To all Ives enthusiasts and Ives skeptics:
Today I’m starting to blog about the Ives Vocal Marathon and what’s involved in this strenuous and unprecedented undertaking. I’m the only person to have played all 185 Ives songs, and before all this is over on February 1, 2009, I will have also played fifteen fragments of songs which Charlie didn’t bother to finish, as well as one unfinished, unpublished song that deserves to see the light of day, if only briefly. Sometimes in these blogs I’ll write about getting ready for the festival presentation (six concerts in three days, whew!), sometimes I’ll write about special things in store for those who attend, sometimes I’ll write about specific songs—analytical comments, what’s involved in practicing them, their “substance” (Ives’s term for “below the technical surface”)—or maybe I’ll write about the weather. But it all gets back to the Ives songs in my mind—I wrote the previous frivolous comment and immediately thought of all the Ives songs that refer to the weather, for example “Soliloquy”:
When a man is sitting on the hearth beside the fire, he says, “Nature is a simple affair.” Then he looks out the window and sees a hailstorm and says, “Nature can’t be so easily disposed of.”
I’m writing this after practicing the song “Thoreau” and the finale of the Concord Sonata, entitled Thoreau. Henry David Thoreau can’t be so easily disposed of either. Those brooding octaves in the left hand, which seem like the author walking in the woods in all kinds of weather, are surprisingly hard to control. And in the song they are slightly higher than in the piano piece (a whole step)—just enough to make the song seem light as a feather while the piano piece seems to bear the philosophical weight of the ages.
And the opening of the song contains the only extended passage of melodrama by Ives—a truly inspired reading of paraphrased Walden about sounds and atmospheric conditions and living along in the wilderness, Thoreau through the Ives filter as it were, as the atmosphere filters the distant sound of the Concord bell.
”Melodrama” in the technical sense, of course—spoken (not sung) words accompanied by music. David Barron reads this passage in an inspired manner, and he sings the song beautifully. But I as the pianist have to get the correct tone of the vocal piece, a quite different tone from the one for piano alone. The song is almost a bagatelle—a marvelous, thought-provoking bagatelle, like late Beethoven, but a bagatelle nonetheless. The piano piece is altogether different, a meditation on nature and the ways of life and death. A tall order, since the notes of one are contained (almost) in the notes of the other, just transposed!
Gotta get back to work—there are 185 of these things! See “coming events” at
www.ivesvocalmarathon.com for more details.
Ciao,
Neely
