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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
I recently held in my hands the manuscript of Charles Ives's "Three Places in New England." The staff of the Music Library at Yale University left it out for me on a wooden table, and I hesitated before touching the pages, because no American wrote music more momentous than this. Ives was an insurance executive who doubled as perhaps the most audacious composer of the early twentieth century. He began to conceive "Three Places" in 1908, and made changes as late as 1929. The movements have long, heavily freighted titles: "The 'St. Gaudens' in Boston Common (Col. Robert Gould Shaw and His Colored Regiment)"; "Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut"; "The Housatonic at Stockbridge." They are more than evocations of places; they are meditations on American destiny. The first movement is a nightmare vision of the Civil War--a "Black March," Ives called it. The second is an innocent frenzy of patriotic tunes looking back on the American Revolution. The finale is a mystery in sound, which enshrines the memory of a summer walk that Ives took with his wife, Harmony, along the banks of the Housatonic River in the Berkshires. There are dissonances and ambiguities in the river's flow. This is the New England landscape that generated not only Norman Rockwell's small-town idylls but also the American apocalypse of "Moby-Dick."
Ives's manuscript is an enigma. Some of the music is crisply written in ink, but other passages are crammed in the margins. You can see new notes and chords pencilled in, sharps and flats added here and there, afterthoughts galore. All told, it looks like the work of an amateur, which is how a lot of people saw Ives when he first appeared on the scene. Then, there is the matter of the dates. In the nineteen-eighties, the writer Maynard Solomon suggested...
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