Charles Ives - Piano Sonata No. 2 "Concord" [1/4] 

RDVMusic genius

MrPartidoalto --- ABSOLUTELY Amazing.....I agree.....BRAVO from Acapulco!

+Edgar Girtain, IV OMG, and I just ate lunch. Do you believe everything you read? Hint: stay away from the Sunday comics.

+mstalcup Spoken like a true pompous historian who cannot hear the forest because of the wind in the trees. By any chance do you favor bow ties? The truth is, Ives likely will dwindle away to only a meager footnote or two in some forgettable music students' doctoral thesis that no one will read. There is no joy in this music, nor any great depth of idea or purpose, it's just a relic of the collapse of tonal romanticism under the weight of chromaticism. It must have been a drug to those guys. See also the early works of Berg, Webern, and Schoenberg, and many other composers who took themselves much too seriously.

+Marv Luse How did you find yourself here -- considering your axe-grinding posture toward people who find something interesting to listen to in Ives' music? I don't listen for the sake of historicity. I just like what I hear. Ives' art is unique. He was modest about his work during his lifetime, spending most of his public interaction selling insurance and keeping his musical scores stuffed inside his desk. How am I showing myself to be pompous? Is any perspective outside idealization or devaluation of art pompous to you? Do I have to declare myself to be in the throwing flowers camp or the throwing feces camp to be something other than pompous? You come off as really oppressive. By the way, chromaticism is old hat; it's pervasive in the music of Palestrina. You can't tonicize a new key center in any tonally functional way other than by the use of chromaticism. Do you think that music was all diatonic in the Romantic period? When you present the idea of chromaticism as somehow existing apart from and incompatible with tonality, you show you seriously have no idea what chromaticism is. The Romantic period didn't just suddenly end when tonal centers became ambiguous. Listen to Arnold Schonberg's very early work, Pelleas und Melisande. It reflects the Romantic influence of Richard Strauss. Also listen to the expressionist works of Berg, particularly Wozzeck and Lulu, the latter of which is simultaneously pantonal in structure and strongly emotive in content. Performance and appreciation of these works lives in the present. No art, from today or a thousand years ago, should best be relegated to a museum context, or hastily passed off as the outcome of some ersatz battle between clearly-delineated camps of music theory in which the singular notable point is who won and who lost. There's room for all of it. Stop cherishing and regurgitating your simplistic, yet vitriolically passionate opinions on music. I'm afraid I have to break it to you that it's not as conveniently cut-and-dried as you wish it were. We've been making music for at least 100,000 years; the difference between what happened in music in 1800 vs. what happened 2016 won't be noted by many people in a few thousand years. Who cares about historicity when putting that into perspective? People will forget Ives, and they will forget countless others. That's why I like to hear sound as sound and not as a piece of history. I'm anything but focussed on history as a musical qualifier.

+Marv Luse You have a problem with his comment? What do you mean, no joy? #notlisteningtotheecstasy

+Marv Luse lol talk about "those who felt entitled to be served unambiguously tonal and requisitely predictable music." Soulless old fool.

"there is no joy in this music" dude i'm sorry

Well, how do I get out?!?!?

My composition class brought me here

IT brought me here

@@fifilabellechapelle7132 why would anyone with connected brain cells make this fucking idiotic comment

Yup Fifi you definitely have connected brain cells .....just the two tho! Why so disparaging ? All art is full of 'dissonance' just depends upon the timing when 'new' art breaks through and it's always treated with the negativity you show ...even Beethoven was ridiculed as was Chopin Debussy etc. Indeed, for example, if you are lover of Debussy there's much in this Mass to listen out for, texture, ambience, melodic invention, rich harmony ...beauty - why not listen again with a bit more 'freedom in your ear?

@@fifilabellechapelle7132 then why not show more respect for a man / composer like Ives, who as much as Bach, Beethoven believed in the integrity of what he was doing .. he deserves better than "crap" for his efforts especially from somebody who I'd guess has never composed a piece of music in his her / life. You do'nt like it? Fine that's okay but the music of Ives ? - it's far from crap. Rubenstein (great pianist imo) had an opinion just like you- but chose his words a lot better I suspect

He played it too. He was a virtuoso pianist.

And every time he played it, it was never the same... he constantly changed things, added notes, took out things, lengthen repetitions of patterns or shortened them. He was ceaselessly unsatisfied that it was "finished."

I'm sure he was able to play it. He was basically an American Mozart, composing and playing pieces for organ in his teens that are considered near impossible today.

Ives could play anything he wrote. There is a CD of his home recordings on piano, check it out.

Caleb Hu A Mozart in performance, but a Beethoven in composition, haha. The editing process for this piece took around 35 years I believe

It is? Oh.

As Ives would say, don't listen to the notes, you'll miss the music. Something like that.

that's the mistake that makes the rest transcendent, gotcha...

bill Bloggs Yes, the car, bill.

Indeed yes! These so called "muscicians" are supposed to have studied at prestigious institutions and they still make unacceptable errors. There is nary a single performance I have heard in my seventy three years that meets my expectations. Shame on all of you! I shall read the score of this sublime work and hear it in my head the way it should be done! Happy New Year. ☺☺

Playing Kapustin would be much easier.

Here comes the Bride is in all four movements, as is Beethoven's Fifth, the fugue theme from the Hammerklavier, on and on and on...

You'll hear it MOST clearly in the 3rd movt..... The Alcotts.

+Mr. DSCH (ClassicalComposer09) It shows where the emphasis in phrasing is. It's like normal measures but the measures change so much that there's no point in writing a time signature.

Also for an easier readability

No.

😅Nobody even wants to explain, it's probably because of your low intelligence 😮😅😊

It's normal. Music is a language or, better, a thousand languages. If you don't get used to a language you don't know you can't understand. This Sonata has a unique language that no other musician spoke. So if you are used to Mozart, Chopin or Brahms this music will sound obscure. Start listening to late german/Austrian composers of late 1800: Mahler, Schoenberg, Webern, then try Prokoviev, Stravinskij and one day you will love Ives. His music is so unique and expressive. A genius.

I’m not sure if you’re being entirely serious

I ended up here too. I want to get out!!!

bit of a joke. backfired. don't mistake me for some aloof prick; i think the piece is quite beautiful

And I'm half a year late to this conversation.

Most certainly.... and it's CONCORD, MASS.... he knows the meaning of. Have you visited there? He got it right. And he and his wife spent their honeymoon there.

@@AndrewRudin And his wife is named Harmony, which is another touch of amusing irony. Harmony and Ives in Concord. How nice.

Noooo! 😁 Berg is way less expressive and natural, I wouldn't compare though.

then y do u love it

Oh, I hit STOP waaaaaaay before then!!!

Uh, yeah . . . sure . . . whatever you say.