“Perhaps I’d better go back to Mr. Jadassohn”:
Charles Ives’s Harmonic Training in Late NineteenthCentury
America
David Thurmaier
University of Missouri-Kansas City
Charles Ives’s music is best known for its musical borrowing, stylistic diversity, and
progressive use of harmony—for example, freely mixing functional diatonic tonality
with bitonality, and experimenting with polychords and non-tertian structures. But
most of his earliest music, composed under the guidance of his father George, and
his Yale professor Horatio Parker, was quite conservative and reflective of mid-to-late
nineteenth-century European trends. One consistent feature of Ives’s early instruction
in tonal harmony was a textbook chosen by both teachers: the Manual of Harmony
(Lehrbuch der Harmonie, 1883) by the German composer, theorist, and pianist Salomon
Jadassohn (1831-1902).1
Jadassohn’s textbook, which achieved widespread popularity
in nineteenth-century American music schools, is a manual based almost exclusively
on vertical chord construction using eighteenth-century thoroughbass practice (e.g.,
Kirnberger), with some attention to contemporary chromatic harmony.
The use of Jadassohn’s book for Ives’s harmonic instruction is particularly notable
because George Ives and Parker were almost complete opposites aesthetically; George
Ives valued radical experimentation, whereas Parker stressed pedagogical rigor and the
emulation of European models. In his own writings, moreover, Charles Ives attacked
Jadassohn’s “academic” approach to music theory numerous times, citing him as an
example of everything wrong with conventional musical training (e.g., the quotation in
the title of this essay was Ives’s sarcastic response to a violinist who did not understand
1
Salomon Jadassohn, Manual of Harmony, translated by Paul Torek and Henry Bickford Pasmore
(New York: G. Schirmer, 1890).
Theoria 23/2016130
his music). Although scholars such as Carol Baron, J. Peter Burkholder, and Philip
Lambert have discussed Ives’s training with his father and Parker, these accounts
have not examined how Ives’s sometimes awkward and tentative adventures in tonal
harmony may have their origins in Jadassohn’s textbook and teachings instead of from
merely his father’s experimental inclinations and his student rebellion against Parker.2
I contend that Ives’s familiarity with Jadassohn’s text and its teachings are reflected
in the harmonic procedures of several early tonal compositions (ca. 1888-1902). In
particular, three principles from Jadassohn’s manual closely relate to these works:
first, a rigidly vertical approach to harmony and sonority that downplays the role of
melody; second, a strong emphasis on the augmented triad as a primary sonority that
creates unusual harmonic progressions; and third, the employment of common tones
to produce nearly all adjacent chord connections. I also trace heretofore unexplored
connections between Jadassohn’s theories, influenced by nineteenth-century German
aesthetics from Hoffmann to Schopenhauer, to later writings by Parker and Ives.
These discoveries reveal the impact of this prominent German “manualist” on the
development of the idiosyncratic American composer and on late nineteenth-century
American music theory pedagogy in general.
Music Theory in Late Nineteenth-Century America and “Practical” Harmony
By the time Ives entered Yale in 1894, music theory instruction in the United States
reflected a strong Germanic influence that favored a new “practical” type of pedagogy.
One reason was that many distinguished composers associated with the burgeoning
conservatory movement in America had themselves studied in Germany under
composers espousing this approach. Such renowned composers as John Knowles
Paine (the first professor of music at Harvard in 1875), Ives’s teacher Horatio Parker
(named Battell Professor of the Theory of Music at Yale in 1894), and George
Whitefield Chadwick (appointed Director of the New England Conservatory in 1897),
all took their turns studying with composers like Carl Reinecke and Josef Rheinberger
in Munich and Leipzig. Upon their return to the United States, they adopted texts
written by Germans that advocated a “practical” approach to teaching harmony to
2
See Carol Baron, “George Ives’s Essay in Music Theory: An Introduction and Annotated
Edition,” American Music 10, no. 3 (1992): 239–88, J. Peter Burkholder, “Ives and Yale: The Enduring
Influence of a College Experience,” College Music Symposium 39 (1999), and Philip Lambert, The Music of
Charles Ives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 25-38.
