The Light That is Felt – Songs of Charles Ives
“Take my hand,” said she;
“And then the dark will all be light”
Charles Edward Ives composed nearly 200 songs throughout his life. In 1922 he prepared his largest single bound collection, 114 Songs, for a private printing by G. Schirmer publishers. Wiley Hitchcock, in the thorough introduction to his 2004 critical edition 129 Songs, described the Ives song canon as “the contents of a kind of scrapbook or commonplace book or chapbook, or even a desk drawer. Into such a receptacle Ives tossed irregularly, if not casually, his reactions —in the form of songs—to memories, personalities, places, events, discoveries, ideas, visions, and fantasies in his life.”1 Whether popular tale or personal reflection, this concept of the songs as memorabilia is realized in a most powerful way: the songs emotionally and viscerally evoke memory. Captured memories —real or idealized, distant or near—are the materials for the music.
From cosmopolitan incident (Ann Street) to pastoral stroll (The Housatonic at Stockbridge) Ives’s songs describe a range of experience: a child’s playtime, a commuter’s observations, a courtier’s hope. His songs exhibit reverence for the populace and pop culture, daring adventure and family devotion; life and death. Ives brings the listeners into the heart of his songs’ stories through remarkable craft. The works initially draw one in through idiosyncratic surface details. As time, place, and setting of the stories are initiated, Ives’s stunning inspirations begin to manifest. He masterfully develops his material, and, as the songs unfold, the music burrows to an emotional core.
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Ives’s metaphor for his songs was laundry: “I have not written a book at all . . . I have merely cleaned house. All that is left is out on the clothes line; but it’s good for a man’s vanity to have the neighbors see him—on the clothes line.” 2 Ives’s cheeky comment is revealing. He describes the songs as chronicling his existence, and bares his essence in the process. These lyrical “fabrics” attract the listener with their unique varieties of style, complexity, and musical portraiture. Whether the surface texture is a dense thicket or sparsely flowing tapestry, the sonic environment is what initially grabs the listener. In some cases, the arresting music could be a trance-like pattern, as in the spinning-wheel figurations of Two Little Flowers or The Children’s Hour. In other instances what might intrigue the ear is the augmentation of a popular song snippet, as the opening phrase of The Things Our Fathers Loved that turns out to be a slow version of “Dixie Land.” Other striking details might be more pointillistic, perhaps as brief as the flame-sparking triads of December or the bass drum thumps that propel the march General William Booth Enters into Heaven. Whether they be snatches of popular tunes, or the swirls, echoes, and whacks that make up our daily sonic environs, these musical moments evoke familiar sounds. They are access points into the songs.
One could describe Ives’s elevation of sonic detail in practically any measure of these works: the shifting chorded clangor of an abbreviated day on a Wall Street sidewalk in Ann Street; the carefully regulated layers of slow-to-fast ripples of notes in The Housatonic at Stockbridge; the slightly off-the-main-beat stretch of slowly cascading arpeggios in The Light That Is Felt.
Whatever captivating detail draws the listener into the music, one can listen for how it develops. The musical images we hear on the surface are also the motives that expertly wind their way through the song, binding the music together as compositional threads. A scion of magnates in the hat-making industry, Ives carried out the metaphoric appliqué: “The fabric of existence weaves itself whole . . . It comes directly out of the heart of experience of life and thinking about life and living life.” 3
What marks the ingenuity of Ives’s songs, then, is not the evocativeness of a singular idée fixe. Rather, it is the matrix of details that draw us temporally into the settings, and engenders our own emotional response to the text. Stuart Feder writes, “Ives has created a palimpsest, on which layers are superimposed on other layers which are never completely erased. Thus the past enriches and informs the present.” 4
Ives masterfully evokes memory through this skillful handling of musical layering. He draws us toward the impressions that form our senses when life rushes toward us, overwhelms us, and shakes us from our waking sleep. Ives illustrates that in the midst of these impressions, vivid and fleeting, we become aware of something else: things that call to the best of what we are capable of as human beings; things that we recognize to be completely true. These moments of capturing and sharing memory are the substance of Ives’s songs, the part that “comes from somewhere near the soul.” 5
Or, as Ives put it in The Things Our Fathers Loved: “I think there must be a place in the soul all made of tunes. . . .”
