CHARLES EDWARD IVES (1874- 1954)

Symphony No 4

The purpose of this note is to give some general background only to Charles Ives. The outline of the symphony itself will be dealt with by Matthew.

Charles Ives is regarded as one of the first American composers of international renown although his music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. His influences were a combination of American popular and church music traditions of his youth, coupled with military marches and European (Beethoven-Brahms) tradition. At the same time he was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music using techniques including polytonality polyrythm and quarter tones, foreshadowing by many years many musical innovations of the 20th century. Ives’ music reaches our ears even now with a similar shock to that of Stravinsky in his time. Yet Ives did not write to shock. He wrote as a professionally trained amateur and, without the expectation of his music being played, did not court popularity. What never ceases to surprise is that his music was written mainly before 1918 at the same time as Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, composers he was unlikely to have encountered, were flying their revolutionary flags in Europe.

He was born in Danebury, Conneticut in 1874, the son of George Ives, a U.S army bandleader in the American Civil War. His father was his principal teacher whose influence instilled in him the desire to reproduce the surrounding sounds and not to be afraid of resulting discord. Ives himself became a church organist at the age of 14 and composed his own hymns. He went on to Yale where he studied music as well as being an all-American lad in the football team. His teachers were more than bemused by his early compositions. Ives did not go on to be a composer waiting to be performed. Composition was a serious pastime but his chosen career was as an insurance broker. With his business partner and friend he formed the firm of Ives and Myrick in 1906 and he wrote “Life Insurance with Relation to Inheritance Tax” a tome, which was to be an insurance broker’s bible for many years. In 1908 he married and moved to New York giving up the church organ in the process. For a composer his wife bore the most delightful name, Harmony Twitchell

Despite a long life Ives was composing mainly between 1900 and 1920. Like his contemporary, Sibelius, he stopped altogether in 1927 having in tears announced to his wife he would never compose again. He did continue to revise existing works.

Ives’ music is like that of none other. His works often resemble an aural collage of sepia photographs evoking old memories. For example in his Holidays Symphony one hears misty impressionist sounds and buzzings with vague mixtures of distant military calls or hymn tunes intermingling and merging but one should not be surprised to hear a sudden upsurge from the military town band parade as if John Philip Sousa himself had taken over. Then out of some indefinable chaos one can be given a popular tune such as the Campdown Races played on a jews harp. Much is based on reminiscences which Ives would recall, particularly of his father rehearsing the military band in the town square or, as in the fourth symphony two bands marching past each other in opposite directions.

The fourth symphony written between 1910 and 1916 bears some relationship to his earlier work, “The Unanswered Question”. Ives is stated to have said “that it contains a searching question of ‘What’ and ‘Why’ which the spirit of man asks of life” It is said to have included 15 references to earlier compositions of Ives and some thirty hymns. It also has an offstage battery of percussion, six trumpets and an ether organ (which might have been some sort of synthesiser) and it needs a second conductor. So get yourselves ready for a unique aural experience

This note was written for the Blackheath Music Appreciation Society by Lionel J Lewis ©

VIOLIN CONCERTO

Some of you may remember, without necessarily owning to it, a popular television programme in the 1960’s called “Juke Box Jury”. It contained a panel of four mediocre celebrities of the day who discussed the merits or demerits of the latest release and then voted if it would be a hit or a miss. The chairman of these proceedings, David Jacobs, would then ding a bell if it were voted a hit or squeeze a rude motor horn if it were forecast to be a miss

I suppose one could say of Frederick Delius that in his time there were to be more misses than there were hits. This may explain a long ambivalence towards this composer. Born in Bradford where he went to the local grammar school his life was to become spent in Florida, Germany, Norway, and France where he lived and died.

Delius is one of those composers with whom some become enraptured whilst others are totally non-plussed. It is not that his music is difficult but he was certainly his own man with his own distinctive style . He was not a composer of structures like Beethoven or Brahms or Elgar, his British contemporary. His scoring is based on chromatic harmony. No need to be frightened of that expression. Chromatic is simply the Greek word for colour and the effect of colour is obtained by adding harmonies in a different key to that of the principal theme. Delius was a painter in sound not with the intention to produce visual images à la Richard Strauss but to evoke the “son et parfum” surrounding his subject. His music bore equally evocative titles. Brigg Fair, Summer Night on the River, Appalachia, Sleigh Ride, A Village Romeo and Juliet, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring . His Deux Aquarelles have more in common with the Summer Exhibition than the Conservatoire. Paris, The Song of A Great City, is a nocturne which owes more to Whistler than to Debussy. Debussy and Delius, both born the same year, are described as impressionists but in different ways. If Debussy’s music is said to be atmospheric, then that of Delius would best be described as aromatic

His father, Julius Delius, was a German immigrant industrialist in the wool trade. Delius, one of four brothers and ten sisters, was expected to follow in the family business despite his wishing to study music. He spent some time in the business in Stroud and then abroad without great success. He then went at his apparent request to manage an orange plantation in Solano Grove, Jacksonville Florida in 1884. There, he took lessons in music and was influenced by the surroundings and the songs and dances of the negroes. From this period there came first his Florida Suite, which included the original version of his famous La Calinda. Later on he wrote Appalachia, variations on a slave song, a big score indeed which would have won him an Oscar for its open prairie Western style music, except that the kinematograph had yet to be invented.

