“A Disturbing Lack of Musical and Stylistic Continuity”? Elliott Carter, Charles Ives, and Musical Borrowing

Abstract

Elliott and Charles Ives shared complex personal and professional relationship. Ives supported Carter's musical pursuits as young man and remained guiding influence throughout his career. As Jan Swafford writes, however, Carter, whose mature music would owe great deal to Ives ... would pay back his mentor with baffling mixture of admiration, advocacy, and cold repudiation (Swafford 1998: 334). Although he eventually softened his early criticism of Ives and acknowledged his musical debts, was consistently puzzled by the stress in Ives's music on musical borrowing--i.e., the procedures by which composer includes material from or refers to pre-existing musical pieces in the context of an original work. (1) As put it, Ives's reliance on quotations accounted for a disturbing lack of musical and stylistic continuity (Perlis 1974: 145). On another occasion, described Ives's inclusion of popular songs and hymns as constantly (Edwards 1971: 63). (2) In view of these and numerous other statements, it is equally perplexing that borrows from Ives's music on several occasions, most overtly in his 2001 Figment No. 2 (RememberingMr. Ives) for solo cello. This composition contains literal snippets and gestures from, as well as stylistic allusions to, two Ives pieces: the Concord Sonata and Hallowe'en. In what follows, I explore the ways in which borrows from Ives both literally and figuratively; how he incorporates those quotations into his music; and how he evokes Ives's memory and musical style in several works. Along the way, I illuminate some contradictions of Carter's aesthetic stance and connect them to broader problematics in late twentieth-century modernism. The Quotation Problem In nearly all of his writings on Ives, acknowledges and admires Ives's musical innovations, particularly those in rhythm and temporality. For example, in 1973 letter to John Kirkpatrick, observes: What is interesting about Ives, today, are the many different procedures he thought up, so it seems, to produce his polyrhythmic and dissonant (quoted in Meyer and Shreffler 2008: 210). Several scholars have previously investigated Carter's interest in Ives's abstract compositional techniques. Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler explain that Carter the composer continued to find solutions for the same musical problems that Ives had posed: the combination of different groups of instruments moving at different speeds, new formal concepts, new ways to control the flow of time, and ways of orchestrating so that complex polyphonic could be clearly (6). David Schiff also notes that textures reminiscent of Ives's music can be heard throughout Carter's mature works, in abstract form (Schiff 1983: 35). Considering his admiration for such compositional procedures in Ives's music, it is peculiar that seldom comments on the large body of music Ives composed without any trace of musical borrowing. Many of these pieces such as the piano studies were intended as compositional experiments and show Ives's imagination at its most fertile. In them, he creates and solves particular musical problems of rhythm, pitch, and temporality in smaller settings. (3) In fact, majority of these works would have interested in light of their compositional rigor, but he chose not to comment on them, highlighting instead his disagreements with Ives's music that contains quotations. To take an example of his problematic stance toward quotation in Ives's music, consider what wrote in an essay from 1974: As for myself, I have always been fascinated by the polyrhythmic aspect of Ives's music, as well as its multiple layering, but perplexed at times by the disturbing lack of musical and stylistic continuity, caused largely by the constant use of musical quotations in many works. To me composer develops his own personal language, suitable to express his field of experience and thought. …