Bad Resolutions or Good? Ives's piano ‘Take–Offs’

Extract

In a Moment of Reflection Ives asked himself, ‘Are my ears on wrong?’ Like so many composers he had to contend with periods of self-doubt, and during the first two decades of this century, when his mature works were written, he was presented with very few opportunities to hear them played in public. Yet he continued to jot down a muddled host of experimental ideas; his imagination fuelled by personal experience. From childhood in Danbury Connecticut Ives had possessed a phenomenal memory: for the kinds of literature that he read, the people that he met and the music-making that he heard. All these impressions were later collated and presented in his Memos. Dictated in the 1920's and 1930's, they make fascinating reading, both in terms of their vivid accounts of local bandcalls, revivalist singsongs, barn dancing, blacked-up minstrelsy, and ad hoc performance practice together with the composer's opinions about American musical life as he knew it. However, none of this was mere objective note-taking: Ives often expresses himself in the vernacular and doggerel of his boyhood.