More Ives

Since we're on Ives at the beginning of the new millennium, here's a
couple more.

"Intimidation has not turned back one transcendent thought or one valuable
idea from going where it was destined to go and doing what it was
destined to do. It may be temporarily delayed, or its species may revert
only to propagate in a related form, but brute force (the world's greatest
idiot) has never kept the germ from its divine order. A black eye never
reformed a drunkard, a czar never stopped a free thought."

["The Majority" (1919) in _Charles E. Ives -- Memos_, W.W. Norton, 1972]

"... why can't music go out in the same way it comes into a man, without
having to crawl over a fence of sounds, thoraxes, catguts, wire, wood, and
brass? Is it the composer's fault that man has only ten fingers?"

[cite lost -- probably also found in _Memos_]

Happy New Year!

Steve Soderberg

> --- In tuning@egroups.com, "D.Stearns" <STEARNS@C...> wrote:
>
> http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/16871
>
> >
> > I think Charles Ives aired this idea quite beautifully when he wrote
> > "the future of music may not lie entirely with music itself, but
> > rather with the way it makes itself a part with -- in the way it
> > encourages and extends, rather than limits, the aspirations and
> ideals of the people -- the finer things that humanity does and
> dreams
> of".
>
> wishing everyone happy holidays and continued inspired and inspiring
> > dreaming,

>"... why can't music go out in the same way it comes into a man, without
>having to crawl over a fence of sounds, thoraxes, catguts, wire, wood, and
>brass? Is it the composer's fault that man has only ten fingers?"
>
>[cite lost -- probably also found in _Memos_]

I'm pretty sure this is from the afterword to "114 Songs"; the argument in defense of the occasionally "unsingable" content - "must a song always be a song?" A great passage - including a satire on critics who claimed Beethoven was not a great composer for violin, or piano, or any instrument in particular - that if he'd focused he could have been as great a composer as Rubenstein...:)

Franz
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