Ives, From the Steeples and the Mountains

Charles Ives (1874-1954) was a towering figure among American composers. He graduated from Yale and went into the insurance business, retiring in 1930 after a successful career and all the meanwhile, he kept composing music during his free time.

Just as Ruggles had a niche for crafting out lines that are truly polyphonic, Ives’s music shows his capacity to operate with multiple systems, systems that are incompatible with each other and exist independently. From the Steeples and the Mountains gives us on the one hand, bells from the steeples that play descending scales alternating between C major, D-flat major and B major, and on the other hand, rocks from the mountains represented by the trumpet and trombone in loose imitation. This juxtaposition of the auditory experience of the bells and the visual image of the rocks plays on the mind of the observer, especially when the visual image has to be translated into an audio one. To further complicate matters, our observer seems to be walking closer and closer to the steeples and the mountains. As a result, the resonance of the bells becomes increasingly overwhelming and the sternness of the rocks increasingly intimidating until the consciousness of the observer drifts out of focus and then suddenly, everything stops and we are presented with a stationary picture of the scenery.

September 2012