Listening to Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata and reading the lives of Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Thoreau gave insight to the movements that were named after each Transcendentalist. Emerson’s tempestuous chords brought in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony’s fateful knocks. And, almost Biblical, after the storm came a sweet quiet. Hawthorne’s collage followed: A hymn that was sabotaged and bombarded; a whimsical circus-like melody stitched together with ever changing harmony. After the Alcotts’s tenderness and Thoreau’s subliminal evocation, the sonata vaporized before the listener.
As his music exploded on the score, Ives made me think of the expanse of the page, and how to write to the edge and fall off…
