experience of life with his father.”61 In the years that followed Darger’s death and discovery, he became a poster-child for postmodernism—proof that the work of mainstream, forward-thinking modernist artists was insuicient as the only denizen of gallery walls, and serving as the embodiment of the eclectic, explosive aesthetic that became the norm in the 1980s and 90s. he novel similarity between the work of Darger and Ives is multifarious. Both are depictive of a perceived destructive hazard of industrialization, and both respond to this threat with American and religious themes. Both used blatant borrowing and “collage” as the medium of choice, and both are assembled using methods that by art-world standards were considered experimental. he similarities only intensify in the popular understanding of the two artists’ personalities—both have been the subject of extensive posthumous psychoanalysis, having had their treatment of gender selected as a topic of critical import. Paramount in sealing this bond is a portrayal of kinship as outsiders. A simple Google search of “charles ives” and “henry darger” yields about 23,000 instances of the two names mentioned in close proximity. A 2011 article from he Wire expressly groups Ives with “the American ‘outsider artists’ who crept out of obscurity in the last decades of the twentieth century.”62 To be sure, Ives was not an outsider in a Dargerian sense; he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1947, though he shunned the recognition and dispersed the prize money, saying that “prizes are badges of mediocrity.”63 Despite his general disdain for popular acclaim, including his deliberate decision to rarely publish (and almost exclusively self-publish), he was very much in the public eye. he fact that Copland, Carter, Cowell, and others were writing about his music means that he cannot be seen historically as a true outsider. He may have been stubborn and ungrateful, but in relief against Darger, he was an insider in every sense that matters. In order to legitimize—dare I say excuse—the peculiarities of his work and the ofensiveness of his personality, the postmodern art world has retroactively ostracized him in 60 John M. MacGregor, Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002), 718. 61 MacGregor, 34. 62 Adam Harper, “Exclusive Extract: Heaven Is Real: John Maus and the Truth of Pop,” he Wire, (online, July 2011): accessed December 30, 2013, http://thewire.co.uk/archive/artists/ john-maus/exclusive-extract_heaven-is-real_john-maus-and-the-truth-of-pop_by-adam-harper. 63 Harold C. Schoenberg, he Lives of the Great Composers, 3rd ed., (New York: Norton, 1997), 562. 23 order to more fully accept his work as canonical. he ironies are practically a matryoshka: to make Ives popular, he must irst be absolved. To cleanse his reputation, he must be seen as misunderstood or under-appreciated—wronged in some way by society, rather than the other way around, as New Musicology would have it. Pointing out his unpopularity, no matter how self-inlicted, becomes the only way to generate empathy, and with it appreciation. By placing him historically outside the public consciousness, his memory becomes by deinition inside it. his attitudinal reversal, combined with the fortuitous alignment of his eclectic aesthetic with recent trends makes the postmodern the only environment in which his music can be unreservedly valued. Indulgence in and romanticization of a guilty past is the favorite pastime of post-civil rights America. ——— In the end, we ind ourselves in a tangled web of interpretation. How much of our understanding of Ives’s music must be informed by our understanding of Ives? Can his music, as Beardsley/Wimsatt would have it, be understood per sola virtus, solely on its aesthetic and/or content, wholly unsullied by the intentional fallacy? Or inversely, is Ives’s music entirely unacceptable and incomprehensible without a clear picture of the man? What has made Ives’s music so beloved by America today when it was regarded as so insuicient in the past? Is it the illuminating presence of new critical biography, or are changes in American taste responsible? he answer lies in an ironic, postmodern twist of Beardsley/Wimsatt’s advice. To care about Ives’s music we must irst be informed of his true intentions, and then categorically reject those intentions in favor of mythological ones. Ives as patriotic progressive (despite his pre-Civil War vision), Ives as champion of minorities (despite his clearly articulated prejudices), Ives as maverick (despite his “dilapidated old hat”), and inally Ives as outsider (despite his Pulitzer). If Copland is the anti-Ives, then Walt Whitman is the ironic anti-Ives. Whitman was a true transcendentalist, living in the pre-industrial age for which Ives yearned, yet he was gay and called for a remade world free of prejudice toward race, gender, and sexuality. Parts of his poem, “he Sleepers” seem to instruct us how to be postmodern, and how to deal with Ives. He who has been famous and he who shall be famous ater to-day, [...] he great already known and the great any time ater to-day, [...] I swear they are averaged now—one is no better than the other64 64 Walt Whitman, “he Sleepers,” in Leaves of Grass, (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892), 326-330 24 BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernstein, Leonard. “he Absorption of Race Elements into American Music (1939).” In Findings, 36-99. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. ———. he Unanswered Question (1973). YouTube, accessed 27 December 2013. http://youtu.be/OWeQXTnv_xU?t=2h53m7s. Block, Geofrey. “Bernstein’s Senior hesis at Harvard: he Roots of a Lifelong Search to Discover an American Identity.” College Music Symposium 48 (2008): 52-68. ———. Charles Ives: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Burkholder, J. Peter. All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. ———, ed. Charles Ives and His World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. ———, et al. “Ives, Charles.