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November 13, 2009

J. Peter Burkholder has announced that he is stepping down as president of the Charles Ives Society. Peter has been president for eighteen years, almost as long as Wiley Hitchcock was. He will remain on the board. I'm not sure how he's managed to handle the affairs of the Ives Society so effectively and remain so productive. He's the author of three important books on Ives and lots of shorter papers (see below). Thanks Peter, for a job well done!

Those who attended the IVM will remember his lively presence at the events. Go to iTunes U and you can hear his voice as the able moderator of the panel "Specific Topics, Specific Songs," featuring papers by Judith Tick, William Brooks and Yonatan Malin.

Books on Ives by J. Peter Burkholder:

All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing
Charles Ives and His World
Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music

His other writings on Ives include:

Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition (ed. Burkholder and Block)
Charles Ives: A Bio-Bibliography (preface by JPB)
Charles Ives Remembered (by Vivian Perlis, new forward by JPB)
Various dictionary entries
"The Organist in Ives," in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 55, No. 2, 2002 (this article won the [Irving] Lowens Article Award of the Society for American Music in 2004)
"Ives and Yale: The Enduring Influence of a College Experience." College Music Symposium 39, 1999

I could go on, but you get the idea. I have read most of these writings, and I can attest that they are invaluable. Especially when I am teaching. Over and over, when preparing my Ives seminar in the fall of 2008, I found myself asking "I wonder what Peter Burkholder has to say about this." So I'd go back to the books and check it out. My curiosity was always rewarded, both on the micro level (his discussions of the symphonies in All Made of Tunes will tell you all you need to know) and the macro level (his discussion of the legacy of Emerson in Charlie and his extended family is invaluable for setting the record straight—a nuanced treatment of a much-oversimplified subject).

So many thanks, Peter—for your wonderful writings, your leadership of the Society, and your warm, friendly presence here at Wesleyan last winter!

November 2, 2009

While the event is fresh in my mind I would like to write about the Ives performance yesterday at The Hopkins School. Or, as it was known when Ives was there, Hopkins Grammar School. (One still encounters HGS as the acronym.)

Heath Commons at Hopkins, the site of the concert, is a spectacular venue. It has a complete wall of windows, which the audience faces during events. Introductory remarks began shortly after 3:00 and the music was over about 4:45. The first Sunday in November is when the Eastern USA goes off daylight savings time, so those assembled saw the light fade into dusk and evening, over some lovely hills and what remained of the fall colors. A wonderful sight. One of the Hopkins administrators told me that they scheduled as many events in this location as possible, at 3:00 p.m., so that audiences can experience the coming of night in this manner.

Evidently when the public is not in attendance to pay attention to something, there are lots of comfortable chairs and sofas in the room—we found them stored in another part of the building that served as a green room. The piano is a new concert grand Steinway, quite a beautiful instrument with a rather light touch and a clearer sound than many new instruments from this company. The only problem with it was that it's not really designed for accompanying—I had to play almost the entire concert with the una corda pedal. A small price to pay for the lovely venue, the delicious reception, and the excellent crowd.

Gary Harger never sounded better. Ditto Elizabeth Saunders. Paul Woodiel and I played the Second Violin Sonata as well as we ever have. We first played this piece about twenty-five years ago, and we work it up every three or four years, or so it seems, a total of five or six performances so far. I wish we could play it more often. It's the sort of piece that is a lot of trouble to put together just for one gig. But in a few years we'll have another occasion, I'm sure...

The biggest change in the songs since the IVM is a new sense of freedom and authority with so much of the material, especially the early pieces. Since Ives wrote, or finished, or began, or worked on so many of them while a student at Hopkins, it was singularly appropriate to hear them on the Hopkins campus. But these performances were also a reminder that early Ives songs are really popular music from the 1890s and need to be sung in the super-flexible manner so much in vogue at the turn of the last century. (Brahms should be done in this manner as well, in my opinion, but that is another subject for another time.) The early love songs and those wonderful Victorian sacred solos by the precocious Ivesy (his nickname at Hopkins, we learned from James Sinclair's brilliant introduction to the event) have never sounded better, not even earlier this year at the IVM. Anyone who doubts this can listen to iTunes U and to the commercial recordings and judge for him/herself. If you were at Hopkins yesterday, that is. For the rest of you—eventually we may have clips from this show on this web site, but (as always) that will take some time.

