Of Pitch And Time

Only the brass section echoes the Romantic orchestral tradition (albeit enlarged): five trumpets, four horns, four trombones and two tubas.  Keyboards include piano, organ and celesta.  For the Universe Symphony’s first performance, on June 6, 1996 in Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center in New York City, fourteen percussionists were required to play the scored parts, creating a huge spectrum of percussive color.

While a symphony is usually divided into three or four movements with breaks of silence between them, the Universe is divided into three broad sections, each preceded by a prelude of varying length.  The opening overture-like fragments introduce motifs of the three conceptual orchestras which comprise this full symphony orchestra ensemble – Pulse of the Cosmos, Earth Orchestra, and Heavens Orchestra – which eventually combine for a powerful 64 minutes, juxtaposing unbridled chaos with scintillatingly scrutinized and organized repose.  The very structures of tradition have been turned on their metaphysical ears.  A once-recognizable 4/4 compound beating of time — marked Largo — is subverted to a quarter note at a metronome marking of 30.  Since there is no actual practical metronome marking produced that low, this is a very slow pulse indeed.

The Universe Symphony contains the ground-breaking structure of a rhythmic grid defined purely by percussion, called the Pulse of the Cosmos and based on repeating time frames equivalent to 16 seconds (called ‘Basic Units’, or BUs). Prelude #1 features percussion almost exclusively and is a full half-hour in length.  As if a force of nature, it continues throughout the remainder of the piece. Astonishingly to an observer, the primary conductor’s two-second beat rarely connects visually with actual hits of percussion or with the attack of most any other instrument.  That’s the virtue of prime numbers: Ives designated a different percussion instrument for each distinct  subdivision of the 16-second time frame by invoking different denominators, even thirteen and 43 (see List of Percussion, below), an extraordinary device through which sections are heard coming in and out of focus as they pursue their particular rhythmic direction.

I took this invitation at face value.  Less imaginative critics might be quick to disregard the practicality of such a venture.  They could always say, ‘the piece is in ”pieces,” likely subject to its ”sketchy nature.”’  However, once gathered together and put into order in a loose-leaf fashion, specific and detailed directions clearly point the way through the considerable practical concerns into a dramatically new world, a universe of detail.  For those claiming that too much material was irretrievably lost for the piece to ever be fully completed, this recording is ample contradiction.  There is nothing missing.  All turned out to have been providentially provided by the composer.

Although anyone encountering Ives’s world will be used to the unexpected, the general tuning scheme for the symphony is, surprisingly, not conventional 12-tone equal temperament.  Ives learned early on from his father George, a Civil War bandmaster and inveterate music experimenter, that one could vary and improve upon standard musical tuning.  Introduced to Hermann Helmholtz’s acoustic landmark On the Sensations of Tone(translated into English by Alexander J Ellis), Charles Ives was provided with an alternative microtonal interpretation of music notation and tuning, an attractive substitute for the conventional practice of straight equal temperament.

Orchestral intonation eventually settled on equal temperament in the twentieth century, but the road to this convention was not paved with equal sized stones.  Performance evolved its own pitches.  Once the Classical period threw off the continuous use of the harpsichord continuo as a foundation, the preferred tuning of an ensemble was an extended sixth-comma meantone.  The enharmonic notes (or ‘chromatic pairs’), which necessarily sound identical on the keyboard,  provide far more distinctive expression.  C# differs from Db and music is the beneficiary.  Which note was to be played higher changed and exchanged as Western European music developed. 

As they listen and make their intonation on the fly, string players now tend to play sharps higher, following the tradition of the pure fifth tuning of its open strings, giving a sharper third as the result of adding four fifths and subtracting the octaves.  Confusingly, brass players prefer the reverse interpretation owing to the natural overtone series basis of their instruments, which gives a smaller major third interval resulting from the distance between the fourth and fifth harmonics.

Treating Ives’s notation as implying extended Pythagorean tuning results in twenty-one distinct pitches.  By simply connecting pure perfect fifths (at 702 cents, rather than that of the pedestrian equal-tempered fifth of 700 cents), one moves from a closed and fixed set of 12 notes to an infinite spiraling which produces a different value for each spiral and, consequently, its corresponding note’s pitch.  The aural results truly reward the care taken to get to the heart of Ives’s intonational aim.

