Ives Fourth Symphony

As the Charles Ives Society settles into its fourth decade, it is not only gradually closing in on its long-stated goal of a complete critical edition of the composer’s works. It is also increasingly releasing monumental scholarly editions showing something of a shift from the multiple missions the society has pursued since its inception in 1973. To provide just one example of the diverse editorial approaches the society editors have employed, one could compare the playful speculation of John Kirkpatrick’s Forty Earlier Songs (New York: Associated Music Publishers; Peer International Group, 1993) with the exacting scholarship of H. Wiley Hitchcock’s 129 Songs (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2004). Kirkpatrick conjecturally applied a Rudyard Kipling text to arrive at an earlier version of “The Ending Year” (which Kirkpatrick called “The Song of the Dead”) because the text in the ink score, in Kirkpatrick’s mind, could not “possibly be the words to which this music was originally composed” (quoted in Forty Earlier Songs, p. x). Hitchcock, too, added a Kipling text in 129 Songs, when he under-laid the text to “Tarrant Moss.” But Hitchcock took that step only because Ives himself had wanted to use the text but couldn’t get permission from Kipling, and so had to settle for publishing only the first few words in 114 Songs (Redding, CT: C. E. Ives, 1922). Hitchcock’s lengthy critical commentary—which in its unabridged form takes up as much space on a page as the song itself—provides an exhaustive editorial rationale for the decision to include the whole text. Furthermore, the markedly different editorial approach is hinted at by simply looking at the physical characteristics of the two volumes: Forty Earlier Songs is a svelte ninety-three pages; 129 Songs weighs in at just under 700 pages (counting the separately-issued critical apparatus). These two editions not only underscore the stunning diversity of Ives Society editions. For me they call to mind the observation of another bard of American song: that the times they are a-changin’ (at least when it comes to editing Ives’s music).

In late 2011, the Ives Society published its critical edition of Ives’s Fourth Symphony, a project that was more than twenty years in the making, more than thirty-five years, if you count the fact that William Brooks, one of the editors, finished his dissertation about the symphony’s second movement in 1976 (“Sources and Errata List for Charles Ives’ Symphony no. 4, Movement II” [Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 1976]), hence paralleling the almost geological time frame for the first performance of the work (the earliest traces of Ives’s sketches date from around 1910; it was first conducted by Stokowski in 1965). The weight of the volume makes clear the gravitas of the project. At over fifteen inches tall, it dwarfs the Ives Society’s editions of the first, second, and third symphonies (all a more manageable twelve inches), and seems clearly intended for a conductor’s podium rather than a student’s satchel.

Perhaps the most immediately striking feature of this edition upon opening the volume is that it is a result of the coordinated efforts of four separate editors, each entrusted with one of the movements. While James Sinclair retains credit as the executive editor, the individual movements are edited by William Brooks, Sinclair himself, Kenneth Singleton, and Wayne Shirley. Although the society has published editions which were joint efforts before— for example The Unanswered Question...