Its echoes can be heard in nearly everything the Danbury, Connecticut native wrote, from his hundreds of rather conventional art songs to his still-radical piano sonatas and symphonies.His music has earned a reputation for density and complexity.
Charles Ives Top Songs Full Of BlockyHis pieces are full of blocky, dissonant harmonies; lines moving in different tempos or meters; multiple keys occurring simultaneously; and a sometimes-impenetrable amount of activity. The adjectives craggy, flinty, and granite-like get thrown around. It was like learning another language, because I had spent my entire life playing kind of refined art music, and Ivess music is totally reminiscent of the unschooled earnestness of community music, specifically in New England. In more traditional classical forms such as the sonata, a piece begins by presenting a few themes before exploring how those themes can evolve and interact. While each does have a few main themes that draw on those childhood songs, each movement begins with all the variations, digressions, explorations, dissections, and manipulations of those themes. Sometimes bits of the theme or related tunes flash by, only to be subsumed into his continued ruminations. And only then does the preceding music snap into place as a unified, if somewhat fuzzy, whole. Denk singles out the finale of the first sonata, which transforms the hymn Work, for the Night Is Coming into what he calls a rambling and endlessly regenerating march. After seven relentlessly tumbling minutes, the pianist concludes with a short gospel cadence whose meaning has been entirely transfigured. For Jackiw, the third sonatathe longest of the setcontains such a moment. The entire sonata is based on the hymn I Need Thee Every Hour, and each movement has a complicated, cyclical form in which the hymn assumes numerous guises. Ivess harmonic language is slightly less dissonant than usual, but his structures are no less labyrinthine. Nonetheless, when the hymn appears, unadulterated, at the end, Jackiw feels overwhelmed by the breathtaking shock of beauty that wipes out the preceding chaos. It triggers the vivid memory of a campsite from his childhood. Sometimes his memories are humorous and playful, sometimes wistful and longing, sometimes all of these at the same time. In that light, the complexity of these pieces is a profoundly human expression of that moment of sensory recall, which is always just beyond our reach. To paraphrase another maximalist New Englander, these pieces contain multitudes. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle. Chapel Hill St., Suite 200, Durham, NC 27701 phone 919-286-1972 fax 919-286-4274.
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