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From Gershwin to Ives in 20th-century America

We normally identify the American music scene in the early twentieth century with the name of George Gershwin. However, if tradition made us accustomed to remembering just one performer, the history of music brings to our minds another equally important composer: Charles Ives. Both lived right in the middle of the music revolution (Gershwin: 1898-1937; Ives: 1874-1954), and became the direct witnesses of what was going on in Europe.
The Vienna school was dominating and Arnold Schoenberg was the new “deus ex machina”. Gershwin managed to stay away from such a troubled context and began to look for a genre where he could merge jazz and classical music, although never abandoned tonality.

His outcome was the insertion of jazz in the great symphonic pieces of European cultivated music, without neglecting a thin fil rouge linked to popular background. Ives, the son of a bandmaster, began to study with his father since early childhood. He later became one of H. Parker's pupils at Yale and immediately stood out for his tendency to experiment sound in an extreme way.
For this reason he gave up the decision to become a professional musician, with the exception of an experience as on organist in the Bloomfield church from 1989 to 1900 and then in New York until 1902. Ives's figure stood out for his geniality and antiacademicism in an America that tended towards the greatest marketing of consumer music.
This aspect brought the American composer closer to the new revolutions which were taking place in those years especially in Austria. Ives's works focussed the attention of some of the most selected circles and soon became a key reference point for the young Americans who were laboriously looking for a cultural identity.
One of the most original characteristics of his language was the combination of different materials in editing that allowed him to get very close to polytonality and atonality. If we limit the comparison to the symphonic field, the differences between the two authors can strongly be underscored. Ives's “Symphony n. 4” (1910-1916), for example, deals with existential themes. It is no accident that in 1927 he stated: “The works' aesthetic program is made up by the harassing questions about 'what?' and 'why?' that man's spirit asks itself about existence”. Noise in this work is considered as an integral expression of modern life in the western world, going well beyond tonalism. Even Gershwin in “An American in Paris” (1928) used noise (the taxis' horns), although with an evident descriptive purpose aimed at recreating city-life images.

His composition suggests the idea of the American tourist in a European metropolis, whereas all the questions linked to existence that Ives asked himself in his works are completely missing here. Another evidence of Ives's constant and personal search is to be found in “Holidays Symphony” (1904-1913), a work that took Ives a long time to create and that was so impudent as to look almost inconceivable in early 20th-century America.
The composer became so isolated that he was forced to earn his living by becoming an insurer . With his 1924 “Rhapsody in Blue” for piano and jazz band, Gershwin tried to get closer to a wider number of musical forms, by inserting jazz style in a symphonic context for the first time. The composer lived such a choice almost as it were his country's expressive need, a musical expression that was some sort of “recording” of a people's habits lacking, however, the need to experiment new kinds of sound and new compositional ways.
Gershwin was still bound to a tradition that saw melody as the only reference point inside musical literature in the early 20th century. Dodecaphony was not used and the European world of experimentation was far, and maybe not accepted yet.
Ives, on the other hand, kept his own consistency neglecting the fads of an America that was intriguing and ready to give her children richness and ease.
Certainly a hard sacrifice when it comes to financial issues. Among Ives's works for orchestra are “Robert Browing Ouverture” (1908) and “Three places in New England” (1911) that witness his deep love for experimentation. It is spontaneous to compare him to composer Erik Satie, famous for breaking academic rules, for his taste for novelties and for achieving original musical goals. In “String quartet” n. 2 (1907-1913), tonal overlaps highlight a sound choice influenced by Bartók.
The descriptive nature is the prevailing element here: the quartet, in fact, tells of four men speaking, discussing, talking about politics, fighting, shaking hands, shutting up and going to the mountain to watch the firmament. Music comments their various moods by using experimental tools that clash against the concept of melody.
We can end this excursus about the two Americans by stating that Ives made America alive in experimentation and bound, against her will, to topical things, whereas Gershwin satisfied every hidden taste of the beauty of rhythm and melody.

(1) Mario Pasi: “Gershwin”, Rusconi Ed.

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