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Ives Plays Ives: The Complete Recordings of Charles Ives at the Piano

Charles Ives (1874–1954)

Ives Plays Ives

The Complete Recordings of Charles Ives at the Piano, 1933–1943

June 12, 1933

1. Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 1 (beg.) 3:58

2. Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 1 (end)  1:28

3. Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 3         2:33

4. Improvisation on a passage in Study No. 23, Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 2, and Emerson Overture’s Cadenza No. 4 (with false start) 0:44

5. Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 1 (beg.) 2:14

6. Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 1 (end)  2:24

11. Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 1 (beg.) 2:57

12. Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 1 (end) 2:53

13. Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 3        3:33

14. Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 3        3:40

May 11, 1938

15. Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 3 (beg.) 1:53

16. Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 3 (end) 0:40

18. Study No. 9: The Anti-Abolitionist Riots         2:04

23. Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 1 (abandoned) 0:17

24. Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 1 (middle)          1:04

26. Three Improvisations, No. 1      0:50

27. Sonata No. 2 for Piano: Concord, Mass., “Hawthorne” (excerpt)    0:17

29. Unidentified (improvisation on the Sunrise Cadenza?)        0:21

31. Three Improvisations, No. 3      0:42

32. Sonata No. 2 for Piano: Concord, Mass., “Emerson” (partial)            2:05

33. Sonata No. 2 for Piano: Concord, Mass., “Emerson” (partial)            1:23

34. Sonata No. 2 for Piano: Concord, Mass., “Emerson” (partial)            4:02

35. Study No. 2 and Study No. 23 (mixed)             2:24

36. Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 3 (abandoned)       0:57

37. Study No. 9: The Anti-Abolitionist Riots               2:15

38. They Are There!, first take (abandoned)                1:59

39. They Are There!, second take                3:30

41. March No. 6 for Piano, with “Here’s to Good Old Yale” 2:09

42. Sonata No. 2 for Piano: Concord, Mass., “The Alcotts”       5:02

The invention of sound-recording devices late in the nineteenth century made possible the preservation of definitive performances played or led by some important composers of the first decades of the twentieth century. Elgar, Rachmaninoff, Richard Strauss, and Stravinsky, among others, left a significant legacy of recordings of their own works. Charles Ives (born in Danbury, Connecticut, October 20, 1874; died in New York City, May 19, 1954), however, did not approach recording in order to leave a legacy. At least at first, he simply wanted an opportunity to listen to some of his music with advantageous detachment (and possibly to shortcut supplying to Henry Cowell and others variants of his music). With virtually no performances of his important music occurring during the first two decades of the century, Ives certainly had a backlog of curiosity about the sound of his own compositional efforts, and the need to judge them as such.

By 1933 Ives had retired from his insurance business and had largely finished writing his autobiographical Memos. He had heard some performances of his instrumental works (mostly in very disappointing efforts), but none of his piano works. While on an extended European vacation, he introduced himself to recording, at the Columbia Graphophone Company in London. According to Ives, the first session was both sad and amusing:

“Just [back] from 3 Abbey Road, London, June 12, 1933. Machinery! and what everything else is, and the other side of life as machinery, or as a result of its influence and fixtures—all of this, whatever the above means, I saw this a.m. I wanted to record (for my own observation) certain passages of piano things of mine. In the first place you have to be there at a certain time—so does Paderewski when he gives an 8:31 concert. How do you know at 8:31 that you are going to feel like playing note #92? Then you have to play what you have to play, which may not be exactly what you have to play. A bell rings—two bells—and a nice red light starts—and you start. You get going, going good maybe the first time, as I did this a.m. Then the nice engineer comes back and says you took over four minutes, and the last part was not recorded. As I remember, the last part was the only part of the above “going good” part. Then he played it over—it happened to be one of the best [times] that I’ve played it—so I told him that was just O.K., and I’d play some of the other passages. Then he says—“What?—that recording is all gone—we didn’t keep [it]—it was only to get the time”—!! So I had to play it again—and it was awful this time—sweaty fingers, short of breath . . . Then the man comes in and says “This is all recorded”—even the cuss words. Then just as I was going good again, the red light [goes out] and the buzzer sounds, and the time is up. The next record has to start in the beginning of the last measure—but how can you dive off a rock when you’re in the middle of the pool? So I told him I’d start all over again, and this time I got started going wrong and kept it up perfectly, and it was recorded perfectly! . . . A man may play to himself and his music starts to live—then he tries to put it under a machine, and it’s dead!” (Memos, pp. 80–81)

