Band Showcase: An Ives Extravaganza!

Charles Ives’s father was a bandleader in the Civil War and in his home town of Danbury, Connecticut, and Ives grew up with band music. This concert by the Concert Band and Symphonic Band presents marches he wrote for band and works by Ives that have been arranged for band, including pieces that capture his memories of bands, band music, and other music of Danbury in the late nineteenth century. Jason Nam, Eric Smedley, and two students conduct, and J. Peter Burkholder offers context.

Charles Ives (1874-1954) 

March “Intercollegiate” (ca. 1895), edited and arr. Keith Brion 

   Concert Band 
   Jacob Kessler, conductor 

Welcome from Abra Bush 

David Henry Jacobs, Bicentennial Dean of the Jacobs School of Music 

Old Home Days Suite, arr. Jonathan Elkus 

   1. Waltz (ca. 1894-95, rev. 1921) 
   2. (a) The Opera House (from Memories, 1897) 
       (b) Old Home Day (Chorus, ca. 1920) 
   3. The Collection (1920) 
   4. Slow March (ca. 1887, rev. 1921)
   5. London Bridge Is Fallen Down! (ca. 1891) 

They Are There! (1942), arr. James B. Sinclair 

Variations on “America” (ca. 1891-92, rev. ca. 1909-10 and ca. 1949), arr. Tiffany Galus 

   Concert Band 
   Jason H. Nam, conductor 

Themes and events of the festival Charles Ives at 150   
   Joseph Horowitz, festival co-organizer 

Fugue in C Major (ca. 1898), arr. James B. Sinclair 

Finale from Symphony No. 2 (ca. 1902-9), arr. Jonathan Elkus 

Decoration Day (ca. 1912-20, rev. ca. 1923-24), arr. Jonathan Elkus 

   Symphonic Band 
   Eric Smedley, conductor 

March “Omega Lambda Chi” (1895-96), edited and arr. Keith Brion 

   Symphonic Band 
   Ally Capone, conductor 

Program note by J. Peter Burkholder

Charles Ives had a lifelong affinity for bands, band music, and band musicians. His father, George Ives (1845-1894), was the youngest bandleader in the Union Army during the Civil War and later directed the leading amateur band in his home town of Danbury, Connecticut. As a boy, Charles Ives played drums in his father’s band. He came to know from the inside what amateur bands and band musicians were like, combining high spirits and love of music with sometimes less than perfect playing.

In his teens and twenties, Ives composed several pieces for band, but only two survive complete: the marches that begin and end tonight’s program. Yet he often celebrated bands and band music in his songs, piano pieces, and orchestral works, and we will hear several examples this week. His embrace of the sounds and spirit of band music has endeared him to band musicians, and many of his works have been transcribed for band.

March “Intercollegiate” earned its name because in the second strain, repeated at the end, the trombones and baritone horn play the popular song Annie Lisle, better known as the tune many colleges and universities use for their Alma Mater— including Hail to Old IU, sung here at every graduation ceremony. Nineteenth-century marches often included a popular tune. This march was an early success for Ives, published in 1896 and played in Washington D.C. by the combined forces of the New Haven Band and the Washington Marine Band on March 4, 1897, during the festivities for William McKinley’s inauguration as president.

Old Home Days is a suite assembled by Jonathan Elkus and transcribed from several Ives songs. As a group, the movements hint at the variety of musical types Ives grew up hearing: a waltz song, an operetta, a march, a hymn, a funeral march, and an experiment in playing in two keys at once.

They Are There! started life as a 1917 song in which Ives framed the American effort in World War I, not as a fight against Germany or Germans, but as part of a long struggle for “Liberty for all,” “in a world where all may have a ‘say’”—a struggle that included the 1848 revolutions for democracy in Germany, whose failure spurred many Germans to emigrate to the United States, and the American Civil War, fought to end slavery. Ives reinforced that link by quoting or paraphrasing several Civil War songs. In 1942 Ives updated the song for the fight against Hitler, envisioning “a People’s World Nation,” and Lou Harrison orchestrated it for unison chorus and orchestra. James B. Sinclair, who is with us for this week’s festival, arranged it for band.

