Ives Chamber and Chamber Orchestra Works

Ives often grouped miniatures in sets, and this concert by the New Music Ensemble includes two sets for chamber orchestra and one for string quartet (joined by bass or piano for one movement each). Also on the program are his Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for two pianos tuned a quarter tone apart. The concert concludes with Ives’s Central Park in the Dark, his “picture-in-sounds” of the sounds of nature gradually obscured by music and other sounds of human activity until those suddenly stop and we hear again nature’s “night sounds and silent darkness.” James B. Sinclair, Paul Borg, and Derek J. Myler present commentary.

October 3, 2024

Auer Hall

New Music Ensemble
David Dzubay, director and conductor

Kuttner Quartet
Arthur Trælnes, violin
Gabriel Fedak, violin
Seung A Jung, viola
John Sample, cello
John Woodward, double bass
Aaron Wonson, piano

Piano Duo
Paul Borg & Kimberly Carballo

Commentary
James B. Sinclair
Paul Borg 
Derek J. Myler

Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Set for Theatre Orchestra (assembled/reworked ca. 1915)

   I. In the Cage
   II. In the Inn (Potpourri)
   III. In the Night

commentary by James B. Sinclair

Set No. 6: From the Side Hill (ca. 1925-30?)

   I. Mists
   II. The Rainbow
   III. Afterglow
   IV. Evening

commentary by Paul Borg

Three Quarter-Tone Pieces (1923-24)

   I. Largo, very slowly
   II. Allegro
   III. Chorale: Adagio, very slowly

   Kim Carballo and Paul Borg, piano duo

A Set of Three Short Pieces (assembled ca. 1935)

   I. Largo cantabile: Hymn (ca. 1907-8)
   II. Scherzo: Holding Your Own! (1903-4)
   III. Adagio cantabile: The Innate (ca. 1908)

   Kuttner Quartet
   Arthur Traelnes and Gabriel Fedak, violins
   Seung A Jung, viola
   John Sample, cello
   John Woodward, bass
   Aaron Wonson, piano
   commentary by Derek J. Myler

Central Park in the Dark (ca. 1909, rev. ca. 1936)

Derek J. Myler’s presence is made possible by the Music Theory Five Friends Master Class Series honoring Robert Samels.

Program note by James B. Sinclair

Charles Ives was a master of miniatures. His output of shorter pieces, which average merely a minute and a half, includes 184 songs and dozens of brilliant instrumental inspirations, many of which he grouped together in “sets.” For Ives, a set, often in three movements, was the perfect answer to his diverse creations. These sets include the three larger Orchestral Sets (the first of which is Ives’s Three Places in New England), ten Sets for Chamber Orchestra, the Set for Theatre Orchestra, and A Set of Three Short Pieces for chamber ensembles.

In all, there are some thirty “set” designations. Ives fairly owned the genre. It gave him freedom, allowed serendipity, and invited surprising juxtapositions and stimulating thematic titling (such as “The Other Side of Pioneering, or Side Lights on American Enterprise,” and “Water Colors”).

The Set for Theatre Orchestra begins with “In the Cage,” an instrumental version of Ives’s song The Cage, to a prose text by Ives himself:

A leopard went around his cage from one side back to the other side; he stopped only when the keeper came around with meat. A boy who had been there three hours began to wonder, “Is life anything like that?”

Ives wrote in his Memos that the movement was a result of taking a walk one hot summer afternoon in Central Park with [Yale classmates] Bart Yung [whose father was Chinese] and George Lewis . . . when we were all living together at 65 Central Park West [New York City] in 1906 (or before). Sitting on a bench near the menagerie, watching the leopard’s cage and a little boy (who had apparently been a long time watching the leopard)— this aroused Bart’s Oriental fatalism—hence the text in the score and in the song. . . . A drum is supposed to be the leopard’s feet going pro and con.

The second movement, “In the Inn,” uses the first of Ives’s Four Ragtime Dances as a platform for capturing the old theatre orchestra practice of adding popular tunes on top of given compositions; the movement is thus subtitled Potpourri. Ives uses the hymn tunes Bringing in the Sheaves and Welcome Voice for the main thematic material and the popular songs After the Ball, Push dem Clouds Away, Reuben and Rachel, and Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay for added spice.

The third movement, “In the Night,” is a quiet elegy. A distant mesh of sound surrounds the horn intoning an old song that, as Ives wrote, “is suggested in a general way.” As the song ends, a solo cello adds the beginning of a hymn: “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens . . . ” and the music fades away.

Set No. 6: From the Side Hill combines four atmospheric songs as orchestrated by Ives through markings in one of his personal copies of 114 Songs. While the chosen songs or their precursors date from 1914-21, Ives’s orchestrational mark-up was done in the late 1920s. Ives remembered his father playing songs on basset horn or trombone, having passed out the words to the audience, “who were expected to read the words and sing silently with him.” Ives made instrumental versions of these and other songs in that spirit.

Mists (Harmony Twichell Ives)

Low lie the mists;
they hide each hill and dell;
The grey skies weep
with us who bid farewell.
But happier days
through memory weave a spell,
And bring new hope
to hearts who bid farewell.

The Rainbow (William Wordsworth)

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Afterglow (James Fenimore Cooper, Jr.)

At the quiet close of day
Gently yet the willows sway;
When the sunset light is low,
Lingers still the afterglow.
Beauty tarries loth to die,
Every lightest fantasy
Lovelier grows in memory,
Where the truer beauties lie.

Evening (John Milton)

Now came still evening on, and twilight gray
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompanied, for the beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests
Were slunk, but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence is pleased.

In the mid-1920s, Ives fashioned Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for a two-manual quarter-tone piano, then recast them for two pianos, Piano 2 sounding a quarter tone lower than Piano 1. He based the second and third movements on some earlier pieces. Ives became convinced that the future of music needed a broader harmonic language and wrote an impressive essay on the possibilities of quarter-tone music.

Ives probably assembled A Set of Three Short Pieces in 1935, bringing together a diverse group of brief chamber works he composed ca. 1903-8. The first movement, for string quartet and double bass, is based on two hymns, More Love to Thee and Olivet (“My faith looks up to Thee”). For the second movement, Ives cobbled together his ragtime-like Scherzo for String Quartet with his Practice for String Quartet in Holding Your Own! for a middle section, and borrowed a clutch of tunes: Bringing in the Sheaves, Massa’s in the Cold Ground, My Old Kentucky Home, Sailor’s Hornpipe, and Streets of Cairo. The third movement, for string quartet with piano, hints at Come, Thou Fount of Ev’ry Blessing, then finally states a complete phrase of the hymn at the end.

Part of the remarkable work Central Park in the Dark dates from 1906 (“Runaway [cab horse] smashes into fence”), but overall it appears to have been composed in 1909. Ives sometimes appended to the title “(in the Good Ole Summer Time).” It shares with his famed The Unanswered Question the use of the strings as an independent stratum. He later paired the pieces as Two Contemplations (the present work as “A Contemplation of Nothing Serious”), and they premiered together in 1946. For over three decades Ives lived across from or close to Central Park in New York City. Ives characterized his strings’ ten-measure chord cycle as “night sounds” that feel redolent of the heavy, humid night air. Over this come “sounds from the Casino over the pond,” of “street singers,” and of “pianolas having a ragtime war.” As the human sounds begin to drown out “the sounds of nature,” the winds, pianos, and percussion accelerate away from the prevailing tempo. After a climax, a sudden hush: “again the darkness is heard—an echo over the pond—and we walk home.”