Over the course of a decade that included four such sessions, Ives recorded seventeen different pieces, ranging from the early March No. 6and rejected Largo for Symphony No. 1 to the “improvisations” that indeed may have been freshly created in front of the microphone in 1938. But most of the music recorded—the Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” the Studies Nos. 2, 9, 11, and 23, and the “Emerson” movement of Sonata No. 2 for Piano: Concord, Mass.—is related closely to Ives’s early, unfinished Emerson Overture for Piano and Orchestra (circa 1910–11).

Especially in the first three recording sessions, Ives’s motivation was clearly a wish to hear this music. Thus it comes as a surprise that in 1938, on the fifth disc side he recorded in a single day, Ives abandoned a snippet of “Hawthorne” material from the Concord Sonata, and turned, with little pause, to performing the movement that Professor Horatio Parker had rejected from the First Symphony, and then rolled through three other bits of music unrelated to the “Emerson” material. In 1943 his agenda changed, to emphasize movements from “Concord” and memorable readings of the World War II song “They Are There!”(the latter recorded perhaps with the hope of convincing someone—anyone!—that this rouser, based on much familiar music, would make a fine national rallying march). The surprise in this last recording session (besides his magnificent performance of the “Alcotts” movement of Concord) is a dashing performance of the youthful March No. 6.

Among the revelations in these recordings are the Three Improvisations (the second only recently identified as page 2 of the manuscript of Study No. 2), the other improvisation (track 4), and an unidentified item (track 29). David Porter’s essay that follows here demonstrates how fresh and self-rejuvenated Ives can make earlier pieces sound, through juggling and cross-fertilization.

It is possible, even probable, that Ives recorded all of this material without music on the piano rack. His style is improvisatory and spontaneous, reflecting the Romantic ideal of performance with which he grew up. The fast tempos are strikingly fast, the flexibility within an established tempo, amazing; Ives is especially volatile when pushing, in loud or energetic passages and in accelerandos, and very much in the style of the times he often seems rather casual or generalized with his rhythm. These collected recordings are a priceless lesson in a performance style for Ives’s music.

As indicated by the track listing, Ives sometimes filled a disc side with a series of pieces played with only brief pauses between them; for this disc it was necessary to reduce Ives’s pauses to a more standardized separation. Some of the original discs have banding that indicates Ives purposely stopped and restarted. We have retained Ives’s remarks before or after various pieces, except where they are unintelligible. The pitch level, variable even within sessions, has been adjusted to near A440. (One performance, track 28 here, suffered from a wild fluctuation in the original cutting machine’s speed; for this project, the very patient David Porter accomplished the analogue minimalization of the resultant pitch deviations.) Needle jumps in the playback of the original discs were repaired digitally (fortunately they were all backward skips, losing no music), and only a conservative level of noise suppression and click/pop reduction was employed.

Ives recorded separately (but consecutively) tracks 20 and 21; together, however—and without duplication of material—they constitute the two pages of Study No. 2 and are therefore joined here without pause. For the 1938 performance of Study No. 9it was desirable to cross-edit two different disc copies of the same performance: one copy was complete but badly scratched; the other lacked a transfer of the opening measure yet afforded a quieter surface free of skips.

Some of this material was included on disc 4 of the CBS LP album Charles Ives: The 100th Anniversary (M4 32504; released 1974): the present Tracks 1 and 2 (edited together as Side 1, Band 5), Track 3 (Side 1, Band 6), Track 17 (Side 2, Band 7), Track 21 (Side 2, Band 4), Track 22 (Side 2, Band 9), Track 25 (Side 25, Band 10), Track 26 (Side 2, Band 3), Track 27 (Side 1, Band 3), Track 28 (Side 2, Band 1), Tracks 29 and 30 (combined as Side 2, Band 8), Track 31 (Side 2, Band 5), Track 32 (Side 1, Band 1), Track 34 (Side 1, Band 2), Track 37 (Side 2, Band 6), Tracks 39 and 40 (combined in part as Side 2, Band 11), Track 41 (Side 2, Band 2), and Track 42 (Side 1, Band 4).

