IVES: Songs, Vol. 4 - Maple Leaves; Minnelied; The New River; A Night Thought; On the Antipodes; more.
Various Artists.
Naxos 8.559272 (B) (DDD) TT: 73:15.
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IVES: Songs, Vol. 5 - Paracelsus; The Rainbow; Remembrance; Requiem; September; Serenity; The Side Show; Sunrise; more.
Various Artists.
Naxos 8.559273 (B) (DDD) TT: 80:00.
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IVES: Songs, Vol. 6 - There is a Lane; They are There!; The Things Our Fathers Loved; Thoreau; Tolerance; Tom Sails Away; Two Little Flowers; Vote for Names!; Walt Whitman; Watchman!; William Will; more.
Various Artists.
Naxos 8.559274 (B) (DDD) TT: 65:48.
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They sing in my soul. We have here the last three volumes of Naxos's set of Ives's complete songs, minus the ones he never finished. Ives turned out one of the most prolific songwriters of the century, finishing up with nearly two hundred. Unlike Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, and Fauré, Ives never wrote a cycle. Unlike Wolf, who methodically went through volumes of lyric poetry, Ives seemed to turn to song only when he found or wrote a text he wanted to set. This justifies Naxos's presentation of the songs alphabetically by title (although I would have preferred chronological order).. Yet despite this apparently casual approach, Ives's songs became central to his achievement in instrumental genres, and his instrumental works also influenced his songs.

Volume 4 contains "Majority" through "Over All the Treetops," volume 5 "Paracelsus" through "Swimmers," and volume 6 "Tarrant Moss" through "Yellow Leaves." This runs to 105 songs.

What impresses here, besides individual items, is Ives's amazing variety. One finds Lieder, mélodie, Victorian and Edwardian "parlor songs," Ives's version of Impressionist nature painting, political songs, philosophic songs, "sacred arias," college songs, songs of remembrance and recollection, settings of literature, and surprisingly few love songs not among the Lieder. The quality of almost every single one is amazingly high. The composer seldom wrote a dud, and those tended to occur very early, in his teens. Ives's work tends to fall into rough periods. In the 1880s, we find his juvenilia. A Yale period follows, during which Ives studies with the American Wagnerian Horatio Parker and acquires a first-class professional technique. The myth of Ives as a naïve tinkerer is just that. In fact, he underwent a more thorough professional training than the largely self-taught Elgar. The music follows contemporary trends, mainly German and Central European, with Dvorák and Brahms notable influences. The first symphony (1898, original version) follows in general a conventional course, although the first movement seems to want to modulate through all the keys. By the second symphony (1902, original version), Ives keeps the harmonic basis of tonal music, but begins to incorporate his "collage" technique, where he incorporates medleys of popular tunes. He also feels himself consciously looking to write an identifiably-"American" music. The Symphony #3 (1904) represents the peak of this style, although harmonically it flits about strange territory. The next decade saw increasing experimentation as Ives transforms into the composer we know. However, none of these periods are truly separate. Ives produced experimental work as early as the Nineties and relatively conservative work late. Any idiom can pop up at any time, and the songs bear this out.

Because of the helter-skelter of the songs, I find it difficult to organize this review. I'll try to stick to discussing categories, fitting them as much as I can into a general chronology.

Parlor songs. Ives grew up in small-town New England among a musical family, so he would have encountered many of these. The "Slow March" (1887) is his earliest known song. Fairly bland, it's at least capable, but you can't say much more for it. However, Ives soon began imitating the best of the era, mainly people like Stephen Foster and Henry Clay Work, and his writing improved. "Marie" (2nd version, 1901), "My Lou Jennine" (1894), "Memories: "a. Very Pleasant & b. Rather Sad" (1897), "A Perfect Day" (1902, nothing like the Carrie Jacobs Bond hit), "To Edith" (1919), "Two Little Flowers" (1921) are superior examples of the type. However, as early as 1888, we see him itching to try other things, with his satirical "A Song -- For Anything." He takes the same tune and puts three different sets of lyrics to it: a "sacred song," a love song, and a "farewell to Yale." The song demonstrates, in Ives's words, "how inferior music is inclined to follow inferior words, and vice-versa." It's a cousin of the joke in Singin' in the Rain, where Don Lockwood's (Gene Kelly) career is traced through tonier and tonier venues with the same music. Ives often avoids the sentimentality of the genre, even with drippy texts, by superior melody and elegantly irregular phrasing. Ives knew very well that he was drawn to such things, but he never dismissed them and looked on them as imperfect expressions of the divine. On the other hand, the late "The One Way" (1923) satirizes the songs that a younger Ives was happy to write, showing the anger of one who considered himself a dupe. Nevertheless, he kept coming up with such things even late, as in "On the Counter" (1920).

