THE MUSICAL TRANSCENDENTALISM
OF CHARLES IVES
Dunya Dujmié
Zagreb
It seems that Debussy’s lucid anti-dilettante Mr. Croche was with real
visionary instinct justifying the work of Charles Ives, that genius of the
uncharted desert of the American 20th century, when he said: »Music
has become a set of scattered forces. It is being turned into a speculative
song. I honour a few tones from the flute of an Egyptian shepherd more,
because he takes part in the landscape and hears harmonies not known
to text-books. The musicians’ mistake is that they listen only to music
written by practised hands, and never to that created by the landscape«.'
It is not only a question of the landscape, but also of all the other facts
provided by the material world, or better still, of their unity, their
essence and agglomeration, which appear in art as concrete and visible
bearers of the inner, potential ideas of a work of art. Landscape, un-
derstood in this deeper and denser form, becomes a sort of symbol, the
metaphor of an artistic idea, which it fertilises with emotional power.
This idea embodies elements of the landscape’s potential endurance and
stability, and perhaps also of its fall and degeneration. Such a landscape
provides the creative mind with the stimulating foundation of a certain
emotional condition, which aspires to be solved through concrete artistic
images.
Even folk music, which is a structural part of this superior landscape.
regardless of whether it acts through the strength of its rhythm, melodic
lines or timbre, no longer manifests itself through characteristic and
concrete sound, but becomes a historical interpretation of complex rela-
tions in space and time.
It is a fact that the language of music develops according to its own
laws, but it is also formed under the influence of the whole fundus of
reality, determined by environment and epoch. In other words, a certain
* Etienne SOURIAU, La correspondence des arts, Elements d'esthétique comparée,
Paris 1954, p. 119.90 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF THE AESTHETICS AND SOCIOLOGY OF MUSIC
social consciousness creates the aesthetic disposition for a certain com-
bination of sound elements. These sound elements originate under the
influence of the total conceptual potential of all the members of a certain
society.
The American landscape, the sound fundus of American reality, and
also the American social consciousness, are phenomena without precedent
in their exceptionality. We will leave aside the complex historical, na-
tional, and spiritual constellation of the American mentality, and return
to the question of the musical Americanism of Charles Ives, which is
what interests us here. We can rightly underline the unquestionable fact
that every real American will accept his music with a true shock of re-
cognition. This recognisable element in Ives’s music, or better still, the
way certain of his tonal images are emotionally defined, is a result of a
knowledge of the whole complex of American musical language and
modes of expression. And the primordial origin of such a collective,
social musical consciousness lies in folklore.
Folklore is known to have helped Charles Ives to replace the cha-
racteristic lack of solidity in American spiritual continuity. Thanks to
specific elements of national melodics, rhythm and the tonic and colour-
istic potential, which the internationally minded Ives brought into Ame-
rican musical language, this language attained the persuasiveness so
essential for any national musical structure. Ives’s music, without doubt,
springs from the previously mentioned, superior landscape of America.
It spreads in a nationally recognizable way towards the open spaces of
the international. Often it carries within it anticipations of many, some-
times even epochal, technical discoveries of European 20th century
music. In his compositions Ives used polyrhythmical combinations many
years before Stravinsky did. He discovered polytonality at a time when
Milhaud had just been born. He brought clusters and quartertone struc-
tures into music before Henry Cowell and Alois Haba had started com-
posing. So it is not surprising that at a time when MacDowell, Parker,
Loeffeler, Foote and Chadwich were writing over-ripe and scolastic
music, which was their conception of European Classicism and especially
of Romanticism, and which verged on kitsch, Ives’s instinct for the dis-
covery of new possibilities of sound, his unstereotype understanding of
rhythm and melodic and harmonic movements, elevated him above his
contemporaries.
In his orchestral works, especially in the A Symphony: Holidays and
Three Places in New England, Ives builds orchestral blocks of great
density, broken at intervals by sudden dynamic contracts or quotations
of well-known musical fragments. This transposition of recognizable
elements is another important anticipation in Ives’s creativity, with
which the artist almost reached the discovery of concrete music. We
must also mention that in these works is expressed Ives’s superior and
skilfully stylized relation towards the programmatic purposely built into
a work. The question of the programmatic of Ives’s music goes beyondTHE MUSICAL TRANSCENDENTALISM OF CHARLES IVES 91
the regions of musical aesthetics, and comes to a stop somewhere in the
region of the, as yet not sufficiently investigated, philosophical and lite-
rary speculations of American transcendentalists.
Let us remember Souriau and his ideas about programmatic music:
»The demands of true musical structure are such that the creator, as
soon as stimulation goes too far and leaves final stylization, is simply
forced to renounce music itself and transgress its basic laws. So little are
the facts of nature in harmony with those laws. Even emotional descrip-
tion in music leaves those bounds as soon as it approaches too close to
the real movements of the soul, the natural course of psychical facts,
which do not contain the prescribed repetitions, not the quivering, nor
architectonic transitions from one tonality to the other, nor correct ca-
dendes, nor the ready, stereotyped conclusions which musical form
demands.«?
Although there can be no word of description in Ives's music, Ame-
rican transcendentalism, shaped by literature, was its continuous source.
Ives tried to regard musical expression as a special form of manifold
psychological, philosophical and aesthetic functions. To put it more
simply, as a problem which adds to its total insolubility by its continual
complexity. But let us now say something about transcendentalism, that
great and irreplaceable inspiration of Ives’s music.
Transcendentalism was the manner of speculation of progressive Ame-
rican romantics in the first half of the 19th century. As such, it spread
first as revolt against the barren doctrines of the unitarians, later as a
protest against lasting American dependence on Europe, and finally as
a deep questioning of the spiritual foundations and moral implications
of the new American democracy. The basic premise of transcendentalism
is that man is the spiritual centre of the universe, and that only in man
can we find the solution and key to nature, history, and finally to the
universe itself. The transcendentalists develop this idea further, saying
that the success of self-fulfilment depends on the harmonious reconcilia-
tion between two psychological tendencies: the impulse to transcend
self, the aspiration of the individual to surpass the whole world in the
experience of one moment, and to become one with all the world, and
second, the impulse towards self-affirmation of personality, its desire to
remain united and responsible only to itself.
The peak of transcendental speculation is the claim that intuition and
imagination present as sure a road to the truth, as does abstract logic.
The idea of putting the power and gift of imagination on the same level
with reason, with which the role of the artist, as the original interpretor
of imagination, is automatically equalled with the role of the scientist of
philosopher ~ this idea, perhaps more than all others, animated the ima-
gination of Charles Ives. Ives turned to the study of century old trans-
* [bid., p. 148.