Article on Charles Ives by Jeremy Denk

[paul secor]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jun/19/charles-ives-wins/?insrc=hpma

Ostensibly a review of a new Ives biography, it ends up being a short essay on Denk's opinions about Ives - which is fine with me.

[Larry Kart]

A post I made on another site (rec.music.classical.recordings) about Denk's IMO awful Ives piece. You can go to that site for a lot of back and forth on the topic.

Some examples (with comments) of what I found callow and stupid in Denk's piece:

"Charles Ives, the crazy and brilliant patriarch of American music, loved a good cacophony."

Vulgar and cheesy, IMO.


"Ives had many enemies, including himself, but his real impulse was affection: a desperate affection for the past, and for the joys and possibilities of music-making."

That was his real impulse? And why "desperate"?

"Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1874, and grew up in a world of music that has now become not just historical but quaint--marches, hymns, sentimental ballads, ragtime. This unlikely and motley collection of genres and styles became his source material; he was destined to be its modernist archivist."

He was its "modernist archivist"? I don't think so. That material went on to suffuse all sorts of later American music-making. Now if you want to say that Ives' attitude toward those musics and the way he handled them was unique -- musicality and dramatically/emotionally -- OK. But Denk doesn't say that.

"By day he crafted sales pitches for an army of insurance men; by night he scrawled unsalable musical visions."

Vulgar and wrong-headed. Ives wasn't crafting "sales pitches for an army of insurance men." He was among the chief conceptual architects of the modern insurance industry.

"...there aren't that many insurance tycoons doubling as undiscovered modernist geniuses..."

Right-- there are none, you smart ass. And don't tell me Wallace Stevens. An insurance executive, yes, but Stevens was no tycoon and he wasn't an "undiscovered" modernist; he was a recognized one.

"Ives turned doubt to artistic insight, but the doubt turned back against him. He was an unusually insecure pioneer. When he published the "Concord" Sonata, an act of supreme confidence, he also released a companion book (Essays Before a Sonata) as a preemptive defense. It's hard to imagine Beethoven supplying a program note to his late quartets."

Plenty of other major composers -- Berlioz? Wagner? Busoni? -- published reams of self-explanatory, self-justifying prose.

"Another of the essential Ives problems, an important manifestation of his doubt, is his simultaneous affection for music of unashamed consonance--like hymns or Stephen Foster ballads, which are almost too easy to understand--and music of bewildering dissonance. (His dirty secret was that he loved to write beautiful things.)"

"His dirty secret..." Come on.


"Humor has a complicated place in the value system of classical music, and for many Ives's broad wit is a failing. But his slapstick pastiches and his most affecting testaments share a common urge: to recreate the messiness of human experience."

What slop. Let's assume that with "affecting testaments" Denk has in mind something like the third movement of Ives' Orchestral Set No. 2, which creates (quoting John Kirkpatrick) "an impression of an event at the time of the sinking of the Lusitania, in which a crowd of office workers waiting at a New York City elevated station in the early evening heard a hurdy gurdy playing "In the Sweet By and By," then heard the El workers beginning to whistle or hum the tune, "and before long the entire crowd was singing the chorus wholeheartedly and with dignity, as an outlet for their feelings..... Ives' music evokes this scene, with a sense of many people, living, working, and experiencing things together." This is Ives "recreating the messiness of human existence"? No -- complexity is not messiness, though one can see where Denk might think so.

Denk on the slow movement of the First Violin Sonata: "We float through increasingly complex, dreamlike sonorities, aware at once that we are in "The Old Oaken Bucket" and not. Admirable in purely musical terms, this passage is also rich in meaning: you feel the familiar tune drifting away from you, even nostalgia becoming memory."

What the heck does "even nostalgia becoming memory" mean? Even?

And that final paragraph:

"If Ives’s music often falls flat in performance, does that make the music less great? For most people the answer is unequivocally yes. But it’s worth contemplating the example of three piano sonatas, all written within fifteen years of the premiere of Ives’s “Concord,” by three of the most important American composers: Carter, Barber, Copland. Each of these pieces attempts an epic statement, fusing popular music with the complexities of modernism. Each is more expertly composed than the “Concord”—better crafted, more transparent, more pianistic—and eminently practical in concert. But Ives’s sonata towers over them all, despite or because of its doubts, sweeping past the fine points of constructing a musical work to address the nature and purpose of music itself. And that is the injustice of art; sometimes all the craft in the world is trumped by someone with something more important to say."

What's with that "trumped"? Were Ives, Carter, Barber, and Copland all participants in some damn musical zero-sum game? Did Wagner trump Brahms, or vice versa? Grow up, Jeremy.

Also, if Denk feels that "Ives’s music often falls flat in performance" (only when it's not well-performed, I would say), then how the heck does it "say" all those "more important" things? Surely Denk doesn't mean that it's music best left to be contemplated in libraries?

[AllenLowe]

glad you posted these quotes; been meaning to read Denk, but don't subscribe; but what an utter fool he sounds like.

[Stefan Wood]

Good lord, that's some horrible writing.

[paul secor]

The excerpted quotes don't give a sense of the article - imo.

[AllenLowe]

ok; seems like I can now access the whole thing; but just be aware that for the last 12 years I have consoled myself by remembering that Ives, too, worked in the insurance industry.

[Larry Kart]

BTW, I didn't mean to -- as clearly appeared to be the case -- jump down Paul's throat that way. A week or so ago I was part of a long and sometimes hostile back-and-forth about Denk's Ives piece on the Rec.Music.Classical.Recordings site (a Google group that I believe can be accessed by anyone, though you have to sign on to Google post there), and when I saw the Denk Ives "monster" rearing its head here, I kind of lost my own head and posted one of the things I had posted about the piece on RCMR. That no doubt came across as rude and thoughtless, and in fact it was. I apologize.