Lieder and mélodies. These begin to appear in the Nineties, probably spurred by Ives's studies at Yale. Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms are the big influences here, and Ives comes up with stuff that stands, modest though unashamed, in that august company. "Rosenzweig" of 1892 and the 1896 version of "Marie" (unlike the second) have a Schubertian directness and simplicity. It's all about the melody. "Wiegenlied" (1896) incorporates a Brahmsian texture and a bit of Grieg harmony. Some songs exist in two versions, German and English -- like the Brahmsian "Widmung" (1899) and "There is a Lane" (1902), where the later "regularizes" the original. One also finds songs in English in the Lieder style. Both "On Judges' Walk" (1901) and "Rough Wind" (1902) use the opening theme of Ives's first symphony. "Over All the Treetops" (1903), Harmony Ives's paraphrase of Goethe's "Über allen Gipfeln," reverts to Ives's Schubert vein -- one of Ives's most affecting song (although here taken too fast). The French songs are fewer, but "Qu'il m'irait bien" (1897) perfectly captures the harmony and manner of Chabrier.

However, Ives permits himself to stretch in the genre as well, adding "touches" that become the bases of his more experimental work. "The Only Son" (1898), a setting of Kipling, twists 19th-century notions of harmony almost to breakdown, while both versions of "Rosamunde" (1898, 1901) may begin in Schubert, but end in a characteristic Ivesian neighborhood. "Old Home Day" (1920) on the other hand shows Ives's mastery of integrating sudden shifts of mood and popular quotation into coherence -- familiar to those who know his second symphony of almost two decades before.

College and political songs. Like Cole Porter not that much later, Ives entered into the musical side of Yale college life with gusto. The one such song in these three volumes, 1895's "Son of a Gambolier," is a college drinking/fight song with the same tune as the later "I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech." So Ives had a minor hit ("I'm a rambling rake of poverty/And the son of a gambolier"). How it ever made its way from New Haven to Atlanta, I have no idea.

The political songs run the gamut from enthusiasm to acerbic disappointment. "William Will!" (1896) raises the banner for McKinley, a campaign song with "virtuoso" piano interludes between the stanzas. Designed as a rouser, it mostly talks about the virtues of a high tariff, exactly the opposite of most official Republican thinking today, oddly enough. It's amazing how Ives gets you to care. "Vote for Names! Names! Names!" came about during the 1912 Presidential campaign where Wilson, Taft, and Roosevelt slugged it out. Ives apparently disliked all of them. The song requires three pianists, each pounding their own music, representing the cant of all three political parties, including the Bull Moose. An more scathing version exists, referring to "Woodrow, William, and Theodore" in schoolmarmish tones. "Nov. 2, 1920 (An Election)" takes an even dimmer view. Ives hated the results of that election, which buried his hardscrabble ethic in "normalcy." He felt that the ideals soldiers had died for in the previous war had been dismissed, and he was pretty much right. This is one of Ives's most distinctive and difficult songs, a vocal equivalent of the "Hawthorne" movement in his "Concord" Sonata. Robert Gardner sings the bejeezis out of this thing.

