Student Recital and Panel: Ives Piano Music

Five students present a selection from Ives’s music for piano, including a brief “Take-Off,” one of his Studies, the Three-Page Sonata in three movements, a programmatic piece based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s satirical story “The Celestial Rail-Road,” and the “Emerson” movement from his Second Piano Sonata (Concord). The recital is followed immediately by a panel on performing Ives’s Concord Sonata, featuring three of its best-known performers: Gilbert Kalish, Jeremy Denk, and Steven Mayer.

Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Three-Page Sonata (ca. 1910-11, rev. ca. 1925-26)

   Seri Kim, piano

Song Without (Good) Words, from Set of Five Take-Offs (ca. 1909)

   Tarje Grover, piano

The Celestial Railroad (ca. 1925)

   Aaron Wonson, piano

Study No. 9: The Anti-Abolitionist Riots in Boston in the 1830’s and 1840’s (ca. 1912-13)

   Benjamin David Tufte, piano

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

   I. Emerson

   Christian Verfenstein, piano

Performing Ives’s Concord Sonata

Jeremy Denk, Gilbert Kalish, and Steven Mayer, pianists

Joseph Horowitz, host

Program note by J. Peter Burkholder

Charles Ives was a piano virtuoso who played every day—but not in public. His wife Harmony said that “Charlie’s father had wanted him to be a concert pianist, but he was much too shy—he couldn’t face that being-alone on the stage in front of an audience.” Sitting out of sight in the organ loft suited him better.

Ives typically composed at the piano, exploring ideas and letting them coalesce before writing them down. While sharing an apartment in New York with fellow Yale graduates, he recalled “trying out sounds, beats, etc., usually by what is called politely ‘improvisation on the keyboard’—what classmates in the flat called ‘resident disturbances.’” His piano music, and the recordings made of his playing late in life, reflect his improvisatory approach and his ability to conceive and play music of great difficulty and complexity.

The Three-Page Sonata got its name because Ives wrote it out on three pages of music paper. Its three movements explore a variety of characters and moods. The opening movement hints at sonata form, featuring a repeated “exposition” with two contrasting ideas, the first somber, the second more energetic, followed by a “development” that is mostly new material. Instead of a recapitulation, the piece moves on without a break to the central slow movement. Over arpeggiated chords in the bass that gradually sink lower, streams of dissonant chords lead to a familiar melody in a high register: the clock tower tune Westminster Chimes. The fast finale begins with a march, then suddenly shifts to a ragtime episode. The march and ragtime return in abbreviated form. After almost constant dissonance, the sonata ends on an incongruous but somehow satisfying major chord.

Song Without (Good) Words is a take-off on Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. Over an arching accompaniment, a lilting melody is distorted as some notes are displaced up or down an octave. At first comic, the effect becomes more serious as the harmonies grow thicker and more chromatic. The song repeats, then comes to a soft, enigmatic close.

Around 1925, Ives reworked the “Hawthorne” movement of his Second Piano Sonata, known as the Concord Sonata, into The Celestial Railroad, a musical depiction of events in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1843 short story of the same name. About half the piece is taken from “Hawthorne,” the rest new. Hawthorne’s tale satirizes charlatans who preach a false religion that requires no work and no sacrifice. Borrowing imagery from John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), which recounts an arduous pilgrimage on foot from this sinful world to salvation in Heaven, Hawthorne offers instead a comfortable trip on that new nineteenth-century technology: a locomotive. The narrator dreams he is at a railroad station in the City of Destruction and meets a Mr. Smooth-it-away, who takes him aboard a train to the Celestial City. We hear the train start up and reach full speed, passing by pilgrims on foot and horrible sights out the window. After a stop at Vanity Fair, where one can purchase things that fit worldly tastes (marked by sentimental tunes and ragtime), the trip resumes. The loud music suddenly ceases, and we hear a quiet hymn, representing the pilgrims (“Jesus, lover of my soul, . . . Safe into the haven guide, O receive my soul at last”). We get a brief glimpse of them out the window, then after the final leg the train stops, and we see them entering the Celestial City from across the River Jordan. But those on the train are escorted instead onto a ferry to Hell, and Mr. Smooth-it-away changes back into a demon. The narrator leaps into the water to escape and wakes from his dream, symbolized—in Ives’s music, though not in Hawthorne’s story—by a band playing a march on the Fourth of July.

Ives’s piano studies are simultaneously exercises in composition and etudes for the performer. Some, including Study No. 9, are also programmatic or linked in various ways to other works of his. The title, The Anti-Abolitionist Riots in Boston in the 1830’s and 1840’s, reminds us that in those decades many Northerners still supported slavery, and some violently opposed its abolition. Ives’s grandparents George White Ives and Sarah Ives were strong abolitionists, and Ives felt a personal connection to the cause. Beginning and ending with a soft, brief prayer for freedom, the piece is otherwise loud and raucous, befitting a sound-picture of a riot. Emerson was also an abolitionist, and Ives adapted Study No. 9 as a piano cadenza in his Emerson Overture and included brief portions in the next piece on the program.

We will hear Ives’s complete Piano Sonata No. 2: Concord, Mass., 1840-60 on Sunday afternoon. Its first movement, “Emerson,” is a celebration of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), the Transcendentalist lecturer, writer, and poet. Ives adapted it from his incomplete Emerson Overture, scored for piano and orchestra. Its origin in a kind of concerto helps to explain why “Emerson” begins with a dramatic cadenza that fragments and juxtaposes all the themes before they appear in complete form. Among those themes are the “human faith melody” heard in all four movements of the sonata, which includes within it the opening motto from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and a short motive identified with Emerson himself, in a jagged rhythm one could use to declaim “Hear! the herald speaks.”

The movement combines elements of sonata form with a contrast between rhapsodic passages and more lyrical ones. Ives identified the rhapsodic sections with Emerson’s prose lectures, piling up clause upon clause and idea upon idea, and said the lyrical ones, with more regular phrasing, represent Emerson’s poetry. The opening cadenza and following rhapsody suggest the first theme and transition. A slower, quiet section serves as a second theme, followed by rhapsodic development of the Beethoven and Emerson motives. A lyrical episode presents variations of a descending melody over rolling accompaniment, building to a rapturous peak. Further development leads to a brief fugue, a varied recapitulation of the second theme, and a final climax on the Emerson and Beethoven motives. These slowly fade as they repeat, then vanish into silence.