Charles E. Ives, Symphony No. 4 ed. by William Brooks et al., and: Charles Ives Society Performance Edition, 2011 ed. by Thomas M. Brodhead (review)

The story of the Charles Ives industry is one of the most extraordinary sagas in twentieth-century music. Ives’s chronic isolation can be compared to that of Emily Dickinson, who published only a handful of poems in her lifetime, even then in heavily edited form, and later became acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century. Her important idiosyncratic punctuation was restored only with the Thomas H. Johnson editions in the 1950s. Ives’s reputation also gathered pace through the mid-twentieth century. Allowance has to be made for the fact that, unlike words, music requires efficient performing materials—scores and parts. Ives—and his copyists—produced these in the most haphazard way imaginable. He hardly ever experienced professional musicians performing his work and when he did the results were met with scant comprehension. Ives’s scores have had to be put together into a performable state by generations of musicians willing to do it— some generously paid by the composer. Bernard Herrmann recalled: ‘Ives, after all, was a very impractical man when it came to performances of music. By not being a professional musician in the sense that he did not have to make a living out of music, he entered into an abstraction of music. Because it was an abstraction, it didn’t deal with any of the realistic problems’ (in Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History (New Haven, 1974), 160). Herrmann, who worked with Ives on some of his scores, also claimed that he never read proofs and, of course, he was in very poor health from his 1918 heart attack onwards. Over half a century after Ives’s death in 1954, it still remains astonishing that a composer now regarded as a major figure has required assistance on such a scale to make his works playable. There is nothing comparable in musical history—and the apotheosis of these performing problems comes in the Fourth Symphony.

By 1916 the work was more or less complete but revisions went on until 1926. It was the first and second movements that were played in the International Referendum Concert of the Pro Musica Society at New York Town Hall on 29 January 1927. In January 1929, the second movement came out in Henry Cowell’s New Music Quarterly, a venture then being financed by Ives. The conductor was Eugene Goossens (1893–1962), a member of the English musical dynasty that originated in Belgium, and now a neglected composer, although Vernon Handley recorded his orchestral works in Australia in the 1990s (ABC Classics 442 364–2; 462 014–2; 462 766–2). At the time of the Ives premiere Goossens was conductor of the Rochester Symphony, founded in 1923. It seems surprising that this Ives performance rated no mention in Goossens’s autobiography, Overture and Beginners (London, 1951). He refers to conducting in New York and all he says is: ‘We survived, incidentally, a grim piece for strings by Carl Ruggles, the New England modernist who, like his fellow countryman, Ives, wrote next to unplayable music’ (p. 233). The ‘grim piece’ must have been Portals (International Composers Guild, 24 December 1926) and Goossens had previously conducted another Ruggles performance in New York—Men and Mountains (ICG, 7 December 1924; see Carol J. Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (New York, 2000), 71). It seems odd that Goossens coupled Ruggles with Ives when the problems with Ives are incomparably greater. Three months later, on 10 April, Goossens conducted George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique in New York, which caused a scandal, although Goossens concluded: ‘The Ballet mécanique was...