American Radicals
New England and Chicago
* Ives: Three Places in New England (Orchestral Set No. 1)
* Ives: Orchestral Set No. 2*
* Ruggles: Sun-treader
* Ruggles: Men and Mountains
* Seeger, RC: Andante for Strings
The Cleveland Orchestra & Chorus*/Christoph von Dohnanyi
London 289 443 776-2 Total time: 62:15
Summary for the Busy Executive: Brave new worlds, fabulously realized.
I'm currently re-reading Wilfrid Mellers's classic treatise on American
music (not currently in print, naturally) Music in a New Found Land -
simultaneously brilliant and infuriating. For Mellers, music belongs to
the general culture and thus links up with other arts. Indeed, to Mellers,
great music must illuminate that culture, and at this last point he and
I part company. For Mellers's assumption essentially forces him to
undervalue certain composers, notably Chadwick, Piston, Schuman, Beach,
MacDowell, and Barber, and overrate others, like Horatio Parker.
Nevertheless, Mellers has managed to build an American musical taxonomy,
related very strongly to American literary trends and themes. Whether
you believe in the bedrock reality of Mellers's analysis or the justness of
his individual judgments matters less than his provocation to new thoughts
and views of familiar artists and their works.
Mellers detects two characteristic - and to some extent contradictory -
strains in American art: the democratic and Whitmanesque embracing of
multitudes and the hieratic pursuit of the individual's lonely truth.
Ives - like Whitman himself - expresses both simultaneously, in works like
the Universe Symphony and the Concord Sonata. He at once tries to give
back the complexity of American life and the sternness of the individual
pilgrimage, the latter all the more necessary because Americans have the
obligation to make things new, according to Mellers. We haven't the luxury
(or the deadening influence) of a stable, traditional culture. Instead,
we derive from the jostling of our various and varied origins - not only
Europe, but Africa and, so far to a lesser extent, Asia as well. We come
from these places and yet don't remain of these places. A German-American
differs from the family branch in Hamburg. An African-American probably
shares more in common with that German-American than with the current
members of the tribe from which his ancestors sprang. Consequently, the
art we can point to as particularly American may resemble that of other
countries, but it also expresses or embodies something not found elsewhere
- a way of singing, a state (or states) of mind, the way the body moves.
The hermit in the European forest may indeed be alone (although really
never more than a few miles away from some village), but the American
pioneer is alone in an ocean of grass and tree and desert. The hermit
stays put; the pioneer, like the sailor, explores. For the European,
loneliness is emptiness, alienation from society and tradition. For the
mythical American, physical loneliness means spiritual pilgrimage. What's
around the corner might very well be closer to heaven itself. "Starting
from scratch, from zero," more often than not, strikes the American as a
virtue.
The American artistic radicals, therefore, tend to differ from their
European opposite numbers. Schoenberg, for example, took great care to
construct a vision of Austro-German musical tradition and to show how his
experiments conformed to and extended that vision. Ives didn't bother. To
him, the tradition meant mainly Europeanized gentility - totally inadequate
to express the U.S. - although of course no one starts completely from
scratch.
Most American radicals emphasize the hieratic. They practice mainly a
negative art, kicking over what has gone before and then erecting their
bit of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. It reminds me a bit of the
wholesale razing of Victorian mansions in favor of the large, Fifties-style
ranch house or Le Corbusier's nightmare vision of Paris as a series of
what's always struck me as gargantuan parking structures. These radicals
reject the multitude in favor of the few hardy souls with the courage
to join them in the wilderness. Ives and Henry Cowell stand as major
exceptions. Although both have their priestly moments, they want to
express everything - as far as Ives is concerned, frequently in the same
piece.
Ives shows us something new in the very genre he has created - the "set,"
as opposed to the "suite." These aren't conceived as whole compositions,
based on dance forms, or excerpts from something larger. The "set" implies
that, although the composer has conceived each member independently, they
all bond together spiritually. In the case of the first orchestral set,
the three works show different mystical aspects of New England. The
opening piece, "The 'St Gaudens' in Boston Common," refers to the great
sculptor's monument to the Civil War Massachusetts 54th Volunteer, the
first black infantry regiment, decimated in the heaviest fighting. Ives
gives us a slow march - so beginning so slowly indeed that one can't tell
it's a march - which bit by bit becomes less slow. Fragments of Civil War
marches - "The Battle Cry of Freedom" and "Marching through Georgia" among
them - weave in an out to create an elegy to the black troops, most of whom
would perish and then suffer the posthumous indignity of a mass grave. The
second movement, a compendium of quick marches, has the energy and shares
much of the idiom of late 19th-century pop. Ives fans will recognize
fragments from the second symphony and from his "Circus March" as well.
