Charles Ives, Three-Page Sonata (1905) (recorded live on KUHF, Houston Public Radio) by adamtendler

(LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY, 8/9/05)

“Well, you’re right,” I finally answered, still getting used to the fact that this woman had raised her hand during my concert to submit her opinion.  ”He was angry.  Ives composed [the Three-Page Sonata] at a time when he was consciously turning his back on the American musical establishment of the early twentieth century, which was, for all intents, a rather subdued period of our musical history.  He felt insulted by the indifference of audiences and critics who, in his view, he’’d already compromised his creative integrity for.  Whether he had or not, and whether or not anyone was ever indifferent to his music in the first place, is still anyone’s guess.  But regardless, his intense feelings of rejection and scorn led to a famous decision: from that point on Ives would compose only according to his own rules and inspirations.  He became a kind of musical inventor.  And as for money, he decided to earn his living outside of the realm of music altogether.  Ives went on to create a successful, and even quite influential, life insurance company which he ran for the rest of his life.  He’d once said that he didn’t want his family to ‘starve on his dissonances.’ 

“By the time Ives’s music was discovered, let alone appreciated, it was only a few years before his death at the age of eighty, and this was decades after he’d stopped composing.  Tired, ill, bitter, and distracted by new projects — mostly political essays — most of what remained of his efforts as a composer lay in piles of furious sketches, everything from short fragments like this Three-Page Sonata to full-fledged symphonies, all of which required serious deciphering and piecing-together later by scholars, something that continues with spirited debate to this day.  The resulting pieces [of music], if nothing else, come at us as astonishing artifacts, evidence of a creative voice too ahead of its time to be appreciated in its time.  They’re postcards from a musical laboratory, states of mind, mostly dissonant, filled with legend and mystery and nostalgia, permeating with heartbreak in the most profound sense.  The heartbreak of a life unfulfilled.”   

I’d given variations of this speech throughout the tour, but never to an audience so enrapt, and [these three women who comprised my audience and I] continued our discussions freely throughout the rest of the program, me turning to face them on the piano bench between pieces. 

I learned that they were all visual artists, and that none of them had any musical training whatsoever.  The music came to them in colors, they said, in movement, in emotion, even as memories.  They’d never suffered that distinct misfortune of inheriting the musician’s impulse to analyze the notes, meter, harmony, rhythm, or the relationship between consonance and dissonance in a piece of music — a side-effect of our schooling.  They never learned to treat music as a specimen to examine and dissect.  

In America 88x50, [namely my concerts in small towns and school outreach performances] I realized that lay audiences and children actually listened.  I simply had to get out of the way and let them.  There was nothing exotic about the process; the nonmusicians I’d encountered naturally associated what they heard with feelings or scenes they already knew, or if need be, they’d make some room to accomodate whatever they heard.  If anyone ever admitted to me that they didn’t appreciate a piece, I’d hear them out, give a few extra words of background information, and then it was almost always, “Ah… Okay, I see.”

So Ives sounded “angry” in the Three-Page Sonata.  Fine by me.  For Christ’s sake, he was.