Saturday, January 14, the Brooklyn Art Song Society will present a marathon concert at Galapagos of the entirety of Charles Ives’ 114 Songs, and for the first time consulting the new Wiley Hitchcock edition, which corrects previous errors and standardizes indications and markings.
Just because something is a cliché doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Charles Ives (1874-1954) was an American original; perhaps this nation’s first truly distinctive composer, one whose works still sound innovative and sui generis. Son of a marching band leader, Ives had a passion for music, but the Connecticut Yankee opted to make a fortune in life insurance so that his family would not have to suffer financially for his vocation. That successfully attended to, Ives composed in splendid isolation an extensive œuvre consisting largely of art songs and major orchestral works, and some choral, chamber and piano music. By 1927, when he suddenly found himself temperamentally unable to compose further, his output included 169 songs and four symphonies, many employing advanced and experimental compositional and performance techniques, such as polytonality, collage, microtonality, tone clusters, and chance operations, that would not be seen in even the foremost of the avant-garde, like Leo Ornstein or Henry Cowell, for another decade to two. From 1927 until his death, Ives did continue to edit and revise his compositions, in some cases rendering earlier works more radical in hindsight.
Upon Ives “discovery” in the 1940s, his orchestral music, only now receiving premieres, dominated his public voice, providing as it did large-scale, impressive works that yet seamlessly interwove musics of small-town Americana (often simultaneously, one on top of the other) in an idiom unburdened by European tradition or academic rigidity. Here was a classical art unequivocally and uncompromisingly native to the American condition! Exposure for the more stylistically diverse, eccentric, and experimental songs lagged behind, however, despite his self-publication of 114 of them in 1922. With the establishment of an American song culture around the Tanglewood festivals of the 1950s, recognition and influence increased. A seminal project involving renowned Ives interpreter Paul Sperry was the recording of what was then thought the complete Ives song repertoire, released on Albany Records in 1995. These songs run the gamut from sentimental parlor songs to German Lieder to stream-of-consciousness character pieces to bracingly dissonant, calamitous, cacophonous monuments to the expressive possibilities of a single human voice and piano.
The Brooklyn Art Song Society, run primarily out of the Brooklyn Conservatory, is the astonishing undertaking of Michael Brofman and Michael Rose. Mr. Brofman, a young pianist with an ingenious and sensitive feel for voicing, phrasing, structure, and momentum, and Mr. Rose, an impressive composer/pianist, have devised programs combining art song staples – Schumann, Duparc – with contemporary American composers such as Tom Cipullo and Yehudi Wyner, while cultivating relationships with both established and emerging vocal and instrumental talent. In addition to Mssrs. Sperry, Brofman, and Rose, appearing on the Marathon will be: Deborah van Renterghem, soprano; Emily Riggs, soprano, Brandon Snook, tenor; Robert Osborne, bass-baritone; Marc Peloquin, piano; Miori Sugiyama, piano; Jodie Rottle, flute; and Mary Nessinger, mezzosoprano.
Admission: $20
Master Works: Charles Ives: 114 Songs
Saturday, January 14, at 4:30
16 Main St
Brooklyn, NY 11201
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