Yankee Music

Charles E. Ives's Third Symphony lay in his barn in Connecticut for 35 years before it got its first full performance in 1946. It won a Pulitzer Prize the next year. In Carnegie Hall last week, the ailing old (76) composer's Second Symphony, finished in 1901, finally came to judgment.

In his Second, Ives had set out to express "the musical feelings of the Connecticut country around here in the 1890s the music of the country folk." "To one of his rare visitors he explained that "there's not much to say about the symphony . . . It is full of the tunes they sang and played then." A composer who experimented with polytonality (writing in two or more keys simultaneously) before Stravinsky even thought about Firebird (1910), Ives somewhat whimsically deeded to set his Yankee tunes "in counter point with some Bach tunes," as "a sort of bad joke." Joke or not, audience and critics enjoyed the Second as Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra through it. Olin Downes of the New York Times found parts of it "of unique inspiration and a noble elevation of thought."

The Herald -Tribune's Virgil Thomson judged it "unquestionably an authentic work of art " Altogether, the Second is much easier going than the sometimes bewildering third. It opens with a serene song in the strings, reminiscent of the green beauty of the Connecticut countryside. In the slow third movement come the "Bach tunes" in full brass, while the strings are skittering at something else. Actually, the chorales are typically Ivesian abstractions; if Ives, a kind of John Marin of music, quotes from anything, it is that old 19th Century standard, the Long Green Organ Book. If there is a "bad joke" anywhere, it comes in the rousing finale where Ives gets De Camptown Races, Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean and some barn dance fiddling all going at once.

Charles Ives himself was not present to hear the applause. Ill for years with diabetes and heart trouble, he also has a nervous condition which makes listening to music unbearable. The stoutest Yankee of all U.S. composers-- a man who composed for love, sold insurance for a living--Ives now lives in strict retirement with his wife Harmony. His First Symphony, never performed, is still "out in the barn."

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