American first
Peter Dickinson
Charles Ives and His America Frank Rossiter (Gollancz £8.50)
A great composer inevitably reveals the character of the society in which he grew up, both by what he exemplified and by what he reacted against. Musicians are often too. involved in music to see historical issues objectively, so it is particularly instructive to read the approach of a professional historian to the phenomenon of Charles Ives. History is a relevant discipline, since the recognition belatedly accorded to Ives has upset the comfortable assumptions of musical history in this century.
It is only relatively recently that the British musical public has had the opportunity to get to know the work of Charles Ives, and to assess him as 'America's first great composer'. His centenary in October 1974 was a landmark : it brought a documentary on BBC 2, an American culture Sunday on Radio 3, and a whole week of Ives concerts in , London presented by the Park Lane Group, quite apart from concerts up and down the country. The occurrence of the American Bicentenary this year has kept Ives in front of the concert-going public, and there are now plenty of records. Ives is no longer obscure, he is international. The apPeal of his music crosses all kinds of boundaries between European and American cultural traditions. It proves that a composer true to the local sources of his inspiration, however improbable, may reach out to become universal. Bartok's use of Hungarian
folk music to forge a new style liberated from Germarkacademicism is in some ways com parable. In literature Joyce drew richly from his Dublin memories. But Ives was more naïve and instinctive at a time when music had no precedent for his techniques of dissonant free association and collage. Unlike Bartok or Joyce, Ives was completely isolated. He was misunderstood as a student at Yale, where it was assumed that American composers studied in Europe in order to learn how to compose. There was therefore no prospect of a career in music for a .progressive composer ahead of his time in
his sound, but steeped in New England's Past for his inspiration. Ives led a divided
life: becoming a millionaire in the insurance
business and composing at weekends and at night. By the end of World War I, before he
Was fifty, Ives had completed his composi
tion and began to retire from business owing to ill-health. From the 1910s onwards the
music took on a life of its own and struggled towards recognition which only became Widespread in America well after World War I I, Meanwhile American music was coming of age, even though composers like Copland, Sessions and Carter still studied abroad. The vitality of American popular music in both musicals and jazz caused the more serious (so-called)composer to be neglected. But this neglect was nothing compared to what Ives had suffered earlier and from which he was emerging triumphant. As a result he has become a father-figure to several generations of composers in America even if, naturally enough, this causes a back-lash from time to time. Some older composers envy his success and some younger ones resent his obvious patriotism. The importance of Ives is now recognised by scrupulous research at Yale under the direction of John Kirkpatrick, one of the pioneer performers of Ives, and the documents and scores are being edited and published. Some of the work is centred on the music and some of it concerns the phenomenon of Ives himself in his context.
Frank Rossiter's book is accurately titled, since it concerns the context of Ives rather than his music. But it helps to answer a question posed by Aaron Copland at the Eves Centenary Conference held in New York: 'How could that man write that music ?' The question will remain endlessly fascinating because of the enduring quality of Ives' finest works.
Rossiter traces in detail the life of Danbury, Connecticut, where Ives was born, and goes on to examine Yale University and the business world of New York. He holds that Ives faced considerable pressures from his own society to conform socially in his atti tudes and be a good American. In a man's world at school, Yale and in business, classical music was regarded as effeminate, so his own masculine music became dissonant to compensate. Music was not an acceptable profession either socially or commercially : so Ives made money in business. Like Erik Satie, Ives protected himself against being taken too seriously by being serious and humorous at the same time: he retained the pose of playful boy right into middle age when he abruptly switched into being a can tankerous old man. He became out of sym pathy with the modern world and increasingly after his marriage became a recluse. In the years up to World War I he revolution ised the methods of insurance agents, but in so doing, Rossiter feels, he became the busi nessman in his own .tastes and attitudes. In business, as in his ideas about art and politics, he was an idealist : Thoreau and Emer son were amongst his Transcendental her oes. It is usually claimed that Ives was able to see life whole, art and commerce, but Ros siter points out the separation that Ives practised so that only his music and his political views were unconventional.
Alongside much ably researched detail, with approaching 100 pages of notes On sources, some of Rossiter's judgments seem over-simplified. He follows the Ives saga through to ultimate recognition and reveals Ives' continual generosity right up to his death in 1954. Ives paid for many concerts of modern music by American organisations and supported publishing ventures whether concerned with his own music or not. He published some of his own works at his own expense around 1920 and it was by sending these out more or less at random that he began to find allies he had no other means of reaching. Rossiter claims that Ives could have found allies in New York's avant-garde especially after World War I but that he was prevented from doing so because such people would have been bohemian and thus socially unacceptable. Ives met and disliked Varese, an aggressive pioneer himself. In fact it was too late by the 1920s. Ives had written his music and the pattern of his relation to society had been unalterably fixed—these strands Rossiter expounds—and the resulting tensions had broken his health for good.
Charles Ives and His America ends by suggesting that Ives was as firmly conditioned by his background and its pressures as Soviet composers have been by the edicts of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. This conclusion comes in an epilogue which makes clear that it is Ives' role as businessman which conforms in the Soviet manner, not his music. This stimulating
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