Mad Music: Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel

10 | Rigging Up a Concert

The year 1927 would bring Ives into contact for the first time with the two men who more than any would be responsible for getting the music world, and the world at large, to pay attention to Charles Ives. That October, John Kirkpatrick wrote asking for a copy of the Concord Sonata, which he had seen in Paris that spring on Katherine Heyman’s piano: “I am an amateur musician on the brink of becoming a professional,” Kirkpatrick stated, and “to prove it” he enclosed a program of a recent concert he had given in Paris, where he was studying with Nadia Boulanger and other teachers. Heyman had earlier that year received from Ives a copy of some piano transcriptions of the orchestral Emerson Concerto, from which the first movement of the sonata was derived, and Ives responded to Kirkpatrick’s inquiry by promising to have a photographic copy of the transcriptions made for him, too. Over the next dozen years Kirkpatrick would bombard Ives with dozens of letters trying to pin down the composer ’s precise intentions about the piece. Kirkpatrick later admitted to Henry Cowell that for several years he regarded the piece “as quite mad and unperformable,” even as he grew increasingly obsessed with it.1 As much as Ives appreciated Kirkpatrick’s interest, and as much as later generations would be indebted to Kirkpatrick not only for his landmark 1939 Town Hall premiere of the Concord but even more for his single-minded effort after Ives’s death to catalog and sort his seven thousand pages of music manuscripts, Ives never really warmed to Kirkpatrick , whose humorless self-centeredness and intense and slightly priggish perfectionism made Ives wary from the start: although they lived only a few miles from one another in Connecticut, Ives dodged a face-to-face chapter 10 Rigging Up a Concert 200 • mad music meeting for years, and it was not until May 1937 that they met for the first time, and not until 1945 that Kirkpatrick presumed to sign a letter to him with his first name alone.2 Kirkpatrick’s family owned a high-end jewelry store on Park Avenue, and he was a bit of a spoiled rich kid, good-looking enough and charming and quick enough to be able to rely on his “ability to ‘slip through,’” as his prep school housemaster disapprovingly noted (“he is a voluntary failure”). Kirkpatrick dropped out of Princeton in his final semester and left in June 1926 for Paris, where he met Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson , and Roy Harris, all students of Boulanger as well and all destined to become important American composers; while there he received hundreds of worried letters from his mother, each precisely filling four sides of a folded sheet of expensive cream stationery, and regularly overspent his not inconsiderable monthly allowance of $150, prompting his older brother to write suggesting that if there were any “scrape” he had gotten into he ought to confide in him, and by the way “who the hell is Marie?” Kirkpatrick spent most of the next five years there.3 Henry Cowell was from another universe. A relentless networker with a natural genius for promotion and a determination to put what was by then being called “ultra-modern” music on the map, Cowell had made it his business to know literally everyone in the musical avant-garde. Starting in 1925 he churned out dozens of articles for both popular magazines like the New Republic and artsy journals, praising modernist American composers in unabashedly boosterish tones, proclaiming that new composers such as Rudhyar, Ornstein, Ruggles, Slonimsky—and himself—“are together forming a gigantic American musical culture” that “is becoming one of the most interesting the world has known.”4 In July 1927 he wrote Ives inviting him to become a subscriber and honorary advisory-board member to the publication he had just launched, New Music, whose unusual idea was to publish entire scores of new music that the regular publishers would not touch. It was through Cowell that Ives would meet Carl Ruggles and Nicolas Slonimsky, his two closest musical friends for the last decades of his life, and have ten of his most advanced compositions published for the first time (“The Fourth of July,” “Washington ’s Birthday,” and the song “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” among them) and the first recording made of any of his music.5 Rigging Up...