Concord Donna Coleman performs a great white whale of a sonata
PLAYS A GREAT WHITE WHALE OF A SONATA
Pianist Donna Coleman is a woman obsessed. She has played plenty of music in her lifetime, enough to earn a master’s at the University of Michigan and a doctor of musical arts degree at the Eastman School of Music. But ever since her student years, one composition has steadfastly remained her great white whale: Charles Ives’ Second Piano Sonata: Concord, Mass. (1840-1860) — or, as it is generally known, the Concord Sonata. She has programmed it often, she has recorded it (on a much-admired CD on the Etcetera label), and this Tuesday she will perform it at the San Miguel Chapel to launch a three-concert mini-festival she has designed to situate the piece in its historical context. “Ives’ music has taken over my entire life,” she said. “For me, he’s the greatest composer. And I don’t even say he’s the greatest American composer. He is the greatest composer.”
Ives, who was born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1874 and died in New York City in 1954, was a curious character. The son of a Civil War bandmaster, he graduated (just barely) from Yale, where the distinguished composer-pedagogue Horatio Parker tried to tame his student’s imaginative impulses. Avant-garde though he was in his musical proclivities, Ives retained a practical streak from his small-town upbringing in New England. This led him to the underwriting business. He and a colleague founded an insurance firm during the first decade of the 20th century, and Ives entered the annals of that industry by pioneering the concept of estate planning. While he grew rich as a businessman, he busied himself privately as a composer, following his musical interests without assuming that his pieces would gain either performances or fame. He didn’t expect his compositions to bring in any money. On the rare occasions when they did, he characteristically shared it with struggling composers he assisted.
His vast catalog includes many works that resemble nothing that had come before — complex musical landscapes in which several pieces seem to be overlapping in different keys and tempos, filled with quotations from the hymns, parlor songs, and patriotic tunes that stuck with him as remnants of his Connecticut boyhood. A few disciples sought him out and paid attention, but mostly he was ignored. In 1926 he stopped writing new works, although he did continue to revise earlier compositions. Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the standard encyclopedia of classical music for the English-speaking world, did not include an entry on Ives when its third edition appeared the following year. It finally recognized him with two paragraphs in 1944, in the supplementary volume of its fourth edition, and its fifth edition (1954) it gave him a slightly fuller writeup; that’s because in 1947 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Symphony No. 3, which had just received its premiere even though he had completed it 36 years earlier. By way of comparison, the most recent printing of Grove’s allocates him 27 densely printed pages.
In the 1960s, Ives was still widely viewed as little more than a cranky Yankee who tinkered with tones. Coleman mentioned how, as late as 1979, Samuel Barber could toss off a dismissal in an interview: “I can’t bear Ives. It is now unfashionable to say this, but in my opinion, he was an amateur, a hack, who didn’t put pieces together well.” This gets her hackles up. “I’ve studied this music for 40-some years. I [could] show you how every note in the Concord Sonata came to be.”
She first heard about the piece from a friend at college who, flying high from his first exposure to Ives, told her the composer had written two piano sonatas that were so hard that nobody could play them. “So I, of course, having never heard a note of Ives, immediately said, ‘Well, that’s ridiculous. There’s no such thing as music that can’t be played. I’m going to learn those sonatas.’ ” It proved to be an allabsorbing process. It is true that parts of the piece are terrifically difficult in terms of technical demands, and when Coleman set about learning it there was not a performing tradition to draw on. Composed mostly between 1916 and 1919, the piece had been premiered in 1938 by the pianist John Kirkpatrick, a friend of the composer’s, who made the first recording of it. But few performers picked up on the work for decades, and it was pretty much virgin territory for pianists even when Coleman was in graduate school. “I did not have any mentors,” she said. “It was like an archeological dig for me: peeling back layers, reading, studying, analyzing, analyzing, analyzing. Gradually things are revealed.”
