Ives: String Quartet No. 2

Like other works by the American composer Charles Ives (1874–1954), his Second String Quartet, which he completed in 1913, anticipated musical developments that became widespread only half a century later—in this case, “instrumental theater,” in which instruments are given roles in a drama that unfolds without words. The piece is also radical in its harmonies, its often abrupt gestures, and its snatches of hymn tunes or marching songs. It is made to make the listener sit up.

Introduction

Ives wrote very little chamber music in standard forms: just two string quartets and five violin sonatas. He composed his First String Quartet (1896) as a sophomore at Yale and, drawing on his boyhood musical experiences as he often did, based it on hymn tunes—hence its alternative title “A Revival Service.” In its consonant harmony, however, the work keeps to the rules.

By the time he wrote his Second String Quartet, Ives had long given up hope of making a career as a musician. He earned his living running an insurance company with a partner, kept his composing for his free time, and did not seek performances. Nor was he concerned any longer about the rules and conventions.

History

Ives expressed his dissatisfaction with the string quartet as it stood at the end of the 19th century in unapologetically sexist language. “The string quartet music got more and more weak, trite, and effeminate,” he wrote in his Memos. So he “started a quartet score, half mad, half in fun, and half to try out, practice, and have some fun with making these men fiddlers get up and do something like men.”

He seems to have worked on the piece between 1907 and 1913 (the chronology of his works is almost always unclear), when he was busy with other projects, including the orchestral scores Three Places in New England and The Fourth of July and the Concord Sonata for piano. Sometimes he tried out things with musician friends and acquaintances, but there was no proper performance of the Second String Quartet until a group of Juilliard students played it in New York City in 1946 at a concert organized by the composer Elliott Carter (1908–2012).

Ives: Quartet No. 2 for Strings

Form

The work is in three movements—but that’s where any connection with the regular string-quartet genre ends. Each movement is defined not principally by its tempo (as in conventional string quartets), but by its characters and position in the drama that goes through the composition from beginning to end. The four players represent four men who, as Ives put it, “converse, discuss, argue (in re ‘Politick’), fight, shake hands, shut up—then walk up the mountain side to view the firmament!”

The story is set out by the movements’ titles, beginning with “Discussions,” a movement consisting of generally contemplative music in which the participants stray into familiar melodies or find agreement in consonant chords. In the second, shorter and faster movement, they come to “Arguments.” Then, in the finale—once more, long and slow—they follow “The Call of the Mountains.”

Analysis

In the big opening slow movement, we find the players pretty much of sound mind, except in the middle section, in which Ives quotes some well-known tunes: “Dixie,” “Marching through Georgia,” and “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.” In his manuscript, he wrote at the end: “Enough discussions for us!” Discussion is often used as a metaphor for how music will go in a conventional first movement: through the exposition and development of themes. By comparison, however, Ives’s first movement proceeds through divagations and interruptions that come closer to mimicking how people of different minds and temperaments express themselves.

“Arguments” is very different—argumentative and compact. Some of the music comes from a sketch Ives made in 1907, imagining in wordless music the heated conversations he and his flatmates had as young men in New York City. The second violin is cast as “Rollo,” a character trying to interpose some good old-fashioned Romantic lyricism into the debate, which concludes with another outburst of quotations, including the “Ode to Joy” theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

The “walk up the mountainside” of the third movement takes as long as the two previous movements together, winding slowly upwards through passages in which the four players are in step, and others in which one of them is the leader. All four seem to be remembering hymn tunes—and sometimes almost succeed—though it is perhaps the striving that is the greater hymn.

Connections

Having very little to do with the string-quartet tradition (as it existed at the time), the work is strongly connected to other compositions Ives was simultaneously working on in at least three respects: it makes free use of dissonance which does not have to be resolved; it works with found material, especially from the American vernacular, though quotations from the classics (such as Beethoven’s Ninth) may be included; and it uses both those means (dissonance and quotation) in the interest of illustration—and often of autobiography. In this string quartet, Ives is remembering his young adulthood and conveying his feelings to the listener. In that respect, there is something very old-world and Romantic, even in his most revolutionary modernism.

Legacy

Unheard until 1946, and unpublished until eight years later, Ives’s Second String Quartet had to wait a generation or two to have any effect on other composers. But then it did: Elliott Carter, whom Ives had befriended years before, was very taken with the concept of instruments as characters. The idea informs much of his chamber music, but especially his own Second String Quartet (1959), in which each of the instruments has a particular personality, and his Third (1971), in which the four play as two duos. On another level, the work—still new a century after it was written—has established a place in the modern string-quartet repertory.

________

Article by Paul Griffiths