A Salesman's Centennial

A hundred years ago this week, America's first great composer was born, the son of a small-town Connecticut bandmaster who'd fought in the Civil War, and who taught his son to rely on his own ears and himself. Charles Ives went to Yale, took some music courses but didn't like his teachers' insistence on doing things in traditional ways, continued to prefer out-of-tune psalms sung at camp meetings to romantic orchestrations played in concert halls, went out and became an insurance agent and then a partner in his own insurance agency. During the day Ives sold insurance, managed the firm, worked on a manual explaining how to induce potential customers to sit back under a barrage of "authoritative data" forcing them to acknowledge that life insurance was doing its part in "the progress of the greater life values." At night and on weekends, Ives wrote symphonies and songs and sonatas, which mostly didn't get played till years later because they upset listeners too much. Ives said his two careers complemented one another: he said it helped his music when he had to "dig a little in real life."

Ives borrowed some of his desire to dig a little in real life, along with some revulsion at respectability and belief in an independent ruggedness, from the New England Transcendentalists. He read them again and again, quoting them in letters and memos and then finally in a book of criticism called Essays Before a Sonata, a sort of preface to a four-movement piano sonata celebrating Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Thoreau in turn. Ives particularly admired Emerson for his 'radicalism'--so radical, Ives wrote, that it "plunges to all roots at once," cutting the basis from more limited, specific criticism of the world even as it criticized the world as a whole. It was something like Ives's music, resolutely refusing "to let the ears lie back in an easy chair," insisting on testing everything by the transcendental standards, unconcerned with conventional consonance, that timider people set aside. The tunes everyone had known as a child would probably meet the standards--"Columbia Gem of the Ocean" and "Rock of Ages" were always popping up in Ives's music--and so might something entirely new, some quarter-tone creation uncorrupted by respectability or qualifying compromises. They'd both have to meet the same standards, though. They could be lumped together, and if the juxtaposition sounded funny--Ives wrote a great piano trio with a second movement labeled TSIAJ, for "The Scherzo is a Joke"--the joke was on neither the popular tunes nor the stringent lyricism, but on the pedants who'd have liked to keep them separate. When Ives was joking, his music could be something like a Roy Lichtenstein painting of a comic book frame, mocking people's belief that 'art' should be separate from 'life,' off somewhere in a museum; and when Ives was serious the hymns could come from the stringency as naturally as Bach's last Goldberg Variation could turn out to be a quodlibet of folksongs.

Except that the world of those hymns, the world Ives liked to think had shaped the New England Transcendentalists, didn't quite coincide with the world he lived in. There'd been a double-sidedness to the tradition the Transcendentalists came from from the beginning: The Protestant ethic would later be interpreted as the spirit of capitalism. But in Ives's time, in an increasingly corporate economy featuring the aggressive salesmanship and "authoritative data" whose identity with "real life" he confidently asserted, things were still more complicated. Sometimes the divergence between the love for the tranquil American past Ives thought he remembered and the aggressive boosterism of his class and time impressed a querulous split on his radical concern for absolute justice. "The Soviet is a crude form of our old-fashioned New England town meeting," he affirmed; and he added that "a sudden amount of perfect equality today thrown on the world would bring in its wake an equal amount of perfect melancholy."

Ives was militantly for women's suffrage, and he addressed his insurance circulars to businesswomen as well as men; but his wife Harmony evidently found it necessary to play a quietly supportive role, and Ives incessantly denounced the "femaled-male crooners" who were "emasculating America for money!" And on other political issues--Ives became something of a crank late in his life, sending plans for new governmental systems, but even before he developed these plans--Ives displayed a similar ambivalence of feeling. "Vote for Names! Names! Names!" he exclaimed during the 1912 election. "Three nice men Teddy, Woodrow & Bill $ame $ame $ame." But that didn't stop him from greeting Wilson as the savior of the proletariat the world over, the man who was going to maintain old-fashioned American democratic ideals and smash "the Hohenzollern Hog". That most first-hand observers of the war saw in it few old-fashioned American ideals, and certainly little salvation for the proletariat the world over--just a lot of carnage and death and maybe some profits--didn't matter. All Ives's energy, all his critical will and assertive independence, poured into support for the war to end wars. Ives wrote a patriotic song called "He Is There," and he liked it so much that when the next war began, he just changed the words a little. On the interesting centennial five-record set that Columbia has just issued, there's a record of him playing and singing the World War II version, and he just goes on and on, getting more bellicosely bombastic as he goes along. It still sounds stirring, as an old man's last call to battle should, but it sounds more than a little ludicrous, too. It's like a parody out of some '30s pacifist tract, some embarrassingly guileless Johnny Got His Gun. But Ives was entirely serious, and he stayed that way to the end.

In the Concord Sonata, all the ambivalences and ambiguities work. All through the sonata Ives keeps returning to the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, but they sound with a double edge. Beethoven meant to Ives all that was most progressive, most substantial, most radical--the "last sublime echoes of the greatest socialist symphonies" and "the relentlessness of fate knocking at the door." But in the third movement of the sonata, "The Alcotts," Ives made the four notes over, into an old hymn tune, as peaceful and completed as the camp-meeting songs his grandmother had sung. The tune recurs throughout the sonata, and always, after you've heard the whole piece once, with the same double resonance--which Ives said was single, "transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the cynic, respectively." It was more possible in music than in politics to confidently identify backward and forward glances, "digging in real life" with selling insurance, radicalism with patriotism, a Concord hymn tune with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

But another part of the sonata's power is the ineffable sadness of its last movement, when the four-note theme comes in for the last time on a flute--Thoreau's flute, Ives explained. The flute's been silent for the first three movements, and the tune comes in slowly and quietly, without preparation or roots, out of the blue. The sonata ends without a resolution. It is as though the old hymns couldn't stand against the bombast of fate knocking on the door. It is as though Ives had admitted that his father's world was gone, and that he had not yet tested newer, more specific radicalisms that might still work in the new world.