I asked one of the ladies in the Hopkins administration how it felt to have the finest American composer among the alumni of her school. She smiled and said it was wonderful. Earlier in the evening Karen Klugman, the organizer of the event and Hopkins contact person, spoke of what she and others in the school adminstration call "the Ives effect." It seems that all over the world, wherever Hopkins faculty travel, they identify themselves and get the response, "Oh, Hopkins, that's where Charles Ives went to school." What a great thing to be known for!

The opening talk was about the Reverend John Davenport, who founded Hopkins in 1640, and his various Puritan associates, including Edward Hopkins, for whom the school was named. (He seems to have put up much of the money.) I learned a great deal about this distinguished institution, I learned amazing details about Ives in his late teens (the records of the school's clubs and the reporting on 1980s sporting events are complete beyond imagining), and I got to make beautiful music with some of the best performers I know. It doesn't get much better than this.

I'm going to contact Hopkins and see if the students who were at our event would be willing to read this post and make their own comments. That should make for some interesting reading.

November 1, 2009

My last post was on October 6—almost a month has passed and I have not written a word in this blog. I can report that I have been unusually busy, even for me. Check out my other blog for details. I'll do another sort of update there ASAP—neelybrucemusic.com.

The Ives activity, recent and forthcoming, has been rehearsals, for the most part. But this afternoon at 3:00 Elizabeth Saunders, Gary Harger, Paul Woodiel and I, with host speaker James Sinclair, with present an all-Ives concert at The Hopkins School in New Haven—Ives's high school alma mater. The concert will be part of the celebration of the 350th anniversary of the founding of the school. (It's hard to believe that there's a high school in the USA that is 350 years old!) The program:

Because Thou Art
Canon I
Her Eyes
At Parting
My Lou Jennine
Sung by Mr. Harger

The Alcotts
Piano solo

Country Celestial
Hymn of Trust
Camp Meeting
Rock of Ages
His Exultation
Sung by Ms. Saunders

Second Violin Sonata
Played by Mssrs. Woodiel and Bruce

Friendship
Sung by Mr. Harger

Old Home Day
Performed by the company

When I get back to more regular blogging (which will be soon, because my main obstacle to blogging—composing under deadline—has passed) I'll report more on this event. For the moment, I have to do some last-minute practicing, so I have to wrap this up.

One more Ives activity—on Wednesday the 4th I will speak to Robert Carl's graduate composition seminar at The Hartt School about Ives as a song composer. I'll looking forward to this with the keenest anticipation, and expect it will be the subject of several future blogs.

Two new countries: Armenia and French Polynesia

October 6, 2009

I have devoted two classes (about two and a half hours) to listening to the following recordings and discussing them. This is not a complete discography of performances of this song, of course. I invite readers who are fond of other recordings of "Charlie Rutlage," or know of performances that present particular problems or interesting details, to let me know about them via this form. Many thanks.

RECORDINGS OF “CHARLIE RUTLAGE”
Played in class: Poetry and Song, MUSC 126, fall 2009

David Barron, baritone; Neely Bruce, piano (IVM, 2007)
Nicholas Isherwood, bass; Eric Watson, piano (Accord Musidisc)
Paul Sperry, tenor; Irma Vallecillo, piano (Albany Records)
Samuel Ramey, baritone; Warren Jones, piano (Argo)
Charles van Tassel, bariton; Marien van Nieukerken, piano (Walpurgis/Vox Temporis)
Henry Herford, baritone; Robin Bowman, piano (Unicorn-Kanchana)
Thomas Hampson, baritone; Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor (RCA)
Michael Ingham, baritone; Henry Brant, piano (AmCam
Veronica Lenz-Kuhn, soprano; Tan Crone, piano (Thorofon)

October 6, 2009

In spite of all my resolutions to begin blogging again in September, the start of school on two different campuses (Wesleyan and Brown) has defeated me. Today, however, I turn over a new leaf. I believe I have enough of a routine established to allow for writing early in the morning, so here goes.

For some time I have been saying that I would write about various recorded performances of "Charlie Rutlage." The time has come to start. I've devoted two sessions of my "Poetry and Song" class for Wesleyan freshmen to the consideration of nine different recordings. Later this morning I'll post a list of the singers and their accompanists—readers of this blog know that I am very fond of lists.