Ives was forever annoyed with editors for taking liberties with his notation spellings, and there are several examples in the historical record.  The discussion of an Ives acoustic plan is prominent in a 1944 letter written (in his wife’s hand) about a planned publication of his Violin Sonata #3.  Poor Charles was by this time unable to draw even a simple straight line as a result of compounding health problems.  Addressing music editors Sol Babitz and Ingolf Dahl, Harmony Ives diplomatically tried to ensure that the final music notation remained as the composer had indicated, particularly chromatic spellings.  Editors wanting to change Ives’s intended notation is a recurrent irritation in his life.  As stated clearly in the letter:

…he is rather sorry that some flats and sharps have been changed into each other.  Mr. Ives usually had a reason technically, acoustically or otherwise, for using sharps and flats.  If a D-flat is in one part and C-sharp in another on the same time beat, it was mainly due to some acoustical plan—which he had in mind or was working out or trying to in those days (Burkholder, editor, Charles Ives and His World, p250).

Ever the idealist, Ives strongly insisted that notated sharps were to be heard higher in pitch when compared with their respective flat counterparts for a majority of his later music.  In the idealized situation, there is about an eighthtone distance between a notated C# and a  Db. 

If the piano can be tuned out of tune to make it more practicable (that is, imperfect intervals), why can’t the ear learn a hundred other intervals if it wants to try?—and why shouldn’t it want to try? (Ives, Memos, p140).

In order to play such pieces, woodwind players must develop and use different fingerings, or ‘grippings,’ to achieve accurate results.  Brass players make embouchure adjustments and find ways to alter their instruments’ tube lengths.  Obviously, strings can adjust most easily.  The piano and the organ tuning in this recording use this same tuning model, as does the primary harp. 

Having met the challenges of conducting a Lincoln Center première of great musical complexity, the more recent call to conduct and manage this mammoth work in a pioneering studio situation was a dream come true. Facing the limitations of a small space, which could allow only a few people to record at a time, I conducted an initial core of only four players: viola, cello, trombone and a Javanese gong for Ives’s requisite low bell (which is struck throughout all ten cycles on the downbeat of each BU).  The initial core group performance was recorded in synchronized video and audio formats.  Sessions followed to add further instruments, always synchronized with the original video  Players heard relevant previously-recorded tracks through headphones. 

In the live performance, a second conductor directed a separate ensemble, taking cues from the first.  In the recording, a second video camera was synchronized with the first, the appropriate sequence then being played to guide each small recording ensemble.  Over 120 layered tracks were eventually combined in the blended stereo mix that is this recording.  Each instrumentalist played all of that instrument’s parts.  Only 19 musicians perform the entirety of the Universe Symphony, which in real time requires 74 musicians and three conductors..

In the Universe Symphony, Ives explored a transcendental experience he could trace to one of his summer vacations in the Adirondack Mountains, seeking a musical representation of his visualizations on the Keene Valley plateau.  He could be said to explore parallel processing, juxtaposing the sky and the ensuing heavens with the ground in the same gaze..  Ives transmuted this plateau experience into the Universe Symphony.  A symphony worthy of the name ‘Universe’ would open the door to:

…a parallel way of listening to music, suggested by looking at a view (1) with the eyes toward the sky or tops of the trees, taking in the earth or foreground subjectively – that is, not focusing the eye on it – (2) then looking at the earth and land, and seeing the sky and the top of the foreground subjectively.  In other words, giving a musical piece in two parts, but played at the same time – the lower parts (the basses, cellos, tubas, trombones, bassoons, etc.) working out something representing the earth, and listening to that primarily – and then the upper parts (strings, upper woodwind, piano, bells, etc) reflecting the skies and the Heaven (Ives, Memos, p106).

A full explanation of the piecing together of the Universe Symphony cannot be given justice in this (necessarily restricted) notes format, but is available from the author as a book, The Ives Universe.