Recital and Panel 5: Ives, the Concord Sonata,
and American Literature

Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2: Concord, Mass., 1840-60 is one of his most important works, with four movements on the writers Emerson, Hawthorne, The Alcotts, and Thoreau. Steven Mayer performs the sonata, accompanied by excerpts from Emerson, Ives, and Thoreau read by William Sharp. The performance is followed by the festival’s final interdisciplinary panel, with IU scholars from English and Comparative Literature joined by visiting scholars of American literature and musicology and the festival co-organizers, each giving a brief statement followed by a wide-ranging discussion.

Steven Mayer, piano
William Sharp, baritone and reader
Elizabeth Hile, flute

Discussants

Laura Dassow Walls (English, Notre Dame University)
Denise Von Glahn (Musicology, Florida State University)
Christoph Irmscher (English, Indiana University):
David Michael Hertz (Comparative Literature, Indiana University):
Jonathan Elmer (English, Indiana University):
Joseph Horowitz

Respondents
Allen C. Guelzo (History, Princeton University)
J. Peter Burkholder

Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Thoreau (Henry David Thoreau, arr. 1915)

     William Sharp, baritone
     Steven Mayer, piano

     commentary by J. Peter Burkholder

Piano Sonata No. 2: Concord, Mass., 1840-60 (ca. 1916-19, rev. 1920s-40s)

     I. Emerson
     II. Hawthorne
     III. The Alcotts
     IV. Thoreau

     —with readings from Emerson, Thoreau, and Ives

     Steven Mayer, piano
     William Sharp, reader
     Elizabeth Hile, flute

Intermission

Panel 5: Ives, the Concord Sonata, and American Literature

Charles Ives’s links to American literature, like his links to American music and America at large, can help us unlock the past and our ongoing relationship to cultural memory. Most obviously, Ives connects to American writers via the Transcendentalists, as in the Concord Sonata. What, exactly, were these relationships, and what do they tell us? Less obviously, Ives links to a distinctive species of American literary genius: self-made and (as he would have been the first to acknowledge) “unfinished”; other pertinent names include Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, Faulkner—and Emerson himself.

Discussants

Laura Dassow Walls (English, Notre Dame University):
Ives, Thoreau, and the Tempo of Nature

Denise Von Glahn (Musicology, Florida State University):
Ives and Thoreau on Sound and Space

Christoph Irmscher (English, Indiana University):
The Music of the Transcendentalists

David Michael Hertz (Comparative Literature, Indiana University):
Ives, Emerson, Quotation, Originality

Jonathan Elmer (English, Indiana University):
“Singing New-Englandly”: Dickinson, Ives, and the Dislocation of Place

Joseph Horowitz:
Ives, Herman Melville, and the Self-Created “Unfinished” American Genius

Allen C. Guelzo (History, Princeton University), Respondent
J. Peter Burkholder, Respondent

Program note by Joseph Horowitz

Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2 maps the summit of the American keyboard literature. Titled Concord, Mass., 1840-60, it comprises four pieces (“Emerson,” “Hawthorne,” “The Alcotts,” and “Thoreau”), Ives explains, “called a sonata for want of a more exact name.” When he published the sonata in 1920, he issued a companion volume of Essays Before a Sonata, “written primarily as a preface or reason” for the sonata, describing sonata and essays together as “an attempt to present (one person’s) impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over a half century ago.” An original copy of Essays, signed by Ives (and by his six-year-old daughter Edith), is on display at the Cook Music Library.

Ives also writes: “A working woman after coming from one of [Emerson’s] lectures said: ‘I love to go to hear Emerson, not because I understand him, but because he looks as though he thought everybody was as good as he was.’” While fabulously popular, Emerson’s lectures, with their high-pitched, idiosyncratic rhetoric, could also be fabulously elusive. This combination of elevated climes and lowly realities is Emersonian and (especially) Ivesian. “Like all courageous souls,” Ives writes, “the higher Emerson soars, the more lowly he becomes.” Emerson himself says, “I embrace the common. I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.” The resulting breadth is ecumenical, universal. It girds character. It limns an immanent divinity.