The reaction to these performances has been lively. The students definitely have their favorites, and they're not always  mine. The starting point for the discussion was the way one pronounces the text. The first recording I played was a live performance by IVM's own David Barron—not the one you can hear on iTunes U but an early one, from a concert in 2007. David grew up in Amarillo, Texas. To prepare to learn this song, back in the late 1960s, he asked his parents to record the texts and send them to him on cassette. He had lived outside the state of Texas long enough to distrust his own Texas accent, and wanted to go for maximum authenticity. He studied every inflection of each reading, listening to the cassettes over and over.  The methodology was impeccable, and the result, to my ear, is what Kid O'Malley actually might have sounded like, when he recited the ballad for John Lomax over a century ago.

This is not the case with other performances. On the level of "proper Texas accent" alone the class discussions were fascinating. One of the members of the class is from Texas, and she could serve as something of a reality check. Details will follow in later blogs.

In the month of September we had a new country—Kenya. (You see I did continue to check the stats, even though I wasn't able to write anything.) That's it for now. I've got to practice for the premiere of Shep Shapiro's Twelve Fugues this coming Saturday. See www.neelybrucemusic.com for more information about that, or check out the Wesleyan home page (www.wesleyan.edu).

September 4, 2009

I am in Kansas City attending the Second International Conference on Music and Minimalism. The papers have been uniformly fascinating and the level of performance quite high. Many old friends are here, including Tom Johnson and super-blogger Kyle Gann. I have spent more time with Robert Carl in the last three days here than I have in Connecticut during the last three months.

Those of you who have read Kyle's opening address for the IVM will remember his section on the various ways in which Ives seems to have anticipated virtually every major compositional development of the second half of the twentieth century. In this blog I have devoted several entries to issues of circularity in the Ives songs. Bearing out Kyle's observations, it is remarkable how many of the papers in this conference have brought to the surface issues relating minimalist composers and Ives. Two cases stand out—the influence of Ives on Europeans (especially Louis Andressen and Michael Nyman) and the remarkable similarity of Ives's manuscripts to those of David Johnson and the difficulty both composers seem to have had in making decisions. (This is also referred to as "giving the composer/performer/editor/whoever freedom of choice.")

This afternoon I will play Tom Johnson's Organ and Silence for the ideal audience in St. Paul's Episcopal Church, a small resonant church with gorgeous stained glass. I will be blogging about Organ and Silence and other aspects of this remarkable conference on my other web site, www.neelybrucemusic.com.

One more bit of news. We have a new country—Myanmar.

It's time to eat breakfast...

September 1, 2009

Phyllis and I returned to Middletown yesterday and I had a hectic half-day of readjustment. It was one of those days when nothing seemed to go right, and unexpected problems were popping up everywhere. After glorious Ives rehearsals with Johana Arnold in idyllic natural surroundings it was quite a jolt.

This morning I learned that the very day I was having so much trouble with this and that and the other thing, my friend Joe Hamner died suddenly. While he was unable to attend the final concentrated fling of the IVM earlier this year, he had come up from Washington DC for virtually all of the major Ives concerts we had produced at Wesleyan in the three years previous. He was completely devoted to the music of Ives, and loved every minute of every performance he heard. I'm more than a bit distracted by the death of someone I've known since the fall of 1956, and very sad.

Joe was quite active as a member of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, and a memorial is planned. I'll resume writing about my rehearsals with Johana very soon, and regular blogging thereafter is assured. In the meantime, Joe, old buddy, may you rest in peace.

August 30, 2009

I had intended to be back in the regular business of blogging by now, but I have had troubles with my computer at home, and the one at my office at Wesleyan isn't conducive to blogging because all of my Ives materials are at home. But now I'm in the Catskills, with my wife Phyllis, at the home of Johana Arnold and her husband Kim Paterson. Their computer works just fine, and I've got lots of Ives material with me, for rehearsal purposes. I've blogged here before, and it seems only right to do it again.

Jo are I are reviewing various Ives songs, and they are going very well. Among other tasks, we are deciding which of these pieces are appropriate for one of our next little Ives performances—on Sunday 8 November we're going to do (with Elizabeth Saunders and Peter Standaart) songs which relate to Luis Mora, at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury.