Thurmaier – ives’s harmonic Training 131
their students, as opposed to a theoretical or philosophical perspective more common
in the early nineteenth century. Robert Wason explains that in the latter part of the
nineteenth century the influential German theorist Hugo Riemann “divided music
theory as a whole into two categories: ‘speculative’ theory and ‘practical’ harmony,”
neither of which had much to do with “musical practice, for analysis, the means by
which theoretical precepts could be tested in practice, had all but disappeared from
works on harmony.”3
This “practical” approach, best illustrated in texts by the German
theorist Ernst Richter and Jadassohn, aimed to present the basic concepts of harmony
and voice leading in clear, concise language with a minimum of speculation. Richter,
Jadassohn’s teacher and predecessor at the University of Leipzig Conservatory, clearly
summarizes this approach in the preface to his Lehrbuch der Harmonie (1853):
The author conceives that such a textbook should contain what is fundamental
and most essential in musical theory, presented briefly, yet in as complete a form
as possible; and that these fundamental features should always be accompanied by
references to and directions for their working out in practice, to fit the student for
later attempts at composition. This book contains no scientifico-theoretical treatise
on harmony, but, although based on the firm foundation common to all methods
of harmony, is intended solely for practical ends, which would seem very difficult to
attain by abstract scientific study with our present meagre equipment . . . .With this
practical aim in view the author has endeavored to present the laws of harmony, and
the teachings drawn from observation and experience, in a clear and simple manner,
and—as he intended the book for study—to let the principles contained therein
operate through their own force, without attempting to win a wider circle of readers
by clothing them in especially learned language or an attractive form.4
Moreover, Leonard Phillips notes that Richter’s text was even anachronistic historically,
as it “stems directly from the thoroughbass practice of the 18th
century and represents
a pedagogical philosophy which kept theory instruction virtually removed from the
mainstream of 19th
-century music.”5
This pedagogical approach proved exceedingly
popular, particularly in America; Richter’s text, for instance, was in its eighth edition
3
Robert Wason, Viennese Harmonic Theory from Albrechtsberger to Schenker and Schoenberg (Rochester:
University of Rochester Press, 1982), 116-17.
4
Ernst Friedrich Richter, Manual of Harmony, translated by Theodore Baker (New York: G.
Schirmer, 1912), iv.
5
Leonard Phillips, “The Leipzig Conservatory, 1843-81” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1979),
135.
Theoria 23/2016132
when it was first translated into English (and would go into over 25 editions well into
the twentieth century) and Jadassohn’s harmony book was in its third German edition
by the time it was first translated into English in 1890.
Part of the attraction of these texts was their ability to synthesize concepts from
the highly influential writings of Gottfried Weber (1779-1839) with slightly more
contemporary harmonic techniques found in early nineteenth-century chromaticism.
Weber was one of the first practical writers of music theory, publishing his own music
manual (Allgemeine Musiklehre zum Selbstunterricht für Lehre und Lernende in vier Vorkapiteln,
1822) best known today for introducing the concepts of “multiple meaning” (e.g.,
whereby a C-minor triad can be interpreted as the submediant in E-flat major, the
subdominant in G minor, etc.) and “step theory” (extending the concept put forth by
Georg Vogler) whereby Roman numerals are used to correlate chord function with
scale degree, and distinguishing major and minor keys with upper-case and lower-case
numerals respectively (as well as including the circle for diminished chords).6
Weber’s
manual was also popular in the United States due to its straightforward approach to
theory, with a minimum of speculative theory. The impact of Weber’s teachings has
endured, as these concepts are still part and parcel of many undergraduate music
theory textbooks presently used by contemporary universities.7
However, these texts found their detractors. The main criticism put forth was that
they were too pedantic, extracting the life out of the creative side of music celebrated
in earlier treatises that prized empiricism and speculation. Contemporary scholars
judge these texts particularly harshly, for example describing works by Jadassohn
as advocating a “dull, mechanical familiarity with what is now generally regarded as
inadequate analytical and compositional techniques,” featuring “pedantic part-writing
routines,” and others describing the entire state of music theory instruction in late
nineteenth-century America as “a mélange of stultified ideas” illustrating a “dearth of
new ideas.”8
Paul Henry Lang describes these authors (e.g., Reicha, Fetis, Jadassohn,
6
For more on Weber’s theories, including his idea of “multiple meaning” see Janna Saslaw,
“Gottfried Weber and Multiple Meaning,” Theoria 5 (1990–91): 74–103.
