Ives: Central Park in the Dark (1906)
This work, like so many of Ives’s compositions, contains a rich amalgam of experiences, impressions, and ideas, moulded with that highly personal alchemy into a kaleidoscopic collage which relates to us in one extended gesture the distilled essence of all its formative material. Wilfrid Mellers calls him “the first authentic American composer”, and recognises that “….[as] an honest creator, he had to take his materials from the world around him……the town band, the corny theatre tune, the chapel hymn”. Ives himself described the singing of the local stonemason at a camp meeting thus: “Old John is a supreme musician. Look into his face and hear the music of the ages. Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds. If you do, you may miss the music.” These entreaties may (or may not….) apply to this extraordinarily evocative nocturne: trying to identify all the sounds he claims to have included may be fun, but (to quote Prof Mellers again) “Paradoxically, these fusions of contrarities sound purposeful, not chaotic…. The music evokes, with astonishing immediacy, the physical and nervous sensation of being present [in the vast outdoors]; yet the flux of life becomes one through the force of the imagination……of being at once identified with the flux of appearances and detached from it, as watching eye, as listening ear. In this sense, the essence of Ives’s art is discovery: a new-found land….the more immediate the artist’s response to the external world, the more deeply he has to seek Reality beneath the flux”. So let us then turn to the best possible description of this “canvas” – from the composer’s own note in the score:
This piece purports to be a picture-in-sounds of the sounds of nature and of happenings that men [sic…!] would hear some thirty or so years ago (before the combustion engine and radio monopolized the earth and air), when sitting on a bench in Central Park [New York City] on a hot summer night. The strings represent the night sounds and silent darkness – interrupted by sounds (the rest of the orchestra) from the Casino over the pond – of street singers coming up from the [Columbus?] Circle singing, in spots, the tunes of those days – of some “night owls” from Healy’s whistling the latest or the Freshman March – the “occasional elevated”, a street parade or a “break-down” in the distance – of newsboys crying “uxtries” – of pianolas having a ragtime war in the apartment house “over the garden wall”, a street car and a street band join in the chorus – a fire engine, a cab horse runs away, lands “over the fence and out”, the wayfarers shout – again the darkness is heard – an echo over the pond – and we walk home.
This piece was first entitled, “A Contemplation of Nothing Serious” or “Central Park in the Dark in ‘The Good Old Summer Time’.” (It was first conceived as the second of two companion pieces, the first being “A Contemplation of a Serious Matter” or “The Unanswered Perennial Question”.)
© Alan George
