It’s that day
again, the Fourth of July, so here is a live performance of the third movement
of Charles Ives’s Holidays Symphony, the movement called “The
Fourth of July”: six minutes or so of celebratory dissonance.
According to Robert Greenberg
the piece is “cacophonous, wonderfully crazy and includes everything and the
kitchen sink”. You might recognise some of the tunes quoted, among them “Yankee
Doodle”, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Marching Through Georgia”. Underneath
it all is “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean”. Ives (whose wife’s name was,
wonderfully, Harmony) could afford to write to please himself. Quote
unquote:
He had zero tolerance […] for the wimps and mollycoddles who shuddered, or worse, hissed, at new music. He was famous for standing up at concerts and bellowing at such offenders, “Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.”
The movement had
its premiere in Paris in February 1932.
That was 82 years ago, so don’t tell me this music is difficult:
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