Meet Charles Ives

So did you ever just sat still for a while and quietly observe the workings of your mind? I mean, does it not just go anywhere and everywhere—on its own—right? Thoughts about the past; thoughts about the present; thoughts about the future… Inspired thoughts; thoughts you might be embarrassed to share with anyone… But no, this is a music blog, not a blog about meditation.

Now imagine that you can spontaneously write down all these thoughts—like James Joyce writing in what came to be called train of thought.

Further, imagine that these thoughts  you are thinking, observing, and writing down—these thoughts which are images and feelings—are being heard by you as music—as melodies, harmonies, and rhythms, and that your skill is such that you can orchestrate them in any way and any compositional style that please you.  Well, if you can imagine all that, then meet Charles Ives.

Charles Ives, the illustrious American composer, was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, long before the age of computers, sampling, and digital recording techniques. He was the son of George Ives, a talented and far-thinking church organist, who encouraged his son to hear and play different melodies in different keys and different meters—all at the same time. It is told that George Ives even arranged for different bands to march around the Danbury town square playing different pieces of music so that his son could experience the effects of the changing relationships of the sound sources on his musical ear.

Add to this musical background the fact that Charles Ives considered himself a Transcendentalist in the fashion of the great American thinker and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Transcendentalists shared many philosophical views with followers of the Masonic traditions of the time. These are the same teachings that inspired such great composers as Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. What did they believe? In this brief quote from an 1842 lecture at a Masonic Temple in Boston, Emerson said the following:

“The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit than its own.” – copied from the American Transcendentalism Web http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/authors/emerson/essays/transcendentalist.html

The Transcendentalists set themselves apart from what they called the Materialists. Simply put, a Materialist believes in the supremacy of the material universe. To the Materialist, the material universe is reality—a reality that to the Transcendentalist proves itself to be passing, transitory, and ultimately inferior to the eternal realm of higher consciousness, inspiration, and ecstasy.

I speak of this transcendental perspective because I find it in the music of Charles Ives.
I am not satisfied with the idea that it just a description, or even an exploration, of life he experienced in his world of Danbury, Connecticut, or even  that world seen through the eyes of a modern classical composer exploring new musical realms and pushing old musical boundaries. I believe that Ives grappled with the tensions that exist between the consciousness of the Transcendentalist and the consciousness of the Materialist. I believe that this grappling can be heard to one degree or another in all of Ives’ music.

Familiar tunes, often spirituals and church hymns momentarily establish themselves only to fragment and ultimately drown in other tunes and harmonies. In other words, nothing lasts for very long in Ives’ music. Things come and go, sometimes many things come and go at once; is this not a valid description of life? Religious hymns and spirituals, popular songs, music quoted from other composers, all entwine, vie for one’s attention, and ultimately go—disappear— swallowed up—lost in time.

A most interesting piece of music by Charles Ives is his, The Unanswered Question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkaOz48cq2g

I suggest this link because it shows the notation, but is a rather short version.  The one I most enjoy is the 7 plus minute version by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and chorus, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. Please listen to the piece on the best sound system possible or, at least, through really good headphones.

There is a continuous backdrop of shifting consonant harmonies in the strings sounded sans regular rhythm and definitive phrases. The music just flows on like a gentle unimpeded stream. Does it represent the eternal, the transcendental?

At measure 16, a little over a minute into the piece, a five note motif is sounded by a horn against the strings.  Beginning with a descending diminished 7^th, the sound is dissonant and unsettled and lasts no more than a few seconds. Is this the question? What it is? And who is asking it?

The harmony of the strings—could it represent Pythagoras’ Harmony of the Spheres?—seems unmoved, unaffected by the question. The piece goes on like that. The constant strings, the persistent, sometimes disturbed, questioning of the horn, until in the end, the strings win out—or at least, are the last to be heard. Is the question resolved in the eternal harmony of the spheres? Or unlike the music by which Ives represents it, is there really any end to the ‘real’ Unanswered Question that Ives represents?—And what, if anything, does it all mean?  

  

Brubeck, Joyce, and the Relationship that Exists...

Years ago, when I was living in Chicago, there was  an elderly blues-man who often played acoustic guitar  in a coffee house in my neighborhood—I am sorry to say that I can’t remember his name. He began and ended every set with the song, “I’ll Fly Away.”

