into the rolling hills of Ireland
I roamed
looking for the green secret of existence –
with your second generation legs
I began up a slate brown peak
while they were putting your body
into the cold cold cold
(and sometimes hot) funereal condominium
and did you know that
the mountains here
look like big, large, pebbles?
the kind that you could skip across the bay, that I see
out of the window…
It’s a quaint bed and breakfast
with ceilings slightly too low
they amplify the big bony structure
you gave to me
and this view is something like
the view you might have had in Nantucket
when you journeyed with your love
toward the honeyed moon…
and probably like the coast in the Carolinas,
but not like the beach in Stone Harbor,
but maybe the midshipmen rocks of the Golden Gate?
but I’m on a different journey,
not celebrating marriage,
but celebrating you.

my arrangement for string orchestra of Ives String Quartet No. 1 was commissioned and premiered by the New York City based string ensemble, Shattered Glass, in the summer of 2014

A brief commentary from the arranger:

The arranging of small ensemble works for large ensembles has always caused argument. Some believe it disrespectful to the composer (a grave-digging of sorts) and some believe that the music’s expression cannot be contained within the scope of the original instrumentation; and I am sure handfuls of other arguments could find their naming here. I have always believed that arguments like these rest on a case-by-case basis, and that no two pieces can be argued in the same breath.

Charles Ives wrote his String Quartet No. 1 at the age of twenty-two, just prior to his departure from the ball fields of Yale. His time there was marked by a sincere antagonism toward musical tastes and his teacher, mostly due to his growing up with George Ives – his extra-musical father. In a picture taken two years after the composition of this work, Ives is clearly still a boy: slick hair, clean-shaven, pressed collar, and a sparkle in his eye. His youth seeps out of every measure of this work. Though one must not mistake this work for the work of an amateur.

My first roadblock was in questioning whether or not this work deserved instrumental expansion, and the addition of weight. Based on its musical merit alone, I found the answer to be an astounding yes: the tutti sections and finales are of a magnitude that the quartet can only do so much justice, and more importantly I personally found the psycho-nostalgic and hyper-sensitive sound world to beg for spatial treatment.

My second roadblock: would arranging this work be an act of grave-digging? This answer came from Vivian Perlis’ great works on Ives, particularly her An Oral History, in the words of film-composer Bernard Herrmann:

“In the thirties I tried to get the Budapest Quartet to play the First Quartet and they wouldn’t consider it, because they said it was just a lot of cheap American religious music themes. That got me irritated, and I said, “Well, it is no different from Haydn.” They said, “What do you mean? Haydn is a great composer.” And I said, “Yeah, but there were cheap beer garden tunes in his quartets.” They said, “Oh, that’s different.” And I said, “No, it isn’t different. You don’t mind them, but you mind these. That’s all.” And they never played Ives, because they never really had a feeling for him. I worked with Ives on the First String Quartet. We worked on the score together, adding a bass part and all that.

Here was living proof that Ives indeed had even attempted to manipulate the work in the very same way; but of course, knowing what one can know (eighty years removed) of the man, this seemed obvious.

And my third and final roadblock: how much variation can one add to an already existing score (dynamics, spatial play, orchestration) without turning the work into something wholly different? I remembered immediately upon my hearing of the Fourth Symphony that Ives had indeed recycled immense amounts of material from the First String Quartet, and on top of borrowing, manipulated the material a great deal. I found another answer from Perlis’ book, this time from Elliot Carter:

[Of the Fourth Symphony] “The third, which is about seventy-five percent the same as the first movement of the First String Quartet, has a few irregular bar lengths, polyrhythms and dissonances added especially at the expanded climax near the end. Comparison between these two show, in small, how Ives revised his works to suit the changes brought about by his musical development…”

So all answers aside, I sat down to work. I worked from an out-of-print version of the score by Peer International (circa 1961). I found over twenty-seven errors and questionable circumstances; for each of these I made the most objective decisions based on the material Ives had already presented. Once these were corrected and the music entered was into the computer, I began constructing the arrangement with the idea of the larger string orchestra as an amplifying body, as well as an argumentative one.

While working on the piece I was fortunate to live on the West Side of Manhattan at 157th Street. One block away from my home at the Academy of Arts and Letters, an exhibit opened during my work: Charles Ives workroom from his home in Redding Connecticut. Each day that I worked I made sure to take breaks and go and reflect on Ives – his humor, his disposition, his music, and his humanity. From this reflection I finally felt confident that a respectful arrangement created out of love for the music of Ives would do our greatest American musical hero justice. I hope that everyone who hears or performs this work derives as much joy from it as I did while living with it.