The original discs used for this compilation are held in the Historical Sound Recordings Collection at Yale University.

My thanks to David Porter for his expert help in identifying the musical selections relating to the Emerson Overture for Piano and Orchestra; to Richard Warren, curator of Yale’s Historical Sound Recordings, for his careful digital transfer of the original discs; and to Robert Wolff of Sony Music Studios for his admirable sound editing.

                —James B. Sinclair, Executive Editor, The Charles Ives Society

Charles Ives Discovered

While conducting an oral history project on Charles Ives in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I carried with me a small gray metal box full of 3 x 5 index cards, each with the name of a person who had known Ives. The “missing persons” section in the box included several people who had changed their names or addresses and were difficult to find. Among the most elusive was Mary Howard, a sound engineer responsible for recording Ives in 1943, playing his own music in her studio. I had seen the label “Mary Howard Recordings” on old discs at the Yale Music Library—exciting and promising, but tantalizing, because they were not in good enough condition to be played. I wondered whether Mary Howard was alive and where she was. Most important, where were the masters of these unique recordings?

The few people I met who remembered Mary Howard told me she had died in an automobile accident—probably. One day, while visiting Oliver Daniel, then head of concert music at BMI and a well-known figure in the music world (and also co-founder of CRI), I showed him my box of cards and said, “I guess I should move Mary Howard from ‘missing’ to ‘deceased’.” He responded, “Really?” and picked up his telephone, dialed a number, and handed the phone to me, “Here she is,” he said. Mary Howard had retired from the recording business in New York City—and indeed, following an automobile accident. But she had not died; instead she had remarried as Mary Howard Pickardt and lived in Washington, Connecticut.

Within a few days, I was interviewing Mary Howard in her home. She described the visit of Harmony and Charles Ives to her studio: “The reason he came was that he got letters from conductors and performers who were going to play something, asking how they should interpret the music . . . ‘Interpret! Interpret! If they don’t know anything about music well, I’ll tell them.’” Ives proceeded to do so, furiously, at the piano. Mary Howard said that Ives was not well, and Mrs. Ives was concerned about his getting so excited. Mary continued, “Over and over again he would play parts of his music, saying, ‘I’ve got to make them understand!’ ”

Following the interview, I was invited to see the large collection of sound recordings stored in her attic. Mary Howard agreed that I could return with a few student helpers, to make an inventory. (My tacit aim was to find the masters of the Ives recordings.) We did return, and worked through an impressive amount of material but had almost lost hope, when, at the end of the day, in the last room, on the bottom shelf, there they were! Later, when the masters were played, we found a previously unknown recording of “The Alcotts” from the Sonata No. 2 for Piano: Concord, Mass.

The interview with Mary Howard provided me with an interesting view of Ives for my oral history, Charles Ives Remembered (1974). The discovery and subsequent preservation of her recordings, however, were far more important than the interview itself. Hearing Ives perform his own music is a unique and moving experience, for it brings the composer close to the listener through the intensity and spontaneity so characteristic of Charles Ives.

—Vivian Perlis, Vice-President, The Charles Ives Society; Director, The Oral History Project, Yale University

Recording and Re-Recording Ives

Before the early 1950s, when recorders using ¼-inch audiotape were first marketed, a musician who wished to make recordings of reasonable quality could obtain best results in a recording studio, either an independent one or one linked to a commercial recording company. This ensured the services of an appropriately insulated space, equipment of high quality, and an experienced recording engineer. Equipment for home recording on discs had been available from the late 1920s, but it was cumbersome and its quality was no better than that of AM radio. Because there were many professional studios in New York City, it is understandable that Charles Ives made recordings in them for his own use.

