Ives Sacred Choral Music

Ives worked as a church organist from February 1889 (when he was 14) through June 1902. Throughout those years, he wrote sacred choral music in the late Romantic style, represented here by the anthem Crossing the Bar and the cantata The Celestial Country. In his last two positions, where he was choirmaster as well as organist, he also composed sacred works for choir, such as Psalm 67 and Psalm 100, that explored new techniques and were probably tried out in rehearsal but never sung in services. Two decades later, he drew on numerous new techniques in Psalm 90, often regarded as his choral masterpiece. The Contemporary Vocal Ensemble NOTUS performs, conducted by Dominick DiOrio and two student conductors, and J. Peter Burkholder provides commentary on each piece.

October 8, 2024

Auer Hall

Dominick DiOrio, director and conductor
Joseph Parr, organ
Benjamin Wegner, conductor
Evelyn Rohrbach, organ
Destin Wernicke, organ
Gabriel Fanelli, conductor
Preston Rogers, baritone
Gabriela Martinez, soprano
Veronica Siebert, mezzo soprano
Paul Chi-En Chao, tenor
Tyley Whitney, bass
Scott Andy Boggs, tenor
Hayden Ives-Glasgow, organ
J. Peter Burkholder, commentary
NOTUS Contemporary Vocal Ensemble

Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Psalm 100 (ca. 1902)

     Dominick DiOrio, conductor
     Joseph Parr, organ

Crossing the Bar (Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ca. 1894)

     Benjamin Wegner, conductor
     Evelyn Rohrbach, organ

Psalm 90 (1923-24)

     Dominick DiOrio, conductor
     Destin Wernicke, organ

Psalm 67 (ca. 1898-99)

     Gabriel Fanelli, conductor

The Celestial Country (1898-1902)
1. Prelude, Trio, and Chorus: Lento—Allegro moderato
2. Aria for Baritone: Moderato cantabile
     Preston Rogers, baritone
3. Quartet, accompanied: Moderato con spirito
     Gabriela Martinez, soprano
     Veronica Siebert, mezzo soprano
     Paul Chi-En Chao, tenor
     Tyley Whitney, bass
4. Intermezzo for String Quartet: Adagio—Tempo di scherzo
5. Double Quartet, a cappella: Allegretto con spirito
6. Aria for Tenor: Allegretto con moto
     Scott Andy Boggs, tenor
7. Chorale and Finale: Largo—Allegro moderato
     
     Dominick DiOrio, conductor
     Hayden Ives-Glasgow, organ

From February 1889, when he was fourteen, through June 1902, Charles Ives was a professional church organist. He was something of a prodigy; when he moved from the Second Congregational Church in his home town of Danbury (Connecticut) to the Second Baptist Church on his fifteenth birthday, the Danbury Evening News reported that he was “the youngest organist in the state.” He went on to prestigious posts at Episcopal and Congregational churches in New Haven and Presbyterian churches in Bloomfield (New Jersey) and New York City.

Throughout, Ives wrote sacred choral music for services in the late Romantic style of the era. At his last two posts, where he was choirmaster as well as organist, he grew more ambitious and experimental, writing pieces for the choir that explored new techniques—and, given their dissonances and difficulty, were probably tried out in rehearsal but never sung during church services. Many of these are psalms, whose structure as a series of verses lends itself to varying the texture and figuration from one verse to the next.

One such piece is Psalm 100 (ca. 1902), scored for two choirs: one of treble voices and one of mixed voices. The first two verses “make a joyful noise” as the treble choir sounds a major chord and the others dance around it. In the third verse, the mixed chorus loudly announces that “the Lord, he is God,” marching down the chromatic scale repeating a two-chord pattern, while the trebles sing a soft descant above. Next the mixed choir offers praise and thanksgiving in familiar harmonies while the trebles add soft dissonant echoes. The psalm ends triumphantly with a return to the opening music, now with chimes added.

Crossing the Bar (ca. 1894) exemplifies Ives’s anthems in traditional style. The harmonies are lush and often chromatic but fully tonal, and the music is perfectly tailored to the text. The poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, pictures death as embarking on a sea voyage with the hope of seeing “my Pilot face to face.”

Psalm 90 (1923-24) is often regarded as Ives’s masterpiece for choir. He certainly thought so; according to John Kirkpatrick, who edited much of Ives’s music for publication, “Mrs. Ives recalled his saying that it was the only one of his works that he was satisfied with.” The psalm contrasts God’s eternal presence, represented by a low organ note that repeats throughout, with human frailty, suffering, sinfulness, and mortality, captured in a variety of dissonant musical ideas. It culminates in a plea for mercy, gladness, and beauty, conveyed through beautiful sonorities, sparkling bells, and gentle melodies. At the end, when the choir prays “establish thou the work of our hands upon us,” they sing in the old familiar style of the anthems Ives composed in the 1890s, a moving allusion to the time when his church music was literally “the work of his hands” as organist and composer.

Psalm 67 (ca. 1898-99) is an early experiment, using new techniques to recreate familiar styles of church music through novel, dissonant sounds. The first two verses, asking for mercy and blessing, resemble Anglican chant, a sober style of choral recitation with a melody in the top voice supported by chords in the others. But instead of traditional harmonies, Ives accompanies his melody with a five-note chord presented in a series of different transpositions and spacings. A call to praise God leads to another traditional style remade in a modern idiom; at the words “O let the nations be glad and sing for joy,” the upper voices echo the lower voices in imitative polyphony, suggesting the sound of multitudes in joyful song. The call to praise God repeats, and the last two verses recall the first two, looking to the future for blessings.

Ives’s longest and most ambitious choral work is The Celestial Country (1898- 1902), a cantata in seven movements in late Romantic style. He modeled it in part on cantatas he had performed by Dudley Buck, a leading church composer of the time with whom Ives had taken organ lessons, but also on the oratorio Hora novissima by his composition teacher at Yale, Horatio Parker. Ives’s cantata shares with Parker’s oratorio a similar subject, a vision of a heavenly city, as well as types of movement it contains, opening and closing with chorus and including solo arias and movements for vocal quartet and for voices without accompaniment. Ives also borrowed ideas from Parker; for example, his third movement shares the same tempo, triple meter, key, and form as Parker’s third movement and features in the middle section the same distinctive rhythm as Parker, alternating measures of three and four beats. Most unusual in Ives’s cantata is an entirely instrumental movement, an intermezzo for string quartet at the center of the work, like the keystone of an arch.

Ives led the first performance of The Celestial Country on April 18, 1902, in an evening concert at New York’s Central Presbyterian Church, where he was organist and choirmaster. The reviewer in the Musical Courier noted that “an audience completely filling the church listened with expressions of pleasure, and at the close the composer was overwhelmed with congratulations, which he accepted in modest fashion.” The concert was both the climax of his career as a church musician and the end of it. A week later he resigned his position, his last paid job in music.

Ives never wrote another piece like The Celestial Country. His long experience as organist provided a strong foundation for his later compositions, and his cantata shows his mastery of traditional styles and techniques. But he found his individual voice in writing pieces that blended classical, popular, church, and experimental traditions and celebrated American songs, hymns, history, places, and literature, and it was these works—music we have been hearing during this festival, from the Second and Third Symphonies through Three Places in New England and the Concord Sonata—that ultimately made his reputation.