Commemorating uniquely rooted American modernism: Philharmonic plays the Ives Second

Charles Ives: Visionary Connecticut Yankee

Opportunities to sample the music of Charles Ives in concert on his 150th birth anniversary have been rare in these parts. So I was immediately interested to learn the Philharmonic Orchestra of Indianapolis had scheduled a performance of his Symphony No. 2 as centerpiece of a program excitedly titled "America! America! Music of Change!"

Taking in a concert of Indianapolis' adult volunteer orchestra was itself rare for me, as I had not heard the Philharmonic since shortly after moving to Indianapolis 38 years ago, when the orchestra's home was Caleb Mills Hall at Shortridge Middle School. Sunday afternoon at the Pike Performing Arts Center, longtime music director Orcenith Smith paid Ives the honor that professional Hoosier musical organizations seem to have passed up this year. 

The Second Symphony is the product of Ives' post-university formative years. He was building restively on the tutelage of the conservative Yale University professor Horatio Parker and launching a career in the insurance business at the same time.  Vernacular music absorbed in his youth in Danbury, Conn., percolated in his mind along with uneasiness about conventional composition, which nevertheless provided procedures and a tone of tribute based on Beethoven and Brahms. The Second Symphony folds in bits of Stephen Foster ("Camptown Races"), hymns, barn-dance fiddling,  band music, and patriotic melodies ("America the Beautiful," "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean") .

As knowledgeable as the conductor's program notes and remarks from the stage seem to be, they reflect

Orcenith Smith, professor of music at DePauw University

understandable difficulty in judging which tunes are prominent or merely glanced at as the full-scale work proceeds. Melodic fragments appear and reappear in a manner that weaves the entire composition together and blurs most distinctions that the movement headings (Andante moderato, Allegro, Adagio cantabile, Lento maestoso, Allegro molto vivace) seem to stipulate. 

Besides, the ravages of time prevent these quotations from being familiar in the 21st century, which Ives probably counted on.  Even "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," a full statement of which crowns the finale, is very little known today outside this symphony. Its interruption by the last chord, a kind of dissonant Bronx cheer, should not be taken as the composer's thumbing his nose at the tune, but was in fact the way the bands of Ives' youth signaled they were finally done playing after providing background music. Such a context means the Ives Second Symphony can genuinely be considered a period piece. 

That phrase is at odds with the perennial demands we make of art. What aids its survival in contemporary ears may be that the genius for combination and context-wrenching so characteristic of Ives ensures this work's vitality, justifying the exclamation points in the Philharmonic's concert title. So who cares if we no longer hear "gentle voices calling 'Old Black Joe,'" or feel embarrassment at Foster's fragmentary evocation of fondly remembered plantation life? The phrase fades quickly and we're on to something else out of Ives' roiling imagination.

So was the Philharmonic's performance, knitting together the disparate strands of received melodies and the way Ives vigorously linked them, as if to provide running commentary, spiced with dissonance.  Such a procedure can't lead to top-drawer music, in the estimation of many. At a gathering in Tanglewood commemorating the nation's bicentennial in 1976, I remember the consensus of a panel discussion that Ives was not a major composer because almost none of his tunes were his own. The sometimes censorious Raymond Leppard, keen to maintain musical propriety as music director of the Indianapolis Symphony, once dismissed Ives with one word: "incompetent," while praising George Gershwin as "America's Schubert." I can't subscribe to such belittlement of Ives' genius, and felt so long before my son William's illuminating performance of Ives' four violin sonatas in Danbury last month. 

So I'm grateful to Smith and his ensemble of dedicated amateurs for providing my only other exposure to live Ives in this sesquicentennial year. Also on the thoughtfully assembled program were a happily bristling performance of George Whitefield Chadwick's "Jubilee" (from "Symphonic Sketches") and the brooding, strings-only second movement (alla sarabande) of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's Sinfonietta No. 2 ("Generations").