4/27/20

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Charles Ives (1874-1954)

After a piece like Christopher Rouse’s Gorgon, it is probably about time that we briefly return to more lighthearted music. Today’s piece is another work from the American composer Charles Ives, and if you are unfamiliar with his Three Quarter-Tone Pieces (which I wrote about on April 18), I would highly recommend that you take a pause from reading this post and go get a brief refresher of ‘classic Ives.’ Don’t worry - if that piece didn’t appeal to you, I assure you that today’s piece is a different beast entirely. As I mentioned in my previous post on Charles Ives, he was not nearly as prolific (in terms of quantity) as many of his contemporaries, although a large quantity of music he wrote was for piano or orchestra. Over a long period of his life, Ives also composed a collection of 114 songs which were primarily written for solo voice accompanied by piano. In that collection of songs there is one titled A Son of a Gambolier, which, as a close friend of mine in the Blair School of Music composition studio put it, is “quite possibly the best piece Charles Ives ever wrote.” That is certainly an exaggeration, but I must say that this piece is still remarkably brilliant.

A Son of a Gambolier is unabashedly tonal and free of any sort of polytonality or microtonality. It is also remarkably march-like, even featuring a trio section in the key a fifth lower than the opening. So in knowing that about the piece, this may be the part where you, the reader, are thinking something along the lines of “well, what makes this piece so darn interesting?” - and to answer that, all I have to say is “aesthetic.” The piece is simply amusing, free of any sort of major drama, and delectably jovial in spirit. Every harmonic progression is completely logical, with only a few chromatic tricks thrown in from time to time. On top of that, the piece is driven a lot by melodic content, which is a fancy way of saying that it will certainly get stuck in your head.

Perhaps one of the more notable musical aspects of the piece is its instrumentation, but even that element of it is quite obviously approached with reckless abandon. The piece begins with a short and fun introduction from the piano alone, with the tenor only entering after a repetition of the first melodic idea. After two verses the voice part is out and the piece moves into the trio section. Don’t get me wrong, when I say “out,” I mean “out” - Ives must have believed that the voice part says all it needs to say in those two verses because the tenor has no further singing parts in the rest of the piece. It gets even better with the entrance of the “Kazoo Chorus” (that’s right - you read it correctly: “Kazoo Chorus”) which paraphrases the vocal part from earlier in the piece. Now I must admit that I would not be doing the kazoo community justice if I did not mention the absurd range which Ives calls for the kazooists to perform, reaching all the way up to a high C to solidify a frightening 2-octave range. If I had to put some sort of measure to the difficulty of the kazoo part, I would have to put it as just slightly easier than the principal trumpet part of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man (that’s a joke, by the way - hold off on the searing comments, trumpet players). The fun doesn’t end there, however, because Charles Ives, after introducing the Kazoo Chorus, then adds piccolos, ocarinas, fifes, and trombones as the cherry on top of the sundae. Perhaps my favorite aspect of it all is how all the instrumental additions almost seem as if they were after-thoughts. It is not unlikely that Ives, mid-composing, thought to add trombones to the song and then simply added a line and the word “trombones” to indicate that element of the song. Perhaps it was more planned than that, but regardless, it still makes for a hilarious yet brilliant addition to the already fun piece.

Perhaps the most important take away from this piece is that composers often write music for the sake of writing music, and that music doesn’t have to mean anything. I don’t say that to make Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 seem more calculated or important than Ives’ A Son of a Gambolier, but by measure of sheer magnitude, there is certainly some small disparity. Even in light of that, A Son of a Gambolier is not any less interesting than any other piece. It is quite possible that the song was a mere two-day project or small attempt at comedy for Charles Ives - a test to see how catchy and rowdy of a song he could compose. After all, the piece is remarkably different from a large quantity of his other pieces, which were significantly more experimental. Whatever his intention, the piece certainly is approachable and entertaining for countless listeners. Below I have linked a video with the score so that you can follow along. If you have ever wondered what a music major’s go-to bar song is, the answer is waiting right before your eyes.