Ives Violin Sonata #4 and our Present Moment in US History

Ives, a Greenwich Village composer in his younger days, will be represented in The Village Trip lineup with his Violin Sonata #4 performed by violinist David Fulmer and pianist Joan Forsyth.

https://www.thevillagetrip.com/event/genius-invention/

Someone asked about this work, “Why all the fuss over Yes Jesus Loves You?” Let’s all take a stab at that?

That’s the most interesting aspect of Ives’ work. Ives was coming out of this –

This is a screenshot from the short film treatment of One of the Missing by Ambrose Bierce, the soldier is pinned under rubble when a building collapses around him. He is alone. He finds a cocked gun pointing at him and he cannot move.

Ives was born in the aftermath of the Civil War and the moment of Ives’ 150th anniversary is marked by a return of all that, dredged up.

The sectarian strife was religious, political, pervading the entire noosphere. And there we are now, full throttle.

The Lollards: England was on the fringes of Christendom. It is not surprising that the Lollards were appalled by the corruption and hypocrisy of the papacy. Protestantism in the UK was a politicization of Lollard idealism and was corrupt from the beginning. Centuries of reaction and counter-reaction ensue, transplanted to the colonies. The Puritans became as horrid and censorious as the inquisition The Quakers, like the Lollards, wanted to *get real*. The Puritans drove them to Nantucket to experiment with a form of capitalism. This sectarian strife is in
American music; Ives wisely does not mention it in his long and very interesting program note.

Ives’s work is, in the end, purest music. We do not need any back story. And considering a plausible backstroy is your creative enterprise, if you choose. That’s one of the best things music does; it turns the horrors of our moment into wordless music, even when there are words to the music.

America’s sectarian strife is in Ives’ music.

Today, we are pinned under rubble with a cocked gun pointing at us, writhing, looking for some way to slither out.

The Bierce story - some motion causes the trigger to fire, but there is nothing in the chamber. The poor soldier dies of a heart attack. This makes me think of Walter Benjamin at the Spanish border in the Pyrenees, hoping to cross the border into safety during the Nazi occupation of France. He did not wait for the mircacle. Others in his party made it across.

Arnold Schoenberg was also born 150 years ago. He clearly understood Ives. Ives, Amram, Copland, founded their music on rough hewn American vernacular music including hymns. Schoenberg likewise knew his music was built upon hymns – Lutheran hymns – Bach. Lou Harrison and John Cage both balked at Schoenberg’s choral harmonization exercizes, but do we not see Schoenberg coming to understand and perhaps admire the authenticity of that reaction? I go so far as to say that in Schoenberg we find a European nodding in approval of our downtown scene.

Schoenberg gave a nod of approval to what was to become our vibrant downtown and hipster scene.

Schoenberg’s comments on Ives and other American composers are collected on this website in the “News” section. His comments about Ives suggest he had a deep appreciation of Ives’ authenticity.

Schoenberg left no comments about our Babbitts and Boykans. Their music had not ripened before Schoenberg’s death, nor had the values of the International Style in music – that utopian music, music of nowhere and everywhere.Oddly, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Wolpe, Krenek, Hindemith, when they came to the US uprooted, were in that utopian (in the original literal sense) space*. Their work was an expression of their uprootedness. America is a utopian space. See Koolhaas’ Delierious New York. That utopian quality is overdetermined. The State Department and CIA push against natioanalism jumped on something already ongoing giving a nudge, a tailwind for the International Style. Neoclassicism of Stravinsky, Hindemith, Schoenberg and Djuna Barnes’ *The Antiphon* and so much else, was a between the war utopian phenomenon that paved the way for the still more utopian International Style.

Much more to be said.

Please buy tickets.

*In the late 80’s composer Edward Green planted that seed about uprooted Europeans. It’s obvious in retrospect, but I must acknowledge that I heard it from him first in a conversation.

Some Ives:

And here, with Alba Potes we seeded the Columbia Andes with Northeastern Transendentalism, this is Alba Potes’ translation of the Cradle Song by Augusta Ives, employing the rich resonant Columbia tiple, a 4-course 12-string guitar: