“If they played a Charles Ives piece near where I am, I wouldn’t miss it.” John Cage
There is undoubtedly an irresistible attraction exerted by eccentricity, that strange world without common measure, full of somewhat incomprehensible novelties in which we are hopeless outsiders, but which nevertheless does not expel us. On the contrary, it allows us to participate in unknown ways in the taste for the strangest musical ideas or inventions, just as it happens in the music of charles ives.
Sometimes the approach to the distant (or the new) has a reverential or cautious air, but it is each one of us who measures the distance and decides how to face that mystery as if we were deciding the never exact graduation of a spyglass.
This intrusion of not unthinkable but unthinkable musical ideas opens a window for us through which we observe a landscape with the restlessness that bewilderment brings.
But wich ones the secret of the music of charles ives?
Another unanswered question.
Far from the idealization, the prestige or the nostalgia of an era full of inventions, we are surprised each time by the new irruption, even when we already know it, we are waiting for it, or we have heard it.
In this lies our permanent character as foreigners, as Wilhelm Müller presents it in the first lines of the Winterreise: “Fremd bin ich eingezogen /Fremd zieh ich wieder aus” (As a stranger I arrived / I leave also as a stranger)
As if it were a music that is heard both as part of a remote past or a distant future, she acquires an absolutely current way, even when she does it in a very different way from the current time of the classics.
Ives’ music needs macerating.
Twenty years passed between the composition of the “Concord Sonata” and its premiere. Another twenty years for it to be heard for the first time in Argentina.
Something similar happened with his “Fourth Symphony”. Its premiere occurred twenty years after its composition, and another forty-seven passed before it was heard for the first time in Argentina, in November 2012 at the Teatro Colón.
We already know: time resolves complexities.
Ives’s music resists analysis but does not reject it.
Perhaps it is more appropriate to describe it, as Henry David Thoreau described the nature around Concord, in detail but without hermeneutics.
The world of guesswork.
A resistance to stability or consolidation is clearly heard in the Concord Sonata, thus including itself in what we could call the “long American tradition of innovationwhich Heiner Müller or Giles Deleuze admired so much, among others.
How not to admire the extension, in which conciseness and surprise coexist?
The “Concord Sonata” is monumental and forceful. It is one of those works that when they finish seem to embody those last words of Hamlet: “The rest is silence.”
This association with silence reinforces the memory of the epigraph that opens this text. I think the same as John Cage. “If they played the Concord Sonata near where I am, I wouldn’t miss it.”
–Martín Bauer is a musician, composer and cultural manager.
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