When listening to recordings made before the days of tape masters, one needs to bear in mind the conditions under which they were made; these were considerably different from those of today. The principal difference is that the longest side (period of uninterrupted performance) possible for records to be played on a home phonograph was about five minutes (the maximum for a 12-inch side cut directly at 78 rpm). Radio broadcast transcriptions could hold about 15 minutes per side, but any such recordings would have to be divided into 5-minute sections when copied for home playback.

In those days of direct-to-disc recording, each side was like a performance—that is, one continuous take that could not be changed, only replaced by another take of the same material. A single segment could be either a full side or a 5-minute group of shorter pieces, for each of which the machinery could be started and stopped. Sound from the performance was converted by microphone into electrical current, equalized for cutting, amplified, and converted to mechanical motion by a cutting head that operated on a soft blank disc surface.

The pre-1950 recording studio provided to the customer one or more of the following: (a) processed discs produced by electroplating, mastering, and pressing (as with published commercial recordings), (b) original discs (if of 12-inch diameter or less), or (c) copies made by cutting blanks from playback of originals. Ives’s personal recordings can reliably be said to have been produced by all of the above-mentioned methods.

The Columbia discs were made in the studios at 3 Abbey Road, London, and “shellac” pressings were produced for Ives, probably directly from platings of the original cuttings (as in [a], above).

The Speak-O-Phone discs, inscribed on aluminum blanks, are most likely originals (as in [b] above)—noisy indeed, but second-generation copies created by this process would be so noisy that the music itself would be nearly inaudible. These discs, of three different diameters, survived fairly flat and in good condition, having been either infrequently played or treated carefully with the special needles provided by the studio for playback. Unfortunately, they are undated (in fact their labels are unmarked), and no evidence suggests when they might have been made. According to Professor Michael Biel of Morehouse College in Kentucky, Speak-O-Phone was incorporated in 1926. Recordings dated as early as 1929 have been reported, but Speak-O-Phone discs in the Yale Collection that are dated were made between 1934 and 1937. (By the latter year the aluminum disc process had been rendered obsolete by recorders that cut grooves in lacquer-coated blanks.)

The discs from the Melotone Recording Studios and Mary Howard Recordings are either originals or studio-made professional copies thereof (as in [c], above). Discs from both studios, well-known for recordings of performances or broadcasts, were cut on lacquer-coated blanks, which have a life span limited by the chemical degradation of their ingredients. The complete extant recordings of Charles Ives appear in this publication. The transfers to digital format were made employing a Packburn Audio Noise Suppressor.

—Richard Warren, Jr., Curator, Historical Sound Recordings, Yale University

The Evolution of Ives’s “Emerson” Music

I recently completed a reconstruction of Ives’s Emerson Overture [or Concerto] for Piano and Orchestra. (It was premiered by the Cleveland Orchestra in October 1998.) With that score in hand—a critical edition of Ives’s intended but unfinished concerto, based on about 100 pages of musical sources—we can see how Ives used materials from it in other works. On this CD, with the exception of tracks 26–31 and 38–42 (related to other compositions), all of the music began as part of, or is derived from, the Emerson Overture/Concerto. The following is an account of the evolution of this music.

Ives abandoned plans for the Emerson Concerto, but not its music. First he “translated” some of it (as he put it) into the first movement of his Sonata No. 2 for Piano: Concord, Mass., on which he was working during 1911–15. He had not used in the sonata movement a large part of the concerto’s opening section, but he proceeded to rework portions of that into three other piano pieces, the Studies No. 1, No. 2, and No. 9 (The Anti-Abolitionist Riots in the 1830’s and 1840’s). These studies were adaptations of the “Centrifugal Cadenzas” in the Emerson Concerto, Cadenzas 1–3 for Studies No. 9, No. 1, and No. 2, respectively. A part of Cadenza 4 found its way into Study No. 23 (and a truncated version of it into the “Emerson” movement of Concord).

