Mike Leghorn <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>When you're listening to Ives's quotations, are you listening to the music
>being quoted, or are you listening Ives? (Hint: the correct answer is the
>latter).

Yes; & i've also been studying this much quoted/totally misunderstood
composer for years.

>And yes, there *is* collaging (e.g.  2nd mvt 4th symphony, "Country Band
>March), and I get a sense that there *is* an aesthetic difference between
>the quote and the sourced material.

You can get a sense; but that says more about your listening than it
does about Ives.  When Ives uses a quote, he's almost inevitably using it
literally; & the rare cases - such as this one - where the usage seems to
foreshadow true collaging, my assumption is that this is more our looking
for futurism in this classic (albeit maverick) romantic than true
collaging.  More on this below.

Think of the vast number of cases where Ives has quoted preexisting
melodies to create a strictly literal meaning - from Puttnam's Camp to
This Scherzo Is A Joke - & tell me why you choose to concentrate on the
exception rather than the rule?; especially when Ives' approach derives
from a completely different aesthetic to the one that you're describing.
In technical terms, Ives is a popular eclectic of the Gottschalk school; &
the secret learning you get from studying Ives as the composer intended the
music to be studied is that the great Creole is the one mighty influence
which appears everywhere in the Ives style.

(Do you really want to argue that The Union is a postModernist piece? Or
the Montevideo?)

If the expression postModernism is to have any useful meaning at all (& i
suspect that the term as a useful expression probably is on its last legs,
with the vets already hovering around it with a wall of screens), it has
to describe either a historical process or alternative approaches which
closely parallel the historical process.  Historically, postModernism
is (big surprise here, i guess) a post Modernist school which coopts
pre-existing material within a mechanised aesthetic, changing - & usually
often commenting on - them in the process.  The mechanical structuralism
is the unifying spirit behind all modernist schools & is completely alien
to Ives' romantic (& often quasi-improvisational) musical flow; while the
co-optive quality (where the material is scratched - to use a popular
terminology - to fit within the postModernist aesthetic without reference
to the previous context) forms the basis of true postModernism.

This co-optive element in this aesthetic is why postModernism is not
eclecticism (also known as synergism, which adopts preexisting modes
more or less as is to create a transcendental whole), even though the two
approaches are often confused in the public eye.  Like Gottschalk before
him, Ives is a popular eclectic in style; & a romantically free-spirited
one at that - in the then current terminology, he loved to rag his source
materiel; & many of the composer's more playful quotes (& particularly
those which now sound like true collages) are used in a kind of scored ad
libitum style, which retains the materiel's fundamental integrity even as
he flays its external structure to the bone.  It may be that some (perhaps
many) of these pieces are literally derived from Ives' improvisations
at the church organ, although noone can actually prove this (except
for the 3rd Symphony, which is known to be based on an organ original);
but whatever the truth of this particular theory, the Ives approach to
composition is not postModernist by any useful definition of postModernism.

Try listening to the Country Band not as an anachronistic collage but as
the virtuouso Ives ragging his material; & you'll immediately realise this.
It's obvious once you clear your ears of the 20th century assumptions that
CEI simply didn't share.

>I get the impression that Ives wasn't consious about his place in musical
>geneology.  Btw, didn't he use 12-tone rows ("Chromatimelodtune") before
>Schoenberg?

Not sure; but since everyone else did, it's not impossible.  As i recall,
there's a tone-row in Mozart somewhere....

People forget that the Ikon neither invented the tone-row nor the only
system for organising tone-row basied composition - Schoenberg just created
a particular method method for 12-tone composition which he thought would
guarantee the surpremacy of German music for the next 100 years....

Poor deluded bastard.

>Actually (and I know I'll get in trouble for saying this), I kind of think
>of Ives as an impressionist in some ways.

Especially from Ives, Rollo....

Live in peace
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