PREFACE
Charles Ives took up intensive work on his Symphony No. 2 in New York in 1907, at the time of his courtship and engagement to Harmony Twichell.1 It was Ives’s first major orchestral work after his Symphony No. 1, written ten years before at Yale College under the watchful eye of Horatio Parker. Symphony No. 1 was fully based on European models, owing much to Dvořák and Tchaikovsky. Ives later faulted Parker as being “governed too much by the German rule,” and clearly there had been disagreements between teacher and student over Ives’s first symphony. Parker discouraged Ives’s kaleidoscopic key changes in the exposition of Symphony No. 1’s opening movement—“hogging all the keys at one meal” was his expression. More telling, Parker rejected Ives’s proposed slow movement for the symphony, probably because it introduced gospel (or “camp meeting”) tunes.2 From those very sketches come the most haunting passages in the middle movement of Symphony No. 2, neatly encapsulating the way in which Ives’s second symphony both departs from and draws from his first. It is also an early illustration of how Ives asserted his independence and forged his own style by drawing on the vernacular music of his childhood. As J. Peter Burkholder puts it, Ives’s ambition in Symphony No. 2 was “to create a symphony in the European Romantic tradition that is suffused with the character of American melody, wedding the two traditions in a single work.”3 How Ives went about achieving this synthesis will be explored below.
Performance History
Symphony No. 2 was fully copied in ink by Ives’s copyist George Price around 1909–10 (see Facsimile 2). Soon thereafter, Ives had performance parts copied for the first and third movements. The only performance from that time that he recalled was “in the fall of 1910 or 1911,” when Edgar Stowell, conductor of the Music Settlement School orchestra, tried over the first movement “and conducted it … at one of the school concerts.”4 No other performances are documented. Ives may have lent Price’s ink copy of the full score to Walter Damrosch , who in March 1910 had conducted in Carnegie Hall, one Saturday morning, a reading of two movements from Ives’s Symphony No. 1. Though Damrosch encouraged Ives to engage the New York Symphony for a reading of another symphony (which could have been either his Symphony No. 2 or No. 3), Ives never pursued the suggestion.5
In the following decades Ives’s achievements as a modernist gradually became known among the musical public. The nostalgic nature of Symphony No. 2, though remaining dear to Ives, was out of step with the modernist spirit, and it would be another forty years before its time finally came. Leonard Bernstein’s premiere of the symphony in Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic on Washington’s Birthday, 22 February 1951, was a triumph, and Bernstein’s signature recording, released in 1960, set a performance tradition for the next forty years.6
Listeners familiar with Ives the modernist, however, could hardly have been disappointed at the symphony’s conclusion. Since the 1930s Ives had been working out a tag compressing Reveille and Columbia, Gem of the Ocean (see Facsimile 4) to replace his original ending—the tried-and-true tonic unison (given as an ossia, p. 135 of this edition). For Bernstein’s 1951 premiere of the symphony and its publication soon after, Ives appended the tag’s “final terrific discord” (p. 134 of this edition), as Henry Cowell described it, which Ives had told Cowell “was the formula for signifying the very end of the last dance of all: the players played any old note, good and loud, for the last chord.” 7
The “Overture Habit” and Symphony No. 2
In Symphony No. 2 Ives borrows not only from tunes popular in his youth, but also from some of his own earlier compositions, including several overtures, some early organ music, and a “Revival Service” for string quartet, now all lost. In his introduction to the 1951 publication, Ives wrote that the second theme of the last movement was “partly from an early short piece called The American Woods,” and goes on to say that “the part suggesting a Steve Foster tune, while over it the old farmers fiddled a barn dance with all its jigs, gallops and reels, was played in Danbury on the Old Wooster House Bandstand in 1889.” 8 In 1932, Ives had been more specific, that the symphony
was the result of the overture habit, common about two generations ago. The [Adagio cantabile] was a part from a Revival Service for string quartet, and played in Center Church, [New Haven]—but this was revised (à la Brahms at Parker’s suggestion), and scored in 1909 or 1910, when the symphony was copied out in ink by Mr. Price. … Some of the themes in this symphony suggest Gospel Hymns and Steve Foster. (The last movement was a kind of overture—played partly as a shorter piece by Father’s Orchestra [in] 1889, [and by] the Danbury Band—[with the tune] The Red White and Blue and old barn-dance fiddles on top.)9
The Red White and Blue is another name for the patriotic song Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, which, with accompanying fiddle tunes, is the principal unifying feature of Symphony No. 2.