Some time between 1915 and 1918, Ives arranged, from another of the unused concerto passages, the first of his Transcriptions from “Emerson” (also for piano). These transcriptions grew to four after Ives had Concord privately printed in 1921. In the “Emerson” movement of Concord, Ives had simplified his music, but in the Transcriptions he restored thicker, more complex textures. (More than two decades later, when Ives reworked the Concord Sonata, resulting in a second edition published in 1947, he reinstated in the “Emerson” movement some of these original textures.)

Even though Ives’s aim in the Four Transcriptions from “Emerson” was to maintain the original character of the Emerson Concerto, they lacked the music of the“Centrifugal Cadenzas.” By the late 1920s, Ives had decided to reinstate the music of Cadenzas 1–3 in the first of the “Emerson” Transcriptions. This decision provided the impetus to make his first recordings (in June 1933, in the Columbia Graphophone Studio in London). About a year before, he had written:

“Shortly I think I shall make a record, perhaps playing each movement two or three different ways. This will be done more for my own satisfaction and study, and also to save the trouble and eyesight of copying it all out. After the record is made, Mr. Henry Cowell, Mr. Nicolas Slonimsky, or some other acoustical genius, could write it down for me—and probably better than I can.” (Memos, p. 80)

Ives thought the recording sessions were a huge disappointment. He told Cowell that he could have played better with one hand tied behind his back. He must have also realized that the poor sound quality of the recordings would make it nearly impossible for anyone to write down what he had played. And so, probably later that same year, he prepared a very special photostat set of the “Emerson” Transcriptions, which previously had been professionally copied. He heavily amended the music, and added six sheets with numerous inserts, mostly for the first and third Transcriptions. This invaluable source is known as “Copy C”; it is the one that represents most closely the condition of the original Concerto. 

Over the next five years Ives made several more recordings of the first and third Transcriptions, all of them based on the version in “Copy C.” The transition from the opening of Cadenza No. 1 (as found in Study No. 9) differs in the earlier and late recordings, sometimes being based on the transition devised for the study (track 1, 0:18–0:22) and sometimes being closer to Ives’s version in “Copy C” (tracks 5 [0:19–0:22] and 11 [0:16–0:20]). The truncated 1933 version of Cadenza No. 2 (track 1, 2:49–3:15) is different from the version found in the Concerto sketch; it is omitted entirely from one of the aluminum Speak-O-Phone discs (tracks 5–6), partly used in another aluminum disc (tracks 11 [2:32–2:37] and 12 [0:32–0:35]), and reinstated in its original form with an improvised extension in one of the 1938 Melotone discs (track 24, 0:26–0:44). Cadenza No. 3 (found in Study No. 2) replaces mm. 40–45 of “Emerson” Transcription No. 1 (Ives never recorded the original ending). One of the Speak-O-Phone aluminum sides (track 12, 1:55–2:23) has an entirely new passage (an “unidentified fragment,” No. 528 in Sinclair’s Ives Catalogue) for the fiendishly difficult “riot” section (an idea apparently abandoned by 1938). Possibly by the late 1930s Ives’s health was so poor that he was not up to playing his original version, although he was fit enough to record Study No. 2complete (compare track 21 [0:13–0:50] and track 35 [0:49–1:27]).

In the earliest recording of Transcription No. 3, the first measure is extended forward by one note, and the following 6 beats are extended to last 20 beats (track 3, 0:00–0:29). The fourth measure is also extended from length of 6 beats to 11½ beats (0:39–0:49). The Coda is also extended from a length of 14 beats to 24 beats (beginning at 2:05, the extension beginning at 2:20). This is how the music exists in “Copy C” and its insert sheet. Ives’s other recordings of the Transcription No. 3 also have these extensions. Some interesting differences among the five recordings are that Ives does not use mm. 5–6 in the 1933 recording (track 3, where they would be found at 0:49) but does use them in the later Speak-O-Phone recordings (tracks 13, [1:02–1:22], 14 [1:04–1:27], and 15 [0:39–0:53]). However, the 1943 recording (track 36) has a slightly shorter beginning (with its first 6 seconds being equivalent to the first 10 seconds of track 3) and mm. 5–6 are truncated (at 0:36–0:44).