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Take a song like Down East. Ives wrote the text to this song—not a very distinguished text at first glance. The beginning of the piece proceeds with a haze of sound in chromatic motion. Feder describes the effect as “open[ing] with that impressionistic, spell-weaving musical texture that whispers, ‘Now we are going back.’” 6
The music surrounds the words, proceeding at a very slow pace. (“Songs . . . Songs! Visions of my homeland, come with strains of childhood; Come with tunes we sang in schooldays, And with songs from Mother’s heart.”) Ives’s setting mimics the physical sensation of trying to “remember” a memory: One becomes quiet; the pace of thought slows; the eyes fix on a distant point, without seeing. And then, suddenly, the inner vision becomes clear. We arrive at the second part of the song:
Way down east in a village by the sea,
Stands the old red farmhouse that watches o’er the lea;
All that is best in me, lying deep in memory,
Draws my heart where I would be, nearer to thee.
Ev’ry Sunday morning, when the chores were almost done,
From that little parlor sounds the old melodeon,
“Nearer my God to Thee, nearer to Thee”;
With those strains a stronger hope comes, nearer to me.
These are plain-spoken words, full of imagery that could characterize any number of popular songs and religious hymns at the turn of the twentieth century. The second part of the song is set with an easily recognizable melodic line and a repeating rhythmic pattern, more elements that could add up to a “sentimental” song.
But they don’t. The melody and accompaniment, though primarily formed of symmetrical patterns, have enough asymmetry within them to keep the ear of the listener “awake.” This is the heart of the song. When we are “remembering” a memory we are not lulled into a state of near- slumber. On the contrary, we are the most awake, and the emotions we experience are sharp. There is nothing extra, either in the melody or accompaniment. The conscious withholding of superfluous ornamentation keeps the impact acute. Ives courageously allows his song’s essence to be left unadorned. “All that is left is out on the clothes line.”
This “lack of anything extra” and the subtle asymmetries that tug on the ear are endemic to all the “sentimental” songs we have recorded on this CD (Two Little Flowers, Songs my mother taught me, The Light That Is Felt are three examples.) Note how, in each of these “simpler” settings, the subtle shifting of musical layers in the piano against the voice set us up for an altered state of awareness.
One can imagine what The Light That Is Felt would sound like if the asymmetries were taken out. Would it so perfectly express that very tiny human moment that we experience over and over in life, when fear gives way to faith? Had Ives not compressed the emotional drama through interaction between accompaniment and text, we would be left with a simple homily. Instead, piano chords and melodic curves are carefully balanced away from downbeats; delicate staccato figures are placed in the right hand of the piano to slenderly paint “paused on the dark stair timidly” and “only when our hands we lay in Thine;” the moment of weighted broken chords is staved off until the third measure before the end for “and there is darkness nevermore,” and then quickly backs off from over-pontificating by fragilely returning to an elevated descending arpeggio in the last measure.
We hear these subtle shifts of focus time and again in Ives’s songs of greater complexity. There is one moment, one universal experience—not always great or grand—telescoped perfectly in sound. In Tom Sails Away, the impetus for the descriptive scene of childhood, recalled slowly then set in motion, glowing, vivid, full of sights and sounds and noise, is a singular moment of saying goodbye to a beloved brother whose return is uncertain.
Those moments of parting are felt so strongly, so keenly, that one can do nothing but let the mind run over a series of memories and impressions of the times leading up to and away from that moment. The heart cannot really hold the experience of the precise moment of parting; it is too much for us to bear.
In musical terms, Ives starts with a wisp of melody that is repeated hypnotically in the piano and voice (“Scenes from my childhood are with me.”) The scene unfolds gently. As the sonic remembrances unleash, the commotion heightens. The town springs to life. A musical climax parlays the excited tumult of children greeting their father at the end of a work day. (“Daddy is coming up the hill from the mill, we run down the lane to meet him.”) The piano accompaniment is crashing, tumbling, and exuberant. Then the sound scatters, and the present scene comes into focus:
“But today, today Tom sailed away for over there.”
The music takes on massive weight, the piano tells us about this journey (and its cultural context) by overlaying “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” in the midst of the counterpoint. As the energy again dissipates the singer repeats words from the popular George M. Cohan patriotic song of the time (“Over there! Over there! For the Yanks are coming”), with a telling semitone dissonance between the voice and piano on the final repeat. The music dissolves further, and we are left with the “scenes from . . . childhood . . . floating before [our] eyes.” What we ultimately see facing us —the departure of a loved one—swims in our vision.
Ives’s ability to paint such a scene while attending to individual details (including writing his own lyrics for Tom Sails Away) speaks to the precision and care of the songs. It is how Ives can reconcile and magnify the minute point of intimacy that peers out of the first verse of The Light That Is Felt and seamlessly transform it into religious ecstasy in the next, without losing the singularity of the central scene.
A tender child of summers three,
At night, while seeking her little bed,
Paused on the dark stair timidly.
“Oh, mother! Take my hand,” said she;
“And then the dark will all be light.”
