MUSIC OF AMERICAN COMPOSER CHARLES IVES

VARIATIONS ON “AMERICA”

Variations on "America" was originally a composition for organ. Composed in 1891 when Ives was seventeen, it is an arrangement of the traditional tune My Country, 'Tis of Thee, and was at the time the de facto anthem of the United States. The tune is also widely recognized in Thomas Arne's orchestration as the British National Anthem, God Save the Queen, and in the former anthems of Russia, Switzerland, and Germany, as well as being the current national anthem of Liechtenstein and royal anthem of Norway.  Ives later described the piece as "but a boy's work, partly serious and partly in fun." These variations serve, however, as perhaps the most comprehensive illustration of Ives's youthful sweep of style. 

The variations are a witty, irreverent piece for organ, probably typical of a “silly” teenage phenom like Ives. According to his biographers, the piece was played by Ives in organ recitals in Danbury and Brewster, New York, during the same year. At the Brewster concert, his father would not let him play the pages which included canons in two or three keys at once, because they were “unsuitable for church performance--they upset the elderly ladies and made the little boys laugh and get noisy!”

This work was transcribed for orchestra in 1964 by William Schuman and for band in 1968 by William Rhodes.

DECORATION DAY

Decoration Day was originally part of a larger piece entitled Holidays Symphony, though it stands squarely on its own. It is a musical depiction of a small town placing wreaths on the graves of its Civil War dead on what would later be known as Memorial Day. The piece is a tour-de-force of imagination and depth. Significantly, when the great Igor Stravinsky was asked his definition of a musical masterpiece he replied simply, "Decoration Day."

--Andrew Skaggs (United States Navy Band)

From Ives's postface to Decoration Day:

In the early morning the gardens and woods about the village are the meeting places of those who, with tender memories and devoted hands, gather the flowers for the day's memorial. During the forenoon as the people join each other on the Green there is felt, at times, a fervency and intensity - a shadow, perhaps, of the fanatical harshness - reflecting old Abolitionist days. It is a day, as Thoreau suggests, when there is a pervading consciousness of 'Nature's kinship with the lower order - man.'

After the Town Hall is filled with the Spring's harvest of lilacs, daisies and peonies, the parade is slowly formed on Main Street. First come the three Marshals on plough horses (going sideways); then the Warden and Burgesses in carriages, the Village Cornet Band, the G.A.R., two by two, the Militia (Company G), while the volunteer Fire Brigade, drawing the decorated horsecart, with its jangling bells, brings up the rear -- the inevitable swarm of small boys following. The march to Wooster Cemetery is a thing a boy never forgets. the roll of muffled drums and Adeste Fideles answers for the dirge. A little girl on the fencepost waves to her father and wonders if he looked like that at Gettysburg.

After the last grave is decorated Taps sounds out through the pines and hickories, while a last hymn is sung. Then the ranks are formed again and 'we all march back to town' to a Yankee stimulant -- Reeve's inspiring Second Regiment Quickstep -- though to many a soldier, the somber thoughts of the day underlie the tunes of the band. The march stops -- and in the silence, the shadow of the early morning flower-song rises over the Town, and the sunset behind West Mountain breathes its benediction upon the Day.

COUNTRY BAND MARCH

Country Band March was composed around 1903, four years after Ives's graduation from Yale and five years prior to his lucrative insurance partnership with Julian Myrick. Ives had just resigned as organist at Central Presbyterian Church, New York, thus ending thirteen and one-half years as organist of various churches. He was, according to Henry Cowell, "exasperated ... by the routine harmony for hymns." During this period Ives finished his Second Symphony (1902), composed three organ pieces that were later incorporated into his Third Symphony (1904), composed the Overture and March "1776"and various songs and chamber pieces. Apparently, the Country Band March received no performances, and only a pencil score-sketch is in evidence today. Later, Ives seemed very interested in this music, since he incorporated nearly all of it, in one form or another, into the "Hawthorne" movement of Sonata No. 2 (Concord)," The Celestial Railroad,’’ the Fourth Symphony (second movement) and especially "Putnam's Camp" from Three Places in New England.

From the "out of tune" introduction to the pandemonium which reigns at the close, the Country Band March is a marvelous parody of the realities of performance by a country band. While the main march theme is probably Ives' own, the march features an impressive list of quotations that includes Arkansas Traveler, Battle Cry of Freedom, British Grenadiers, The Girl I Left Behind Me, London Bridge, Marching Through Georgia, "Massa's in de Cold, Cold Ground, My Old Kentucky Home, Violets, Yankee Doodle, May Day Waltz and Semper Fidelis. There is rarely anything straightforward about the use of this material; the tunes are subjected to Ives's famous techniques of "poly-everything." Of particular interest is Ives's use of "ragtime" elements to enliven this already spirited march.

SON OF A GAMBOLIER

A gambolier may be described as a wandering wastrel -- or as as an oft-sung college song has it, a "rambling wreck." One of Ives's "marches with college tunes in the trio [layered] against the original theme," this one from the mid-1890's (or later) is easily his most intricately woven. Although Ives in his 114 Songs describes both, "A Son of a Gambolier" and, "The Circus Band" (Track 18) as "brass-band marches," there survive not even fragmentary sources. This transcription was made for performances by Keith Wilson and the Yale Band on their first European tour in 1961.

Come join my humble ditty,
From Tippery town I steer,
Like ev’ry honest fellow,
I take my lager beer,
Like ev’ry honest fellow,
I take my whiskey clear.
I’m a rambling rake of poverty,
And a son of a Gambolier.

I wish I had a barrel of rum,
And sugar three hundred pound,
The college bell to mix it in,
The clapper to stir it round;
I’d drink the health of dear old Yale,
And friends both far and near.
I’m a rambling rake of poverty,
And a son of a Gambolier.

Unbeknownst to most Georgia Tech fans, “(I’m a) Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech”—the music for the official fight song for the Georgia Institute of Technology—was composed by Charles Ives! It first appeared in print in 1908.

SYMPHONY NO. 2 FINALE 

The finale is marked Allegro molto vivace and amounts to a rollicking fiddle tune. The theme is Ives’s, but its underpinning is Foster’s Camptown Races, which finally emerges onto the surface in the horns. Part of the breathless and headlong quality of the finale comes from its quick shifts of direction, like montage in film; an example is the fife-and-drum corps that breaks into the end of the first-theme section (we’re back in sonata form). The gentle second theme evokes Foster’s Old Black Joe. The finale’s coda is a romping Ivesian quodlibet, recalling that old genre in which familiar tunes are stacked up in counterpoint. Here it is a grand brass-band review of themes from the whole symphony that climaxes with the trombones blaring out Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean at ffff—as loud as possible, if not louder.  

Then comes the famous last chord, a yawping tone cluster that Ives added decades after the symphony was finished. It is generally taken as the old Ives thumbing his nose at the conventionalities of the piece, but his explanation makes a quite different point: he noted that at old-time dances fiddlers would often signal the end of the evening with a raking dissonance across the strings. So the end of the second symphony is another demonstration of Ives’s love of the concrete realities of everyday music, and their indelible connection to the heart and soul.