Thomas Brodhead maakte de nieuwe editie van de Vierde symfonie van Ives die het Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest 13 en 14 september speelt. Een buitengewoon ingewikkelde klus.
Hierbij zijn verhaal over deze nieuwe editie. Thomas Brodhead zal beide uitvoeringen in Amsterdam bijwonen.

From Chaos to Order: A new performance edition of the Ives Fourth Symphony

Editing Charles Ives’s music is challenging.  There’s no adjective or qualifying phrase that can follow that sentence adequately, because the complexities involved are extraordinary, both owing to the time-frame over which Ives would compose his music (i.e. some pieces span years if not decades of development) and owing to the microcosmos of musical notation swimming on most every page of music manuscript he created (and there are over 6000 such pages.)

Ives’s Fourth Symphony is his most complex orchestral work, and many consider it his greatest composition.  Biographers of Ives could take virtually any page from the symphony and tell the story of his life, from the musical experiments of his father that taught him to think outside the box, through the late 19th-century American country band and congregational church music culture in which he grew up, and finally to the philosophical principles about mankind he embraced in his adulthood that were influenced by the American transcendentalists he loved to read, quote, and write about.
Ives only heard the first two movements of his Fourth Symphony during his lifetime, and only by an ensemble of just 50 players on a concert in 1927.  An arrangement of the third movement by nascent film composer Bernard Herrmann was played over CBS radio in the 1930s, which Ives may or may not have heard.  But aside from these tentative forays into the score, nothing came of it during his lifetime.  The first performance of the complete symphony did not occur until 11 years after Ives’s death, when Leopold Stokowski premiered the work in 1965 with the American Symphony Orchestra.  The full score–a provisional performance score–was published later that year, and has served as the only publication of the work for the past 47 years.

The concert at the Concertgebouw this week is the third public performance of the new Charles Ives Society Critical Edition Performance Score of 2011.  Its first performance took place just three weeks ago on August 26, 2012, by the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra under Peter Eotvos.  Last week it was performed in Berlin by The Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Ingo Metzmacher.  This week the score is being championed again by Peter Eotvos in a performance that should be revelatory, energetic, and dramatic, just as it was in Lucerne.

Editing the Fourth Symphony is a daunting task because it requires all of the concentration and perspicacity required for editing a work much longer in performance time.  I would argue its thirty minutes of music (spanning a mere 129 pages of engraved score) requires the same amount of editorial labor for producing a new edition of the entire Ring Cycle. And in fact, the new Ives Society Critical Edition of the score is divided into not one but two different scores, and utilizes the editorial work of not one but five different editors.

The Ives Society Critical Edition is split into (1) a scholarly score that presents the music as Ives left it, and (2) a separate performance score that clarifies the music using renotations that facilitate performance but preserve Ives’s intentions.  This division was necessary because Ives’s original notation is at times unperformable (because of the idiosyncratic notational style that Ives employed) and then misleading (because non-synchronous effects are typically explained through written instructions rather than music notation.)  The scholarly score was first prepared in the 1980s by William Brooks, James Sinclair, Kenneth Singleton, and Wayne Shirley, each tackling a separate movement (respectively the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th movement.)  My work on the project began in 2003 first as music engraver (music typesetter) and as assistant Volume Editor (checking, reviewing, and refining the works of the individual editors), and then grew to encompass the whole of the creation and editing of the performance score.
The new performance score attempts to clarify all of Ives’s intentions without subjective intrusion, allowing conductors to make as many possible personal choices as they desire from the plethora of performance options Ives provided (and there are many to choose from.)

Among the outstanding features of this work are polytemporal dyssynchronies, in which different sections of the main orchestra break into separate tempos that play independently.  Sometimes they take the form of large-scale divisions of the entire orchestra, other times individual players simply break away from the total flock and go their own way.  On top of this are two spatially-separated groups–one of percussion, the other of violins and a harp–that are located in different parts of the hall, away from the main orchestra; these groups play both together and independently of the main orchestra.  At least two conductors are typically required to negotiate all the forces (in Lucerne four were used, last week in Berlin two were used, and here in Amsterdam this week two are in use.)

Communicating Ives’s intentions (and copious options) graphically–with self-explaining notation–for the conductors and the players has been a labor of mine for the past 9 years.  The previous score of 1965 was provisional and ambiguous, creating such terrible rehearsal and performance problems that many conductors preferred not to approach the score because the task of unraveling it seemed far too daunting.  Additionally, the 1965 score was sloppily hand-copied and the often unreadble parts contained not a single cue, but that was the least of the problems facing players who took on that score.  The greatest single problem was the presentation of the dyssynchronies, which were not explained graphically in the score (i.e. by using self-explaining music notation) but rather in written instructions by Ives.  This created 47 years of conflicting interpretations of crucial passages in the piece, many of which were either poorly informed or simply passed over unobserved by the conductor.

Also compromising conductors of the past score were passages where half the musicians play in one meter and the other half play in a different meter.  These passages are best negotiated by two conductors, but the standard top-down ordering of the instruments in the conductor’s score (a convention that presents winds, brass, percussion, and strings top-down in that order) worked against the reading of the score by the individual conductors.  In this standard ordering they could not easily “parse” the page visually to see which instruments they would be conducting.  This even worked against a single conductor who would attempt to negotiate these passages alone, for it would make it difficult to call out which players are in which group to rehearse them independently before joining the two groups.  The new score corrects this problem by presenting each group in the full score in its own bracketed section of the page, allowing for easy apprehension of the metrical divisions.

On the other side of the conductor’s podium are the parts, which required careful editing to communicate to the players exactly what is happening in each section of the piece, and to which group a player belongs as it shifts its association from one metrical or temporal group to another, and then which conductor to follow in those passages.  The careful construction and editing of the parts has been a task that has spanned several years, and has not been a trivial task at all.

Music is never merely in the notes that are played: trite but true, music lays in between the notes.  The previous edition forced players to strain to determine which notes to play and how to play them; the goal of the new edition is to present the music clearly so that the musicians never have to struggle to know what or how to play and instead may simply make music with the notes.

In addition to the spatially-separated groups described earlier (of percussion and of Violins and Harp), the work employs an enormous orchestra including 6 keyboardists (solo piano, four-handed orchestra piano, celesta, organ, and a special quarter-tone piano that makes use of 24 notes per octave), winds, a large brass section including 6 trumpets, 10 percussionists, strings, and mixed chorus. The location and appearance of the chorus for this performance should also be a surprise to the concert goers to the Concertgebouw this week.

The reception of the new score has been extremely positive, and already performances have been scheduled in October of this year by the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, the American Symphony Orchestra, and University of Kentucky Symphony; in the spring the Detroit Symphony will take it to Carnegie Hall, and the nearby New York Philharmonic will tackle it on an independent concert.

–Thomas Brodhead

In addition to being the editor of the Charles Ives Society Performance Edition of the Ives Fourth Symphony, Thomas Brodhead is the editor of Ives’s piano works, “The Celestial Railroad”, “Four Transcriptions from ‘Emerson’”, the author of “Ives’s Celestial Railroad and his Fourth Symphony”, and is a member of the board of directors of the Charles Ives Society.  He currently lives outside of Nashville, Tennessee, and is happy to be contacted at brodhead.tom@gmail.com.