7
One of the most revealing aspects of examining Richter’s and Jadassohn’s texts in particular
was how little the basic approach to teaching theory has changed in well over a century. Many contemporary
textbooks are inspired by the writings of Heinrich Schenker, but many chapters in the “practical”
texts could be substituted very easily with current texts without any trouble.
8
The first description (Jadassohn) from David Damschroder and David Russell Williams,
“Salomon Jadassohn,” in Music Theory from Zarlino to Schenker: A Bibliography and Guide (Hillsdale, NY:
Thurmaier – ives’s harmonic Training 133
Riemann, etc.) as “manualists,” and rigid academicians who “teach technical expediency,
and as a result the student becomes proficient in only the technical means of manyvoiced
construction and orchestration . . . . This instruction teaches a métier not an
art.”9
Other criticism of the practical approach came from notable composers and
theorists such as Arnold Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker, both of whom expressed
several problems with Richter’s (and by extension, Jadassohn’s) approach to harmonic
pedagogy.10
Schoenberg’s disagreements likely arose from the “manualists” lack of
application to composition, whereas Schenker differed philosophically with them.
Schoenberg was particularly troubled by Richter’s preferred methods for modulation:
the dominant seventh and diminished seventh chords. He believed that modulations
that occur through only a few such unprepared chords are too “artless and primitive,”
and thus we need “[a] richer and more complex means of modulation.11
Schenker
shared Schoenberg’s concerns about the practical manuals’ dubious methods of
modulation and he found Jadassohn’s pedagogy particularly flawed and confused,
arguing that Jadassohn failed to understand the horizontal composing-out of scalesteps.
In reference to an example from Jadassohn’s text Kunst zu modulieren und präludieren,
Schenker explains:
He accords to each scale-step the identical value of a half-note, translates the scalesteps
simply into triads or seventh-chords (what an obvious tautology) . . . and believes
that thereby he has reached the effect of a modulation, whereas, in reality, he stopped
short at his unfree sketch, although he wrote it over again. In my opinion this way of
Pendragon Press, 1990), 128; the second from Daniel Harrison, Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 298; and the third from Robert Wason, “Musica Practica:
Music Theory as Pedagogy” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 66.
9
Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton, 1941), 973-94.
10
Because Jadassohn studied with Richter, and their books display the same general philosophical
and musical approach, we can consider criticism of one to apply in general to the other. Differences
in Jadassohn’s book will be explained later.
11
Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, translated by Roy E. Carter (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983), 15.
Theoria 23/2016134
proceeding is to be criticized all the more because Jadassohn most likely knows full
well that a real modulation looks somewhat different.12
In addition, Schenker disapproved of using homegrown examples instead of drawing
material and concepts from the repertoire itself.
Schenker was indeed correct about the manualists’ lack of connection to “real”
music in their texts, as Jadassohn’s book contains almost no examples from the
repertoire save for a brief excerpt from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier used in a discussion
of acceptable cross relations. By only including composed examples, most of them just
a few measures long in the keys of C major or C minor, Jadassohn opens himself up to
the criticism that his explanations are abstract and devoid of context. In the preface to
the Manual of Harmony, he acknowledges that including such self-composed works may
not be as artistic but he argues that this strategy benefits the students, writing that “it is
therefore better to show the pupil the application of and the exceptions to the rule by
means of examples specially constructed for the purpose; although such little pieces,
written merely to teach certain points, possess neither the value nor the charm of
artistic compositions.”13
Schenker similarly offered scathing commentary on this type
of pedagogy in relation to Richter’s text, which is also bereft of examples from the
literature, asking the questions, “Where are they [examples demonstrating a concept]
found in works of art? Thus it is not chance but merely a natural consequence of the
contradiction inherent in this example that the author could not find a sample from
any master-work to fit this example of harmony (i.e., scale-steps), infested as it is with
counterpoint (i.e., rules of voice-leading).”14
Schenker’s point certainly rings true here;
this type of pedagogy can produce unidiomatic and unusual progressions that have
little basis in actual practice.
Music Theory at Yale in the 1890s
The practical approach to music theory pedagogy was instituted at Yale University in
the 1890s, when Horatio Parker was first appointed to the faculty, and when Charles
12
Heinrich Schenker, Harmony, ed. by Oswald Jonas, translated by Elisabeth Mann Borgese
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 337-38.