Ives’s characteristically offhand remarks about his earlier works and the “overture habit” provide a key to the unusual formal structure of this five-movement symphony. Although Ives does not refer specifically to the common form of overture—a slow introduction leading through a concluding half cadence to a “sonata allegro” movement—he was entirely familiar with the structure not only as organist and concertgoer but through the repertoire staples of his father’s band and orchestra 10. The symphony’s five movements are best seen as a symmetrical structure in which the third (middle) movement functions as a meditative interlude between two introduction-and-allegro “overtures” that are thematically related—principally to each other, but also to the middle movement. Ives provides further unity in this symphony through his reliance on its principal key of F in movements two, three, and five in its pastoral, meditative, and triumphal guises respectively, and by his extensive use of harmonic relationships a minor third apart.11
Motivic Materials
The following is a movement-by-movement description of the thematic materials in Symphony No. 2; some extramusical elements relevant to these materials are discussed in the section that follows.
I Andante moderato (B minor and D major)
A fantasia in modified binary form based on Ives’s Sonata for Organ and his Down East Overture (both lost), this introductory movement implants the symphony’s principal materials—paraphrases of Foster’s Massa’s in de Cold Ground (m. 1; as cantus-discantus, m. 7) and the motto phrase of Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean with its accompanying fiddle tune Pig Town Fling (m. 67). All will be restated—and in the same order—in the fourth and fifth movements.12
An extended half cadence leads to:
II Allegro (A{flat} major and F major)
Cast in modified sonata-allegro form, the expository material is a parade of paraphrases, beginning in m. 1 with Henry Clay Work’s abolitionist song Wake Nicodemus (“for the great Jubilee”); followed by a martial setting of the gospel hymn BRINGING IN THE SHEAVES (m. 42), leading in m. 72 to a pastoral setting of the college song Where, O Where Are the Pea-green Freshmen? (a secular parody of the gospel hymn text Where, O Where Are the Hebrew Children?, merging into Foster’s Old Black Joe (end of mm. 83–84).
After an extensive development section, the recapitulation appears in the movement’s secondary key of F (m. 105), slipping into A{flat} for BRINGING IN THE SHEAVES but then—following the exposition’s scheme—back to F for Where, O Where. A last, valedictory statement of Lowell Mason’s H AMBURG (m. 367) crowns the accelerated coda, concluding with Wake Nicodemus—and the ascension of what must be the final celebratory rocket of the “great Jubilee.”
This movement is evidently based on Ives’s lost overture Town, Gown and State for brass band, which may have been the work Ives called “alla Zampa” in a list of works he compiled in 1929.13 The exposition closely corresponds to the first thematic group of Hérold’s Zampa overture in its alla breve opening, transitional second episode with descending bass, and final episode whose third-related pastoral accelerates back to alla breve. Ives looked to late 19 th century Romantic symphonies as his models for the treatment of his themes and transitions: the exposition’s straightforward sequence of tunes is pure Bruckner, as are the arresting contrasts that articulate its overall design. 14
III Adagio cantabile (F major and B{flat} major)
This straightforward ABA' interlude is organized (“à la Brahms,” as Ives said) on the perfect fourth and the major third, both in its melodic contour and in the tonal areas it explores, providing contrast to the symphony’s schematic emphasis otherwise on minor thirds. While the B section focuses principally on Charles Zeuner’s MISSIONARY CHANT (a hymn tune quoted by Ives in many works, partly owing to the resemblance of its opening to the Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony motto (see Extramusical Elements below). The refrains and their cadential extensions in A and A' borrow from John Sweney’s gospel hymn BEULAH LAND (m. 11) and Samuel Ward’s hymn tune MATERNA (m. 15).15
IV Lento (maestoso) (B minor and D major)
and
V Allegro molto vivace (F major and A{flat} major)
At first numbered collectively by Ives as “IV”—as though they were a single “overture”—this pair of movements is likened by Burkholder to the finale of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1.16 The fourth movement—an ABA' introduction —recalls the first movement, re-establishing the three themes (Massa’s in de Cold Ground, Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, and Pig Town Fling) that will attain their fullest form in the fifth movement, which begins in spirited fashion following an extended half cadence.
