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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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 repute slowly grew as America’s first actually authentic composer.
To mark the anniversary, pianist Jeremy Denk has launched the album IVES DENK, with violinist Stefan Jackiw. It comprises Ives’ 4 violin sonatas and his two large 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 understand how to put in writing a fugue the proper manner, then I’m prepared to have you ever attempt the mistaken manner.”
A lot of Ives’ music sounds, at the least at first listening to, prefer it was certainly composed the “mistaken manner.” 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 all the music round him. You by no means know when snippets of common church hymns, circus marches, parlor songs or ragtime ditties would possibly weasel their manner into a chunk. In Ives’ day, his listeners might need thought he was merely enjoying off common tradition, however in his singular, rugged manner, Ives is telling us these songs are a part of the gravel that pours into the muse of American music. Within the ramshackle, ragtime-inflected center motion of the Violin Sonata No. 3 you’ll be able to 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. Concerning 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 means of the primary web page,” Ives wrote in his memoir. “He was all bothered with the rhythms and the notes, and he acquired mad. He mentioned, ‘This can’t be performed. It’s not 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 Battle.”
There’s a sort 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, however it must wait one other 34 years for its public debut. The crepuscular opening motion sounds harmless sufficient, like one thing Brahms might need written had he lived one other dozen years. Ives quotes each a hymn and a cowboy track — in Ives the sacred and profane usually collide. Some 25 minutes later, simply earlier than the ominous remaining 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 widespread threads are woven by means 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 finally 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 directly. 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 may 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 full of contradictions, failure, grace and imaginative and prescient. And it will be troublesome to search out extra satisfying liner notes than these by Denk, whose 2022 memoir Each Good Boy Does Effective affords 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 means of, and wrestle with its personal failure.”
An album of Ives music, particularly one as nicely performed and thought frightening 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.