A
At 08:43 AM 11/28/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>Neat Mark
>
>some of the same deliberate awkwardness & 'ungainly' music that we find in
>Ives (whose work I really like).
>
>There's a great essay by Guy Davenport (of course) in his Geography of the
>Imagination, by the way, making some of the same points, that Ives is a
>USAmerican original...
A point that neither I nor Davenport can lay claim to.
In 1970 my college roommate and I took a house in the far boonies of
Massachussets when it came time to write our dissertations. He was a
composer and wrote about Ives. I didn't write my own but read all of
Parkman, whose descriptions of the landscape in which French, English,
Colonials and Indians found themselves fighting are enough to give one
poison ivy without even going outside--he really knew that difficult
terrain--and wrote a great deal of poetry--the seminal year for me in many
ways.
Close by were a great many skirmish sites, including Deerfield, where the
French and their Indian allies down from Canada attacked in midwinter 1700.
This is remembered as the Deerfield Massacre. They took many captives and
camped that night on a tall hill, heavily-forested then and now (as is much
of the countryside), called Sugarloaf, directly on the shore of the
Connecticut River. In the morning they and their captives began the long
walk to the St. Lawrence, using the frozen Connecticut River as a highway
for much of the journey. To that journey we owe Mary Rowlandson's captivity
narrative. There are a few houses left from those times, but a great many
more from immediately after the defeat of the French at Quebec--during the
war this was the front line.
So between the music of Ives and endless talk about him, and the landscape
outside that was the landscape (which still contained its history) that
nourished Ives, I was devouring him.
Back in New York I was teaching at Hunter College in the weeks of the Ives
Centennial, when the American Society of Musicologists was meeting in the
building, and the auditorium was a constant series of performances.
In the US Ives seems to have largely fallen by the wayside--a few of the
symphonic pieces are performed occasionally, and some of the chamber music,
tho rarely. The choral music almost never. Mystifying--we manage still to
read Homer, but the world of Ives' music seems to be increasingly lost to
most Americans.
Mark
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