He wasn’t flashy either with his singing or his guitar playing, but he was always engaging and never failed to get his audience tapping their feet and clapping their hands to his music. His power emanated from his rhythm, though, on the face of it, he did not seem to do anything that was not characteristic of blues.

Other players, myself included, used these same rhythms, yet could not elicit the same response from our audiences—and I, for one, wondered why. I wondered what he had, or what he did, that we didn’t. I came to the conclusion that it was not what he had, but where he had it that made all the difference. I concluded that while I had the rhythms in my head, he had the rhythms in his body. I reasoned that since human beings respond to rhythm with their bodies, not with their minds, then if the rhythms came from a performer’s body, then it would be that which would make the difference—would give their rhythms power.

What does it mean to have the rhythm in the body? I decided that it was the body that had to understand the rhythm and that  being able to count and play a rhythm did not mean that the body understood it.

For decades I have been a full-time professional musician—performer and teacher. My studio is my laboratory. It is there that I study myself and my students in order to make us all better musicians. One thing that has become clear to me is that for the average student, rhythm is one of the last pieces to be fit into the matrix of their music. Again, I am not speaking about being able to count and play the rhythms, this ability usually develops pretty rapidly with traditional musical work, but to get the body to really understand rhythm and convey its power through the music takes a different kind of work—a different kind of awareness.

I think that James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was on to something when he said, “Rhythm is the relationship that exists between the whole and its parts; between any part and the whole; and between any part and any other part within the whole.”

The important word here, the key to his definition, is the word relationship. Rhythm is relationship and for a relationship to exist there needs to be at least two—two sounds, two people, two things.  Rhythm in music can thus be understood as the relationship that exists between a piece of music and every sound that makes up that music; between every sound and every other sound within that music; and also the relationship that exists between every sub-phrase and every phrase and even every chord within the whole piece of music.

The greatness of Joyce’s definition of rhythm is that it is not limited to the relationships that exist between the relative duration of different sounds in music; it can also be applied to the relationships that exist between the pitches of those sounds, and all of the distinctions of timbre and dynamics also. His definition applies also to painting, sculpture, dance, poetry, in fact, everything and anything that is made up of more than one thing—and perhaps even to all that appears to be only one thing when we consider that one can always be in relation to nothing.

And what is the basis of all rhythm—of all relationships? It is the self. What we understand as the self, ourselves, is the beginning of every relationship we contemplate, and to neglect this truth is to render any study of rhythm and relationship a non sequitur.

Please listen to this recording by the Dave Brubeck Quartet of Unsquare Dance in 7/4 time from his epic recording Time Further Out ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDB4K5zCcfk ).

Dave Brubeck, like the old bluesman, like James Joyce’s poetry and prose, had his rhythms in his body. He, like them, and the many others not mentioned here in this blog, communicated their rhythms in a very powerful way to others. They all inspire me, and hopefully, my music too, and that of the student’s also with whom I have the privilege to work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igRMwiKPLrU&feature=youtube_gdata

                                                                                                © copyright Michael Kovitz, 2016

When a Sound is more than a Sound

What do Shamsuddin Farid Desai, John Coltrane, Toru Takemitsu, and Jimi Hendrix have in common?

The answer is that one cannot understand their music without being appreciative of sound. Of course all music is made of sound, but knowing that is not the same as being aware of it. You walk into a room and someone asks you if you were aware of walking into the room. You think back and remembering the entrance way and the fact that you were previously outside and that now you are inside, you answer, “Yes, yes I was aware of entering the room.”—but this is not necessarily true. Remembering that you did something is not a guarantee that you were aware of what you were doing at the time. And knowing that you just listened to this or that piece of music is not a guarantee that you were, at the time, aware of sound.

Sound, what is it? Let’s first  take a look at a sound, a single sound. A sound is not a note. Nobody hears notes. Note is, in fact, an abbreviation for notation—an indication of two aspects of a sound—pitch and duration. Notation works well in a system in which sounds with specific pitches and specific durations are used to create and express concrete musical forms—a music in which individual sounds are combined in various way to create forms. In this kind of music the sound is often subservient to what it creates.

But the music of Shamsuddin Farid Desai, John Coltrane, Toru Takemitsu, and Jimi Hendrix make sound itself equal to, or even superior to, what the combinations of sounds produce. For musicians like these, a single sound can have more than one pitch and duration of these sounds often cannot be measured out on a grid defined by a time signature. Also, from the timbrel point of view, sounds previously considered non-musical are sometimes embraced by musicians and composers. Want some concrete examples?

