The Four Ives Violin Sonatas

All four of Charles Ives’s sonatas for violin and piano feature movements based on hymn tunes, all in varieties of cumulative form in which the hymn tune theme is hinted at, heard in fragments and variants, and finally presented whole near the end. The Fourth Violin Sonata is the simplest and most direct, the Third the most Romantic, while the Second and First are more complex and include middle movements on popular tunes. Violinist Stefan Jackiw and pianist Jeremy Denk present the four sonatas in that order, from most accessible to most challenging, with Bloomington’s First Presbyterian Church Chancel Choir singing many of the principal source tunes. Jeremy Denk and J. Peter Burkholder offer commentary.

Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Sonata No. 4 for Violin and Piano: Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting (ca. 1914-16)

   I. Allegro—Allegro molto
   II. Largo—Allegro conslugarocko—Andante con spirito—Adagio cantabile—Largo cantabile
   III. Allegro

Sonata No. 3 for Violin and Piano (1914)

   Beulah Land (1876, lyrics by Edgar Page Stites, music by John R. Sweney)
   I Need Thee Ev’ry Hour (1872, lyrics by Annie S. Hawks, refrain and music by Robert Lowry)

   I. Verse 1: Adagio—Refrain
      Verse 2: Andante—Con moto—Refrain/Adagio
      Verse 3: Allegretto—Refrain/Adagio
      Verse 4: Adagio—Refrain

   There’ll Be No Dark Valley (1896, lyrics by W. O. Cushing, music by Ira D. Sankey)

   II. Allegro
   III. Adagio cantabile

Intermission

Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano (assembled/recomposed ca. 1914- 17, rev. 1919)

   Autumn (lyrics by Robert Robinson, music arr. from François Barthélémon)

   I. Autumn
   II. In the Barn

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

   III. The Revival

Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano (assembled/recomposed ca. 1914 or ca. 1917)

   Shining Shore (1859, lyrics by David Nelson, music by George F. Root)

   I. Andante—Allegro vivace—Con moto—Andante

   Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1864, lyrics and music by George F. Root)

   The Old Oaken Bucket (1822, lyrics by Samuel Woodworth, music by George Kiallmark)

   II. Largo cantabile

   Work, For the Night Is Coming (1864, lyrics by Annie L. Coghill, music by Lowell Mason)

   III. Allegro

Program note by Jeremy Denk 

These four violin sonatas, like the first four symphonies of Mahler, are a form of autobiography. They tell and retell Ives’s childhood memories of music, trying to recapture their magic, their fervency and sincerity. They abound in social details: farmers singing off-key, rag pianists improvising, mothers worrying, pastors preaching, soldiers dreaming of the old days. This music is often visited by failure (like music in real life), but, in this reconstructed world, the need for expression keeps finding a way. 
These sonatas also tell a story of Ives’s development as a composer. In reverse order—4, 3, 2, 1—Ives starts out somewhat civilized. By the end, he’s dissonant, thorny, craggy, difficult: but still a hopeless Romantic. 

Sonata No. 4: “Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting” 

A camp meeting was a revival weekend of worship. Ives explains: 

There was usually only one Children’s Day in these Summer meetings, and the children made the most of it—often the best of it. 

So—a sonata about the intersection of piety and youthful pranks. In the first movement, one group of children march to a hymn; another boy dutifully practices his fugues. These styles interrupt and overlap wildly. Ives quips that “the loudest singers, and also those with the best voices, as is often the case, would sing most of the wrong notes.” The counterpoint thickens, until the Deacon rings a gong, and the kids innocently march off as if nothing had happened. 

The ravishing second movement, a tone poem of sorts, “moves around a rather quiet but old favorite Hymn of the children.” The piano reflects “the outdoor sounds of nature on these Summer days—the west wind in the pines and oaks, the running brook.” In the middle, the kids throw rocks in the brook: Allegro conslugarocko. This almost destroys the mood, but again, the Deacon calms them down. 

The last movement improvises—with hints of the blues—before revealing “Shall We Gather at the River.” The hymn doesn’t last long. With a sudden youthful rush, and an off-kilter echo, Children’s Day is over. 

Sonata No. 3 

Ives described the Third Sonata as a weak attempt to please snooty Europeans. You do hear a suspiciously lovely Romanticism—some Brahms, maybe even Reger (!)—but still, plenty of true Ives. Most of the piece centers around the hymn I Need Thee Ev’ry Hour. 

The first movement has four sections. Each begins by improvising on Need, then pursues its own path. Verse 1 is devout; Verse 2 starts to dance; Verse 3 escalates to a hoe-down; and Verse 4 slows for a transcendent, sweet-and-sour recapitulation. After each verse is a refrain, partly based on Beulah Land. 

The second movement teleports us to a roadside bar for a witty ragtime apotheosis on the hymn There’ll Be No Dark Valley. 

The third movement abruptly returns to church and I Need Thee Ev’ry Hour. It is easy to imagine Ives the organist, improvising. The music evokes a religious quest, an impassioned searching (“I need thee!”). In the middle, we encounter a bluesy waltz, seemingly incompatible with the rest. But at the shattering climax, Ives combines hymn and waltz. These ideas weave around each other in a benediction. The violin’s Need is surrounded by luminous chords and blue notes, transforming the well-worn clichés of the American hymn. 

Sonata No. 2 

The first movement of the Second Violin Sonata is not about a season, but the hymn Autumn, which inspires all of its themes. An otherworldly introduction gives way to fiddling, dancing, a variety of riffs, styles, and struggles, until—at last!—the complete hymn thunders out. “In the Barn” is a joyful disaster. It starts with country fiddling, slips slyly into urban ragtime, and as time passes, every imaginable genre makes a cameo—overheated Wagnerian Romanticism, fashionable exoticism, a dizzying tour of the early-twentieth-century musical world. In the final movement, “The Revival,” the chaos is forgotten. Ives gives the musicians time to inhabit a religious ecstasy: a gradual liberation, from timeless depth to foot-stamping passion, that is liberating (and moving) to play. 

Sonata No. 1 

The First Sonata begins with dark, searching fragments. Once the fast music begins, Ives switches to joking mode. The first clear arrival is the most irreverent joke of all: he has rewritten the hymn Shining Shore into a lumbering cowboy song! Both violin and piano try to ride this Allegro (as it were) into the sunset, but the dark opening returns, even darker. 

The second movement, one of Ives’s most profound, explores memories of the Civil War and the idea of division. The violin begins musing over The Old Oaken Bucket, an emblem of nostalgia. Ah, the good old days—were they good? Before long, the piece divides in terrifying two, with the marching pianist instructed to drown out the violin. The violin tries to speak, but is barely heard. At last, the violin emerges from behind the piano, only to repeat the piano’s march with heartbreaking tenderness. The music turns to Tramp, Tramp, Tramp!, and the trials and glories of war, as remembered by boastful veterans. But from glory we return to intractable battles. 

The last movement opens with a wild piano march: Work, For the Night Is Coming! But, shortly after the violin enters, the piece suddenly slips into another tune: Watchman, Tell Us of the Night. Watchman starts out in the guise of ragtime, and visits several styles, before finally becoming itself: an aching, yearning hymn. 

Out of eerie stillness the opening of the movement reappears. It gathers, like a whole town of marchers, each to different drums, until it reaches an ecstatic climax—hymn, bells, circling bass. This ecstasy does not diminish even as the music quiets, condensing into one last gospel “Amen.” You can almost hear them all humming there, in the New England countryside, possessed by religious feeling and a sense of the infinite, as the day fades into dusk.