After 18 months he returned to Europe with parental sanction and support to study music in Leipzig coming under the spell of Wagner. Here he studied counterpoint and other tools of his trade but the really great influence there was his meeting with Edvard Grieg who encouraged and approved the early works of Delius. Through the Grieg set he established long standing friendships with Halvorsen and Percy Grainger who was to introduce to Delius the folk song, Brigg Fair.   Delius was to return regularly throughout his life to Norway until ill health prevented him from doing so.

In the mid 1880’s, Delius moved to Paris where he moved in the circles of Gauguin, Munch and Strindberg. However he did not meet with many French musicians and his music was hardly ever to be recognized in France. It was in these late years of the 1880’s that he is thought to have contracted syphilis but its devastating effects did not incapacitate him till the late 1920’s when he became blind and paralyzed. In 1893, he met Jelka Rosen, an artist. She is variously described as Danish or German but she was in fact born in Belgrade and was the granddaughter of the famous 19^th century Bohemian pianist and composer, Ignaz Moscheles. Jelka had exhibited at Salon des Indépendents. She had purchased a house at the artists’ colony of Grez sur Loing, near Fontainebleau, about 40 miles from Paris. Delius moved in with her in 1896 and they married in 1903. They continued to live at Grez except for a short period during the first world war when they stayed temporarily in England. Their marriage was described as unorthodox with Jelka the main breadwinner whilst Freddy played away from home too often for her liking.

The early compositions of Delius were first promoted in Germany with two or three conductors including his works. It was when this work was performed in England in 1907 that Sir Thomas Beecham first heard Delius. Beecham was bowled over. He was not a man to do things by halves and soon he had mounted A Villlage Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden as well as including Delius whenever he could in his concert programmes. This was the making of Delius financially and without Beecham he would probably have sunk into oblivion.

There are few orthodox forms in Delius’ music but during the first world war he turned to writing concertos for violin, cello, double concerto and it is the violin concerto that Matthew Taylor will be considering. There is little point in this note trying to guide you through it. That can be left to Matthew. In any event even a satnav would lose its way in this particular work as it is not a conventional concerto but more a continuous rhapsody for violin intermingled with orchestra. Even the movements are difficult to make out although there is in the last “movement” a tune somewhat reminiscent of Brigg Fair. Still you should not even be reading this note. Far better to close your eyes and let the music take over.

GUSTAV HOLST (1874-1934)

SUITE: THE PLANETS

Most people are familiar, perhaps over familiar, with the Planets that we can have forgotten the thrill and impact of coming to this work for the first time. Nowadays it is part of the daily diet on Classic FM to have Mars for breakfast, Venus for elevenses and Jupiter to cheer up the odd lorry driver on the M6. For many in the Matthew Taylor Class that first acquaintance would have probably been back in the 1950’s when chauvinistically the only recognized conductors, Boult, Sargent and Barbirolli, had to be English and that foreign conductors, particularly immigrants to America like Stokowski, were thought of as off limits.

Gustav Holst, or von Holst to begin with, was of Latvian via Swedish descent, but that is by the bye. He was born in Cheltenham and was as English as steak and kidney pie, not that he would, as a practising vegetarian, have eaten it. After education at Cheltenham Grammar School he entered the Royal College of Music where he studied under Stanford and became a lifelong friend of fellow student Ralph Vaughan-Williams. The two men developed a shared interest in exploring and maintaining the English vocal and choral tradition as found primarily in folk song, madrigals and church music.   Because of a trembling hand he gave up the piano and studied the trombone which he later played in the orchestra pit of the Carl Rosa Opera company to earn his living. Much of his time was given to teaching. He was for several years the music teacher at James Allen Girls School in Dulwich and later at St Pauls Girls School in Hammersmith for which he wrote his delightful St Paul Suite for Strings. He also became director of Music at Morley College, a position which he held until his death. He was succeeded there by Michael Tippett.

He was possessed at different times of various, sometimes eccentric, fads. He shared his vegetarianism and socialism with George Bernard Shaw and the latter pursuit also with William Morris. He was an avid hiker and biker taking his biking holidays as far off as Algeria and from whence came the inspiration for his brilliant orchestral oriental suite, Beni Mora. His other somewhat individual pursuit was an interest in Hindu mysticism and Sanskrit. He wrote operas based on these themes and signed up for a course at the cost of 5 guineas at UCL to study Sanskrit in order that he could translate the originals to write his libretti. Later in life he became friendly with Thomas Hardy and he regarded Egdon Heath, a bleak composition, as his greatest orchestral work. Holst was a lovable oddball whose statue in Cheltenham shows him as a one off left handed conductor.

As a composer, Holst had a considerable output of some 200 works although only a handful have found their way on to the CD shelves. He was a self-confessed traditionalist but there is no doubt he was influenced by the barbaric rhythms of Stravinky’s Rite of Spring, the score of which he presumably studied as it was not performed in England until 1922, and also of the chromaticisms of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces which Henry J Wood was daring enough to introduce to the Proms audience in 1911 and was hissed for his troubles.

