Ives’ Symphony No. 2
Notes by TŌN violinist Emerie Mon
Charles Ives has no shortage of personal descriptors to boast of: actuary, composer, prodigy organist, Yalie, and most significant of all, Connecticut native. Although he wrote six symphonies during his career, his Symphony No. 2 is notable due to the fact that it was composed around a particularly pivotal time in his life. After graduating from Yale University in 1898 Ives moved to New York, having decided to go into the insurance business over his already-established successful career as an organist. This decision to re-prioritize music and composing as a mere creative outlet likely contributed to the increasingly free and experimental outlook present in his works thereafter.
The soundscape of the Second Symphony is a beautiful hodgepodge of Ives’ life experiences as the son of a bandmaster, picking up hymns at church services, hearing vernacular music and folk songs in town, and, of course, a Western European music education at Yale to top it all off. Set in five movements, one can hear aspects of classical giants such as Beethoven, Brahms, and Dvořák which induce a strong feeling of the sublime. On the other end, tunes like “America the Beautiful” in the third movement and “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean” most obviously in the first and fifth movements make faceted appearances, alongside nods to Ives’ own earlier works. All combined, it hints at the direction in which the likes of Bernstein, Copland, Gershwin, and Still would expand decades into the future. Moments of lush orchestration, choral and expansive, make his ear for harmony from the perspective of an organist amply known; and with a punchline of an ending, this symphony is an aurally engaging and cinematic adventure up to its last note.