Charles Ives: Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860 First Recording, 1945, by John Kirkpatrick

Charles Ives: Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860 First Recording, 1945

by John Kirkpatrick

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about

After nearly twenty years living a double life as a both a millionaire life insurance executive and as a self-confident but utterly obscure composer, Charles Ives (b. 1874; d. 1954) self-published 750 copies of the solo piano sonata that he’d composed largely over the period 1904-15 and an accompanying volume of essays regarding the piece. He dedicated them “respectfully” to those who “can’t stand” his work and sent hundreds of copies out to the leading lights of the classical music world in the U.S., drawing his mailing list from the subscribership of the leading journal, The Musical Courier, and from Who’s Who in America. Those who took it at all seriously found it incomprehensible, but for the majority of those who looked at the score it was a travesty - “pretentious drivel” one composer put it - and remained the butt of jokes and gathered mostly derision and scorn for nearly a decade. A few movements were played publicly at a dozen or so concerts during the period 1921-29. Ives finally ran out of copies of the score in 1930.

Among the last people to have received a copy of the first edition was the 23-year-old pianist John Kirkpatrick who, having seen a copy in 1927, wrote to Ives to ask for one. Kirkpatrick performed the shortest movement for the first time in 1932 and then wrote to Ives again for the first time in six years to announce his intention to play the whole thing. He spent several years inundating Ives with questions. The two finally met in 1937, and the following year Kirkpatrick played the entire work at a private gathering in June 1938. A few months later he played it publicly from memory. Ives payed $300 to rent New York’s Town Hall concert hall for a performance by Kirkpatrick, losing $100 after the promotion costs. But the audience liked it and subsequent press, if not unanimously positive, at least took Ives seriously.

Ives meanwhile worked toward a new, revised edition and, much to the chagrin and consternation of Kirkpatrick who had dedicated so many years to the piece, continued to revise the piece over the course of the next decade until, ultimately, his printer begged him to leave it alone so that its final version could go to press in October 1947. A recording of Ives performing the piece was proposed in 1941, but Ives responded that Kirkpatrick would be better. When Kirkpatrick finally recorded it on April 9, 1945, he interpolated many, though not all, of Ives’s recent changes. The recording was not released until 1948 when Columbia issued it in an album of five 12” 78rpm discs, and it sold surprisingly well. So, having just introduced vinyl long-playing records to their catalog, they reissued it on the new format in 1949. After it went out of print, Columbia abandoned their monaural recordings with the advent of stereo sound as the primary format for classical recordings starting in 1958, and the first recording of what has since come to have been regarded as the single most important American work for piano one of the great monuments of American music generally has remained largely unavailable ever since. Kirkpatrick re-recorded it in stereo in 1968 - forty years after he first began work learning it. That much later performance is the version that remains available.

There is a large body of widely available biographical literature on Ives and analysis of the Concord Sonata including its dense network of allusions and remarkable techniques. It is worth pointing out that the story of Ives and his major works including the sonata has helped, for both better and worse, form one significant template for an ideal of how American music ought to work. American artists, we suppose, ought to be radically innovative, self-effacing, self-reliant, unsupported, and hopelessly obscure through most of if not their entire lives and then prove later to have been great geniuses once their productions have proven to be explicable by authority figures who can disseminate them to the populous employing a series of amusing anecdotes and key themes. Cultural literacy then amounts to knowing that the work exists as an acceptable substitute for actually having consistent access to the direct experience of it. If that artist also has millions of dollars in the bank with which to produce and promote the work, all the better.

credits

released December 13, 2023

Recorded April 9, 1945

Transfer, restoration, and notes by Ian Nagoski
Notes drawn largely from:
Kyle Gann, Charles Ives's Concord: Essays After a Sonata (University of Illinois Press) 2017

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