Charles Ives was an exemplar of what the idea of America was supposed to be.
This country began, generally, as a commercial enterprise. Only much later did history and the lens of the Enlightenment bring about the idea of America, a powerful and even beautiful idea, brought forth by a group of remarkable figures debating remarkable ideas that, unfortunately for us, were very much the product of their times. I can't imagine the Declaration of Independence being made, or the Constitution and the Bill of Rights being drafted, in these times. It's even harder for me to imagine, to accept in my imagination, the deliberate effort to turn back the ideas of the Enlightenment, much less that it is succeeding. Two hundred twenty years ago, moral leadership did not fear the tools of slander and ignorance, while today, the political classes wield those tools themselves, and their courtiers and fools applaud. There's a general sense that the idea of America was both a start and a goal, something that we have yet failed to fulfill but should continue to attempt, while more and more I believe that moment, the codification of that idea as the summit, and, starting there, we've had nowhere to go but down. America, as in the idea's that supposedly make up this country, doesn't exist anymore: it was handed off willingly by those who supposedly represent the citizens of the 50 states, handed off to a group of narcissistic, intellectually and socially incestuous cretins who think that America is only what they dream it to be, and their dreams a vanishingly small, punitively narrow and very dark indeed.
I don't know if it can even help, but I can still dream of America, painful as it is to do, and others can too. We'd be in good company, because there have been many who sincerely dreamed beautiful things about America. The foremost for me have been Walt Whitman, Ralph Ellison and especially Charles Ives, and this came alive for me again Saturday at the San Francisco Symphony performance of Ives' "New England Holidays" Symphony. His work has always been some of the most important and compelling music I've ever heard, but I admit that it has also been elusive and I've struggled with getting at it's core, even though I could sense, intuitively, that the core was worth getting to. I've been getting closer the past few years, in great part due to the efforts and musicianship of Tilson Thomas, his love of Ives and his ability to clearly convey the composer's ideas. This work was presented in that same manner, beautifully prepared for the Symphony's East coast concerts this week.
When Ives is made clear like this, what we get as listeners is a window into his dreams. Like Mahler, the personal, psychological component is the most important quality: listening to Ives is like witness an analysis session. His psychology was complex, a mixture of profound love for his father, a deeply and sincerely patriotic desire to create an original American music, an equally sincere and profound belief that his primary responsibility was not to music but to providing for his family and benefiting his fellow man, an intuitive and powerful acceptance of Emerson's idea of the Great Oversoul and an entrancing and idealized memory of his own boyhood in small town America, and by extension an idealized dream of America. It was a dream, of course, and is so even more now, it's this same dream I'm trying to have and hope others can have. Ives music expressed all these things, and in the Holidays Symphony it expresses this dream more than any other element.
He is known now as an avant-gardist, of course, still too extreme and experimental for most listeners. In the avant-garde there is an inherent and often self-conscious quality of epater les bourgoisie, and Ives has that as well, at least superficially. It's a tricky balance: he does explicitly end his Symphony No. 2 with a musical raspberry meant to offend society music critics, but it's a clear joke rather than a guiding musical principal. What creates the experimental quality of his music is just that, experiment. Ives was an inventor, tinkering with music to find an way to express his own idea of musical and spiritual beauty. He didn't have any overriding concept, plan or manifesto that ensured the extreme qualities in his music, rather he found those qualities natural and beautiful. And those qualities can be difficult still, especially the ideas of different musics happening simultaneously, of deliberately out-of-tune parts and sloppy rhythms, and especially in dissonance. To Ives, the essence of America, democracy and humanity itself was many voices sounding at once, close by and in the distance, some professional, some amateurish, all sincere and humane. This means that the sound of Ives is dissonance, which he found beautiful, and which indeed is beautiful.
It is the dissonance that gives me hope, at least in dreams, at least for the 40 minutes or so the work lasts. Dissonance is indeed the sound of America, or at least the idea of America, many voices, many barbaric yawps sounding at once. This means dissonance has never been much popular in America, across the spectrum of taste and political views. What has become the de facto American idea, the material essence of America is consonance, conformity, blandness: commercially, politically culturally, Americans demand it. We insincerely fete the rebel while demanding conformity. And Ives, even though he worked on Wall Street - commuting daily by train! - as a founder of the modern insurance industry would have none of this, which makes him a beautiful hero to a few and confounding, at the very least, to many. Today, supposedly politically right-thinking people consider Ives a homophobe because he excoriated audiences as `sissies' and `panty-waists' for booing the dissonant music of his friend Carl Ruggles. He couldn't care less about their sexuality, he cared about the quality of their ears and the dullness and timorousness of their sensibilities. He cared that they were Americans who refused to even consider the idea of America, which in his days was a reflexive turn towards Europe for any quality in the arts and today is a fear of anyone or anything different and discomfiting, an acceptance of consonance, conformity, blandness, a seeking of these! Why else is "American Idol" so popular? That show promotes the current ideal of beauty, which is denatured, soulless, manufactured, infantile and truly ugly to the ears. That people find this all so compelling in its supposed beauty shows how much we've lost, and for how long. That maybe 10,000 people will hear this beautiful dissonance and humanity of Ives through this week shows that some people still do dream of what America was, and also shows why it's not ever likely to return, even as a dream.