Charles Ives: A Life in Music

Charles Ives: A Life in Music is a theater piece by Joseph Horowitz that tells the story of Ives’s life and career through narration, ten of his songs, and readings drawn from newspapers, letters, and his writings, performed by baritone William Sharp with pianist Steven Mayer and actor Caroline Goodwin. As this was the opening event of the festival, it began with messages of welcome from the dean of the Jacobs School of Music and the co-organizers of the festival.

September 30, 2024

Auer Hall

William Sharp, baritone
Steven Mayer, piano
Caroline Goodwin, actor
Joseph Horowitz, writer and producer

Program note by Joseph Horowitz and J. Peter Burkholder

Tonight’s program uses a selection of songs by Charles Ives to tell the story of his life. Our singer, William Sharp, has for decades been the supreme exponent of these songs. The songs themselves partake of a body of work, almost 200 Ives songs in all, unsurpassed by any other American composer of “art songs”—if in fact Ives’s songs can be called that. They are singular and unclassifiable, and remarkably varied in topic and style. No generalization adequately describes them.

Ives published 114 of them in 1922 and distributed hundreds of free copies, one of which is currently on display at the Cook Music Library. He intended the book to represent his entire career as a songwriter, arranging it in roughly reverse order from his most recent to his earliest (1887). Many of the songs are to his own words or to poems by his wife Harmony; others set poetry in German, French, or Latin and in English from Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats to his own American contemporaries. In the three years before the collection appeared, he wrote some forty-five songs, twenty-two entirely new and the rest adapted from his own earlier music, including works for chorus or for instrumental ensembles. Ives scholar H. Wiley Hitchcock has suggested that he made the arrangements to “display as many of his earlier types of music as possible to a public that, up to then, had experienced almost none.”

Although 114 Songs was savaged by a reviewer in the Musical Courier, the songs began to find performers and audiences, in a trickle that gradually became a stream. A few were premiered in Danbury, New York, and New Orleans in the 1920s. A landmark performance of seven Ives songs, selected and extolled by Aaron Copland, was heard at the Yaddo Festival in 1932, with Copland at the piano. More performances followed in the 1930s, in San Francisco, Dresden, Vienna, Paris, and elsewhere, culminating in the first all-Ives concert in February 1939 at New York’s Town Hall, which included thirteen Ives songs sung by Mina Hager accompanied by John Kirkpatrick.

Recordings of Ives’s songs began to appear in the 1930s, and in 1954 the first all- Ives song recording was issued, featuring soprano Helen Boatwright and John Kirkpatrick. Among the most influential Ives song recordings are two released in 1976, by the American team of mezzo soprano Jan DeGaetani and pianist Gilbert Kalish, and by German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau accompanied by Michael Ponti. The first recording of Ives’s complete songs came out in 1995, featuring four singers including William Sharp and Mary Ann Hart. Yet even today Ives’s songs are far from being as well known as they should be, given their wit, poetic insight, and astonishing range of style, sound, and emotion.

Ives’s own 1922 introduction to his 114 Songs reveals a great deal about the songs and their composer. He writes in part:

An interest in any art-activity, from poetry to baseball, is better, broadly speaking, if held as a part of life. . . . [It] may have a better chance to be more natural, more comprehensive, perhaps, freer, and so more tolerant—it may develop more muscle in the hind legs and so find a broader vantage ground for jumping to the top of a fence, and more interest in looking around.

To explain the impulse to create a book of his songs, Ives quotes from James M. Bailey’s introduction to Life in Danbury, a collection of his writings as founder and editor of the Danbury News:

“Various authors have various reasons for bringing out a book. . . . Some have written a book for money; I have not. Some for fame; I have not. Some for love; I have not. Some for kindlings; I have not. . . . In fact, gentle borrower, I have not written a book at all”—I have merely cleaned house.

Just as Bailey “wrote” his book by clipping from his newspaper, Ives created a musical autobiography by assembling songs written over thirty-five years. This evening’s presentation includes a sampling, interwoven with reminiscences, letters, and stories from a life in music.