An Ives Newsletter - 1 April 2004

After an inordinate break there is much news. Read on—enjoy! (Please submit to us your Ives-related news through the “Unanswered Questions” link on the Ives website.) And remember that May 19th this spring is the 50th anniversary of Ives’s death just short of age 80 in New York City (of a stroke following a successful operation for his double hernia).

Ives’s Legacy

Writing on Nov 3, 2003 on andante.com, Matthew Westphal reported: “The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced that Stephen Hartke will receive the next Charles Ives Living Award, effective for a three-year term beginning in July 2004. The $225,000 Ives Living is paid in annual installments of $75,000; its purpose (as with the MacArthur Foundation's famous ‘genius grant’ fellowships) is to free the recipient from the need to worry about earning a living so that he or she can concentrate fully on composition. To that end, the winner must agree not to accept any salaried employment for the term of the fellowship. (Commissions may be accepted.)” Wrote Westphal, “The Charles Ives Living was inaugurated in 1998, with Martin Bresnick as the first three-year recipient. Chen Yi received the award in 2001; her term ends next June. The fellowship is funded by royalties from Charles Ives's music, bequeathed by his widow to the American Academy to establish a fund for prizes in composition.”

Ives +50

The Juilliard School in New York City presented a week of Ives concerts under the annual FOCUS! festival, January 23-30, 2004, directed by Joel Sachs. A wide range of music was included, ranging from orchestral (e.g. Symphonies 3 & 4, Orchestral Set No. 1, and the NY premiere of the Emerson Overture/Concerto for Piano and Orchestra), chamber ensemble (e.g. the two string quartets, Trio, Violin Sonatas 2 & 4), keyboard works (Piano Sonatas 1 & 2, Three Quarter-tone Pieces, and the extant organ pieces), and a raft of songs (a number of them instrumentally accompanied).

The New York Philharmonic will present eleven concerts at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City centered on Ives’s music, May 11-29, 2004. Symphony No. 4 will be heard on May 15, 19, and 20. John Adams conducts on May 21, 22, and 25.

Ives online

Scott Mortensen has helped to establish a Charles Ives discussion list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/charlesives/

Scott says: “I’ve been surprise by the response, and we’ve had some interesting discussion.” Scott
Mortensen maintains his own extraordinary Ives website at

Ives for the Birds?!

One tidbit viz-a-viz Symphony No. 4 comes forth from research for the new critical edition. In the fourth movement Ives labels the little sparkles of woodwind sound in measures 32 and 64 “Thrush”(and variously marks the notes to try to capture the slight tremolo in the finishing pitch). You can contemplate the bird sound in Michael Tilson Thomas’s Sony recording with the Chicago Symphony at timings 4:36 and 7:17. The new critical edition is now in the (long) process of engraving. A new performing edition is hoped for in 2006 or ’07.

Ives on the Record

Several new recordings have appeared recently, most importantly from Naxos the premiere release of the Emerson Overture/Concerto for Piano and Orchestra as reconstructed by David Porter (paired with Symphony No. 1 in the new edition); James Sinclair conducting the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland (Dublin).

Among the forthcoming CD projects that are “in the can” is the Blair String Quartet’s recording of the Ives quartets (Naxos).

Coming from New World Records in the fall is pianist and Ives editor Donald Berman’s go at a phenomenal list of works, many in their first recording: Studies No. 1, 2, 4, 5, 11; Impression of the ‘St. Gaudens’ in Boston Common; Invention in D; The Celestial Railroad; Waltz-Rondo; Varied Air and Variations; “Storm and Distress” [i.e. the cadenza from Scherzo: Over the Pavements]; Minuetto; March No. 1 with “Year of Jubilee”; March No. 2 with “Son of a Gambolier”; March No. 3 with “Omega Lamda Chi”; March in G and C with “See the Conquering Hero Comes”; March #5 with “Annie Lisle”; March: The Circus Band; March No. 6 with “Here’s to Good Old Yale”; and George Ives’s Fourth Fugue. Berman’s disc will also include the two-piano Three Quarter-Tone Pieces (with Stephen Drury).

New Photos Posted

Several new photos are posted on the Ives website. More to come. If you have a unique Ives-related photo that you wish to share, feel free to submit it to us through the website contact link.

Does length really matter?

Ned Rorem, in an essay on Maurice Ravel, offers some interesting, if believable, statistics. We quote:
“Ravel, who worked constantly, didn't turn out more than eight hours' worth of music, as contrasted with Debussy’s sixteen, Beethoven's thirty, Wagner's fifty, Bach's seventy, Ives’s two thousand, or Webern’s two.” (A Ned Rorem Reader [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], p. 142). No one knows how much music Ives actually wrote, but the Naxos complete Ives project expects to finish (some distant day) with 26 discs (that are generally a hour each in length). Not exactly Rorem’s guess, but impressive enough.