13
Jadassohn, Manual of Harmony, iii-iv.
14
Schenker, 176-77.
Thurmaier – ives’s harmonic Training 135
Ives entered as a student (1894). Parker’s predecessor, the organist Gustave J. Stoeckel,
hired in 1855 as an instructor of church music at Yale College and later appointed
Battell Professor of Music in 1890, taught three courses in music theory: Harmony,
Counterpoint/Canon/Fugue, and Forms. The course description for Harmony is
presented here:
Harmony. 2 hrs. Both terms: acoustics, intervals, chords with inversions and
combinations. Modulation. Nonharmonic tones. Suspensions. Accompaniment of a
melody.15
When Parker arrived and assumed leadership of the music program, he added three
additional courses in strict and free composition, instrumentation, and the history of
music, and modified and expanded the course description for the harmony class:
Harmony (Music 270, 2 cr). Monday and Thursday, 2 pm. A study of chords, their
construction, relations, and progressions. This course covers the following subjects:
Intervals, triads of M & m scales and their inversions and resolutions; Modulations;
Chromatically altered notes; Harmonization of a given melody; Harmony in two,
three, and five parts; Simple instrumental accompaniments. The work is principally
the writing of exercises from figured bass. The exercises will be corrected in the classroom
with explanations & illustrations. Jadassohn’s Harmony (B&H, NY & Leipzig)
is used as textbook.16
The topics covered in this newly revised course description correspond closely to the
table of contents of Jadassohn’s text and emphasize a solid grounding in voice leading
and figured bass. Parker was also likely influenced by the pedagogical trends he was
exposed to while studying in Munich with Rheinberger, as well as from his training
with George Whitefield Chadwick, who studied composition with Jadassohn for three
months privately in Leipzig. As Rosalie Sandra Perry explains, “Parker’s philosophy
of music education emphasized a rigid, theory-dominated program of instruction
. . . . Parker’s uncompromising, rather antihumanistic position concentrated on the
15
Report of the President of Yale University, 1894 (New Haven: Private Printing, 1894), 4; reprinted
in Rosalie Sandra Perry, Charles Ives and the American Mind (Kent, OH: Kent State University
Press, 1974), 6, n. 10. For more on Parker’s courses, see Luther Noss, A History of the Yale School of
Music, 1855-1970 (New Haven: S. Z. Field Printing Co., 1984), 45-48.
16
William K. Kearns, “Horatio Parker (1863-1919): A Study of His Life and Music” (PhD
dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1965), 110-11.
Theoria 23/2016136
disciplinary aspects of music.”17
In spite of this academic and seemingly stifling
approach to theory and composition pedagogy, Parker could count many successful
students during his tenure at Yale in addition to Ives, including Roger Sessions and
Quincy Porter.
Although the music curriculum at Yale was usually restricted to upper-level students
(juniors and seniors), Ives was able to audit courses as a freshman and sophomore
with Parker on the basis of his original compositions; by Ives’s own comments and
his scholastic record, we can be reasonably confident that he took Music 270 with
Parker. Additionally, we know that he absorbed much more from Parker than he would
later admit, as confirmed by the works he wrote during his Yale study and through
“surviving counterpoint exercises [that] show clearly . . . a more exigent level than
those for his father.”18
One reason for Ives’s frustration with Parker may have resulted
from his earlier training with his father, because they apparently covered many of the
same topics:
Father had kept me on Bach and taught me harmony and counterpoint from [when I
was] a child until I went to college. And there with Parker I went over the same things,
even the same harmony and counterpoint textbooks (Jadassohn), and I think I got
a little fed up on too much counterpoint and classroom exercises (maybe because,
somehow counterpoint gradually became so much associated in my mind as a kind of
exercise on paper, instead of on the mountains).19
Ives’s ambivalent remembrances of Parker came much later in life, when he painted a
picture of Parker as a good craftsman and solid composer of religious music, steeped
in the “governed by the German rule,” but unable to comprehend Ives’s compositional
experiments and goals. However, Parker provided Ives with a traditional training in
harmony, counterpoint, and other areas that taught him skills that would serve him
well as he embarked on his own compositions.
17
Perry, 7.
18
Charles Ives, Memos, ed. by John Kirkpatrick (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 49, n. 5.
19
Ibid., 49.
Thurmaier – ives’s harmonic Training 137
Jadassohn...