" Tom Sails Away" (1917) begins as a typically-Ives "recollection" song, where the narrator remembers scenes from his childhood. However, the song takes on a sudden power at the end, when it turns out that Tom sails away to "over there." This and "Grantchester" (from Naxos's second volume) are two of Ives's greatest from the First World War. "They are There!" made me pop-eyed when I saw the date: 1942. My reading led me to believe that Ives composed nothing new after 1927, when he felt his muse had left him. Apparently World War II inspired him to a patriotic rouser -- this one quoting Sousa and "The Battle Cry of Freedom." It resembles Cohan's "Over There" a little, and it's just as sturdy a tune. Often, singers perform these three songs together for an effective "group."

Experimental songs. When people think of Ives, they think of music like this. Ives saw his music as a sort of spiritual pilgrimage, and the pilgrim's way is a hard one. The experimental songs generally break into two subcategories: philosophy and nature, often with some overlap, since Ives read deeply the New England transcendentalists. These songs turn up early, with work like "Song for the Harvest Season" (1894, not to be confused with the 3 Harvest Home Carols), full of the free dissonance we associate with Ives after World War I. "Majority" (1921), at seven minutes one of Ives's longest songs, is mostly very gritty piano and an in-your-face vocal line. A series of high-flown statements about existential meaning, the text, by Ives himself, doesn't really make much sense. "The masses are thinking, whence comes the art of the world?" Honestly, I doubt whether the masses think that. Fortunately, baritone Robert Gardner momentarily suspends disbelief. Perhaps the composer's most iconic song, "The Things Our Fathers Loved" (1917), well-sung by bass David Pittsinger, weaves popular tunes into a meandering vocal line, as the narrator tries to recall songs of his youth -- one of Ives's major statements on the spiritual meaning of the sentimental. "Thoreau" (1915) became a study for the corresponding movement in the "Concord" Sonata. "Watchman!" (1913) combines one of Ives's strongest tunes with a freely-dissonant accompaniment. Ives made it the basis of the first movement of his fourth symphony. This is one of Ives's best, as is "Serenity" (1919), to Whittier's "O Sabbath rest by Galilee." The latter suspends time into timelessness, much as The Unanswered Question does. Ian Howell's unearthly counter-tenor gives the song even more luster.

" Mists" (1910) and "Maple Leaves" (1920, also sung by Howell) represent Ives's nature-painting. It has superficial affinities with Debussy's -- a lot of haze. However, where Debussy is fascinated with surface, Ives uses the effect to get the listener into transcendental mode. Jennifer Casey Cabot stays sweet and true, despite the dissonant curves Ives throws her from the piano. Ives never completed his late masterpiece "Sunrise" (1927). Indeed, it's the last piece he got into decent shape before inspiration fled. We hear John Kirkpatrick's edition of the song for voice, piano, and violin. Tamara Mumford gives a haunting reading.

There are also "one-offs," paths Ives discovered but never pursued. "Walking" (1900) proceeds in sections, yet holds together through subtle motific variation in the piano. I consider it one of the composer's finest. Its syncopations seduce me, as do its Gershwinesque harmonies long before the fact of Gershwin's music. "Side Show" (1921) is a witty morsel -- an Irish waltz in 5/8 time, which manages to briefly quote the second movement of Tchaikovsky's "Pathétique," also in five. "Walt Whitman" (1921) is Ives's only setting of a poet for whom he himself was the musical incarnation. Lots of clanging fourths and fifths, as Ives emits his own version of a "barbaric yawp."

The series. This endeavor strikes me as largely a Yale project. The university provided or trained most of the singers, the pianists, and the venue. Although you can hear better readings of individual songs, the standard here remains quite high throughout. The standout singers include all the mezzos (Tamara Mumford, Mary Phillips, Leah Wool, Amanda Ingram), tenors Ryan MacPherson and Kenneth Tarver, baritone Robert Gardner, sopranos Lielle Berman, Janna Baty, Jennifer Casey Cabot, and Sumi Kittelberger, and especially counter-tenor Ian Howell. They hit it out of the park every time they come to bat. However, the rest of the squad all get their moments to shine. I should say that Kevin Tarver's voice took some getting used to (a little reedy), but his musical intelligence won me over every time. I thought Gardner and Howell had the most beautiful voices in the group, and they also know their way around a song.

Among Naxos's most important releases.

S.G.S. (December 2008)