New England Conservatory has dedicated the week of November 10-17 to a festival in honor of the late John Heiss, with particular emphasis on the work of Charles Ives and Ruth Crawford Seeger. On November 11th the NEC Chamber Orchestra, an unconducted ensemble under the artistic direction of Donald Palma, brought works by both of these and a lagniappe of Haydn to Jordan Hall.
Ruth Porter Crawford, later Seeger (1901-1953), composed in 1931 a strikingly original string quartet in a high modernist idiom with spiky dissonant counterpoint that in some respects foreshadowed the 1960s micro-contrapuntal style of György Ligeti. The slow movement, its third, she arranged for string orchestra under the title Andante for Strings, which NECCO offered as its opening piece. As it happens, as an undergraduate your correspondent wrote a paper comparing the slow movements of the closely contemporaneous Crawford and Barber string quartets—the latter of course the famous Adagio—and discovered, below their highly discrepant surface harmonic palettes, remarkable similarities in their handling of textures, densities and trajectories. Try that experiment at home, on either the quartet or fleshed-out scoring, and see if you agree!
At any rate, the Crawford builds from a nearly inaudible melodic interplay of minor seconds, adding lines that gradually rise to a powerful and frenzied climax and then fades back into the ether. It’s all over in a twinkling but imbued with a security of tone and admirable dynamic control by the performers.
Our first encounter with the Symphony No. 3, The Camp Meeting, of Charles Ives goes back to the 1960s when Thomas Dunn, later conductor of the Handel and Haydn Society, led a performance with the Festival Orchestra of New York. A friend who was in the orchestra commented on how tricky the rhythms were, so it is obvious from the fact that NECCO performed it without a conductor, that much progress has been made in the prowess of young musicians in the intervening decades; indeed, these students made it seem a piece of cake.
Please indulge a small digression on the subject of Ives. This year marks the sesquicentennial of his birth, as well as that of Arnold Schoenberg, and neither of these great artists seems to be getting the level of enthusiastic attention they deserve. As regards Ives, Alex Ross has commented to this effect in The New Yorker, while also writing admirably —do check it out if you subscribe or can evade TNY’s paywall—about the festival put on by Indiana University. On the other hand, the ever-querulous Norman Lebrecht has cranked on about how he hates Ives and can’t see the point of listening to all that clatter and confusion (incidentally, the Third Symphony is pretty solidly tonal, in the key of B-flat Major).
To put aside the old, and sadly periodically recrudescent calumnies that Ives was just a visionary crackpot amateur, let’s take a more careful look at the Third Symphony, written mostly between 1907 and 1910 and based on organ pieces written around 1901. The closest and best analysis comes from the wholly admirable 30-year-old book All Made of Tunes by J. Peter Burkholder, who teaches at Indiana and was the co-organizer of its festival. The outer movements of the symphony (it has but three), subtitled “Old Folks Gatherin’” and “Communion” respectively, are constructed in the form that Ives seems to have created and that Burkholder has called “cumulative form,” which can be thought of as like sonata form but without the exposition. Burkholder speculated that this process may have been suggested by common practices among church organists, of whom Ives was one, improvising on hymns to be used in the service, and also by the structure of sermons by revival preachers of Ives’s childhood. It also makes sense when, like Ives, one uses thematic material that “everybody” would already know: hymn, patriotic and popular tunes. Modern audiences lack this familiarity and so may be less adept at following Ives’s trajectory, which as in many of his pieces is a process of moving from complexity and confusion to simplicity and clarity (other examples of this are his piano trio and, dare we say, the finale of his Fourth Symphony). The Third’s middle movement, subtitled “Children’s Day,” is a sprightly, scherzo-like romp in ternary form. Ives’s “secret sauce” in using found materials, Burkholder observes, is to take these themes not entirely as they come, but rather engineer them into proper “classical” melodies capable of development, with a principal theme and one or more subsidiary ones that are fragmented and combined at first and then stated in their fullest (though not necessarily original) shapes, the subsidiary ones first and the main one last. In the Third Symphony, there is close thematic linkage between the outer movements—the principal tune of the first is a subsidiary theme of the third, and vice versa—as well as close linkages of key.
The Third Symphony is also, one must add, tremendous fun. There are numerous harmonic and melodic “errors,” truncated phrasing, off-key notes that produce delicious dissonances, notes held after they should have gone silent, and so forth, whereby Ives trained his acute and mimetic ear to the way enthusiastic congregants went off on their own tangents, enhancing the emotional exuberance of the camp meeting that gives the work as a whole its name. One Ives story had him complaining to the engraver of the score to leave all the wrong notes as they were, since all the wrong notes were right.
The NECCO performance of the Ives left little to complain about: they seem to have been using the newer critical edition of the score, which leans into those off-kilter notes, and the players were enjoying the permission the score gave them to do things they’re generally “notsaposta” do, yet did with awesome precision. The choice of tempi for the outer slow movements was a little fast, which made them rush the middle movement a bit, which partially obscured its jocularity. We were also a little concerned that, even with its reduced scoring of winds and brass (single winds, two horns, one trombone), there was a balance problem. Nevertheless, we want to call out trombonist Alvin Tsz Yin Ho, principal horn Qianbin Zhu, flute Subee Kim, and concertmaster Michael Fisher for praise. Tragically, in our view, though NECCO sports a percussionist on its roster, he was not to be heard for the (admittedly optional) offstage bells that cap off the finale, mimicking church bells at a tritone separation from the orchestra.
The evening wrapped with what we called, tongue firmly in cheek, a “lagniappe” of Haydn, which in reality was the Symphony No. 44 in E Minor, Hob. 1:44 (1772), given the sobriquet “Trauersymphonie” (Mourning Symphony) for no apparent reason, owing to an apocryphal story that Haydn wanted the slow movement to be used at his funeral (was it?); it certainly has nothing of a mournful affect. What the symphony does have is an abundance of contrapuntal fireworks, with a finale that certainly could have (and maybe did) teach young Mozart a thing or two about integrating polyphony into sonata form, with a side course of melodic inversion. As with much early to middle Haydn, the sonata movements contained repeats not only of the exposition but also of the development + recapitulation, which we were gratified to hear NECCO take. The second-movement minuet (one of two curiosities about the structure of the work, the other being the finale closing in minor mode rather than the more usual practice of the day for a major mode closing to a minor mode piece) is a canon in diapason, or between the upper and lower registers at a measure’s remove, and the stately yet tranquil E major slow movement (OK, so that’s a third curiosity, a symphony in which all four movements share the same key center) offering respite from the somewhat frenzied mien of all the rest. At the opening of the first movement, there seemed to be some minor disagreement among the players as to how many cents are in a semitone as opposed to a whole tone (there’s an important melodic semitone in the principal theme’s opening motif), but that got settled quickly and for the rest the pacing, dynamics, ensemble and expression were superb.
Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.