Piano Sonata No. 2, ‘Concord, Mass., 1840–⁠60’

Seven themes appear on the opening page, some only a few notes long. They interrupt and overlap in the piano, and they include fragments of the melody that returns plainly in The Alcotts.

At the opening of his Essays Before a Sonata, Ives called the first and last movements, Emerson and Thoreau, “composite pictures or impressions”. They give no programme of either man’s life or of any one of his works.

In January 1921 Ives mailed two hundred copies of the Concord Sonata, with a book of essays, to people in the music world. He had paid for the printing himself. Ives was an insurance executive.

After the opening page the dynamic drops, and both halves of the sonata’s main tune sound together. The right hand plays the first half, varied, in C, and the left hand plays the second in A♭. Ives called the tune the “human faith melody”.

The movement grew out of an unfinished concerto from 1910–⁠11. In it Ives cast the soloist as Emerson and the orchestra as the crowd responding to him. In the sonata a single pianist plays both parts.

In his Essays Before a Sonata (1920), Ives recalled that Carlyle had told Emerson some of his paragraphs did not cohere. Ives located Emerson’s plan in “the large unity of a series of particular aspects of a subject”. Kyle Gann has written that the movement mirrors that “grand, nonlinear chaos of interrelated ideas”.

A lyrical theme enters in the piano. Ives labels it verse in the score, for Emerson’s poetry beside his prose. It leads to an apparent return of the opening and then a large climax based on Beethoven.

At Yale, Ives showed Horatio Parker a Fugue in Four Keys, with all four keys sounding at once. Parker curtly asked him to bring no more such experiments. Ives turned to counterpoint, harmony and form, and in four years, Jan Swafford writes, he learned a great deal about the shaping forces of music.

A high melody descends while figures rise beneath it in the bass. The melody returns several times, with more notes and thicker chords at each return. The episode begins and ends softly, with a large crescendo between.

Kyle Gann called this central episode “nature”. The lines rising from the bass approximate a harmonic series, a common sign of nature for composers, and Emerson wrote a famous essay called Nature. The melody gains force with each repetition, a little like Ravel’s Boléro.

The Emerson theme returns in a song-like passage. Fugue-like entries follow, drawn largely from the earlier verse theme, with each line beginning before the previous one has finished.

Ives had begun revising the sonata by 1921, and Emerson received particular attention. A substantially revised edition was printed in 1947. He went on changing the notes for more than twenty years after mailing the score.

Music from the opening episodes returns. Beethoven’s repeated-note figure again builds to a C minor climax, the second after the large outburst in the movement’s first third.

On 28 November 1938 John Kirkpatrick played the whole sonata from memory at a private concert in Cos Cob. The public première followed at New York’s Town Hall on 20 January 1939, and the New York Tribune called it “the greatest music composed by an American”.

The Emerson theme is broken into fragments. Beethoven’s four-note figure returns in A major and E♭ major, keys a tritone apart. At the end the figure is played slowly in the low bass.

Ives ended his Emerson essay with the four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. He placed their message “above the relentlessness of fate knocking at the door”, as “the Soul of humanity knocking at the door of the Divine mysteries”.

The piano opens with rapid arpeggios. Ives linked the opening to the children in Hawthorne’s The Three Golden Apples, waking to frost on the window. The arpeggios soon lead into railway music.

In the first slow episode, the score calls for a felt-covered board, fifteen inches long, to press neighbouring black keys high on the piano. The clusters sound softly while a slower melody moves below.

In his essay, Ives wrote that any full picture of Hawthorne rests on the influence of sin upon the conscience. He described the movement as an “extended fragment” drawn from Hawthorne’s wilder, fantastical adventures into half-childlike, half-fairylike realms, and it does not attempt that fuller picture.

The slow melody is followed by a fast rag. Accents fall just before the beat, in ragtime syncopation. Ives keeps changing the tunes while the accents remain displaced.

Hawthorne’s The Celestial Rail-⁠Road, published in 1843, turns Bunyan’s arduous pilgrimage into a comfortable train ride, and the passengers can stow their sins with the luggage. Ives’s scherzo takes the bustle of the train and the irreverence of the story.

The rag is interrupted by the hymn Martyn, associated with the words “Jesus, lover of my soul”. Its shape resembles the sonata’s recurring melody. The rag returns, and the hymn interrupts it a second time.

In the “Hawthorne” essay of 1920, Ives described an old hymn heard in a churchyard while a circus parade came down Main Street. In his account, the hymn sheltered the people among the graves from the noise of the parade.

