Synopsis
On today’s date in 1946, at the Yaddo Music Festival in Saratoga Springs, New York, the Walden Quartet gave the first professional performance of the String Quartet No. 2 by American composer Charles Ives.
Ives’ String Quartet No. 1 was his first major work — its manuscript is dated 1896, back when Ives was a 21-year old student at Yale. While Ives’ first quartet was written under the watchful eye and conservatively tonal ear of the Yale music professor Horatio Parker, his second, composed between 1907 and 1913, is more often than not a wildly atonal work that would have given poor Professor Parker a heart attack.
On the first page of its score, Ives provided a kind of program. It reads: “String Quartet for four men who converse, discuss, argue politics, fight, shake hands, shut up, and then walk up the mountainside to view the firmament.”
Judging from some musical quotations in the first movement of Ives’ quartet, it seems the American Civil War was one of the political topics fought over by the four men mentioned, and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is quoted, along with Ives’ perennial favorite, Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.
Music Played in Today's Program
Charles Ives (1874-1954): String Quartet No. 2; Emerson Quartet; DG 435 864
On This Day
Births
1863 - American composer and teacher, Horatio William Parker, in Auburndale, Massachusetts. He became chairman of the Yale music department in 1894, where he taught the young Charles Ives.
1890 - Swiss composer Frank Martin, in Geneva
1913 - American composer Henry Brant, in Montréal, Canada
Deaths
1945 - Austrian composer Anton von Webern, 61, accidentally shot by an American soldier in Mittersill, Austria
Premieres
1946 - Cowell: Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 5 (string orchestra arrangement), at the Saratoga Springs Convention Hall, by the Spa Music Festival Orchestra, F. Charles Adler conducting. This music was originally written for five voices, and in that form was premiered on April 14, 1946, at Times Hall in New York by the Randolph Singers directed by David Randolph.
1946 - Ives: String Quartet No. 2, at the Yaddo Music Festival in Saratoga, New York, by the Walden Quartet (This music was completed in 1913)
2000 - Sallinen: opera King Lear, by the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki.
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About Composers Datebook®
Host John Birge presents a daily snapshot of composers past and present, with timely information, intriguing musical events and appropriate, accessible music related to each.
He has been hosting, producing and performing classical music for more than 25 years. Since 1997, he has been hosting on Minnesota Public Radio's Classical Music Service. He played French horn for the Cincinnati Symphony and Pops Orchestra and performed with them on their centennial tour of Europe in 1995. He was trained at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Eastman School of Music and Interlochen Arts Academy.