One indication of the unique complexity of Charles Ives’ Symphony no. 4, which the Seattle Symphony
is playing this weekend: The score, in the most recent edition, is prefaced by 37 pages of explanatory notes, instructions, and background material to help the conductor untangle and coordinate the composer’s extravagant intentions. Another is the map conductor Ludovic Morlot and the Benaroya Hall stage crew had to devise to plan the layout (see below)—the unusual instrumental groupings and sonic foreground/background effects that so fascinated Ives. A third: The SSO will be using four conductors—not only Morlot on his usual podium, but three assistants (Stilian Kirov, Julia Tai, and David Rahbee) to help hold the reins of what is likely the most logistically daunting piece the orchestra has ever played.
And one of the most labor-intensive. The required arsenal for the half-hour work includes six trumpets and two saxophones, an organ, a chorus, and three pianos: one with a madly difficult solo part (to be played by Cristina Valdes); a second played four-hands; and one on which certain keys are retuned a quarter-step off. Ever the idealistic visionary, Ives (1874–1954) even managed to ask for instruments that don’t exist: seven octaves’ worth of bells, which he wanted in “a continuous scale and of like quality” (a part normally played today on synthesizer); and an “ether organ,” which he seems to have envisioned as a sort of keyboard-activated Theremin.
An early champion of the Fourth was Bernard Herrmann, who could plausibly have taken its hyper-angsty opening gesture—stentorian low strings, a snarling trumpet fanfare—as a model for his film scores. Right away Ives deploys the first of those multi-conductor effects: an offstage group of violins and harp, dubbed “Distant Choir,” which continues at its own slow tempo against the rest of the orchestra. Soon the choir (a literal one) enters, singing a hymn that seems to float within the swirling instrumental texture.
Early in the second movement, the quarter-tones in the piano and strings bring a hallucinatory beauty. Later an every-man-for-himself pileup of musical lines—quoting or aping familiar marches, hymns, parlor music, and patriotic songs—creates a glorious chaos, a riotous, all-American crowd scene. The orchestra is divided into groups that play in independent tempos and time signatures, some even accelerating while others remain steady (for instance, the unmistakable imitation of a locomotive starting up, complete with shrill whistle). This chaos drops in and out, revealing, then rudely interrupting, quieter interludes: a dreamy piano, a bluesy trumpet, a saccharine solo violin. After the longest and loudest tumult comes the best joke in this movement, which Ives subtitled “Comedy”: the suddenly deflating ending.
The following fugue—for strings, with touches here and there of solo winds, brass, and organ—is plain in expression yet sumptuous in sound, like a Shaker table made from the richest woods. (The trombone’s poignant farewell is actually a phrase of “Joy to the World” slowed way down.) In the last movement, another offstage group, of percussion, keeps up a gentle, irregular tapping throughout; the rhythmic structure of the rest of the orchestra relates to it in shifting but painstakingly specified ratios. Earlier music returns, transformed and dreamlike (Ives called it “an apotheosis of the preceding content”): The stentorian string theme goes gloomy; the multilayer chaos that was manic and abrupt in the “Comedy” movement is here moody and inexorable; the choir returns, now singing wordlessly, wanderingly; and the orchestra gradually evaporates, leaving only the percussion, like some clockwork that exists outside the symphony’s frame—or outside of man’s control.
Just as the result is a massive collage, so was Ives’ working method. In addition to all the quotations, he constantly tweaked, repurposed, and pilfered from his own music, which is why the Fourth is impossible to date definitively; he readied it for performance sometime in the 1920s, but probably never considered it genuinely “finished.” Much of “Comedy” draws on piano pieces inspired by the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne (for one, the short story “The Celestial Railroad,” hence the locomotive sound effect); the fugue was written in the 1890s as a Yale music student (and later included in his First String Quartet); the finale uses a funeral march for organ which Ives wrote in honor of assassinated President William McKinley (and later worked into his Second String Quartet).
All this—what Ives borrows, and how—is what attracts Morlot to his music. He never heard the Fourth growing up in France, but discovered the composer while an assistant conductor with the Boston Symphony. “For a long time I’ve tried to understand what is American music,” he told me recently, and the inclusiveness, the melting-pot-ness, of Ives’ music naturally resonates—as a kind of metaphor for America itself, as Ives acknowledged: “The future of music may not lie entirely with music itself, but . . . in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits, the aspirations and ideals of the people.” Morlot compares Ives to Mahler, whose approach to the symphony, he says, was also to “embrace all possible traditions”—absorbing and evoking folk songs, klezmer tunes, quaint old Austrian dances.
So it’s exciting that the Seattle Symphony plans to release a live recording of the Fourth—part of a series of all four of Ives’ symphonies (their recording of the bumptious Second came out last April). Ives himself never heard the complete work—only, in 1927, the opening movement and what must have been a seat-of-the-pants attempt at “Comedy” that bore God knows what resemblance to what he really wanted. It wasn’t until 1965 that the full Fourth was posthumously premiered. Its unfettered, festive noise and otherworldly grandeur are thrilling selling points, but it’s also at times heart-clutchingly lovely. And to my ears—even after all these decades, even with all its unself-conscious nostalgia—it’s as fresh and stunningly novel as just about any orchestral work written since.
gborchert@seattleweekly.com
SEATTLE SYMPHONY Benaroya Hall, Third Ave. & Union St., 215-4747, seattlesymphony.org. $20–$122. 7:30 p.m. Thurs., Jan. 29, 8 p.m. Sat., Jan. 31.
