Models and Sources: Ives Songs and the Music That Inspired Them

More than two dozen student singers, joined by faculty and student pianists, present a concert that compares Ives songs with the music he based them on. The first half of the concert contrasts songs by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and others with Ives’s settings of the same texts, where Ives always sought a different reading of the poetry alongside subtle allusions to his model. The second half pairs seven Ives songs with the hymns and popular songs he used as sources, transforming what he borrowed to suggest meanings that could not be conveyed in any other way.

October 7, 2024

Auer Hall

Rachel Dunbar, mezzo soprano  
Allan Armstrong, piano
Mitchell Widmer, baritone
Watcharit Kerdchuen, piano
Tiara Abraham, soprano
Soo Hyun Ryu, soprano
Elijah Bowen, tenor
Ray Hootman, soprano
Ting-Ting Yang, piano  
Evan Gunter, baritone
Sarah Schott, soprano
Talinaiya Bao, soprano
Maddox Realejo, piano
Samantha Whitaker, soprano      
Itsuki Nagamine, piano
Jonathan Elmore, tenor      
Ruby Miller, soprano      
Yi-Hsuan Su, piano
Brittany Weinstock, soprano      
Lila Goldstein, soprano      
Ron Kalinovsky, bass

 

Peter Cornelius (1824-1874)
Ein Ton, from Trauer und Trost, Op. 3, No. 3 (1854, lyrics by Peter Cornelius)

     Mitchell Widmer, baritone
     Watcharit Kerdchuen, piano

Charles Ives
Ein Ton (ca. 1900)

     Tiara Abraham, soprano
     Watcharit Kerdchuen, piano

 

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Ich grolle nicht, from Dichterliebe, Op. 48, No. 7 (1840, lyrics by Heinrich Heine)

     Soo Hyun Ryu, soprano
     Allan Armstrong, piano

Charles Ives
Ich grolle nicht (ca. 1898-99, rev. ca. 1900-1901)

     Elijah Bowen, tenor
     Allan Armstrong, piano

 

Benjamin Godard (1849-1895)
Chanson de Florian (lyrics by Jean Pierre Claris de Florian)

     Ray Hootman, soprano
     Ting-Ting Yang, piano

Charles Ives
Chanson de Florian (ca. 1898)

     Evan Gunter, baritone
     Ting-Ting Yang, piano

 

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Wandrers Nachtlied, D. 768 (ca. 1824, lyrics by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

     Sarah Schott, soprano
     Allan Armstrong, piano

Charles Ives
Ilmenau (ca. 1901)
Over All the Treetops (Harmony Twichell, 1907)

     Talinaiya Bao, soprano
     Maddox Realejo, piano

 

Robert Schumann
Die Lotosblume, from Myrthen, Op. 25, No. 7 (1840, lyrics by Heinrich Heine)

     Samantha Whitaker, soprano
     Itsuki Nagamine, piano

Charles Ives
Die Lotosblume (ca. 1897-98, rev. ca. 1900-1901 and ca. 1908-9)
The South Wind (Harmony Twichell, 1908)

     Jonathan Elmore, tenor
     Itsuki Nagamine, piano

 

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Wiegenlied, Op. 49, No. 4 (1868, lyrics by anonymous and Georg Scherer)

     Ruby Miller, soprano
     Yi-Hsuan Su, piano

Charles Ives
Berceuse (Charles Ives, arr. ca. 1903 or ca. 1920)

     Brittany Weinstock, soprano
     Yi-Hsuan Su, piano

 

Trad. American (music)
A Cowboy’s Death (1891, lyrics by D. J. O’Malley, to the tune The Lake of Pontchartrain)

     Lila Goldstein, soprano
     Allan Armstrong, piano

Charles Ives
Charlie Rutlage (arr. 1920 or 1921)

     Ron Kalinovsky, bass
     Allan Armstrong, piano

Intermission

Sources

Hymn
Nearer, My God, to Thee (1859, lyrics by Sarah Flower Adams, music by Lowell Mason)

     Ensemble

Charles Ives
Down East (1919)