While she was finishing her doctoral studies at Eastman, she got in touch with Kirkpatrick. He was the curator of the Ives archives at Yale, where she would visit him to be “immersed in Ives’ manuscripts.” She explains that when Ives published the
Concord Sonata, in 1921, he held back 37 copies from the print run, and over many years he entered different emendations into them. It is entirely typical of Ives that his changes from copy to copy do not concur and sometimes they are downright incompatible with each other. “John was in the process of collating all of these into a grand critical edition,” she said. “Sadly, it was not complete at time of his transcendence to his higher life, in 1991. My version of the Concord Sonata is unlike the version of anybody else on the planet because I incorporate ideas that John transferred to me from his studies of the manuscripts and the emended versions of the first publication.”
“And then there’s the meaning of it all,” she observed. “The way it sounds is amazing and beautiful and powerful and transforming, but the meaning behind it is the most important to me.” That meaning connects to the Transcendentalist literary figures of 19th-century New England. The sonata’s first movement is titled “Emerson,” the second “Hawthorne,” the third “The Alcotts,” and the fourth “Thoreau.” In a rambling essay published in 1920, Ives wrote: “The whole 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
“The way the [Concord Sonata] sounds is amazing and beautiful and powerful and transforming, but the meaning behind it is the most important to me.” — pianist Donna Coleman
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. The first and last movements do not aim to give any programs of the life or of any particular work of either Emerson or Thoreau, but, rather, composite pictures or impressions.”
Although the sonata is itself long, usually running 45 to 50 minutes, Coleman has enlisted some friends to read a narration she has prepared at different points in the performance. That commentary includes a brief background on the piece and short excerpts from the Transcendentalists’ writings: a paragraph from Emerson’s essay “Circles,” an excerpt from “Little Women,” and so on. “My readers are close friends from Australia who are now living in Los Angeles,” she said.
Australia? Why, yes. Through a curious quirk of fate, much of Coleman’s career has unrolled in that country, where she spent 20 years preaching the gospel of Ives before taking up part-time residence in Santa Fe, where she has lived for a portion of each year since 2015. A Pennsylvania native, she first went to Australia in 1991 on a Fulbright fellowship to tour around the country for a few months and make a recording (she chose Ives’ Piano Sonata No. 1 and some of his short piano pieces). She was offered a job at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, and then her contract got renewed and renewed again. She was awarded the Australian equivalent of tenure and became a permanent resident and eventually a citizen. “I had been there for 20 years,” she said, “but I started thinking about maybe re-establishing myself in the United States, or at least having some base here. I love the desert so much, and the Native American culture here was also a draw for me. I’ve had a long-lasting, deep interest in Native American culture and music, and I took that interest with me to Australia and translated it into working with Australian musicians in the Outback.” She still carries some of the Australian Outback in her heart, which she punningly conveys by titling her concerts the “OutBach® Festival of [Mostly] American Music.”
In the other two installments, she will be joined by violinist Endre Balogh and cellist Antony Cooke, her Los Angeles-based colleagues in an ensemble named — are you ready? — the Concord Trio. On Thursday, Nov. 29, they will pair off to play duos by the composers known as The Boston Six — Amy Beach, George Chadwick, Arthur Foote, Edward MacDowell, John Knowles Paine, and Ives’ teacher Horatio Parker — who set the musical scene into which Ives exploded. Also on that program are pieces by Samuel Barber (an ironic addition, given his disdain for Ives) and the Hungarian Zoltán Kodály (who was an Ives contemporary). On Saturday, Dec. 1, the three musicians team up for piano trios by Ives, Parker, and — again for a European comparison — Maurice Ravel, whose famous Piano Trio was coeval to Ives’.
“Everything seems to go back to Charles Ives and the American Transcendentalists,” Coleman said. “I sort of blame my friend who introduced me to [the writings of] Henry David Thoreau. That put me on this path of a passion for American music and the voice of that era.”