Though Jadassohn is largely forgotten today, his own biography and music are worth
examining, as they inform the pedagogical principles disseminated to many American
students, including Ives.
Jadassohn taught composition, theory, and piano at the Leipzig Conservatory from
the mid-1850s until his death in 1902. Leipzig was a city rich in musical activity, owing
particularly to the influence of Felix Mendelssohn, who founded the Conservatory.
After a few years of piano study with Franz Liszt (1849-52), Jadassohn furthered his
training in music theory by working with Richter and Moritz Hauptmann, and was
named “royal professor” at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1893, succeeding Richter. He
thought of himself primarily as a composer, writing works for all types of ensembles
and achieving some success; unfortunately, at the time his Jewish religious background
may have prevented him from garnering more fame. It was through his music theory
texts, however, that he became an international figure. He authored books covering
nearly all areas of music-theoretic study: just his Musikalische Kompositionslehre alone
consisted of five volumes: harmony, form, counterpoint, instrumentation, and
“practical” music, which covered ear training and figured bass.20
As mentioned, Jadassohn’s books continued a largely conservative tradition of
theory pedagogy advocated by his Leipzig colleagues, though his ideas and observations
were slightly more contemporary with music of his time due to his fondness for the
music of Liszt and Wagner. As Janna Saslaw points out, Jadassohn’s harmony text
“most resembles Richter’s harmony manual (1853), although—because of Jadassohn’s
exposure to the music of Liszt and Wagner—it goes further in its discussions of
chromaticism and enharmonicism.”21
In fact, Jadassohn’s theoretical work has been
the subject of some ridicule in part because of these discussions of chromaticism, in
particular related to a peculiar analysis of the first measures of the Prelude to Tristan
and Isolde in a short book about Wagner’s use of harmony.22
Example 1 reproduces
Jadassohn’s analysis:
20
Damschroder and Williams, 128.
21
Janna Saslaw, “Salomon Jadassohn,” Oxford Music Online.
22
Salomon Jadassohn, Melodik und Harmonik bei Richard Wagner (Berlin: Harmonie, ca. 1889),
27.
Theoria 23/2016138
Example 1. Jadassohn’s analysis of Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan and Isolde, mm. 1-11.
In the example, Jadassohn analyzes the first 11 measures as being in 13 different keys,
highlighting his aforementioned unusual approach to modulation. Wason explains that
for Jadassohn, “chordal meaning—no matter how farfetched—is always chosen by the
ear above melodic meaning; and the analysis which results shows the most extreme
concentration upon chordal identity at the expense of harmonic syntax.”23
Similarly,
Damschroder and Williams state that Jadassohn’s “harmonic perspective fostered a
jumble of key changes that segmented chordal progressions into small compartments,
often with no apparent relationship among them.”24
This analytical approach thus
ignores any sort of contrapuntal or linear interpretation and brands Jadassohn as a
23
Wason, Viennese Harmonic Theory, 95. Also see Milton Babbitt, Words about Music, edited by
Stephen Dembski and Joseph N. Straus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 146, for an
interesting take on Jadassohn’s Tristan and Isolde analysis.
24
Damschroder and Williams, 128.
Thurmaier – ives’s harmonic Training 139
fervent believer in privileging the vertical over the horizontal. This pedagogical
approach extends to how he described chords and illustrated their function, as seen
below.
…and Ives
In addition to Jadassohn’s unusual perspectives on modulation—accomplished
mainly through abrupt chromatic chords and theoretically possible on every chord or
measure, other techniques found in the Manual of Harmony emerge in some of Ives’s
early music. It is impossible to ascertain exactly what Ives gleaned from Jadassohn, but
because he used that particular text for study as a youth as well as a college student, it
is plausible that some concepts presented in the book could have influenced musical
decisions. Ives’s early tonal music from the mid-1880s to a few years after his graduation
from Yale in 1898 consists largely of sacred choral works, organ music, songs, the First
String Quartet and the part of the First Symphony, in addition to other miscellaneous
pieces. These pieces reveal a young composer learning his craft and engaging with
traditional forms and harmonic structures, though not without some experimentation
or a critique of music theory conventions.25
Yet attempting to explain some of Ives’s
awkwardness and idiosyncrasies with tonal harmony by inexperience alone overlooks
the impact of his teachers and their instructional materials.
