There is a story by the American writer Donald Barthelme in which a condemned man is offered the chance to hear one last song before he is executed. He requests Charles Ives' Fourth Symphony, a good choice because with its demand for a huge orchestra, chorus, organ, three pianos (one tuned in quarter-tones), and ultra-complex scoring, the wait involved in preparing a performance would be sure to keep him alive for a long time.
Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954), American composer.
Charles Ives was an epitome of the "American maverick" composer, a diverse group of extreme individualists that also included artists like John Cage, Harry Partch and Ruth Crawford Seeger. Although he sometimes cheated a little by moving back the dates of composition of some of his scores, he really was using many of the techniques associated with the 20th-century avant-garde -- atonality, microtones, polyrhythms, 12-tone series -- at the turn of the last century, often long before the composers who got credit for pioneering them later.
Almost all of them can be heard in his Fourth Symphony, mostly finished by 1915 and fiddled with by Ives until into the mid-1920s, and for almost half-a-century it was considered to be practically unplayable. Individual movements did get rough performances, but the symphony had to wait until 1965, 11 years after the composer's death, to be presented in its entirely by the American Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski together with two assistant conductors who helped with its complicated fabric of conflicting rhythms.
A side note. I was a student in New York at the time and attended that premiere at Carnegie Hall. It was an unforgettable evening. The entire New York musical establishment were there, including fellow composers of Ives' like Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter and even his widow, Harmony Twitchell Ives. At the conclusion of the piece, to an audience who were clearly awed by what they had heard, Stokowski had just begun speaking of the event as honouring one of America's greatest artists when an explosive sneeze rang out.
"That wasn't in the score!" Stokowski immediately shot back, but there had been sounds that were in the score that were far stranger and more shocking than that sneeze.
Stokowski and his two assistant conductors recorded the symphony for Columbia and as it became widely known other concert performances and recordings followed, especially after the composer/conductor Gunther Schuller rebarred parts of the forbidding score to make it easier for a single conductor to control. That first recording, now out of print, remains one of the best despite Stokowski's taking great liberties with the score (the quarter-tone piano is missing, for example), but in general the more recent the recording, the more engaging the performance.
No recording can do the Fourth Symphony real justice. The writing in the second movement, which Ives calls a "comedy", is so dense, with so much going on at once -- marches piled on top of old popular songs stacked on top of hymn tunes, all playing at different tempos to create a sense-overloading roar -- that listeners sitting in different parts of the concert hall will hear substantially different music. Comparing Stokowski's recording with the excellent later one conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas points up the difference the aural perspective chosen by the recording engineers can make. But in general, it is the most recent accounts that immerse you most deeply in the symphony's unique sound world.
Ludovic Morlot and his Seattle musicians showed that they were on Ives' tricky wavelength last year with their recording of the composer's very different Second Symphony. Here Morlot surpasses himself with a programme that includes both the arch-strange Fourth Symphony and its predecessor, one of the composer's simplest and most straightforward works, in an equally fine performance. Has there ever been such a radical change of style between two successive symphonies by one composer? Only Prokofiev's first two symphonies come to mind.
The Fourth Symphony has a programme that allows its four movements to go all over the map in terms of style and scoring. The first movement, a setting of the hymn, Watchman (Tell Us Of The Night) for chorus and orchestra, poses a mystical question answered in different ways by the three that follow. Morlot and his engineers integrate the chorus perfectly into the vaporous, dreamy orchestral haze that swirls around it, creating a magical mood that can shatter if the chorus is too far forward.
The "comedy" that follows is musical dream based on a fantastic Hawthorne's story, The Celestial Railroad, a parody of Pilgrim's Progress in which a pilgrim stand-in does his travelling by train. Ives' train music, with its lunging basses and shrieking brass is stunningly played and recorded here, properly raw in sound but articulated in such a way that embedded tunes surface audibly.
Other difficult moments that Morlot and the Seattle orchestra bring off beautiful are the ethereal opening passage for solo flute and strings playing in quarter-tones (getting orchestral string players to agree on a quarter tone must have been an adventure), the recurrent ragtime rhythms, and the sentimental tune played by a solo violin accompanied by the distant quarter-tone piano to create a feeling of deep nostalgia just before all hell breaks loose in the movement's concluding pages.
After this chaos the third movement suddenly offers a straightforward fugue in C major representing the "channelling of life into ritual and order", and here Morlot chooses a sonority lighter than the organ-like tone that might suit the music better (Ives himself was an organist). There is an organ in the scoring, but the overall thinness of the sound can make the movement feel a little lightweight in comparison to the monumental ones that surround it. Ives regarded the symphony's finale as his finest work. A New England Transcendentalist, he intended some religious significance here, and builds the movement over a constant pulse played by a percussion ensemble. It functions as a heartbeat around which the music accumulates and takes shape, eventually culminating in a massive procession over a descending scale.
Some listeners might hear blues-like accents in parts of it. It eventually subsides and dissolves into a wordless remembrance by the chorus of the opening hymn, most movingly done here.
Although the Fourth Symphony is the main item on the programme, it doesn't overshadow the modest Third, subtitled The Camp Meeting. Here the modernism is almost completely gone, replaced by a feeling of nostalgia reflected in titles of its three movements: Old Folks Gatherin', Children's Day, Communion. Occasionally a light harmonic mist descends to evoke the quality of memory -- it veils the conclusions of the outer movements evocatively in this performance, especially with the sonority of muted chimes at the end as the symphony fades back into memory.
Overall, the piece predicts the "American" sound that symphonists like Copland and Roy Harris were to popularise almost 40 years later.
Two shorter works complete the programme. Central Park In The Dark returns to Ives' more modern sound, with quiet polytonal strings evoking a hot, still summer night in the park suddenly interrupted by a noisy band playing Ragtime Gal. The Unanswered Question may be Ives' most popular piece, often turning up on movie soundtracks. Morlot uses a revised version of the score, one that changes the last note of the question of the title, asked by a solo trumpet. Listeners used the unrevised version may share my feeling that the new one sounds wrong, but I suppose we will adjust to it.
The recorded sound of the 24/96 download available online from eclassical.com and elsewhere comes as close as we've had so far to capturing the intricacies and sonic impact of the Fourth Symphony. Play it in your living room through a good sound system or home theatre and you will blow the roof off the place.