The Star Spangled Banner – Jimi Hendrix  –  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjzZh6-h9fM

Raga Yaman – Shamsuddin Farid Desai  –  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9L9YrMuXuI

Impressions (India) – John Coltrane  –  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSViN6lwGKU

From me flows what you call Time – Toru Takemitsu – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWipy3Q6gAI

A soundician is someone who works with sound. Not all soundicians are musicians and not all musicians are soundicians. But, it is my opinion, that the best musicians are also soundicians. Without an awareness of, and a feeling for, the living quality of sound, music seems somehow flat to me—like wallpaper—somehow two-dimensional instead of three—or four.

Technique is not only a matter of fingers or lips and tongues, and physical training can go only so far. Real technique results from a striving to create sound in accordance with one’s musical vision. To accomplish this, instruments are sometimes stretched to their limits and when they can stretch no further they are modified or replaced. Can the same be said for the ones who play them?

Spirit Garden

“Spirit Garden” is the title of an orchestral composition by Toru Takemitsu. It is also the name of one of his cds which contains an incredible collection of some of his greatest works. The following thoughts were inspired by listening to this cd.

“Little children remember, but only a few, and down they forgot as up they grew” – e.e. cummings

I think I nearly forgot—forgot that what attracted me to music in the first place was its power to alter my state (of consciousness/of awareness). The kind of music did not matter, it could have been jazz, or classical, or pop, or later, the music of the East; what did matter, was something quite intangible and subjective, it was whether the music touched something in me—opened some place—where everything was beautiful and made sense. Life has never made sense to me…

I have always known that it is the silence behind the music that gives music the power to transform my state. Music is beautiful; doing music can be a beautiful thing; but it is silence that I have always loved. What is silence? I am not speaking about merely the absence of sound; it is not the rests in music notation; nor is silence the canvas on which sounds are painted; silence is the very soul of sound—silence is sounds’ inner most dweller. Sound can be the messenger of silence when sound is aware of and experiences the silence within itself.

There is a story about a Perfect Master who favored a certain disciple—much to the consternation of His other disciples. One day they approached the Master and asked him why. He indicated that he would answer their question and promptly removed a magnificent gold ring incrusted with precious jewels from his finger. “What is the value of this ring?” he asked them. They replied that they did not know, saying that they knew nothing of such things, but, if the Master would allow them to, they would bring an expert to appraise the ring. The Master agreed, and an expert was brought, and the ring was appraised for some astronomic amount.

The Master then called the ‘favored’ disciple into the room. He had not been privy to the previous conversations. The Master gave him the ring and asked him its value. Without any hesitation he answered, “Like this, off your finger, it is worthless, on your finger, priceless!” 

Silence is the Master and music is the ring on the Master’s finger.

The music of Toru Takemitsu not only reminds me, but inspires me to experience that silence and that state of transformation that I have always found priceless. Was Toru Takemitsu aware that music can be the messenger of silence? He speaks of silence often in his writings and conversations. One of his books is titled, “Confronting Silence.”

When the casual listener listens to music it is melody and rhythm that creates a path for them to follow through the music. Toru Takemitsu’s music also has melody and rhythm, as well as harmony and dynamics. But the melodies of Takemitsu are not the tune-like melodies most listeners of classical, jazz, and pop music are familiar with, neither are his use of rhythms, harmonies, like those found in more familiar musical forms.

Without the familiar paths, many people feel at a loss to be able to follow, let alone appreciate the music of Toru Takemitsu…

Consider an artist who squirts ink into some container, then presses a piece of paper into the ink, and then pulls it away. What do think? It this art?

The best answer I ever heard to this question came from one of my students. Without hesitating he said, “I would have to see it.” Indeed…

Andre Segovia once said, “What the world does not need is another guitar player—what the world does need are musicians and artists who happen to play the guitar.” The guitar players works from the outside in. He is like a conductor that follows, rather than, leads the orchestra.

A musician works from the inside out. He is like a conductor who hears the music inside himself and finds the way to express it through the orchestra. An artist, not only creates music, he creates art—his music is art. Art has the power to transform the listener’s state, to wake the listener from his dream of life into the dream of that which is beyond life—the divine dream that ends in the experience of real silence.