Insurance agent by day, arch-modernist by night, Charles Ives’ idiosyncratic, cacophonous works are some of the most exciting and influential of the twentieth, and indeed late 19th, centuries. From songs to string quartets to large orchestral works, Ives’s music veers from the lushly romantic to the aggressively contemporary, his restless inventiveness evident in everything he wrote. Ives was particularly interested in, and successful at, marrying popular, particularly American, musical styles – hymns, jazz and celebratory brass band music – with classical structures, something this set of lesser known pieces for orchestra displays in abundance.
The three movements of New England Holidays Symphony show Ives at his exuberant best: chaotically jubilant sketches of carnivalesque joy and abandon. Stravinsky hailed ‘Decoration Day’ as the definitive musical masterpiece: based on Decoration Day ceremonies experienced in his youth, Ives transforms memories of his father’s marching band playing dirges into a riotous dream-like narrative, recognisable tunes clashing with the crazed noise of the crowd. ‘The General Slocum’ comes under Ives’s ‘Cartoons and Take Offs’ genre, or ‘literal’ depictions of events, in this case the explosion of the titular ship in which over 1000 people were killed. Here we’re in almost hauntological territory, as melodies from popular ditties of the time wash against the ominous throb of the waves, recalling The Caretaker and Gavin Bryars’s ‘Sinking of the Titanic’, before disaster strikes in the form of teeth-gnashing dissonance. The other descriptive piece, ‘Yale-Princeton Football Game’, opts for light-hearted jollity, portraying the activities both on and off the pitch of the famous 1897 match through wild piano improvisations, whistles and camp woodwind bleets. The performances are incredibly vibrant, the recording lush, and the cover art, a reproduction of a painting by Ives’s grandnephew James Bigalow Hall, captures the beautiful madness of Ives’s music perfectly.
Joshua Meggitt
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