About this Piece

Ives’ massive, utterly original, and highly influential “Concord” Sonata is not program music as we commonly hear it. (Think Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” concertos or Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.) Rather, it is “an attempt to present (one person’s) impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over a half century ago. This is undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne.”

Ives wrote that in the preface he published in 1920 with the first edition of the sonata. He did not expect his music to do all the heavy philosophical lifting alone and wrote six essays to introduce the work. (Ives had intended the essays to be published with the sonata, but they were eventually turned into a book and issued separately.) “These prefatory essays were written by the composer for those who can’t stand his music—and the music for those who can’t stand his essays; to those who can’t stand either, the whole is respectfully dedicated.”

As with most of Ives’ compositions, there were early glimmerings of the sonata and numerous late revisions. But he began principal work on it in 1909 and “completed” it in 1915. (Ives published a revised edition in 1947.) The “Hawthorne” movement, the second, is, Ives wrote, “but an ‘extended fragment’ trying to suggest some of [Hawthorne’s] wilder, fantastical adventures into the half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal realms.”

This is kaleidoscopic music, dizzying in its allusions to stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and full of distinctive Ivesian devices and techniques. There are cluster chords—played with a precisely measured board on the black keys or banged by fists—and plenty of quotations, including the hymn tune Martyn (“Jesus, lover of my soul”), the patriotic song “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” and a reference to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that appears in all four movements. There are dances and a march, quiet musings, and a hint of a chugging train. (“The Celestial Railroad” was a Hawthorne story, and Ives used some of this same material in a shorter piano piece with that title.)

—John Henken