Ives: Symphony No. 2 — Spartanburg Philharmonic

by Chris Vaneman

Charles Ives may well be the most paradoxical, the most on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand figure in American classical music. Born in 1874, he was the first great American composer, producing masterpieces while Copland and Gershwin were still playing kick-the-can in Brooklyn; but he was virtually unknown as a composer until the late 1940’s, a decade after Gershwin had died. He was a passionate populist, arguing throughout his life that the music and the ideas of the “common man” were superior to the sissified ways of experts; but it was the avant-garde that readily embraced his music and its experiments. He was publicly and privately totally indifferent to anyone else’s thoughts about his music; but evidence has accumulated that he was in the habit of doctoring and backdating his unpublished scores to appear more innovative than he may have been.

Ives grew up in and eventually returned to Danbury, Connecticut, the son of an Army bandmaster with a passion for experiments: Ives recalled his father arranging for two marching bands, playing different tunes, to approach and pass through each other, just because he wanted to hear what it would sound like. As a boy his passions were sports and improvisation on the organ, and at Yale he studied composition under the conservative traditionalist Horatio Parker even as he played on the varsity football team (and in those days Yale was a football powerhouse on par with the best in the country).

Four years of battling with his teacher, Parker, had only heightened his twin musical urges, however. Ives was driven to incorporate the musical aesthetics and even the favorite tunes of everyday Americans into his works, and he was driven to experiment with any and all elements of music. He saw no place for himself in the existing classical music culture, and went into the insurance business, composing on evenings and weekends. Ives and Myrick Insurance became a pioneer in estate planning and term life insurance, and unpublished, unplayed manuscripts piled up in Ives’ study.

The Symphony No. 2 was one of those. Originally written in 1902, it finally received a premiere in 1951: a young conductor named Leonard Bernstein had heard through the grapevine about a trove of innovative scores that a crotchety old New Englander had in his Connecticut home, and sought Ives out. Ives couldn’t be bothered to take the train to New York for the concert; he and his wife listened to a rebroadcast a couple weeks later on their cook’s radio. (Such indifference was totally characteristic. When, 40 years after its composition, Ives’ Third Symphony was premiered and won the Pulitzer Prize, the composer refused to attend the awards banquet, saying, “Prizes are for boys. I’m all grown up.”)

The Second is without much of the crunching dissonance we encounter in many of Ives’ later works, but it does throw plenty of curve balls -- and a few high, inside fastballs, for that matter -- at its listener. Whereas traditionally classical symphonies (like Ives’ First, which he’d written at Yale under the stern and watchful eye of Parker) typically unfold their material gradually, developing a few melodies over a long period, Ives has a whole different concern here. Ives aims to capture the diverse and even chaotic multiplicity of voices in the youthful melting pot of a country that was turn-of-the-century America, and he does so by flinging fragments of familiar tunes almost willy-nilly into the piece as though they were villagers arguing at a town meeting.

Listeners would need an almost encyclopedic knowledge of 19th Century American music to identify all the tunes that pop up. You may have to take my word for it when I tell you that they include Turkey in the Straw, Pig Town Fling, Massa’s in de Cold Ground, Camptown Races, Bringing in the Sheaves, Long, Long Ago, Wake Nicodemus, Columbia, Gem of the Ocean, the hymn tunes Beulah Land, Nettleton, Materna, and Missionary Chant, as well as a college song with the remarkable title Where, Oh Where, Are the Verdant Freshmen? Also bits of two Brahms Symphonies, a Bach Prelude and Fugue, and Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan & Isolde.

E pluribus unum, it says on the back of all minted United States coins: “Out of many, one.” You’d be hard-pressed to find a better musical depiction of that motto than Ives’ Second.