Ives' Quarter-Tone Impressions

Abstract

In the post-World War II period, it has become common for composers with experimental tendencies to write about their work. Charles Ives wrote a great deal of prose, but only in one case did he write specifically about a musical experiment. This one case was the article, Some 'Quarter-tone' Impressions, written in 1924-25, at approximately the end of his composing years, to explicate his Three Quarter-tone Pieces for Two Pianos.1 During the period when Ives was turning out music which found its way into nearly every new niche that was eventually opened to the twentieth-century composer (c. 1900-20), he wrote not technical prose but semi-philosophical essays concerned with the broadest aspects of artistic creation, and other writings which expanded his philosophical viewpoints (derived mainly from Emerson and Thoreau) into the areas of economics and politics. All the while, he was solving in his music the problems of chord-building other than by the traditional pyramiding of thirds, utilizing the full chromatic tone-supply, escaping overmetrical rhythmic practices, and building fluid, prose-like forms rather than rigidly organized phrase-structures relying extensively on repetition. Had he attempted to describe, even briefly, all that he had accomplished along these lines by, let us say, 1915, he would have had to write a very large treatise, or several treatises. But no one could have written so much music in so short a time, or could have written it the way Ives did (rapidly, and without over-self-conscious cerebration about the technical side) and at the same time have formulated verbal accounts of the theory and technic -especially not Ives, whose time was already divided between music and a major business career. By 1923-24 (the date proposed by John Kirkpatrick2 for the Three Quarter-tone Pieces), Ives was beginning to taper off both in composing