Review of Matthew McDonald,Breaking Time’s Arrow: Experiment and Expression in the Music of Charles Ives(Indiana University Press, 2014)

Abstract

[1] Breaking Time's Arrow: Experiment and Expression in the Music of Charles Ives is Matthew McDonald's 2014 contribution to the Indiana University Press series Musical Meaning and Interpretation, edited by Robert S. Hatten. Like other titles in the list, McDonald's study focuses on locating and extracting meaning beyond the sounds. In keeping with the series mission statement he explores "expressive motivations behind musical structures." Given the success of Hatten's series, it's safe to say that Eduard Hanslick would not be pleased.[2] McDonald creatively excavates familiar works by Ives and identifies continuities and meanings lying deep within their multi-directional organizations that are not obvious or intuitive. He looks beneath surface events and pulls out disconnected fragments scattered in the structures of Ives's aural "jigsaw puzzles" (10). His goal is to reveal the ways Ives "reconceive[d] the temporality of music" (9). Understanding Ives's strategies is essential to our fuller appreciation of his achievement. In all cases the author explores the relationships of fragments to some greater coherence--within individual pieces, between pieces in Ives's oeuvre, and at work in the composer's overarching life philosophy.[3] Referencing over fifteen works including songs, a psalm setting, a string quartet, and a piano sonata, McDonald argues that in Ives's music time and space are reoriented, that linearity as traditionally conceived is displaced, and that multiple temporal levels coexist simultaneously (10). He acknowledges the work of his dissertation advisor, Robert P. Morgan, regarding the spatial dimension of Ives's music, but believes Morgan "overplayed his denial of the music's temporality. Temporal sequence and cause-and-effect relationship," McDonald argues, "are essential, even in extremely fractured musical environments" (10). Morgan's pathbreaking work published in 1977 as part of An Ives Celebration: Papers and Panels of the Charles Ives Centennial Festival-Conference is now over 40 years old; it has inspired at least a couple of generations of scholars, including this reviewer, whose own dissertation and subsequent publications have addressed multi-dimensional aspects of Ives's music (Cooney 1995).[4] McDonald posits linear connections and successions in Ives's song "Nov. 2, 1920" and String Quartet No. 2, and extracts relationships in "The Things Our Fathers Loved" that provide unique readings of these pieces. McDonald's observations are thought-provoking and welcome, especially when communicated with his consistently elegant prose. He learned much from his advisor: the author knows how to write. Alongside what he calls "hypothetical" readings of connections and successions are more traditionally grounded observations of local harmonic relationships, embedded stacked intervals, melodic bits borrowed from Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Strauss, and Debussy, and traditional formal overviews of key relationships. If any of McDonald's "hypotheticals" proves too fanciful for some readers, these more conventional structural interpretations should satisfy those wanting assurance that the author is familiar with his score.[5] In keeping with the mission of the series, Breaking Time's Arrow also situates its musical analyses within a framework of broader contextualizing thought and argues its points as much by references to literary works, philosophical analogies, and contemporary theories as by illuminating charts, reductions, tables, and figures. Nevertheless, given the relatively slim size of the volume, 168 pages of text, a generous amount of space is devoted to graphics. Imagining and illuminating potential meanings hidden beneath the surface of music's sounds and scores is the hallmark of Hatten's series, and McDonald's contribution to that larger enterprise is valuable.[6] The book's two sections and six chapters contain many examples of Ives's sketches; it's always inspiring to see the composer's hand and to witness the changes, cross outs, and additions that he visited upon a piece over the course of its gestation. …