•
Rating:
The classic American tradition certainly cannot be considered on par with that of most European countries.
After all, we are talking about a relatively young country where less than a century ago, it wasn't difficult to find oneself in situations similar to those depicted in John Ford or Sam Peckinpah films, which nowadays seem to belong to a very distant past. And yet...
Ives was one of the first American composers to gain fame.
Born in 1874 in Connecticut to a director of a small military band, he began studying music under his father's guidance, but things only started to get serious when he went to Yale to study composition with Horatio Parker, who found his young student's tendency towards experimentalism unacceptable. After all, the New York school would come many years later, and the American musical tradition of the time was very conservative and modeled on the European styles (it couldn't have been otherwise).
Frustrated and determined not to compromise, young Ives decided to settle for a safer job and became an insurance agent (as you can see, even though much water has passed under the bridge, things were not very different from today in this regard).
But his genius couldn't remain latent for long. For the Independence Day of 1891, he composed the Variations on America in which he completed his studies on polytonality, while with his subsequent works, he moved closer to atonality and dodecaphony.
The four symphonies are perhaps the pinnacle of his art and his continuous research and are useful for tracing his growth as a musician; in the first symphony, the calls to European romantic symphonism are evident (primarily Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, and Dvorak) while in the second, European influences, especially Wagner, Bach, and Brahms (even shaping the last two movements on the finale of the latter's first symphony), are still very evident, the themes here are exquisitely American: a song from the civil war, a hymn from a military band, and even a reference to a Stephen Foster song (Yes, the one of "Oh! Susanna").
The third, divided into three movements, describes the day of a religious meeting, and the themes are borrowed from those Ives himself played on similar occasions and gatherings. Very innovative is the use he makes of the main theme in the two slow movements, where it only appears at the end, preceded by small fragments or variations of the same.
The fourth, an imposing symphony composed between 1909 and 1916, is perhaps Ives' absolute masterpiece: characterized by very complex orchestration and massive use of polyrhythm requiring two conductors, it should also be noted as being among the first experiments to bring an instrument like the Theremin into a similar musical context. With this extremely revolutionary approach to composition, Ives sought, in his words, to translate the logic of dreams into music with an extremely complex work, which indeed derails unexpectedly onto ever-new and different tracks. Here, the citations and references to famous themes from popular culture are so numerous and intertwined that it is practically impossible to distinguish them.
If you like the American avant-garde of the '40s and '50s, by listening to this music, you will realize how pioneering Ives was and how many new paths he laid the foundations for by challenging an extremely reactionary system.
History proved him right.
Loading comments slowly
