Dawn Upshaw and Gilbert Kalish perform Charles Ives

Yet we persist in looking at Ives as a stranger in a strange land, a kind of musical wizard and weirdo — which in a way he really was, and an insurance salesman to boot. Upshaw and Kalish, however, showed us that he was truly a great composer. He belongs up there with other magnificent madmen like Beethoven, Schumann, and Shostakovich: He was just as innovative and made almost as much of a difference as they did. But there remains a certain idiosyncratic quality in his work, and it requires a bit of a stretch to get it and even more expansion to perform it well. Upshaw and Kalish were obviously equipped and interested enough to do the job, as they have with other challenging works throughout their careers.

“Songs My Mother Taught Me”

Ives wrote 150 songs (he himself published 114 Songs in a single volume), mostly during a prolific period of the first two decades of the 20th century — the tail end of the Romantic era, the height of Impressionism, the inception of modern music, and the dawn of the jazz age. His songs reflect all of these developments, and he often combined disparate trends in one piece.

For example, Upshaw chose for her opener “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” a traditional American song, set in a piano accompaniment with chromaticisms and intervals of Impressionist and theatrical flavors. This was followed by “The See'r,” a short, repetitive, energetic musical depiction of the mundane image of a man (Ives himself?) walking down the street chewing on a straw and watching everything “going by” (a phrase repeated seven times!). Here, Ives invokes ragtime piano to give the song a lilt, but it soon yields to a march syncopation.

Ives utilizes all sorts of musical influences throughout the songs in a Joycean flow of free associations. Upshaw, who has sung in a variety of musical genres, emphasized these shifts in idiom, bringing out the expressive side of Ives. And the listener could hear shades and anticipations of the songs of Samuel Barber and Ned Rorem popping out all over the place. Upshaw’s singing manifested both charm and discipline, thankfully not at all stodgy and academic the way some singers render song cycles.

The penultimate of the 14 songs chosen by Upshaw was “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” whose title is more familiar to many as an orchestral movement from Ives’s Three Places in New England. For this setting, Ives chose text by Robert Underwood Johnson, a contemporary writer and naturalist (Johnson helped found Yosemite National Park) describing a mystical union between the writer and a setting in nature. In this, the longest of the songs, we find echoes of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Debussy. Upshaw concluded with a contrasting quickstep, “The Circus Band,” capturing the excitement of a street band, whose sounds can be heard in many of Ives’s compositions. There is a remarkable variation and eclecticism in Ives, and Upshaw was up to the task of seizing each musical moment for its particular evocations.

Back to Beethoven

This evening in effect constituted two concerts. Following the intermission, Kalish performed the monumental Ives Piano Sonata No.2, “Concord, Mass. 1840-60” (Kalish’s recording is available on Nonesuch, 2005). His powerful intonations and exhortations stood in sharp contrast to the conciseness and cleverness of the songs.

Kalish gave a brief talk about the sonata, explaining that its four movements are dedicated to transcendentalist authors who lived in or near Concord and embodied spiritual qualities important to Ives. The four movements are: “Emerson,” “Hawthorne,” “The Alcotts,” and “Thoreau.” Kalish pointed out that the piece demonstrates Ives's experimental tendencies: Much of it is written without barlines; the harmonies are advanced; and, in the second movement, there is a cluster chord created by depressing the piano's keys with a 14-3⁄4-inch-long piece of wood.

The piece also amply demonstrates Ives's fondness for musical quotation: The opening bars of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 are quoted in each movement. There are references to Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata and various other works. Unusually for a piano sonata, there are optional parts for other instruments: Near the end of the first movement there is an optional part for viola, and in the last movement a flute (an instrument which Thoreau played) briefly appears. In this performance, Edward Schultz, perched on the balcony to the right of the stage, played soft and distant flute in the last movement.

The Concord Sonata is one of the great masterpieces of the piano repertoire. Again, only a few daring pianists have tackled it, including Kalish and another PCMS artist, Jeremy Denk. Playing the notes is difficult enough; interpreting it in a way that renders it aesthetically whole is almost impossible. Kalish, however, was able not only to negotiate the most difficult passages and transitions, but he also gave the piece a power and sheen that solidified and unified the diverse elements into a coherent and comprehensible musical development.

Ives and jazz

Ives thought of himself as an improviser, and he left room for improvisation in some of his compositions. Risking the wrath of the classical music purists, I will say that Ives anticipated a lot of modern jazz as it emerged in the 1950s onward. Jazz musicians, such as Charlie Parker, Gil Evans, Miles Davis, J.J. Johnson, and John Coltrane to name a few, were taken more by the work of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, and Bartók. They rarely spoke of Ives, yet in some cases their playing almost sounds as if he were hovering around in the nightclub or recording studio.

This is especially true of Thelonious Monk, another American Original (see Robin Kelley’s extraordinary biography), who adapted the stride piano of Ives’s era for his own purposes. Monk’s extensive use of polyrhythms, polytonality, and tone clusters has remarkable parallels to Ives. As mentioned, the Ives Piano Sonata requires the use of a wood block to hit a whole portion of the keyboard, and Monk used his whole forearm to create similar massive tone clusters. The use of multiple idioms and genres is a hallmark of modern jazz and was a hallmark of Ives long before. And of course, Ives and jazz share the European Impressionists, the American Songbook, and African-American spirituals among many other common influences.