Study No. 11 is an enigma. In the Speak-O-Phone discs from the mid-1930s (tracks 7–9) we hear what sounds like an improvisation or recollection (with some exchange going on between Ives and the engineer as Ives starts and stops); the music is based on the new extended ending of the Transcription No. 4 from “Copy C.” A single page of manuscript for this study exists, which represents a version in between the tentative first takes on the Speak-O-Phone discs and the more focused Melotone take of 1938 (track 17). The study is a miniature that may be Ives’s final composition.

Ives also recorded the two “flourishes” from Cadenza 4/Study No. 23 in several of the sessions (tracks 4, 10, and at the end of track 35 [1:52–2:10]), as well as his two substantial excerpts from the study proper (tracks 22 and 25, the latter offering the flourishes of the cadenza in the first 19 seconds).

After recording in the 1930s the “Emerson” music as extended in the first and third Transcriptions, Ives adhered in 1943 quite strictly to the revised version in “Concord” that would appear in print four years later. The extended opening to Transcription No. 3 (found in the openings of tracks 3, 13–16, and 36) is deliberately not used in the 1943 recording of the corresponding passage of the Sonata movement (track 34, 0:29–0:34). This illustrates another aspect of how Ives thought of the varied guises of his “Emerson” music. While the recordings of Studies No. 2and No. 9 keep closely to their manuscripts, the recordings of Transcription No. 1 use the many variants found in “Copy C.” It is as if all the versions have the privilege to be similar to and different from one another—individuals in their own right. This deliberate perpetuation of variants must be a manifestation of Ives’s statement in Memos that he wanted to leave his “Emerson” music unfinished—“I may always have the pleasure of not finishing it . . . seeing it grow and feeling that it is not finished, and the hope that it never will be.”

—David Gray Porter, Coordinating Editor for the Charles Ives Society

Annotated Tracking Information:

Ives plays Ives

The complete recordings of Charles Ives at the piano, 1933–1943

Charles Ives (1874–1954)

Consecutive selections that Ives performed with only a pause between them are shown here connected by a vertical line (l); for this compilation these pauses generally are reduced. Selections that are banded on the original discs are separated here by a dash (—). “Copy C” cited below refers to the third of Ives’s five sets of photostats of the copyist’s ink copy of the Four Transcriptions from “Emerson.” “Cadenzas” cited below are part of the Emerson Overture for Piano and Orchestra. (> = derived from)

June 12, 1933, Columbia Graphophone Co., London

1    TT-1419-1 Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 1       3:58

                Mm. 1-39 as in Copy C, with improvisation. The 0:10-2:03 is based on Study No. 9

(>Cadenza #1); 2:39-3:15 is based on the last 4 mm. of Study No. 1 (>Cadenza                  #2; 3:33-3:57 based on Study No. 2, mm.2-8 (cf. Emerson Overture for Piano and

2    TT-1419-2 Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 1       1:28

                About the last quarter (or an improvisation?). Based on Study No. 2, mm. 8-43

                Mm. 1-25 as in Copy C; m. 1 extended, mm. 1a-b, 2-4, 4a, and 7-25 plus coda from f4890

4               Improvisation on a passage common to Study No. 23,         0:44

                Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 2, and Emerson Overture’s Cadenza #4 (with false start)

Mid 1930s on Speak-O-Phone Discs, (?) New York City

5    7” Disc A Side [1]   Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 1 2:14

                Mm. 1-6, Cadenza #1 [=Study No. 9, mm. 14-20, pause, 21-31, 32-35], and 10-22

6    Side [2]        Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 1       2:24

Mm. 16-26, Cadenza #2 [1st half of improvised part of 1933 recording (5 beats)], 27-39,

part of Cadenza #3 [=Study No. 2, mm. 8-11, 13-14], insert of an unidentified fragment

7    7” Disc B Side [1]   Study No. 11                               0:50

                Mm. 4 [extended by improve.]-7, 12-13 etc., f4800: false start, ends with “I’d like to try again”

                Mm. 4 [extended]-7, 12-17, and 14-17 (or an improvisation on the end of Four Transcriptions

                Mm. 4 [extended]-7 and 12-24; ends with “You want me to go on?”