"The Housatonic at Stockbridge" - the final movement - depicts a walk Ives
and his wife, Harmony (great name for a composer's wife!), took one Sunday
along the Housatonic River. They heard the distant sounds of churchgoers
singing hymns. The contentment of the walk and the gentle intrusion of
the hymns find their way into the music, and so does something else - a
mounting urgency that, surprisingly, bursts like a soap bubble to reveal
the serene, inexorable progress of the stream. I always wondered why
Ives put it there. It's not necessarily a useful question to ask of
most composers, but Ives, despite his technical innovations, seldom
interested himself in purely technical matters. Music for him was largely
a philosophic exercise, and listening to it becomes a moral discipline.
Thus, the violence of the contrast between the first half of the piece and
the latter half provokes a philosophic question, rather than a formal one.
Does it represent the intrusion of the world? Has he thrown a tantrum? A
fight with his wife? I finally got my answer when I heard Ives's later song
of the same title, to his own words. For Ives, "even the weariest river
winds somewhere safe to sea," and the sea for Ives represents the oceanic
mysteries of the universe. Ives wishes to be the river's companion. In
that passage, we hear the strain and earnestness in the American soul's
journey.
The second orchestral set begins with "An Elegy to Our Forefathers,"
originally conceived (according to the liner notes by Calum MacDonald)
as "An Elegy to Stephen Foster." I confess I don't hear much Foster, but I
do hear "Jesus Loves Me" over and over, taken at a slow, sentimental tempo.
Ives took, naturally, a view of the sentimentalism of the 19th century
different even from most of his contemporaries. For him, it represented
not the cheap way out, but the divine seen through a glass darkly. As with
its corresponding number in the first orchestral set, the second movement
- depicting a camp meeting - is a fantasia based mainly on ragtime dances
Ives wrote for the piano in the early 1900s. "Bringing in the Sheaves"
pushes its jolly way in, and a good time is had by all, as the hymn takes
on more and more of the rag rhythm. The final movement, "From Hanover
Square North ..." again paints an incident from Ives's life. He and a
bunch of other commuters were standing at an el train stop when they heard
the news of the sinking of the Lusitania. A barrel organ was in the street
below playing "In the Sweet Bye and Bye," and one by one, the passengers
took up the hymn. The movement opens with a distant choir intoning the Te
Deum chant against the ambient sounds of the night. Gradually, fragments
of those sounds coalesce into "The Sweet Bye and Bye," which grows stronger
and stronger into a Salvation Army brass-band rendition and then fades back
into the night.
Carl Ruggles, only two years younger than Ives and one of the few composers
in whose work Ives took an active interest, hails from New England as well,
but the music really differs from Ives's by quite a bit. Ives, for the
most part, draws music from his own experience. The mundane gives his
music its energy. Ruggles ruthlessly eliminates "real life" from his work,
and his energy comes from his single-mindedness. Where Ives's abundance
tends to sprawl in late Romantic luxuriance, Ruggles's music moves along
the straight and narrow, shortest path. There are no superfluous notes
in Ruggles - a Puritan pioneer in his music, at any rate, if not in life.
Ruggles also exhibits a horror of repeating himself, something Ives
apparently didn't mind. For example, the strategies, techniques, and
sounds of Ives's first orchestral set carry over into the second. Ruggles
seems one of those composers who must reinvent his music each time out.
The soul must progress, not linger or even return. As a result, Ruggles
wrote very few things. A professor of mine once told the story of the Yale
composer Richard Donovan paying a visit to Ruggles. As he got to the door,
he heard Ruggles sounding a chord on the piano and letting it vibrate to
decay. This happened about five times. Donovan finally knocked on the
door, and Ruggles let him in.
"What were you doing?" asked Donovan.
"Giving it the test of time," Ruggles replied.
Sun-treader (from Browning's lines on Shelley), fourteen minutes' worth
of music, cost Ruggles five years of work in its initial form. However,
Ruggles also revised it, cutting it down, mainly. This also took years.