Ives was seventeen and already a highly skilled organist when he wrote Variations on “America” for organ and premiered it in February 1892. Two brief polytonal interludes were added later (ca. 1909-10). In its arrangement for band, it has become one of the most frequently played pieces in the American band repertoire. After an introduction that hints at but never quite gives us the theme, we finally hear “My country, ’tis of Thee” in four-part harmony. Each variation that follows has a distinctive character, and the last leads to a climactic finale. Tonight’s performance features a new arrangement for band by Jacobs faculty member Tiffany Galus.

The Fugue in C Major is James Sinclair’s transcription of the opening movement of Ives’s First String Quartet, which will appear on Friday evening’s concert by the Pacifica Quartet. The piece unfolds as a grand elaboration of Lowell Mason’s Missionary Hymn. The hymn’s first two phrases, which begin alike but have different continuations, are treated in fugue style. The contrasting third phrase bursts forth at the climax, and the final phrase is set as a kind of chorale.

On Saturday night’s concert, the IU Philharmonic Orchestra will perform Ives’s complete Second Symphony, a masterful fusion of the European symphonic tradition with American popular music and hymns. Tonight as an appetizer we hear the finale. Like many symphony movements, this has a sprightly first theme and a lyrical, contemplative second theme. Both are adapted from songs by Stephen Foster, the first from Camptown Races and the second from the sentimental parlor song Old Black Joe; Ives commented in a letter that the movement was “a reflection [of] the days before the Civil War” and “a kind of expression of Stephen Foster’s sadness for slavery.” Along the way we hear dance tunes, a march, and Reveille, and the movement ends with a rousing rendition of the patriotic song Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.

Decoration Day, the second movement of Ives’s Symphony: New England Holidays, is a sound-picture of what we now know as Memorial Day as observed in Danbury when Ives was young. Central to the day’s commemoration is the town band, led by his father George Ives, so the piece is also a memorial to George. Ives attached this program note to the score, giving a heartfelt description of how the day was celebrated, and many of the events mentioned here are reflected in the music.

In the early morning the garden and woods about the village are the meeting places of those who, with tender memories and devoted hands, gather the flowers for the day’s memorial. During the forenoon, as the people join each other on the [village] green, there is felt at times a fervency and intensity—a shadow, perhaps, of the fanatical harshness—reflecting old abolitionist days. It is a day, Thoreau suggests, when there is a pervading consciousness of “Nature’s kinship with the lower order—man.”

After the town hall is filled with the spring’s harvest of lilacs, daisies, and peonies, the parade is slowly formed on Main Street. First come the three marshals on plough horses (going sideways); then the warden and burgesses (in carriages!!), the village cornet band, the G.A.R. [members of the Grand Army of the Republic, the association of Union veterans] two by two, and the militia (Company G), while the volunteer fire brigade, drawing the decorated hose-cart with its jangling bells, brings up the rear—the inevitable swarm of small boys following. The march to Wooster Cemetery [just outside Danbury] is a thing a boy never forgets. The roll of muffled drums and “Adeste fideles” answer for the dirge. A little girl on the fencepost waves to her father and wonders if he looked like that at Gettysburg.

After the last grave is decorated, “Taps” sounds out through the pines and hickories, while a last hymn is sung. Then the ranks are formed again, and we all march back to town to a Yankee stimulant—[David Wallis] Reeves’s inspiring Second Regiment [March]—though to many a soldier the somber thoughts of the day underlie the tunes of the band. The march stops, and in the silence the shadow of the early morning flower-song rises over the town, and the sunset behind West Mountain breathes its benediction upon the day.

We end as we began, with a march. Ives wrote this one while a sophomore at Yale and incorporated into the first strain a song linked to an annual tradition, the Omega Lambda Chi. In this all-college ritual, the sophomore, junior, and senior classes marched around campus to cheer each building, then made the freshmen run the gauntlet between them.