As in Brahms’s symphony, Ives’s final allegro is cast in modified sonata-allegro form, with its development postponed. We are reminded again of how Ives had benefited from Parker’s instruction: from the simple closed-ended melodies he fashions open-ended themes, and proves ever-resourceful in their development. (Note especially Ives’s cantus firmus treatment of Foster’s triadic De Camptown Races [m. 35] and his sequential treatment of Massa’s in de Cold Ground doubling as ANTIOCH [“Joy to the World”; m. 88]. Further, fleeting paraphrases of Brahms, Dvořák, and Tchaikovsky—and a longer one from Bach—are worked organically into the flow.) In his overall design, Ives reveals a sure sense of musical rhetoric: his big tune, Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, having been conspicuously planted in the first and fourth movements, appears first in the finale as a foreshadowing (m.162); then, heralded by the bugler’s call (Reveille, m. 251), it springs forth in all its glory, joined by the cry Wake Nicodemus and jubilant barn-dance fiddlers in a grand quodlibet—a full-blown musical allegory of Emancipation. Ives’s immediate models here are the German paragons of the popular overture, with codas that emblazon heavyweight tunes with high-energy fiddling—Weber’s Jubel, Wagner’s Overture to Tannhäuser, and Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture come to mind. And as Cecil Gray aptly noted about Bruckner’s finales, Ives makes these paired final movements his “most important of all … drawing together and clinching the arguments of the foregoing ones.”17
For Ives, music was a part of life, and should partake of life. As he once said, “The fabric of existence weaves itself whole. You cannot set an art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality and substance.”18 The tunes Ives used in Symphony No. 2 were rife with associations that bear out the nostalgic nature of the work.
The first verse of Wake Nicodemus, used prominently in the second movement, reads:
“Nicodemus, the slave, was of African birth, | And was bought for a bagful of gold; | He was reckon’d as part of the salt of the earth, | But he died years ago, very old. | ’Twas his last sad request so we laid him away | In the trunk of an old hollow tree. | ‘Wake me up!’ was his charge, ‘at the first break of day, | Wake me up for the great Jubilee!’”
In Essays Before a Sonata,19 Ives ruminates on the Concord transcendentalists—Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau—whose lives and works affected him profoundly. All were active in the abolitionist movement: among them, they had written, lectured, preached, demonstrated, and been jailed for the abolitionist cause. Ives’s father and father-in-law, both veterans of the Union Army, would likely have been strong supporters of Emancipation. Ives’s prominent use of Wake Nicodemus thus pays homage to his fathers’ (and spiritual fathers’) generation.
If the second movement does indeed derive from his lost overture Town, Gown and State, Ives might have associated Wake Nicodemus with New Haven, birthplace of the abolitionist precursor Lyman Beecher ( Town), Where, O Where Are the Pea-green Freshmen? with Yale (Gown),20 and Hamburg with Hamburg, Connecticut, a guardian port of the Connecticut River Valley (State).21 The Concord transcendentalists also figure in Ives’s use of Missionary Chant in the third movement, whose rhythm is the same as the motto in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Ives, again in Essays Before a Sonata, wrote of “… a tune the Concord bards are ever playing while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethoven-like sublimity … ”22 (Ives later used the motto in the “human-faith-melody” of his “Concord” Sonata for piano.)
Materna, which Ives uses at the close of the third movement, is a hymn tune written by Samuel A. Ward in 1882. In 1910 it was joined in print to Katherine Lee Bates’s poem “America the Beautiful”. The verses had first appeared in the July 4, 1895 issue of The Congregationalist, during the time Ives was organist at the Center Church on the Green (Congregational) in New Haven. 23 It is quite possible Ives could have come to associate Materna with “America the Beautiful” long before 1910.