Composer: Charles Edward Ives (20 October 1874 - 19 May 1954)
Work Title: Violin Sonata No.1
Performers: Curt Thompson (violin), Rodney Waters (piano)
0:00 - I. Andante
6:54 - II. Largo cantabile
13:35 - III. Allegro
Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though his music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years.
Between about 1902 and 1916, Charles Ives, in his mid-thirties and early forties, at the peak of his composing career, completed four sonatas for violin and piano. More than any other similar cluster of his compositions in a single genre, these sonatas all seem to be citizens of the same musical world. Each has three movements; each includes one or more movements in “cumulative” musical form; each is tinged with the music of American Protestant hymnody and ends with a finale based on a hymn-tune; and all are comparatively “easy” pieces (by Ives’s standards).
Ives offered characteristically picturesque comments about his first violin sonata:
Of the First Sonata:
“In part a general impression, a kind of reflection and remembrance of the peoples’ outdoor gatherings in which men got up and said what they thought, regardless of consequences. The first movement may, in a way, suggest something that nature and human nature would sing out to each other - sometimes. The second movement, a mood when ‘The Old Oaken Bucket’ and ‘Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are Marching’ would come over the hills, trying to relive the sadness of the old Civil War days. And the third movement. The hymns and actions at the farmers’ camp meeting, inciting them to ‘work for the night is coming."
The technical and expressive challenges of Ives' violin sonatas are welcomed by performers (and many listeners), they are considered among the most substantial contributions to the violin literature by an American composer. That was hardly the case at first. In 1914, before completing his Third Sonata, Ives invited Franz Milcke, whom he described in his Memos of 1931-32 as a “prima donna solo violinist . . . from Germany who has given concerts in Carnegie Hall,” to try over the First and Second Sonatas:
“The ‘Professor’ . . . started to play the first movement of the First Sonata. He didn’t even get through the first page. He was all bothered with the rhythms and the notes, and got mad. He said “This cannot be played. It is awful. It is not music, it makes no sense.” He couldn’t get it even after I’d played it over for him several times . . . and said, “When you get awfully indigestible food in your stomach that distresses you, you can get rid of it, but I cannot get those horrible sounds out of my ears.” . . . After he went, I had a kind of feeling which I’ve had off and on. . . . Are my ears on wrong? No one else seems to hear it the same way.”
Not until decades later, essentially only after World War II, years after Ives had died, was it recognized that Ives’s ears were, in fact, on just right, only far ahead of his contemporaries’.
Sources:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles...
www.naxos.com/mainsite/blurbs...
Source videos:
1st movement: • Charles Ives - Violin ...
2nd movement: • Charles Ives - Violin ...
3rd movement: • Charles Ives - Violin ...