Growing the Ear

As part of the NJSO’s ‘American Roots’ winter festival, conductor Anne Manson finds the voice of 20th century music.

By: Susan Van Dongen

Anne Manson will conduct the NJSO with soloist Alan Feinberg (above) at the State Theatre Jan. 9 and the War Memorial Jan. 10.

   The
quintessentially independent Connecticut Yankee, composer Charles E. Ives (1874-1954)
wasn’t worried about negative reactions to his work. He figured if people didn’t
like his complex, emotional music, it wasn’t his fault. "I don’t write music for
sissy ears," he said.

   Even an experienced musician like conductor Anne Manson admits
parts of Ives’ compositions can be challenging and discordant to the uninitiated,
but it’s well worth your patience to hear the works all the way through. That
way you’ll hear the sublime as well as the somewhat disagreeable.

   "In places, the ‘Emerson (piano) Concerto’ is absolutely beautiful,
in other places you have these big, rough sounds," says Ms. Manson, the music
director of the Kansas City Symphony, speaking from her Missouri home. "You have
to understand all of these elements in the context of the piece, otherwise you
can be deterred by the violence of the concerto’s opening."

   Ms. Manson will guest conduct the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra
in an all-Ives and Beethoven program at the State Theatre in New Brunswick Jan.
9, Patriots Theater at the War Memorial in Trenton Jan. 10 and NJPAC in Newark
Jan. 11. It’s part of the NJSO’s Sixth Annual Winter Festival: American Roots,
Jan. 8-26.

   The festival will feature full-orchestra concerts in Trenton,
New Brunswick and Newark, as well as a number of small group and chamber performances
around the state, celebrating works by George Gershwin, Edward MacDowell, Louis
Moreau Gottschalk and Charles Ives. In addition, there will be a special History
of Jazz program and concert featuring the Marcus Roberts Trio at Princeton University’s
Richardson Auditorium Jan. 24. Music authority and scholar Joseph Horowitz serves
again as the festival’s consultant and humanities coordinator.

   The three-week festival will focus on a number of identifiable
influences on the development of a distinct American music voice at the turn of
the 20th century, including Transcendentalist writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882), whose philosophical fire fueled Ives’ imagination.

   Ives dedicated the piano concerto to Emerson, who Ms. Manson
describes as an early hippie. Transcendentalism, popular in the 1830s and ’40s,
mirrored many of the counter-culture ideas of the 1960s, such as pacifism, civil
disobedience and an overall inspiration by the harmony and balance of nature.
The composer tried to weave these Emersonian beliefs into this and many other
works.

   The NJSO’s performance of the concerto, over which Ives labored
for decades but never completed, features pianist Alan Feinberg. It opens by quoting
the familiar four-note theme of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, then struggles with
this leitmotif throughout.

   "The whole piece is a quest," says Ms. Manson. "In the beginning
of the piece you also hear a kind of cannon roaring in the lower notes of the
piano, which represents the anti-abolitionist riots of the 1830s and ’40s. Ives
imagined it as a dialogue between the soloist and the orchestra, between Emerson
and his congregation. It’s a difficult piece to put together because of this,
but Alan Feinberg understands it so well. It’s a shame that this piece is so rarely,
if ever, heard in America. Ives was a great American innovator and the (concerto)
was way ahead of its time. It’s a work that should be known."

   What Ives brought to American music at the turn of the 20th
century was a certain musical autonomy. He definitely didn’t desire to be included
in the late Victorian era’s high-society salons with their pretty piano music
and sentimental songs.

   Ives preferred to challenge the ear, experimenting with radical
procedures that foreshadowed works by European composers such as Igor Stravinsky
and Paul Hindemith. His father, who was the bandmaster for Danbury, Conn., instilled
a curiosity about tone clusters, quartertones and polytonality. Both father and
son were fascinated by the way two distinct melodies combine to create a third
kind of sound, even if it was dissonant.

   For example, the Iveses delighted to hear two bands in close
proximity playing different tunes during a parade, or — in the summer when
the windows were open — a woman singing while a trumpet player down the street
played something completely different.

   "It’s incredible to think what Ives was writing when he was
writing it," Ms. Manson says. "He’s so rooted in America, with his references
to old hymns and band music, but he also experimented with things that were much
more European. He was very isolated and a lot of his music wasn’t played while
he was alive. You wonder just how he developed these ideas. In a way he’s a voice
entirely to himself."

   From the Housatonic at Stockbridge is an excellent example
of Ives’ experimentations.

   "It’s a piece that he wrote while walking with his wife near
the (Housatonic) River, early in their marriage," Ms. Manson says. "It’s an almost
Impressionistic view of the walk. You can hear the steam rising off the river
in the upper strings, the slow movement of the river is in the cello part. They
might have heard hymns coming from a nearby church, so you also hear (religious
music) over the river (theme). Then Ives’ imagination takes it further, and you
hear the river building in power as it rushes out toward the sea."

   Although Ives was raised by a musical father and graduated from
Yale with a degree in music, he wasn’t a professional musician. Instead, he made
his living running a successful insurance agency in New York.

   "All of his output was written in his spare time," Ms. Manson
says.

   A graduate in music from Radcliffe College at Harvard University,
Ms. Manson also studied at King’s College and the Royal College of Music in London.
She’s been the music director of the Kansas City Symphony since 1999, but previously
spent 10 years in the same position with the London-based Mecklenburgh Opera.
She’s also had guest engagements with the London Philharmonic, the Royal Scottish
National Orchestra and the Vienna Chamber Orchestra. In 1994, she became the first
woman to conduct at the Salzburg (Austria) festival, leading a performance of
Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
In the United States, she has also led the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Civic
Orchestra of Chicago as well as the NJSO.

   A champion of new and contemporary music, Ms. Manson has used
her tenure with the Kansas City Symphony to program a great deal of 20th-century
works as well as those by the usual suspects — Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.

   "Presenting new music in the United States is a very important
issue," Ms. Manson says. "There’s a tendency to underestimate American audiences,
which is a terrible mistake. The more an audience can hear experimental sounds,
the easier it is for them to sit down and hear something new. Otherwise it’s a
huge challenge (to hear modern works) the first time.

   "My experience (in Kansas City) has been that the audience is
very curious about new pieces. I’ve had unusually positive feedback about it.
I think if you encourage an audience to think and consider new things, they’ll
do so. There’s a tremendous openness in this country that you don’t find elsewhere."



Anne Manson conducts the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra with soloist Alan Feinberg
at the State Theatre, 15 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, Jan. 9, 8 p.m.; the
Patriots Theater at the War Memorial, West Lafayette and Barrack streets, Trenton,
Jan. 10, 8 p.m; and Prudential Hall, NJPAC, 1 Center St., Newark, Jan 11, 8 p.m.,
Jan. 12, 3 p.m. Tickets cost $19-$72. For information on other Winter Festival
performances, call (800) 255-3476. On the Web: www.njsymphony.org