I'll have more to say about this gig soon, but for now I thought I'd fill you in on the process. Mora is the first important American painter of Hispanic descent, and on the surface you might not think he would be very "Ivesian." But he is almost an exactly contemporary of Charlie's (1876-1940) and there are a number of themes that are important in the oeuvre of each. Ones we're investigating are:

Childhood and domesticity
Travel (distant lands, longing for one's home, etc.)
World War One (this one is a very strong similarity)
Character sketches and village life\
Nature
Religion (a principal issue in Ives, a secondary issue in Mora)

The songs that Johana sings that we're considering are:

The White Gulls
Scotch Lullaby
Cradle Song
God bless and keep thee
The Love Song of Har Dyal
A Farewell to Land
No More
The Housatonic at Stockbridge
The World's Highway
He is there!
Pictures
The "Incantation"
The Se'er (Jo sings this already, and we're borrowing it from Gary)
Romanzo (di Central Park)
Old Home Day
Watchman!
At the River
Hymn
In the mornin'

A wonderful bunch of songs to be practicing here among the beautiful hills and valleys of this part of New York state.

August 4, 2009

I have some exciting news as a composer—I'm writing what amounts to a new opera. Details will be forthcoming on my other website, www.neelybrucemusic.com, as soon as it's appropriate to make an official announcement. In the meantime, because so much time is spent composing (and practicing) and September 8 (when I have to start teaching again) is right around the corner, I will not be blogging as frequently as I have, at least until the opera-composition task is out of the way.

But we do have a new country visiting this site. Paraguay. And we have a wonderful gig! On Sunday, November 1 of this year some of the IVM team will be performing at The Hopkins School in Hamden, Connecticut. The time is not set, but it will be an afternoon concert.

Hopkins is the school to which Ives was sent to get his grades up so he could get into Yale. A year at Hopkins (1893-94) did the trick, and he was admitted to the university that will be forever associated with his name. It was a year he worked on many fine songs. On March 31, 1894, while still a Hopkins student, he saw Götterdämmerung in New York City, which made a powerful impression on him, recorded in one of his best letters (to his father, a great Wagner fan).

In a subsequent post I'll provide a list of songs he worked on at Hopkins. Ives chronology being what it is, one is reluctant to say "a list of songs he composed at Hopkins," but "worked on" can be asserted with some confidence. Making the list will be an interesting and useful exercise.

That's it for now, except to report that my rehearsals with Elizabeth got off to a great start last Wednesday at her new home in Rocky Hill; Gary and I are playing telephone tag about our next rehearsal; violinst Paul Woodiel is going to be part of this program, and I have to relearn the Second Violin Sonata; Jim Sinclair will give introductory remarks about Ives and his Hopkins year; and the five of us are looking forward to a rousing time at Hopkins in the fall.

Jim has put together a great program, which will be the subject of the next blog.

July 27, 2009

While I didn't plan it this way, I've been away from blogging for an entire week. There is a lot to catch up on. Interested readers can check out my other blog (at www.neelybrucemusic.com) for information about the new organ stop at South Church in Middletown, and the fugues of Gerald Shapiro. I'll start writing about the Ives songs again on Wednesday—I'm having my first rehearsal with Elizabeth Saunders for the fall event at the Mattatuck Museum, which promises to be food for thought as well as a lot of fun!

But today I have sad news to report. Those of you who attended the IVM will remember Eugene and Marguerite Halaburt, a lively couple in their 80s who attended all of the sessions and responded to music and scholarship alike with great enthusiasm. I have recently learned that Gene departed this life this spring on the 23rd of April. The cause of death was complications after surgery. Mrs. Halaburt wrote to me and Sue Birch:

"[Gene] died peacefully after voicing his request to be cremated, ashes to be scattered under the aspens in our old home town, Silverton, CO., while the Brass Band plays Ives marches.  The last request might be hard to fulfill.  A memorial service will be held on August l2th at St Patrick Church and maybe we'll have to substitute the Ives on a CD player.  Ironically, the Rocky Mt. Brass Band Festival opens  August 14th but I don't think they're up to Ives.

"Our last big trip was to the Ives Marathon...Neely, I am assuming Gene sent you a recording of the Sunday Church service—he was disappointed in the quality of the recording on his hand-held device..."

Those of you who have heard the Podcasts may have figured out that indeed we received the recording of the church service on Sunday 1 February! Gene did us a remarkable favor. Yes, he had to use a hand-held device, and the quality is uneven, but thanks to his foresight we have what has turned out to be the only sound document of that occasion. Kyle Gann wrote about it, I wrote about, and it lives on in the memories of all who attended. But thanks to Gene Halaburt we have at least a taste of what the event sounded like. Some of the clips are posted for posterity at iTunes U.

Thank you, Gene. May you rest in peace.