6/23 – EVERYDAY PEOPLE: Poems of Kevin Coval and Music of George Gershwin & Charles Ives

Our music today, alongside a spirited young American reading his poetry, is from two of the 20th Century’s most original and fascinating American composers.

Part of the genius of George Gershwin was that he created masterpieces in whatever form he was working: Broadway musicals; popular songs; opera (Porgy and Bess is generally considered to be the great American opera); concert pieces for orchestra and piano solo. He never stopped studying. He always was seeking to better his techniques as he investigated composers and the gamut of musical ideas of his time.

As early as 1917 he experimented with miniature piano pieces, which he referred to as “novelettes.” While he later dismissed them as “not worth bringing up,” they were the forerunner of the preludes we hear today, which were composed in 1925. These are idiomatic, inventive pieces which are played in concert halls and on recordings around the world.

In 1939, critic Lawrence Gilman described Charles Ives as “an unexampled creative artist of our day, probably the most original and extraordinary of American composers.” He wrote orchestral, chamber, and solo vocal and piano music, and used polytonality, atonality, and polymeter/polytone clusters. Often within those techniques he incorporated hymn tunes, marches, and such things as the first four notes of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony (as you shall hear today), with which he seems to have been obsessed.

His Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-60 is his highly original tribute to five of the most important Transcendentalists of the 19th Century: Emerson, Hawthorne, The Alcotts (Luisa May and her father, Bronson), and Thoreau.

In Ives’s own Essays Before a Sonata, he spoke of The Alcotts movement as follows: “Concord village, itself, reminds one of that common virtue lying at the height and root of all the Concord divinities. As one walks down the broad-arched street…he comes presently beneath the old elms overspreading the Alcott house. It seems to stand as a kind of homely but beautiful witness of Concord’s common virtue…all pervaded with the trials and happiness of the family and telling, in a simple way, the story of ‘the richness of not having’…And there sits the little old spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony.”