Ives contrasts Puritan orthodoxies with Emerson’s vagueness, which is also a vastness. Emerson “wrings the neck of any law.” His “messages are all vital, as much, by reason of his indefiniteness, as in spite of it.” These observations fit Ives’s music generally, and his dense, vaulting “Emerson” movement specifically. There is no key signature. There is no sonata form. There are few barlines. The trajectory is torrential: an onslaught of questing dissonant ascents in the treble, amplified— rather than anchored—by plunging octaves in the bass. The quieter sections, which Ives described as evoking Emerson’s verse in contrast to his prose, are roughly homespun: parlor piano strains nervously alive to philosophic impulse.

Movement two of the Concord Sonata is “Hawthorne.” For Ives the essayist, Hawthorne’s fundamental theme is the influence of sin upon the conscience.  Ives’s musical portrait, however, fastens on matter more corporeal: the poet of the supernatural. The movement begins with a diaphanous evocation of Berkshire frost, but instantly turns rambunctious. Its phantasmagoric leaps and lunges discover a churchyard haunted by hymns and distant bells, a circus parade, the locomotive lurch of Hawthorne’s demonic “celestial railroad,” and—lustily sung or dismembered—Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.

“The Alcotts,” coming next, is the shortest and simplest of the Concord movements, a hymn to ordinary things. Writing of the Alcott house, Ives finds “a kind of homely but beautiful witness to Concord’s common virtue,” a “spiritual sturdiness underlying its quaint picturesqueness,” overtones that “tell us that there must have been something aesthetic fibered in the Puritan severity.” And he mentions Scotch airs and family hymns sung within, and the parlor piano “on which Beth . . . played at the Fifth Symphony.” In “The Alcotts,” a four-note “Beethoven’s Fifth” motto surmounts quaint domestic trappings—and scales C major heights as sonorous and sublime as Bronson Alcott’s thoughts. Ives in later years sometimes expressed impatience with the tunefulness, plainness, and consonance of this great cameo. His own performance, recorded in 1943, is unsentimental, excitable, and quick; but the climax—romantically rapturous and broad—tells all.

Twice in this movement—at the end of the first section, and in pounding Beethoven chords at the end—we hear in its complete form what Ives called “that human faith melody—transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast and the cynic, respectively—reflecting an innate hope, a common interest in common things and common men—a tune the Concord bards are ever playing while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethoven-like sublimity.” Anticipated in fragments in “Emerson” and “Hawthorne,” gradually consolidated in “The Alcotts,” and recollected at the close of “Thoreau,” this melody links the four movements via four aspects of a common Concord theme.

Versus the transcendental ecstasies of “Emerson,” “Thoreau,” completing the sonata, is a contemplative nature ecstasy. Of a boat trip to Fair Haven pond, Thoreau writes:

The falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and I was soothed with an infinite stillness. . . . Vast hollows of silence stretched away on every side, and my being expanded in proportion, and filled them. Then first could I appreciate sound, and find it musical.

In Walden, Thoreau writes: “I wish to hear the silence of the night. . . . The silence rings; it is musical and thrills me.” And he reports the “faint,” “sweet” melodies of distant bells:

At a sufficient distance over the woods, this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre.

God-in-nature here translates into a transcendental ether, physically and metaphysically aquiver. Ives’s soft keyboard clusters and arpeggios, rendered with “both pedals . . . used almost constantly,” distill music from Walden mists. 

Ives’s “Thoreau” essay offers a corresponding programmatic vignette. It is Indian summer. The poet sits in his sun-drenched doorway, “rapt in reverie.” “His meditations are interrupted only by the faint sound of the Concord bell,” windswept over the water. As night falls, he plays his flute. Ives’s bells are tolling octaves in the bass. The flute—and Ives supplies an optional flute part—plays the sonata’s “human faith melody,” a sublimation of the omnipresent Beethoven theme, echoing its earlier full and fragmentary appearances. A final whispered five-octave ascent, a final bell echo, a final ghost image of the four-note Beethoven rhythm, and the music vaporizes.

With its “higher” and “more lowly” strains sustained in equipoise, the Concord Sonata embodies an Ivesian ideal. Its raptures and grit, its hymns and bands, are evanescent and earthy, sublime and egalitarian.

—Adapted from Joseph Horowitz’s “Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle” (2012)