the rix mix

Charles Ives: Variations on America / Old Home Days / The Alcotts

The "President's Own" United States Marine Band
Conducted by Colonel Timothy W. Foley.

Naxos

A wonderful album, great Ives, great fun, great patriotism. Ives was a great American; he was genuinely patriotic - an exemplary homegrown citizen - & made fun of it at the same time in his music. The music, so rooted in his era yet sophisticated & visionary, never gets old.

Doesn't matter that these compositions are are mostly arrangements, transcriptions, & imaginings. All of Ives' large, mature orchestral works (& most of the other instrumental pieces) are creations of scholars & editors. Ives' "finished" very little of his music because performance opportunities were so rare, & he had the temperament of a New England inventor-tinkerer, the oddball with the perpetual motion machine in his backyard, or his own father's microtone-tuned piano.

It's proper that Ives is compared to Sousa in the liner notes. Although very different in ambition & style, they were both 19th Century band guys. Ives performed enthusiastically in community & college wind bands as a young man, composed music for band. His dad was a bandleader & fine musician. Band music is prominently featured throughout his orchestral works, integrated or marching out front, sometimes two bands, out of step & out of tune, just like local parades now. This album features two marches later folded into "Putnam's Camp" from "Three Places In New England." Also my favorite Ives march, " The Circus Band," which reminds me of Nino Rota's skewed band music for Fellini films. Rota (who composed several operas) & Sousa shared Ives' disregard of differences between highbrow & lowbrow music. That's not a big deal now, but it was in snobby Boston & New York City when you wouldn't see "respectable" upper class people dancing in the ragtime beer gardens everyone else enjoyed. Some of Sousa's best marches are beer garden dances.

This album has serious music: the moving "Fugue In C Minor" from the 1st String Quartet, later used centrally in the 4th Symphony; the first part of "Decoration Day." But it's mostly for fun.

Liner note writers never mention the possible connection between Ives' youthful "Variations on 'America'" & Beethoven's " 7 Variations on 'God Save the King'". Beethoven was played & idolized in the Ives household.

The United States Marine Band is terrific, a polished, professional ensemble with a broad concert repertoire. But if our military bands play Charles Ives this well, why don't they perform him during 4th of July fireworks? I can't imagine anything that would've delighted Ives more.

Labels: music