     Eva Wilhelm, soprano
     Allan Armstrong, piano

Michael Nolan (1868?-1910)
Little Annie Rooney (1890, lyrics by Michael Nolan)

     Ensemble

Charles Ives
Waltz (ca. 1894-95, rev. 1921)

     Juliana Statile, soprano
     Allan Armstrong, piano

Hymn
Immortal Love, Forever Full (1855, lyrics by John Greenleaf Whittier, music arr. from William V. Wallace)

     Ensemble

Charles Ives
Serenity (John Greenleaf Whittier, arr. 1919)

     Eva Wilhelm, soprano
     Allan Armstrong, piano

The Rainbow (So May It Be) (William Wordsworth, arr. 1921)

     Veronica Siebert, mezzo soprano
     Allan Armstrong, piano

Hymn
Come, Thou Fount of Ev’ry Blessing (ca. 1812, lyrics by Robert Robinson, music by Asahel Nettleton or John Wyeth)

     Ensemble

Charles Ives
The Innate (arr. 1916)

     Juliana Statile, soprano
     Allan Armstrong, piano

Pat Rooney (1844-1892)
Are You the O’Reilly? (1882, lyrics by Pat Rooney)

     Asher Ramaly, tenor
     Josh Catanzaro, piano

Charles Ives
The Side Show (ca. 1896, arr. 1921)

     Lauren Smedberg, mezzo soprano
     Allan Armstrong, piano

Hymn
There Is a Fountain (lyrics by William Cowper, early nineteenth-century melody, arr. by Lowell Mason)

     Ensemble

Charles Ives
General William Booth Enters into Heaven (Vachel Lindsay, 1914)

     Sam Witmer, baritone
     Allan Armstrong, piano

Composers often respond to music by others, borrowing ideas or making something different with the same material. The first half of this concert pairs songs by Charles Ives with songs he used as models, and the second half illustrates ways he drew source material from hymns and popular songs.

The young Mozart once wrote to his father that he had set to music an aria text already “beautifully composed” by Johann Christian Bach: “Just because I know Bach’s setting so well and like it so much, and because it is always ringing in my ears, I wished to try and see whether in spite of all this I could not write an aria totally unlike his.” As Ives was learning to compose, he often tried the same exercise.

For his early song Rock of Ages, Ives took the text of Augustus Toplady’s hymn, well known in the 1830 setting by Thomas Hastings, and set it for vocal soloist in an up-to-date 1890s style.

While trying to master the style and challenges of composing art songs, Ives wrote several songs to German lyrics previously set by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and other composers. Comparing Ives’s German songs to the original settings shows both how deeply he absorbed the language of Romantic art song and how shrewdly he distinguished each song from its model.

In Peter Cornelius’s poem “Ein Ton,” the speaker hears a tone in his heart, asks if it is the sound of his beloved’s last breath or the funeral bell that rang for her, and swears it sounds as clearly as if her spirit sang to quiet his grief. In Cornelius’s setting, the singer recites on a single pitch, literally “ein Ton,” leaving the melody to the piano. Ives could not imitate this clever text-painting without duplicating Cornelius’s one-note tune, so he reversed the roles of the piano and voice, giving a lyrical melody to the singer and suggesting the repeating tone through tolling bass notes, syncopated chords, and recurrent rolling figures in the piano. Ives emulates his model’s central concept without alluding to it overtly—a neat trick.

Robert Schumann’s Ich grolle nicht is moderately fast and loud, with pounding octaves and pulsating chords in the piano. Ives follows the structure of his model and uses similar rhythmic and melodic contours at several spots in the text, but offers a completely different interpretation. His version is softer, slower, and more lyrical, with more varied figuration. A striking difference is the treatment of the opening line (“I’ll not complain, although my heart may break”): defiant in Schumann’s setting, as if the speaker were trying to conceal his grief and wounded pride behind a laugh of triumph; tender and filled with an opposite but equally poignant irony in Ives’s song.

Among Ives’s songs to poems previously set by European composers are several in French, including Chanson de Florian (Song of Florian), modeled on the setting by Benjamin Godard.