At the onset of World War I, Holst tried to enlist but was rejected because of his bad eyes, bad lungs and bad digestion. In wartime England, Holst was persuaded to drop the “von” from his name, as it aroused suspicion. He changed his name by deed poll in 1917. It was shortly before the war that he holidayed in Spain with the Bax brothers, Arnold, (composer) and Clifford, (playwright). It was Clifford who came to introduce Holst to astrology. From then on, Holst practised telling astrological fortunes which he called his pet vice. It was therefore thanks to Clifford Bax that the Planets came to be written. They were to be based on Holst’s astrological view of the character of the planets and not to be confused with the classical gods. There are seven planets in all excluding Earth and also Pluto which had not yet then been discovered

The Suite was in fact started before the war. Matthew Taylor, in his 1910-14 series, played us a two piano score of Mars written by Holst to be played at St Pauls GS. The complete work received its first performance at a private performance under Boult in 1918 but the first public performance did not take place until 1920 under the baton of Albert Coates. Little wonder that most people have erroneously perceived Mars as a reflection of the carnage of the mechanized First World War. We do not know what Holst saw in his mind’s eye but it would appear as if he was possessed of one of the most prophetic of visions. Or could Holst’s newly acquired interest in stargazing have produced for him the fortune telling ability to which he laid claim?

1. Mars – The Bringer of War. The word that best describes the opening is ominous. You know straight away that something is about to happen. The unusual 5/4 rhythm that underlines Holst’s trombones is relentless, never changing, except as to its speed. Quietly to start with, regular if uneven, it soon builds up to nearly the whole orchestra hammering out the rhythm. This is followed by brass from horns to tubas and trumpets chasing each other with martial calls. Eventually it all collapses on itself and a middle section continues at about a quarter of the original speed like some awakening giant trying to rouse itself. This leads to the whole orchestra hammering away again with greater insistence until a discordant climax is hammered out. There cannot be life beyond this.

2. Venus – The Bringer of Peace. (Not the Goddess of Love!). The contrast with Mars could not be greater. Holst had become influenced by Ravel through V-W but the sound here is impressionistic, more Debussy influenced. This is a movement of tranquillity underscored not by melodies as by chords, not accompanying but with a life of their own, simply hanging in their own space.

3. Mercury – The Winged Messenger. Yet another contrast. From the languorous pace of Venus we have a fleet footed Mercury, lightly scored, scurrying round the orchestra from winds to strings. There develops a tune in the strings that has a slight folksy feel for a short time before the movement scampers into thin air.

4. Jupiter – The Bringer of Jollity. This is somewhat uneven. The humour is rumbustious evoking a Falstaffian feel. Here Holst is somewhat heavy handed in his orchestration. The second part becomes a round where the dance is stamped out faster and louder and once too often perhaps. We then reach the middle section which has nothing much to do with jollity. It is very British, very hymn like which is why it became to be recast as “I Vow to Thee, My Country”, redolent of morning assembly at most British public schools. The jovial mood is then recapitulated and the two briefly entwine in a final national peroration. Popular it may be, but not Holst at his best.

5. Saturn – The Bringer of Old Age. This movement is tighter knit altogether. Old age drags itself wearily on woods and harps with basses dragging their feet below. Here the feel is distinctly Sibelian. Did Vaughan Williams have this section in mind when he depicted the Beardmore Glacier in his Sinfonia Antarctica? The music builds to a mighty climax re-enforced by the organ. This is old age containing enormous reserves of energy. As it sinks back the organ comes in and there follows a sublime luxuriant finale undoubtedly influenced in its orchestration by Daybreak from Ravel’s Daphnis & Chloe.

6. Uranus – The Magician. If the Planets were a seven movement symphony, Uranus would be the scherzo. This note would not be the first to draw a similarity to Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice although it is unlikely that Holst had heard it. The music is jokey with a prominent part for the tuba. Another mighty climax is followed from an unbelievable fffff to The change is so swift and sudden that Malcolm Sargent related a tale, probably apocryphal, of two women in the audience talking to each other above the din and as it cut off precipitately into near silence one heard distinctly the words “Oh I always cook mine in fat”.

7. Neptune – The Mystic. The music is scored with seven beats to the bar. It is quiet, and shapeless like some void in space. Like gas clouds it contains no climaxes, no noises. Ultimately from offstage a chorus of women’s voices intermingles high up in the orchestra adding a further mysterious layer. Debussy had used a wordless women’s chorus in Sirènes, the third of his orchestral Nocturnes but this is different. This is a sound that is ethereal and which becomes lost within the orchestra. It eventually fades into nothing, an effect obtained by slowly closing the door of the off stage room. Again one asks whether V-W was conscious of the similarities between this and the finale of his sixth symphony.

The Planets is a great work despite it being uneven. Like Ravel’s Bolero it suffers from over recording and broadcast and is probably, like Bolero, best appreciated in the concert hall where even the coughing can’t always be heard!

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This Note was composed for the Blackheath Music Appreciation Society and copyright is claimed by Lionel J Lewis