Charles Ives

According to a musicologist who was presenting his research on Radio Rai3 (forgive me, I don't remember the name), it seems that Ives "discovered" the dodecaphonic technique before Schoenberg!

More than a discovery, an invention.

I didn't know this one. Thank you

If it were true, and after all why shouldn't it be, a paternity problem similar to the one that occurred between Bell and Meucci for the telephone could arise!

I think it is more correct to say that (perhaps) Ives was the first to use atonality. Dodecaphony, on the other hand, was certainly an inventive creation of Schoenberg.

Atonality refers to a musical piece devoid of tonality; it was a term coined in the early 1900s and refers to the creative phase of rupture preceding the adoption of dodecaphony. Schoenberg rejected the definition of 'atonal' for his music: "Atonal can only mean something that does not correspond to the nature of sound". We must not forget that 'Ton' in German means sound. He preferred to define his music as "pantonal", which is to say: a free relationship of all sounds.

A myth has undoubtedly been created around the figure of Ives: the one who invented atonality before Schoenberg, but not everyone agrees with this statement. "Maynard Solomon wrote that Ives had backdated his scores in an attempt to demonstrate precedence in the race towards atonality. Gayle Sherwood replied by demonstrating that the composer had experimented with unusual harmonies as early as 1898". (Alex Ross)

What is certainly certain is that Ives expressed himself on the subject as follows: "I cannot understand why tonality as such should be abandoned. I cannot even understand why it should always be present."

A small clarification regarding the dating of Ives' compositions.

Ives had the habit of building his compositions through an accumulation of ideas that developed over several years.

He would jot down ideas as they came to mind in the most disparate places: three bars in the margin of another score he was working on, a series of chords on the back of a calendar, and so on. See a list here: http://www.flaminioonline.it/Biografie/Ives-frammenti.html

Every now and then he would fish up these ideas, stitch them together, then abandon them again, and after some time take them up once more, adding more material.

When the compositions were complete, he would revisit them again, stitching three or four scores together to create orchestral Sets.

Furthermore, he was a man of absolute disorder, and he himself could no longer remember the dates of his works.

All his attempts to bring order to his work have done nothing but create confusion. His diaries, for example, contain the same compositions on different dates.

From the above, it can be deduced that it is absolutely impossible to establish a serious dating for Charles Ives' compositions.

All this is better explained by James Sinclair in the introduction to his catalogue of Charles Ives and can be consulted on the dedicated page of Yale University.

http://drs.library.yale.edu/HLTransformer/HLTransServlet?stylename=yul.ead2002.xhtml.xsl&pid=music:mss.0014.1&query=&clear-stylesheet-cache=yes&hlon=yes&big=y&adv=&filter=&hitPageStart=&sortFields=&view=over#did

Proving that a piece is dodecaphonic is a triviality. Without making hearsay claims, one only needs to have the score.

If we really want to indicate Ives as a precursor of something, I would say collage... a practice very dear to composers like Berio (Sinfonia), just to mention one of the first ones.

VERY INTERESTING.

Atonality is a rather vague concept, whereas dodecaphony is instead a strict rule.

The musicologist whose name I cannot recall wanted to highlight that Ives used 12-tone dodecaphonic series long before Schoenberg, but from what can be gathered from your reflections, establishing the before and after in an author prone to disorder is a difficult task.

Frank wrote:

If we really want to indicate Ives as a precursor to something, I would say collage... a practice very dear to composers like Berio (Sinfonia), just to mention one of the first.

Allow me a somewhat sarcastic observation. In a context where the musical material is atonal, the practice of collage is, shall we say, "facilitated."

Pinksword wrote:

VERY INTERESTING.

dodecaphony, on the other hand, is an iron rule.

Iron-clad in its early days, but many composers have shown us that it isn't quite that iron-clad. Or rather, it can be seen as being no more rigid than other languages (if you consider that II V I is also a very restrictive cage).

Paraphrasing Natan, let's say that if an Ives piece were dodecaphonic, you should be able to tell from the first 12 notes, without too many flights of fancy.

Pinksword wrote:

Allow me a somewhat sarcastic observation. In a context where the musical material is atonal, the practice of collage is, shall we say, "facilitated."

I wouldn't say so; if you analyze the work Berio did in Sinfonia - I mean at a macro-form level - in tonality it would be very simple. If we look at the micro-form and obviously the third movement, if we were in a tonal context, the selection would be based on other fragments, but it is possible without too many problems and can also make sense.

Write a capriccio in G major? Do you know how many authorial fragments you could easily use and that you can stitch onto a "II V I"?