                Patch for Study No. 23

                False start (mm. 40-43), from f2225

10                                                         :40

                Patch for Study No. 23

                Mm. 40-43 and 46-53, from f2225

11   8” Disc Side [1]     Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 1       2:57

                Mm. 1-5, Cadenza #1, 10-26, part of Cadenza #2 [=1st half of improvised part of                         1933 recording (5 beats)], and 27-33

12         Side [2]   Four Transcriptions form “Emerson,”No. 3        2:53

Continued from Side 1; mm. 34, 24-26, Cadenza #2 [same as on Side 1], 27-39, Cadenza #3 [=Study No. 2, mm. 8-11, 13], insert of unidentified fragment (no. 528), and 38-42

                Using Copy C, an improvisation on mm. 1-25: m. 25 extended as on f4890

14         Side [2]   Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 3 (as above) 3:40

May 11, 1938, Melotone Recording Co., New York City

                Improvisation in m. 1, mm. 1-4a [extended], and 7-20 [1. beat] (in mm. 16-17 is                               an arpeggio found in Copy C)

                Mm. 19-25

18         Side 2     Study No. 9                                     2:04

                Complete; with internal restart

                Page 1 of MS, mm. 1-5; abandoned

                Page 1 of MS, mm. 2-4, 2-8 (with false start of m. 8), and 8-11

                Page 1 of MS, mm. 1-13

                Page 2 of MS, mm. 15-43 [= Three Improvisations, No. 2]; ends with “Oh! That’s the note!

                Mm. 40-64

23         Side 4     Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 1       0:17

                Starting at m. 16, abandoned

                Improvised introduction (? from Study No. 23), mm. 16-19, 24-26, Cadenza #2                                 (complete and extended with improvisation), and 27-33

                Mm. 73-97; ends with Harmony Ives “There’s a little more [time on the disc].”

                Like the opening material; ends with “I’ll go on.”

                Possibly an improvisation on the “Sunrise Cadenza” in Trio for Violin, Violoncello, and

Piano, mvt. 2 (mm. 204-06)

                Mm. 100-115, and ending with m. 98

Apr 24, 1943, Mary Howard Studio, New York City

Included below (to the left) are the titles as typed onto the Side 1 labels of the individual discs.

32   [A] Side [1] Sonata No. 2 for Piano: Concord, Mass., mvt. 1 (“Emerson”)     2:05

Sonata” ends with “That’s enough”

                Pages 17-18 (=Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 4); ends with “There!”

                Pages 14-18 (=Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 3 + further)

35   [B] Side [1] Study No. 2 (mm. 1-14, 16-43) +                   2:24

“Abolition Riot in Boston in 50s, Part 1” 

Study No. 23 (improvisation on mm. 40-53, with a reprise of m. 1 of Study No. 2)

36   Side [2]        Four Transcriptions from “Emerson,” No. 3       0:57

                Improvisation on the opening, mm. 1-10 (m. 4a is extended); ends with “Oh no, I can’t”

Abolition Riot in Complete; ends with “There!”Boston in 50’s, part 2”

38         Side [2]   They Are There!                            1:59

                “War Song” First take, abandoned; ending (at the 2nd Chorus) “Oh, I have to stop”

                “War Song” Second take (with extra repeat of Chorus)

40         Side [2]   They Are There!                            2:44

                Third Take

41   [E] Side [1]   March No. 6 for Piano, with “Here’s to Good Old Yale” 2:09

“Old Quickstep Using version 3 (which lacks the borrowed Yale tune) March”

42  [F]        Sonata No. 2 for Piano: Concord, Mass.,              5:02

                This take exists now only in several tape transfers; the original disc is lost.

Holidays Symphony. Chicago Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. Sony Classical SK 42381.

Piano Sonata No. 2 (“Concord, Mass., 1840–1860”). Marc-André Hamelin. New World Records 80378-2.

Songs. Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano; Gilbert Kalish, piano. Elektra/Nonesuch 971325-2.

String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2. Juilliard String Quartet. Sony Essential Classics 87967.

