# Charles Ives- 114 Songs



## chu42 (Aug 14, 2018)

I've recently got into Ives' 114 Songs for Piano and Voice, and they are enthralling.

What do you guys think of them? I am of the opinion that if only he were born earlier, he would be rivalling Schubert and Schumann in their _lieder._


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## Dirge (Apr 10, 2012)

Charles IVES: "General William Booth Enters into Heaven" (1914)
:: Gramm & Cumming [ST/AND '61] ~ reissued by Desto, VoxBox, and Phoenix USA





This schizophrenic/phantasmagorical/slightly deranged little song is the "Bohemian Rhapsody" of early 20th-century art song and represents Ives in a nutshell. It sets a 1912 poem by Vachel Lindsay that memorializes the founder of the Salvation Army, General William Booth, who had gone blind and then died that same year. The poem has the blind Booth leading a grotesque army of lepers, cripples, drunkards, drug addicts, criminals, prostitutes, Talk Classical members, etc., in a march to Heaven. As he's parading them in a procession just outside the Pearly Gates (the "court-house doors"), Jesus comes out and "in an instant" cures them of their maladies and welcomes them into Heaven. Ives must have felt like a pig in slop while setting this poem, as it couldn't be any more suited to his nature and talents as a composer of songs, and he of course pulls out all the stops to exploit the veritable cornucopia of vivid imagery and potential material to quote (the Salvation Army hymn "Fountain," for example). Not only is the vocal part eyebrow-raisingly bold and varied, but so too is the piano part.

Gramm & Cumming give what is by far my favorite performance of any Ives song on record-it simply reeks of Ives (as both his champions and his detractors will attest).


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

I haven't heard all the songs but I'm a big fan of the composer. I just love his unpretentious and natural use of dissonance that he constantly delights in, and he has a way of playing simplicity against complexity that I think is tremendous. Here's one of my favorites, simply beautiful:


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

I've only heard a few of them, most of those are of the proto-Americana sort. I love the quirky titles for some of them, quintessentially American but unconventional nevertheless. I was tempted to investigate the six-disc Naxos series but I wasn't overly happy that they released the songs alphabetically rather than chronologically. Ives himself catalogued 114 songs in reverse(!) date order, so surely it would have been more useful for Naxos to simply reverse the process?


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## chu42 (Aug 14, 2018)

Dirge said:


> Charles IVES: "General William Booth Enters into Heaven" (1914)
> :: Gramm & Cumming [ST/AND '61] ~ reissued by Desto, VoxBox, and Phoenix USA
> 
> 
> ...


This is one of the first ones that got me into Ives and it remains a favorite of mine.


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## chu42 (Aug 14, 2018)

It may be because chronology with Ives has always been super iffy. He often didn't attest accurate dates to his own works and he was constantly revising and reshaping so who knows if a date applied to the final product, an early revision, or when it was first written.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

One of my favorites is "The Housatonic at Stockbridge" used later in "Three Places in New England." It reveals Ives as an early ecologist. See also "Like A Sick Eagle."









What performers is everyone listening to? My favorite I've found is the 4-CD volumes on Albany.


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## flamencosketches (Jan 4, 2019)

I haven't heard hardly all of Ives' songs, but the few I have heard I really did not like. Take this one for example:






The feeling I get is that he is trying to mash up some kind of faux Americana with avant-garde classical techniques, trying to squeeze the results into the Schubertian Lieder formula, and ends up doing justice to neither tradition. Comes off very corny. Frankly, this and a few others of the 114 Songs that I've heard really put me off of exploring Ives further. However, the one in the OP is pretty good. Still doesn't catch my imagination much, but at least I don't hear it as overtly bad.

Rant over. If anyone wants to show me the error in my ways, they can feel free


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## chu42 (Aug 14, 2018)

flamencosketches said:


> I haven't heard hardly all of Ives' songs, but the few I have heard I really did not like. Take this one for example:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Perhaps you'd enjoy his Violin Sonatas more:






Written for kids by the way. Although Ives himself admitted that children could not effectively play the 2nd or 3rd movement...


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## flamencosketches (Jan 4, 2019)

^I like some of his early, short orchestral works, though they kind of freak me out! Still need to give a fair shot to the 2nd symphony (of which I have a recording) and his Concord piano sonata (which I do not have, but want to get). The user Millionrainbows mentioned that Ives wrote two great string quartets and now I want to hear those too. I'll write back with what I think of this violin sonata. Thanks. Ives has been capturing my imagination a little more than usual lately.


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