Three Places in New England
1. The “St. Gaudens” in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Regiment)
2. Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut
3. The Housatonic at Stockbridge
Charles Ives
About the Composer
Born in Danbury, Connecticut on October 20, 1874, Charles Ives is regarded as the leading American composer of art music from the early 20th Century. He was born into one of Danbury’s leading families; his father made a career out of teaching, performing, and conducting music. From an early age, Ives was exposed to a wide range of music and studied both piano and organ. He became quite the accomplished performer of American vernacular music, Protestant church music, and European classical music. Although he studied piano and organ with a variety of different teachers, he studied theory and counterpoint with his father, who helped guide him through his first compositions.
In 1894 Ives went on to study at Yale University; however, just six weeks after he matriculated his father died suddenly of a stroke, dramatically altering the course of his life. While Ives studied music and composed actively throughout his time at Yale—finding a mentor in Horatio Parker—after graduating he found a job in insurance, where he would remain for 30 years. He never gave up hope of a musical career and continued to play and compose while he worked in insurance. Although there were periods of time when Ives had a tortured relationship with his music making, his compositional output continued to grow throughout the early 1900s. It is in this period that he increased his integration of vernacular and church music into his orchestra compositions, with pieces such as “Washington’s Birthday” (which you might have heard us play back in Season 5!)
About the Music
A Phoenix Phavorite, Ives has been featured multiple times over the past eight seasons, including September 2019 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and March 2020 at the Armory in Somerville, where we played the first and second movements, respectively, from his renowned Three Places in New England. Written between 1903-1914 and revised in 1930, Three Places in New England received its premiere on January 10, 1931 by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at a New York Town Hall. The piece consists of three movements, each of which paints a vignette of a New England scene. Tonight you will hear the piece in its entirety.
“The St. Gaudens in Boston Common.” The bronze statue, which makes its home in Boston Common, was designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens in honor of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment Volunteer Infantry. It was commissioned as a tribute to Union colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who marched his unit of black volunteer soldiers into Fort Wagner, near Charleston, South Carolina, where they faced a massacre. For Ives, this movement forged a poignant and multifaceted connection to his childhood. It recalls both the many days spent in the Common as a young boy in the presence of the statue and his father’s connection to the Civil War as a Union bandleader. In this movement Ives characteristically weaves in familiar melodies, in this case two Civil War songs, “The Battle Cry of Freedom” and “Marching Through Georgia.” Around the melodies Ives creates a musical landscape, which somberly paints the soldiers marching to their death. The brass, lead by the French horn, attempts to rally; however, all falls silent in the end.
“Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut.” Born in modern day Danvers MA, General Israel Putnam led the American army with distinction at the Battle of Bunker Hill during the Revolutionary War. In this movement Ives paints a scene that takes place at the General’s winter camp. He envisions a boy who—while visiting the campsite on the 4th of the July—falls asleep and daydreams about the soldiers during the Revolutionary War, only to be woken up by the sounds of the festivities. The most complex of the three movements, “Putnam’s Camp” illustrates Ives’s trademark use of collage in his music. Ives layers two separate marches, which at their climax literally collide into one another. Throughout the movement complex and diverse textures create a variegated landscape that reflects the tumultuous nature of American life.
“The Housatonic at Stockbridge” In this final movement, Ives reflects on one of the happier memories to take place in his beloved New England, a walk with his wife along the Housatonic River while they honeymooned in the Berkshires during summer 1908. Ives’s wife Harmony played a crucial role in his development as a composer and was a source of inspiration for many of his works, including Three Places in New England. In early 1908 she wrote a letter to him that read, “inspiration ought to come fullest at one’s happiest moments— I think it would be so satisfying to crystallize one of those moments at the time in some beautiful expression.” And in this final movement Ives accomplished just that. The main melody, played by the violas, horn, and English horn, is simply harmonized by the lower strings and brass while the upper strings utter repeating figures above it all. In his Memos, Ives wrote, “We walked in the meadows along the river, and heard the distant singing from the church across the river . . . the mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and elm trees were some-thing one would always remember.”
Note by Christina Dioguardi