Special Recognitions

Stetson University held forth on Ives, January 29-31, featuring Ives Society president, Ives author, and Indiana University professor J. Peter Burkholder, the Blair String Quartet (who are recording the Ives string quartets), mezzo-soprano Mary Ann Hart, music historian Michael Broyles, musicologist Denise Von Glahn, and students and faculty of Stetson (which is in DeLand, Florida, near Orlando). It was organized by Associate Dean Kari Juusela, a composer. There were four concerts (including the string quartets, Hart's song recital, a song recital by
Stetson students, and an all-comers concert by Stetson student ensembles and faculty), along with lectures and panels. The Juilliard School devoted its annual FOCUS! concerts to a week of Ives

Pittsburgh, June 8–13

The opening session on Wednesday, June 9 of the first National Performing Arts Convention (comprising the annual conferences of the American Symphony Orchestra League, Dance/USA, Chorus America, Opera America, and many smaller organizations) will be called “Variations on America: A Work in Progress”. It’s being conceived by opera and theater designer John Conklin, and will include material on Ives, Whitman and others. Apparently the only Ives work being performed is Variations on America (arr. Wm. Schuman). Here’s the blurb:

Join your colleagues at a “performance collage” to launch the first National Performing Arts Convention. “Variations on America - A Work in progress” will feature performances by a distinguished roster of soloists and ensembles and includes music, movement, text, and images that juxtapose the many ways the performing arts play a galvanizing role in times of celebration, crisis, and change. For more information on the convention, go to www.performingartsconvention.org.

Correspondence coming

Tom C. Owens is wrapping up years of work on a selected correspondence of Charles Ives. The University of California Press expects to publish the 450-page tome in 2005.

Ives As a Movie Star

We get regular inquiries about how to order Theodore Timreck’s 1976 TV docu-drama “A Good Dissonance Like a Man.” This remarkable hour-long show first broadcast by PBS deservedly won a Peabody Prize. The sole source is Facets Multimedia Inc. at 800‑331‑6197 or (search “Charles Ives”). Available only in VHS.

Ives on the Trail

Danbury’s The News-Times recently ran a story on the development of an “Ives Trail” in the Danbury area. To read, coy this link:

http://www.newstimes.com/cgi-bin/dbs.cgi?&db=news&view_records=1&id=60783&email=1

Ives Inspires

A fan of Charles Ives’s music passes his Ives inspired poem on to us:

Charles Ives: On the Completion of “The Housatonic at Stockbridge”

Do you remember the hymn, Dorrnance

Sailing to us across the river,

To our side of the Housatonic,

Harmony? Do you recall the white

Clapboard steeple

On the edge of the bank

The Congregationalist windows

The hidden people?

Soprano to the lapping water

Each pitch cleared a trail through the elms.

And I’’ve captured it, Darling,

In this very score, our walk

Through the trees tangled shadows

That moment of our sweet romance

My heart went soaring

To the noontide

tolling of bells.

-- Robin Freund <

Ives tunes on tour?

Eleanor Merton < writes:

I've recently become Chairman of an orchestra in London, which glories in the name of London Phoenix Orchestra (as a result of a revamp two years ago), but is in fact the 80 year old “Insurance Orchestra.”

The Insurance Orchestra was set up in London by orchestral musicians who worked in the Insurance Industry which centered around the City of London. It had a very high profile for quite a considerable time. It is currently going through a renaissance!

As part of this re-surge in passion and enthusiasm, and for the obvious reason that Charles Ives embodied the link between the Insurance and Classical musical worlds, I wondered if the Charles Ives Society might like to invite our orchestra to America to perform, perhaps in 2005 as part of our 80th anniversary celebrations (which we kick off in Sept 2004)?

If that is too soon, perhaps we could announce some plans during our 80th season, and then do the tour in 2009 to coincide with our 85th anniversary, and 135th anniversary of Ives' birth? Or something along those lines!

We would only be able to come to America for a few days - one week maximum - since everyone has a day job and wouldn't be able to take a lot of annual leave. The musicianship is very high and we would be really delighted to play a couple of Ives symphonic works. Plus we have access to some exceptionally talented young soloists, in case we want to perform a concerto. We could also put on a couple of chamber music concerts featuring Ives work.

Funding would be interesting. We have the backing of various insurance companies in London, but we need to find a focus to boost their involvement. If we could entice American insurance companies to assist with tour funding, it might be rather successful. Also, since we have rebranded ourselves the orchestra of the “Financial Services Industry” we can pull on other types of financial institution, both in England and the US.