The first topic from Jadassohn’s text that resonates with early Ives works is a
strong vertical approach to harmony and sonority. The Wagner analysis discussed
earlier illustrates Jadassohn’s interpretation of harmonic syntax and meaning, one
that eschews any contrapuntal interpretation of the opening of the Tristan Prelude.
This approach seems hardwired in Jadassohn’s conception of music, as even his
counterpoint book, written shortly after the Manual of Harmony, begins with writing in
four parts (placing a cantus firmus in each of the voice parts), bypassing the idea of
species counterpoint entirely.26
Even though Ives was trained as an organist and clearly encountered much
25
For an interesting interpretation of tonality in some of Ives’s early experimental pieces like
Psalm 67 and unpublished exercises, see J. Peter Burkholder, “The Critique of Tonality in the Early Experimental
Music of Charles Ives,” Music Theory Spectrum 12, no. 2 (1990): 203-23.
26
See Jadassohn, A Manual of Single, Double, Triple, and Quadruple Counterpoint, translated by
Theodore Baker (New York: G. Schirmer, 1902).
Theoria 23/2016140
contrapuntal music as shown by his extant organ recital programs, relatively few
strictly contrapuntal pieces exist in his entire catalogue and the great majority of his
music is conceived from a vertical approach. Obvious examples include choral works
like Psalm 67, a piece built of almost exclusively homophonic textures except for a
brief imitative middle section, as well as mature pieces like The Fourth of July that
have manuscript pages where Ives experiments with various vertical constructions.27
This focus on verticality from a compositional perspective is manifested in other ways
in Ives’s music, from his frequent superimposition of quotations, to the extreme,
stratified density of his harmonic structures and textures.
Although we know that Ives did not use Jadassohn’s counterpoint text (it was not
translated into English until 1902), he did study the subject both with his father and
Parker. He was certainly proficient in counterpoint, for example, writing organ fugues
for classes, as well as a prominent fugue in his First String Quartet (later orchestrated as
the third movement of the Fourth Symphony), in addition to later experimental pieces
like Tone Roads No. 1 (1911) that are based on contrapuntal structures like canons.28
Yet
despite these examples, Ives may have been struck by Jadassohn’s emphasis on stacking
chords—even unusual seventh chords—as the way to construct sonorities. One
example of this stacking occurs in chapter 11 in Manual of Harmony, when Jadassohn
explains secondary seventh chords in minor built on the first, third, and seventh scale
degrees; of course the diminished seventh chord occurs on the seventh scale degree,
but the chords on 1 and 3 are more unusual. Example 2 shows Jadassohn’s list of
acceptable secondary seventh chords in minor.
Example 2. Jadassohn, Manual of Harmony, p. 42.
27
For example, one particular sketch page of The Fourth of July found in the Charles Ives Papers
at Yale University is a goldmine for discovering how Ives played with vertical sonorities [f0782].
28
Philip Lambert devotes an entire chapter of The Music of Charles Ives to Ives’s use of counterpoint,
but limits his discussion to the “experimental” pieces not covered in this essay. See Lambert,
25-38.
Thurmaier – ives’s harmonic Training 141
Ives’s music contains many instances of chords built by stacking, even if they do not
make much sense functionally; these occur even in some of his early pieces (particularly
choral settings). I wish to examine two pieces—one more conventional, and the other
more experimental—for their emphasis on verticality and challenges to linear analysis.
Ives’s song “At Parting,” written around 1889 when he was 15, figures prominently
in Ivesian lore because it was one of the works he presented to Parker in order to be
accepted for composition study at Yale.29
The song is in a clear ternary form, with the
outer sections in the style of nineteenth-century parlor songs (e.g., Stephen Foster),
and almost completely diatonic in G major. The middle section, by contrast, is far
more chromatic and striking, as it diverts from G major and consists of a string of
chords that have little tonal relation to G major. Ives seems to be experimenting with
chords and keys and channeling Jadassohn’s Tristan analysis, ignoring standard tonal
syntax. See Example 3, which shows mm. 11-20 of “At Parting.”
Example 3. Ives, “At Parting,” mm. 11-20.
29
See Ives, Memos, 116.
Theoria 23/2016142
After an authentic cadence in G major that concludes the A section, the second verse
contains a chain of seventh chords of various types: half-diminished, diminished,
major-minor, as well as a peculiar cadence that moves to a B-flat major triad, joined
to its predecessor enharmonically by the fifth of that chord (E-sharp to F natural).
