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).  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.  When
>I hear Ives's music, I hear Ives's aesthetic, and I also hear, somewhat,
>the roots of his aesthetic (i.e.  the sourced material).

I agree.  I also suspect that much more is made about the quotations of
Ives, than those of, say Bartok, simply because the source material is
so much more familiar to Western European and North American ears.  (When
I first encountered CI's quoting of "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean" to my
English ears, which had been exposed to a good deal of US culture in the
shape of imported tv and radio programmes, it was the tune which always
accompanied Popeye just after he'd eaten the spinach and was proceeding
to knock the stuffing out of whatever/whoever had previously been knocking
the stuffing out of him...)

I suspect that the music of, say Vaughan Williams sounds different
to English and North American ears, the former (over a certain age,
probably) being far more familiar with the folksong he quoted and whose
modal harmonies he often employed.

>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?

I believe so.

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

Hmmm, the words that spring to my mind are (in no particular order):
iconoclast, eclectic, transcendentalist.

deryk barker
([log in to unmask], http://www.camosun.bc.ca/~dbarker)