A march breaks off from the ragtime, with piano clusters imitating drums. It slows to a pause, and a longer rag begins. This passage builds to the climax of fist clusters.

Ives liked to tell how his father found him, aged five, banging out his band’s drum parts on the piano with his fists. George Ives told Charles that this was all right if he knew what he was doing, and sent him down the street for drum lessons.

After the cluster climax, the piano starts again slowly. The left hand plays phrases of Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.

Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean becomes more recognisable as its phrases accumulate. Fragments of the tune appear across the piano before the tune is heard whole, which reverses the usual order of theme and variations.

At the end of his Hawthorne essay Ives listed what the music may recall: frost on a window, Feathertop, the Seven Vagabonds and Phoebe’s Garden. He then qualified the list with the words “not something that happens, but the way something happens”.

Rapid triplet figures run across the keyboard and carry fragments of familiar tunes. Near the end, Columbia and the hymn appear for the last time, followed by a final gesture across the whole piano.

The piano plays a hymn-like melody in B♭ over bass chords in A♭. The tune is close to complete here. Fragments of this melody appear throughout the Concord Sonata.

In his 1920 essay, Ives pointed to a “little old spinet-piano” at Orchard House. His account combined the Alcott family with Little Women. In it, Beth played Scottish airs and tried her hand at Beethoven’s Fifth.

The short-short-short-long figure of Beethoven’s Fifth sounds through the piano chords. A second borrowed tune, Missionary Hymn, enters, and its repeated notes also fall by a third. Ives sets the two against each other in different keys.

The middle episode is a song-like piano passage in the manner of parlour music. Its turns follow the idiom of Scottish folk song, and twice it quotes the wedding march from Wagner’s Lohengrin.

On 20 January 1939 John Kirkpatrick gave the complete sonata its public première at New York’s Town Hall. He had already played it from memory at a private concert in Cos Cob on 28 November 1938. By then the score had been in circulation for eighteen years.

The Scottish-song turns are extended into a chromatic passage. Piano chords cluster around the melody and lead to a much broader statement of the sonata’s recurring tune.

The whole melody is played in broad C major chords, with both hands. Its rising do–re–mi and Beethoven’s repeated-note figure now form one continuous tune.

Near the end the music briefly returns to B♭. The piano then closes on a C major chord.

Rising chords in the piano sound in two keys at once. Their small upward steps return near the end of the movement.

In his 1920 essay Ives placed Thoreau beside Walden Pond on an autumn day, “a shadow of a thought at first, colored by the mist and haze over the pond”. In his account the mist lifts, and Thoreau grows restless and starts walking.

A plain G major chord begins the first of three walking episodes. Each one quickens and grows louder, then falls back. The last builds to a bell-like climax.

In Ives’s imagined day Thoreau walks the white-pebbled eastern shore, the “bolder northern” and western shores, and the railroad track “where the Aeolian harp plays”. Each quicker stride is still short of the “tempo of Nature”. Ives wrote that Thoreau’s freedom lay “in his submission to her”.

A–C–G rises repeatedly in the bass as an ostinato. Above it the piano plays an independent melody in another key.

In Ives’s account, the evening is interrupted only by “the faint sound of the Concord bell”, because it is prayer-meeting night in the village. Kyle Gann hears the bell in a series of soft, dissonant chords, after which the music moves towards its climax.

The piano repeats chords that grow more dissonant. Earlier in this passage a dotted-rhythm figure appears that is related to the sonata’s recurring melody. The repetition leads to a climax.

In a memo of 1913 Ives noted that the year before he had played the Concord Sonata for his friend Max Smith, a music critic, with Thoreau still rather improvised.

Converging chords follow the climax. The A–C–G ostinato and its melody return, and then figures from the opening page come back.

Thoreau played the flute, though Ives was more interested in his ear. In the opening paragraph of “Thoreau” in Essays Before a Sonata (1920), Ives wrote that Thoreau “did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘the Symphony’”.

The sonata’s recurring melody returns above repeating figures from the movement’s opening. Later the A–C–G ostinato takes over beneath it. The same tune was heard at length in The Alcotts; here it returns in a much quieter ending.

In Ives’s evening, “the poet’s flute is heard out over the pond”. A sketch with a flute playing the sonata’s main melody probably dates from 1911, when Ives holidayed at Pell’s in the Adirondacks and conceived the sonata. The sketch does not yet contain the Beethoven motive.

The opening figures return briefly, followed by chords high on the piano. An earlier phrase sounds beneath them. The final notes keep a slight dissonance, unlike the plain C major ending of The Alcotts.