In 1921, Charles E. Ives, a wealthy . co-proprietor of the New York life-insurance firm Ives & Myrick, launched a bid to rebrand himself as an American Beethoven. He sent copies of his Second Piano Sonata, titled "Concord, Mass., 1840-1860," to hundreds of musicians, critics, and patrons across the United States. The first movement, "Emerson," begins with a kind of axe-swinging gesture: an octave B gets smashed into dissonant splinters. Fractured impressions of Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau ensue. Most of the recipients dismissed the composer as a crank, but a few were spellbound by his transcendentalist conjurations, and a cult began to grow.
In 1939, the pianist John Kirkpatrick played the "Concord" at Town Hall, eliciting critical awe. In 1947, Ives's Third Symphony, a stately mashup of Christian hymns, won him a Pulitzer Prize. In 1951, Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic in the première of the raucous, joyous Second Symphony. By century's end, Ives had seemingly been canonized as the craggy patriarch of American music; in the mid-nineties, I attended three festivals centered on him.
Lately, though, Ives has drifted to the margins again. The hundred-andfiftieth anniversary of his birth, on October 20th, passed with little fanfare. Carnegie Hall is presenting very little by Ives this season, and the Philharmonic is playing nothing at all. It fell to the Jacobs School of Music, at Indiana University Bloomington, to mount a proper tribute-"Charles Ives at 150," a nine-day festival in early October. Part of the neglect has to do with the fact that craggy patriarchs are no longer in fashion, particularly ones who were prone to misogynistic and homophobic rhetoric, as Ives was. But the deeper problem is that American musical organizations have grown perilously risk-averse. Something has gone wrong when the Berliner Festspiele features Ives in depth while New York overlooks him.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 11, 2024 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 11, 2024 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
NO WAY BACK
The resurgence, in the past decade, of Paul Schrader as one of the most accomplished and acclaimed contemporary movie directors is part of a bigger trend: the self-reinvention of Hollywood auteurs as independent filmmakers.
PRIMORDIAL SORROW
\"All Life Long,\" the title of the most recent album by the composer and organist Kali Malone, is taken from a poem by the British Symbolist author Arthur Symons: \"The heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,/ All life long crying without avail,/As the water all night long is crying to me.\"
CHOPPED AND STEWED
The other day, at a Nigerian restaurant called Safari, in Houston, Texas, I peeled back the plastic wrap on a ball of fufu, a staple across West Africa.
TOUCH WOOD
What do people do all day? My daughter loves to read Richard Scarry's book of that title, though she generally skips ahead to the hospital pages.
HELLO, HEARTBREAK
Heartbreak cures are as old as time, or at least as old as the Common Era.
ENEMY OF THE STATE
Javier Milei's plan to remake Argentina begins with waging war on the government.
THE CHOOSING ONES
The saga of my Jewish conversion began twenty-five years ago, when I got engaged to my first husband.
OBSCURE FAMILIAL RELATIONS, EXPLAINED FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Children who share only one parent are half siblings. Children who have been bisected via a tragic logging accident are also half siblings, but in a different way.
NOTE TO SELVES
The Sonoran Desert, which covers much of the southwestern United States, is a vast expanse of arid earth where cartoonish entities-roadrunners, tumbleweeds, telephone-pole-tall succulents make occasional appearances.
BADDIE ISSUES
\"Wicked\" and \"Gladiator II.\"