In the Sixties and Seventies, as American composers began to comb through
their past, Ruggles's music enjoyed a slight boost. Michael Tilson Thomas
made a classic recording of Sun-treader. Ruggles, in his nineties, toured
college campuses, presenting himself as a salty New Englander who liked
to tell off-color jokes, especially to pretty women students. Like
Robert Frost (if anything, a neurotic classics scholar rather than the
earth-rooted New England farmer he liked to play), he created the adorable
fiction of himself. This was a Harvard intellectual, after all. The music
shows it. Highly dissonant, yet it's pretty easy to follow since, unlike
Ives who likes to throw several different ideas against each other,
Ruggles's polyphony consists primarily of canonic variations on the main
idea: a stark statement of single notes accompanied by strong beats on the
tympani, similar in "feel" to the opening to the Brahms Symphony No. 1.
Men and Mountains, an orchestral suite, Ruggles began in 1920 and finished
in 1936. The title comes from William Blake: "Great things are done when
Men and Mountains meet; / This is not done by Jostling in the Street." If
nothing else, you glimpse the artistic priest-recluse presiding over his
private mysteries. The work consists of three movements. "Men" slowly
makes its way up the spiritual mountain. It's apparently a difficult
climb. "Lilacs," for strings alone, is about as delicate as Ruggles gets,
which is to say not very. One feels the intensity of the pilgrim trying to
break through (perhaps not succeeding) to the divine as he contemplates the
field of flowers. Again, the work gives off intellectual and spiritual
effort, above all. "Marching Mountains," the final movement, seems to have
begun as a study for Sun-treader. One gets roughly the same image from its
opening as the later piece - the purposeful, majestic march. The liner
notes use the absolutely appropriate adjective "granitic." However, unlike
Sun-treader it has extended contrasting meditative moods, from which it
builds to a final climax.
If you read most works on American musical modernism, you tend to get the
im pression that everything happens in New York or Boston. Much certainly
happens there, if only because Koussevitzky's in Boston and Aaron Copland's
in New York. Yet, one finds other centers of considerable activity,
including Rochester, New York (home of the Eastman School), and Chicago,
which continues to boast a broad-based, lively contemporary music scene.
When I think of Chicago composers, I think of people as diverse as Leo
Sowerby, Ned Rorem, Easley Blackwood, Charles Seeger, and his second wife,
Ruth Crawford Seeger, in many ways the most remarkable of them all. I
suppose I must thank the women's movement for bringing her to general
attention. After all, Wilfrid Mellers makes absolutely no mention of her,
and the omission has little to do with the quality or the importance of her
music.
Ruth Crawford began as a student of Charles Seeger, a composer and theorist
interested in "free dissonance." Seeger, in my opinion, never rose above
middling as a composer. Ruth Crawford Seeger, on the other hand, remains
an astonishing artist, despite a small output. There are several reasons
for the scarcity of her work. She underwent a considerable period of
creative silence which corresponds to the raising of her two children, Mike
and Peggy. Second, as the youngest child left the house, she was diagnosed
with cancer, and she died shortly thereafter. However, I doubt that she
would have written much in any case. Like Ruggles, she had a holy horror
of repeating herself, and like Varese, she seemed to re-imagine music each
time out. With Seeger, you get the feeling of going back to the beginning
and finding a new path. It's not easy to come up with the radically new.
Her Three Chants for chorus gives you sounds never heard before from a
chorus. Her String Quartet shows new ways of playing groups of homogenous
instruments off one another. I can't think of an earlier quartet that
sounds like it. The Andante is an arrangement for string orchestra of
one of the movements of the quartet. I must say I prefer its quartet
incarnation: the individual lines sing out more clearly. The string
orchestra tends to smooth everything over. At any rate, a wonderful work.
The performances of these pieces better every other account I know.
Dohnanyi infuses every item with electricity, a sense of forward motion,
and yet manages to keep the architecture clear. The textures - even the
loud sounds - are transparent. Even the textures of Ives, which often end
up sounding like aural soup, come across as delicate, without losing their
complexity. The playing throughout is intelligent and superbly musical.
Above all, Dohnanyi and his orchestra manage to distinguish the quite
different personalities behind all of this quite dissonant music. One
composer doesn't sound like "more of the same." Ives, Ruggles, and Crawford
retain their individuality.
The sound is superb, especially when one considers the written thickness
of the textures. This music won't please everybody, and for the most part,
it's not meant to. For my money, however, one of the outstanding releases
of the past five years.
Steve Schwartz
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