CHARLES IVES AND AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC

by H. Cowell*

Charles Ives is the father of indigenous American art-music, and at the same time is in the vanguard of the most forward-looking and experimental composers of today.

Many composers before Ives tried to utilize American folk-material; (...) But some of their music yielded to banal European influence, because they invariably altered the original rhythms (often fascinating irregular) so as to fit the current European mode. Also, all the slight deviations of pitch in the musical scale of the American village folk, wrought in deepest musical ecstasy, were altered so as to suit the conventional European mode of tuning of the major or minor scales.

Ives was born in 1874 in a small Connecticut town where native music lived. His father, a musician, conductor of the band and experimental enough to be interested in acoustics, was evidently a splendid influence. He did not try to narrow down or standardize the views of his son, but allowed him to hear all the native music in its charming and naive entirety, and encouraged him to think for himself. This led into a scientific-musical understanding, and to the ability to sort and utilize his many impressions and to build from them a new musical structure. Such a structure is what Ives has created.

As a child, Ives heard the village band. Not all the members played exactly together; there was always a player or so a fraction either ahead or behind the rest. The pitch of the notes was not always the same with all the instruments; some played a bit sharp, some a bit flat. Sometimes the bass tuba would be an indistinguish­able pitch, almost a percussion noise. Perhaps the trumpet, or rather the cornet, would feel jolly enough to play his addition to the whole quite independently, so that bis part would be altogether different from the rest of the orchestra; yet he would eventually find a way to get in with "the bunch".

Or perhaps Ives heard the fiddling to a dance. The fiddler not only did not play in tune with the conventional notion - he did not want to, and it would have been wrong if he had. His idea of music was quite different, and through slips and slides, and slightly off-pitch tones, which could go loosely under the title of "quarter-tones", he created the right and proper music for the village dance...

Ives was also influenced by the village church music. With a wheezy and often out-of-tune-to-the-point-of-discord harmonium playing simple hymn concords as a base, the congregation sang soulfully and nebulously around the supposed tones of the tune. The so-called unmusical of the congregation sang along behind the tune is both rhythm and pitch, either a bit flat or those with great self-assurance over-aiming at the note and sharping on the high pitches!

Such native characteristics exist all through American village and country music. They are typically American and are the distinctions • between American folk-music and the folk-music of the Europeans from which we spring. Yet the "cultivated" musicians who collected and published these songs of our people unconsciously and without question weeded out all such irregularities and the result was that there is not the slightest suspicion of an original, indigenous, or truly American feeling left in the published versions of these songs...

All the elements of back-country New England music were assimilated by Ives, on whom they made a deep impression. Working with musical feeling deeply rooted in the spirit of the music rather than from a purely intellectual point of view, he found that it was necessary to build his whole musical structure from the ground up. It was impossible for him to confine himself to the known scale, harmony, and rhythm systems brought from Europe.

He therefore found it essential to form a new and broader musical architecture, a scheme of things which, founded on American folk-music, permitted the use of all the elements to be found in it. He did not discard any elements of known musical culture; all of them are present in his work; but he also included the extra-European elements of the folk-music as actually performed, and made a new solid foundation on this music, which permits infinite development and cultivation.

From American Composers on American Music. Abridged

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 881