We older children grope our way
From dark behind to dark before;
And only when our hands we lay
In Thine, O God! The night is day;
Then the night is day,
And there is darkness nevermore.
—John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)
Whittier’s poem of transferred enlightenment speaks to Ives’s sense of the personal as universal: “. . . if local color, national color, any color, is a true pigment of the universal color, it is a divine quality. . . ” 7 Ives believed his songs were for everyone, “that in every human outburst there is the ray of celestial beauty.” 8 As he made sure to impress upon Aaron Copland, in response to Copland’s prescient 1934 article in Modern Music about the songs, “I was paying my respects to the average man (there is one) in the ‘ordinary business of life,’ from the Ashman down to the president. . . .” 9
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During the preparation of his 114 Songs for publication, Ives set off on four international trips with his wife, Harmony. His sense of global reach, of “the universal lyre,” 10 was becoming more indelible. The international travel resonated with the Iveses, particularly since they shared a love for European literature and poetry. Their descriptions from abroad, like this one from Interlaken, are picturesque: “The mountains are being eaten alive by flames in the form of autumnal trees, & the vivid color combined with the dazzling snow peaks, is enough to drive an artist into eating his paint brushes with despair.” 11 One could not describe the songs more searingly.
The letters from abroad are also infused with remarks on European art, culture, and language. Likewise, foreign texts pepper the bookends of his entire song output. Ives’s early re-castings of German lieder (Feldeinsamkeit, Minnelied, Du bist wie eine Blume) were the product of his training with Horatio Parker at Yale University in the late nineteenth century. Those songs are reflective of the German masters, in particular the then contemporary composer Johannes Brahms. (Ives reported with pleasure the visit of the American composer George Whitefield Chadwick to Parker’s class in the spring of 1898 and Chadwick’s telling the professor, “In its way [“Feldeinsamkeit” is] almost as good as Brahms. . . [and] as good a song as you could write.” 12
At the other end of the musical and chronological spectrum are his settings of the fourteenth-century Italian poet Folgore da San Gimignano (1920). 13 They are far more radical in literary and musical technique, the polytonal triadic flights giving voice to the kind of WWI fury that marked the era (and coincided with Ives’s declining health.) It is fitting that Ives offered his American hand to foreign texts at the onset and near the end of his compositional period. The evolution of his musical technique from student exercise to late work notwithstanding, the special place occupied by these songs casts a light on the entirety of his canon. The European texts offered Ives historical precedence. His handling of foreign-language lyrics, some set by composers past, helped him to balance his approach to his own cast of American characters, ranging from the plebeian to the puritanical. For every December “cunning cook,” West London “tramp,” and Minnelied “beloved” was a General William Booth “sinner,” Watchman “trav’ler,” Romanzo di Central Park “lover,” or a “tender child of summers three.”
Ives guided each of these personalities into the light of his modern settings. He shepherded their stories into contemporary America. Ives’s musical and humanitarian aesthetic was wholly entwined: “. . . if he (this poet, composer, and laborer) is open to . . . all lessons of the infinite that humanity has received and thrown to man . . . then it may be that the value of his substance . . . is . . . nearer and nearer to perfect truths. . . .” 14
With this transcendent reach, Ives, one foot anchored in the nineteenth century, navigated the increasingly diverse populace of America and sailed ahead into the twentieth. He personified modern art moored in the vernacular. In strokes of genius, Ives chartered a cargo of memories in the form of songs, one that continues to entreat us to embrace our commonality.
—Donald Berman and Susan Narucki
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Notes:
1
Hitchcock, Wiley, Preface to Charles Ives 129 Songs, Music of the United States Volume 12, A–R Editions Middleton, Wisconsin, 2004, p. lxviii.
2
Ives, Charles E., postface to 114 Songs.
3
Letter to Henry Bellaman 1933, reprinted by Burkholder, J. Peter, ed. Charles Ives and His World, Princeton University Press, 1996, and here cited in Hitchcock, p. xxx.
4
Feder, Stuart. Charles Ives: “My Father’s Song:” A Psycho-analytic Biography, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, p. 314.
5
Ives, Charles E. Essays Before a Sonata, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1961, p. 77.
6
Feder, p. 314.
7
Essays Before A Sonata, p. 81.
8
Essays Before A Sonata, p. 97.
9
Letter to Aaron Copland May 28, 1934, Owens, Tom C. Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives, University of California Press, 2007, p. 222.
10
Letter to Nicolas Slonimsky October 12, 1930, Owens, p. 190.
11
Letter to Slonimsky, December 1932, Owens, p. 197.
12
Hitchcock, xxxvii.
13
Although some songs are dated later because of when they were completed, these songs are among the
final ones Ives began and finished at the late date.
14
Essays Before a Sonata, p. 92.
