Symphony No. 4 (Ives)

Charles Ives's Symphony No. 4, S. 4 (K. 1A4) was written between 1910 and the mid-1920s (the second movement "Comedy" was the last to be composed, most likely in 1924). The symphony is notable for its multilayered complexity—typically requiring two conductors in performance—and for its large and varied orchestration. Combining elements and techniques of Ives's previous compositional work, this has been called "one of his most definitive works";^[1] Ives' biographer, Jan Swafford, has called it "Ives's climactic masterpiece".^[2]

Structure

The symphony is in four movements:

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Watchman, Tell Us of the Night

This movement and the second movement were first performed in the

An arrangement of this movement by future film composer Bernard Herrmann (notable for his scores to Alfred Hitchcock's films) was performed in New York on May 10, 1933, but Ives's version was not performed until the integral premiere of the entire Symphony in 1965. It is a mild orchestral expansion (compared with the extreme expansion of the Comedy movement from its piano solo source) of a student fugue exercise Ives composed during his years at Yale University; in its orchestral form, it ends with a brief quotation of "Joy to the World". According to Elliott Carter, the movement "is about seventy-five percent the same as the first movement of [Ives'] First String Quartet" and "has a few irregular bar lengths, polyrhythms, and dissonances added especially at the expanded climax near the end."^[3] Ives called it "an expression of the reaction of life into formalism and ritualism". Paradoxically, because of its juxtaposition with the other three harmonically, tonally and rhythmically complex movements, Ives biographer Jan Swafford calls this most outwardly simple and conservative movement "in a way the most revolutionary movement of all".^[2]

IV. Finale: Very slowly – Largo maestoso

The symphony ends with what Ives called "an

In Henry Bellamann's program note to the 1927 premiere of the first and second movements of the symphony (a program note that seems to be ghost-written by Ives, as his tone of voice and use of language is obvious throughout), the program of the symphony is described this way:

The aesthetic program of the work is that of many of the greatest literary and musical masterpieces of the world—the searching questions of What? and Why? which the spirit of man asks of life. This is particularly the sense of the prelude. The ... succeeding movements are the diverse answers in which existence replies.

In his Memos, Ives misquotes Bellamann's program note by attributing to it the famous description of the Finale (hence providing further proof that he had supplied descriptive text to Bellamann for the note, with Bellamann dropping the Finale's description because of its absence on the 1927 performance): "The last movement is an apotheosis of the preceding content, in terms that have something to do with the reality of existence and its religious experience."

The symphony is distinguished by its use of

The fourth movement is distinguished by a rhythmic plan in which there is a division between the main orchestra and a separate group of percussion; the two groups play in precise temporal ratios to one another, and obtaining the temporal ratios between the two groups is one of the chief challenges of performing the movement. Also novel in the symphony is the use of

Instrumentation

The symphony is scored for a very large orchestra:

The mixed chorus performs a setting of the hymn "Watchman" in the first movement and a wordless intonation of the hymn "Bethany" in the last movement.

The first and last movements employ a spatially-separated ensemble of 5 violins and harp. The last movement employs a spatially-separated group of percussion.

The size of the orchestra is so large that if a maximum force of musicians were required, you would need 131 musicians in the orchestra (+offstage) and an extra two choirs.

History and reception

The symphony did not have a complete performance until Leopold Stokowski conducted it with the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on April 26, 1965,^[5] 11 years after Ives's death.^[6]

It was soon recorded by the same forces for the first time for the Columbia label.^[7]

The 1965 performance score, published by G. Schirmer (AMP), has been supplanted by a new Charles Ives Society Critical Edition, 2011 (ed. by William Brooks, James Sinclair, Kenneth Singleton, Wayne Shirley, and Thomas M. Brodhead), which presents the music in the largely unperformable but compositionally intriguing state in which Ives left it in his manuscripts, and then a necessary corresponding Performance Score (edited by Thomas M. Brodhead), which was premiered at the

References

Notes