By the early 1900s, Ives stopped resetting texts from European art songs and began to recast some of his German songs with English words. In 1907, his fiancée Harmony Twichell created an English translation for Ives’s Ilmenau, modeled on Schubert’s Wandrers Nachtlied to the same Goethe poem. In spring 1908, she wrote a new poem to fit the music of Ives’s song Die Lotosblume, originally modeled on Schumann’s setting; the new words are not a translation of the German poetry but embrace its theme of nature as a metaphor for love (or vice versa). Ives wrote his own words for Berceuse, adapted from his setting of the text from Brahms’s famous lullaby, whose gently rocking rhythm Ives echoes.

Charlie Rutlage is an unusual case, for Ives never knew the “model.” He found the words in John A. Lomax’s collection of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, published in 1911. The original poem, written by D. J. O’Malley to be sung to the old tune The Lake of Pontchartrain, appeared in 1891 in the Stock Growers’ Journal of Miles City, Montana. By the time Lomax heard the song from a cowboy in Texas, it had been passed down orally for long enough that the name of the author had been forgotten and many words had changed. Ives’s setting captures the spirit of a cowboy song, mimicking the pluck and strum of a guitar in the piano and recitational singing style in the voice. Since Lomax did not print or identify the melody, it is startling how similar the opening of Ives’s song is to the original.

Ives often incorporated hymn tunes and popular songs in his music, transforming what he borrowed. The remaining songs on tonight’s recital use references to other music to suggest meanings that could not be conveyed in any other way. 

Down East recalls home and songs played on the family pump organ, memories that draw out our best and give us hope. The lilting melody paraphrases Lowell Mason’s hymn Nearer, My God, to Thee, quoted near the end.

Waltz is Ives’s response to Michael Nolan’s hit Little Annie Rooney, a breezy, sentimental song about courting Annie from the perspective of “her Joe.” Ives imagines their wedding day, using images of “the whirling throng, moved with wine and song,” and musical references to Nolan’s song to suggest the power of popular songs to cloud our vision with sentiment and intoxicate us with high spirits.

The hymn tune Serenity, adapted from a melody by Irish composer William V. Wallace, is paired most often with words by Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, Immortal Love, Forever Full. Ives’s song Serenity, named after Wallace’s tune, sets two stanzas from another Whittier poem in a meditative style over two alternating chords. Ives derived these chords and the first phrase of each stanza from the opening notes and chords in Wallace’s Serenity, which are quoted directly at the end of each stanza. In The Rainbow (So May It Be!), to words by William Wordsworth, Ives evokes the exultation of seeing a rainbow with thick chords and an arching melody, then paraphrases Wallace’s hymn tune to create a contemplative, reverent mood.

The Innate uses cumulative form, in which the main theme is stated in full only near the end, after being fragmented and developed. Here the theme is the first phrase of Come, Thou Fount of Ev’ry Blessing, whose gradual emergence parallels the growing sense of commitment in Ives’s text.

The Side Show originated as a fraternity show joke. Ives takes the refrain of Pat Rooney’s comic waltz song Are You the O’Reilly and, by dropping a beat from every second measure, gradually transforms the tune into the quintuple-time waltz theme from Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony (the “Russian dance” mentioned in Ives’s text), slyly suggesting that the the symphony theme is little more than a deformed rendition of a popular song.

General William Booth Enters into Heaven sets Vachel Lindsay’s poem on the death of the Salvation Army’s founder. Lindsay imagines Booth beating a bass drum as he enters Heaven leading a parade of souls he had saved, and Ives imitates drumming with dissonant chords in the piano. Lindsay took his poem’s meter and repeating question from the gospel hymn Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb? Ives paraphrased parts of his vocal melody from another hymn with similar imagery, There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood. Ives gives each group of Booth’s followers a different musical characterization. When the parade arrives at the center of Heaven, which Lindsay imagines as a grand courthouse square, Jesus blesses the marchers, and all are made whole. In an apt musical metaphor, the singer uses the whole verse melody of Fountain for this moment of transformation, over drum patterns in the piano. The poem’s recurring question returns in the familiar harmony of a hymn, asking us to consider our own faith in light of Booth’s example, and the parade fades into the distance.