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. (Oxford University Press, accessed December 30, 2013). http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/14000. Cardinal, Roger. Outsider Art. London: Studio Vista, 1972. Carter, Elliott. “An American Destiny (1946).” In Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937-1995, ed. Jonathan W. Barnard, 93-98. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997. ———. “Charles Ives Remembered (1974).” In Collected Essays, ed. Barnard, 98107. Copland, Aaron. “114 Songs retrospective review, 1934.” In Charles Ives and His World, ed. Burkholder, 307-312. ———. Old American Songs: Second Set. Lynbrook: Boosey & Hawkes, 1954. Cowell, Henry, ed. American Composers on American Music. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1933. ———, and Sidney Cowell. Charles Ives and His Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955. Eco, Umberto. Postscript to the Name of Rose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Feder, Stuart. Charles Ives: “My Father’s Song”: A Psychoanalytic Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Gloag, Kenneth. Postmodernism in Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 25 Harper, Adam. “Exclusive Extract: Heaven Is Real: John Maus and the Truth of Pop.” he Wire, (online, July 2011): accessed December 30, 2013. http:// thewire.co.uk/archive/artists/john-maus/exclusive-extract_heaven-is-real_ john-maus-and-the-truth-of-pop_by-adam-harper. Higgins, Kathleen. “Nietzsche and Postmodern Subjectivity.” In Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, ed. Clayton Koelb, 189-216. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Hubb, Nadine. he Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Ives, Charles. 114 Songs, 1922. Reprint, New York: Associated Music Pub. 1975. ———. Overture & March “1776” for heater Orchestra, ed. James B. Sinclair. Bryn Mawr: Merion Music, Inc., 1976. ———. “he Majority.” In Essays Before a Sonata, he Majority and Other Writings, ed. Howard Boatwright. New York: Norton, 1970. Johnson, Marc. E. “Charles Ives’s (Utopian, Pragmatist, Nostalgic, Progressive, Romantic, Modernist) Yankee Realism.” American Music 20, no. 2 (Summer, 2002): 188-233. Kramer, Jonathan D. “he Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism.” Current Musicology 66 (Spring, 1999): 7-20. Kramer, Lawrence. Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Lochhead, Judy, and Joseph Auner, eds. Postmodern Music/Postmodern hought. New York: Routledge, 2002. Lyotard, Jean-François. he Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geof Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. MacGregor, John M. Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal. New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002. Paul, David C. Charles Ives in the Mirror. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Ross, Alex. “Copland and the Republicans.” Alex Ross: he Rest is Noise: Books, articles, and a blog by the music critic of he New Yorker (blog). December 10, 2011. http://www.therestisnoise.com/2011/12/copland-and-the-republicans. html. 26 Rossiter, Frank R. Charles Ives and His America. New York: Norton, 1975. Schoenberg, Harold C. he Lives of the Great Composers, 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1997. Scott, Derek B. he Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, 3rd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Sherwood, Gayle. “Chalres Ives and ‘Our National Malady’.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 555-584. Sousa, John Philip. Sousa’s Great Marches in Piano Transcription: Original Sheet Music of 23 Works. 1898. Reprint, Mineola: Dover, 1975. Starr, Larry. A Union of Diversities: Style in the Music of Charles Ives. New York: Schirmer, 1992. Taruskin, Richard. Music in the Late Twentieth Century, vol. 5 of he Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Tick, Judith. “Charles Ives and Gender Ideology.” In Musicology and Diference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie, 83-106. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Walden, Daniel. “Black Music and Cultural Nationalism: he Maturation of Archie Shepp.” Negro American Literature Forum 5, no. 4 (Winter, 1971): 150154. Whitman, Walt. “he Sleepers.” In Leaves of Grass, 325-332. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892. Wimsatt, W.K. and Monroe C. Beardsley. “he Intentional Fallacy” in he Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, 3-20. London: Methuen & Co., 1954. ABSTRACT Positive reception of Charles Ives as an ideal American composer appeared concurrently in the 1970s with the onset of New Musicology, revisionist biographies, and postmodern attitudes. While Ives’s essay, he Majority (1920) postured him as a self-professed member of a privileged hegemony, more popular contemporaries Elliot Carter and Aaron Copland were critical of his music. Recent scholarship suggests that Ives’s later canonization was generated by anti-communist preference for iercely individualistic “maverick” personalities, exempliied in his experimental eclecticism and disregard for popular taste. However, this interpretation is inconsistent with the prevailing vision of Ives as reclusive and sexually repressed. I argue that Ives’s music captured the attention of the American public in the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement as popular opinion found social merit in the art of outsiders. Leonard Bernstein (a minority in race and sexual orientation) identiied in Ives’s Concord Sonata what he heard as “negro” syncopated rhythms, a characteristic he thought marked the music as American. Later promoters of Ives were also gay, such as Michael Tilson homas. Recent comparison with extreme outsider artists such as Henry Darger, who also focused on conservative religious/patriotic subjects and destructive efects of industrialization, indicates that post-industrial audiences appreciate Ives not for the “progressiveness” of his work, but for its “otherness.” I will show that a postmodern canonization of Ives does not frame him as representative of the cultural majority, rather as the ironic champion of the marginal, the outsider, indeed very “Minority” he sought to resist. 27