Program Notes

Prompt: “This year we celebrate the 150th birthday of Charles Ives. In honor of this occasion your commission is to write a song of between 4-7 minutes long using a TEXT WRITTEN BY IVES HIMSELF, perhaps selected from one of his songs, for the New Music Workshop ensemble”.

I love Charles Ives; I believe he is a true original voice in classical music and someone I emulate often. I have attempted to swirl all my favorite aspects of his work into this piece. I followed a compositional process like orchestral pieces like “The Unanswered Question” or “Central Park in the Dark” wherein subsets of the ensemble are seemingly playing completely different pieces from each other. Group 1 is the quartet, playing material I would write, and Group 2 is the soprano and piano, playing 90% carbon- copied excerpts from the 114 Songs. I chose to include these as direct quotes mainly to honor Ives’ rampant tradition of direct quotations in his own works. Choosing which songs to include was a process that took about a month to complete. I began by singling out which of the 114 Songs had text written by the composer, studying each of them, and highlighting the texts I liked the most. I wrote all these down on individual sticky notes before making 2 or 3 more rounds of cuts and finally landing on texts from 10 songs. I settled on texts that touched on 2 basic themes--nature and music—and ordered them in a way I felt told a new story, a collage becoming a composite, whole image. This ordering is either consciously or unconsciously guided by multiple spring semester assignments analyzing Harry Partch’s Barstow (1941/1968), which also collages text not written by the composer and does not alter them from their found state.

As for the music played by Group 1, the quartet, I first wrote “placeholder” cells all throughout the piece that would comprise a “separate” piece that followed its own rules of pacing, dynamics, and tone but would have key moments of planetary alignment with Group 2. This was also an extremely long process—after all, it was technically the only “new” musical material being composed. I scratched out my ideas over and over until I finally considered, what is the “Ivesian” approach here? I flipped back through the 114 Songs for guidance and noticed 2 key things: first, abrupt and eclectic interjections breaking away from very static traditional songwriting, and second, quotations on quotations on quotations on quotations... A great example of both is in #52, “Old Home Day” when an optional third part to be played by fife, flute, or violin jumps in to quote “Auld Lang Syne” for no apparent reason—it is completely unreflected in the vocal and keyboard parts, and the top recordings of the song on Spotify exclude it, yet this optional part completely changes the character of the section. Thus, Group 1 is 90% of the time playing obfuscated quotations of material from Group 2, sometimes anticipating it, eliding it, imitating it, or quoting it directly.

It was extremely difficult to trust my instincts in this piece. I tried to tell myself over and over that Ives was someone unafraid of humorous effect—my piece begins with a spoken quotation of a footnote from #28, “On The Counter”:

Note: Though there is little danger of it, it is hoped that this song will not be taken seriously, or sung, at least, in public. Which is worse? The music or the words?

I do not like to be self-deprecating about my work. I have found that being a woman in this field means you have to believe in yourself more than anything, and you need to own what you make. Introducing your music by saying how much you hate it just gives your judges more ammunition to exclude you. However, in my research for this piece, I found so much genuine self-deprecation from Ives about his music. It’s not an arrogant nonchalant attitude, but rather a poignant sadness about his music that permeates it. Ives did not compose at all after 1926. In 1927, he supposedly came down the stairs of his house with tears in his eyes and said to his wife, “nothing sounds right”. This singular anecdote became the theme of the piece for me. It is the last spoken text, breaking away from the world of the 114 Songs, after the soprano has repeated “Now! Hear the songs! I know not what are the words...” 3 times. At this point, the listener, performers, and composer have endured a painstaking sound journey akin to switchback roads on a mountainside, carefully maneuvering so that the vehicle does not fall off the edge. It is at the lonely, quiet top of this mountain that we gasp for air and fall on our sides, not relieved that the climb is over but instead questioning why we even attempted it in the first place. This is not a statement of acceptance. It is a statement of deep sadness and confusion about this craft.