Symphony No. 2. New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein conducting. Sony Classical SMK 60202.

Symphony No. 3. Concertgebouw Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. Sony Classical SK 46440.

Symphony No. 4. Chicago Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. Sony Classical SK 44939.

The Unknown Ives, Volume 1. Donald Berman, piano. CRI CD 811.

The Unknown Ives, Volume 2. Donald Berman, piano. New World Records 80618-2.

Violin Sonatas Nos. 1–4. Gregory Fulkerson, violin; Robert Shannon, piano. Bridge Records 9024 A/B.

Burkholder, Peter. Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

——, Editor. Charles Ives and His World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Cowell, Henry, and Sidney Cowell. Charles Ives and His Music. Reprint. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Ives, Charles. Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings. Howard Boatwright, ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999.

Kirkpatrick, John, ed. Charles E. Ives: Memos. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.

Perlis, Vivian. Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994.

Reed, Joseph W. Three American Originals:  John Ford, William Faulkner, & Charles Ives. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984.

Swafford, Jan. Charles Ives: A Life with Music. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

Producers: James Sinclair, Executive Editor, The Charles Ives Society and Joseph R. Dalton, Executive Director, Composers Recordings, Inc.

Digital transfers of original recordings: Richard Warren, Jr., Curator, Historical Sound Recordings, Yale University.

CRI CD edited and mastered by Robert Wolff, engineer, with James Sinclair, David G. Porter, and Joseph R. Dalton at Sony Music Studios, New York City, 1999.

Digital mastering of reissue: Paul Zinman, SoundByte Productions, NYC

Cover art, including size, gallery credit, date, format of art (pastel, etc):

Cover design: Bob Defrin Design, Inc., NYC

This CD was produced in association with The Charles Ives Society from private recordings in the Charles E. Ives Collection, Yale Music Library.

This recording was made possible through the generous support of the Charles Ives Society and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.

This reissue was made possible by a grant from the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trust.

Special thanks to Vivian Perlis, H. Wiley Hitchcock, and James M. Kendrick.

This recording was originally issued on Composers Recordings, Inc. as CRI CD 810.

Herman E. Krawitz, President; Lisa Kahlden, Director of Information Technology; Paul M. Tai, Director of Artists and Repertory; Mojisola Oké, Bookkeeper; Anthony DiGregorio, Production Associate.

RECORDED ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN MUSIC, INC., BOARD OF TRUSTEES:

Richard Aspinwall; Milton Babbitt; John Lee Carroll; Thomas Teige Carroll; Emanuel Gerard; David Hamilton; Rita Hauser; Lisa Kahlden; Herman E. Krawitz; Robert Marx; Arthur Moorhead; Elizabeth Ostrow; Cynthia Parker; Larry Polansky; Don Roberts; Marilyn Shapiro; Patrick Smith; Frank Stanton; Paul M. Tai.

Francis Goelet (1926–1998), Chairman

P & © 2006 Recorded Anthology of American Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.

42 tracks representing 17 different works, including:

Four Transcriptions from “Emerson”

Studies Nos. 2, 9, 11, 20, and 23

“The Alcotts” (complete) and portions of “Emerson” and “Hawthorne” from Sonata No. 2 (“Concord, Mass.”)

Largo (rejected movement 2 from Symphony No. 1)

Three Improvisations

They Are There!

March No. 6 for Piano, “Here’s to Good Old Yale”

June 12, 1933: Columbia Graphophone Co. London

Mid-1930s: “Speak-O-Phone” session, probably New York City

May 11, 1938: Melotone Recording Co., New York City

April 24, 1943: Mary Howard Studio, New York City

Booklet includes complete tracking information and extensive historical notes and documentation.

This recording was originally issued on Composers Recordings, Inc. as CRI CD 810.

P& © 2006 Recorded Anthology of American Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.

NO PART OF THIS RECORDING MAY BE COPIED OR REPRODUCED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION OF R.A.A.M., INC.

TEL 212.290-1680 FAX 212.290-1685

LINER NOTES - Recorded Anthology of American Music, Inc.