Hitchcock's Ives: A New Edition of 129 Songs
H. Wiley Hitchcock has a long history of dedication to the cause of Charles Ives. In the preface to his new edition of 129 Songs1 he recalls his introduction to the composer in a graduate class at the University of Michigan in 1947, a time when courses on American music were virtually unknown. He listened to a badly recorded amateur performance of some of the songs: 'I had no problem hearing through the poor recording and uncertain voice to the extraordinary lyric gifts of Ives . . . to this day, for me, not only does Ives remain uniquely significant among American composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—his music uniquely gratifying and challenging—but the very heart of his oeuvre is the body of songs, numbering about one hundred eighty, that he composed between the mid-1880s and the mid-1920s' (p. xiii).
In 1972 Hitchcock became Founding Director of the Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York; he revitalized the moribund Charles Ives Society; and he and Vivian Perlis were the guiding spirits behind the comprehensive Centennial Festival–Conference held in 1974 at New York and New Haven, when I was honoured to be invited to represent the United Kingdom. Three years later Hitchcock's short monograph appeared2 and the proceedings of the conference made a handsome volume with an international cast of contributors.3 Then, in 'Editing Ives' 129 Songs'4 and elsewhere, Hitchcock lifted the curtain on some of the intractable problems that arise in preparing a scholarly edition from sources as complex as those that Ives left behind. I now consider a selection of songs in the new edition, including some where I have had experience as a performer over many years. If this causes me to question some of the actual notes, it must not obscure the prodigious amount of detail provided with this new edition for every aspect of sources and context.
In 'Editing Ives' 129 Songs' Hitchcock took one short song, 'The Cage', as an example of the problems he faced. He assumed that nobody ever gave Ives the benefit of professional editorial advice when his 114 Songs was published by Schirmers at his own expense in 1922 and that the firm did not take the work of an amateur composer seriously.5 It simply printed what he sent in, but he did have a chance to correct proofs. What Ives's inconsistencies mean—he enjoyed playing his Concord Sonata and other [End Page 606] piano works differently each time—has always been hard to assess. However, 114 Songs may have been more affected by engraver's errors than has been admitted.
The one-page song 'The Cage' is an unusual case, since it went through three printings as a song for voice and piano and was also printed as In the Cage, a chamber piece that could have come first, and exists in a manuscript sketch riddled with emendations. In the printed versions the chords underneath the voice sometimes fail to match the number of beats in the voice part. That can be corrected, which Hitchcock does discreetly with ties rather than new note values, but the most elaborate of the piano chords, four from the end, is slightly different in the four available sources. It is now clear that the version of this chord in 114 Songs has the sharp in the left-hand component wrongly attached to the D rather than the F—a simple engraver's error. The other three sources confirm this. Not everything is as easy to adjudicate, but there was nothing obviously wrong about the chord as printed and widely performed. The 'wrong' left-hand D♯ fits two others in the right hand: the 'wrong' F is matched two octaves above. But the 'right' D and 'right' F♯ add two new pitches to the song's most complex chord...