Following the unusual “chordal meaning” analytical interpretation proposed by
Jadassohn for the music of Wagner, one might analyze the middle section of “At
Parting” as each chord representing a different key area in Example 4.
Example 4. Ives, “At Parting,” reduction and chordal analysis of the middle section
from mm. 12-19.
Measure 12: F-sharp: viio
7
Measure 13: B: viio
4/2
Measure 14: G-sharp: V7, E: viio
7
Measure 15: F-sharp (?):viio
6/5 (misspelled), B-flat: I
Measure 16: B-flat: I, G: V7 (9th?)
This interpretation makes little sense, as it does not take into account chord function or
hierarchy, ignores the vocal melody, which rises and falls with each chord chromatically,
and overlooks some of the common tones between chords that makes the connections
smoother (also something recommended by Jadassohn, as discussed shortly). One
plausible way to explain this chromatic succession comes from the text, in which the
singer inhales the fragrance from a rose representing his heart that he gives to his
departing lover and is suddenly overcome: “where but in dying, dying fails it is my love
for you.” Ives could be simulating the ecstatic and uncontrollable nature of love and
passion through the inclusion of meandering chromatic passages that act as sound and
experience, instead of following tonal syntax and movement toward a clear tonal goal.
Thurmaier – ives’s harmonic Training 143
Ives’s music also features the construction of vertical sonorities built of multiple
chords to create dense textures. His predilection for experimentation with sonorities
and density came from George Ives, who thumbed his nose at Parker’s insistence
that Charles follow the standard rules of tonal harmony and chord construction. A
later example that contains unusual mixed sonorities and defies a linear interpretation
comes from the Postlude for Thanksgiving Service for organ, a sketch that was later
incorporated into Thanksgiving Day and Forefathers’ Day, the last movement of the
Holidays Symphony. The organ sketch, dated to around 1897 while Ives was studying
with Parker, features tall sonorities—mostly stacked polytriads that move up and down
slowly and chromatically. There is a linear chromatic quasi-ostinato in the Pedal, all
sounding over a pedal C, while an important motive (what Ives called the “Harvest
Work Theme”) appears in the Swell. Though analysis can sort out these disparate
parts, Ives intended that they sound simultaneously given the evidence in the sketches.
Example 5 shows the first page of the Postlude:
Example 5. Ives, Postlude for Thanksgiving Service, mm. 1-9.
Theoria 23/2016144
Again, any sort of linear analysis is difficult because of the prominent sonorities that
are held and woven chromatically through the texture. Eventually, the orchestrated
version adds hymn tunes that rise out of these thick chords, but the organ sketch is
remarkable for its density and notable emphasis on sonority. The impulse for fusing
together different sonorities without reference to function may have come from
George Ives, but the idea of vertical analysis and presentation may owe something to
Jadassohn’s text, which allows all permutations of stacked triads and seventh chords,
for example:
All fundamental chords introduced by us, whether Triads or chords of four tones
(chords of the Seventh), can be formed on all degrees of the major and minor scale
and used both in the fundamental position and, for the most part, in their inversions
also.30
This vertical method of chord construction appears again in Jadassohn’s discussion
of modulation. At first, his recipe for how to modulate seems standard enough,
requiring that the new tonic must occur on a strong beat and be followed by an
authentic cadence to establish the new key with what we would now call a pivot
chord. But after his explanation of how common tones between chords makes for
smoother modulations, Jadassohn writes the following:
The chord of the Diminished Seventh is the principal means for getting quickly and
easily from one key into any other. It can enter freely anywhere without preparation
of the seventh. It allows many a resolution and progression into minor and major
and, by the enharmonic change of one or more or all of its tones, it can incline even
towards the most remote keys.31
One could argue that the diminished seventh chord grew in importance in the
nineteenth century, especially as employed for modulation through its enharmonic
reinterpretation, and in that sense Jadassohn reflects the time in which he composed and
lived. However, that chord was also overused as a modulation panacea as Schoenberg
and Schenker implied, and in the subsequent examples in the text, Jadassohn presents
nearly every permutation possible, most of which sound awkward or clumsy. Moreover,
the second sentence in the preceding quotation that permits the diminished chord to
30
Jadassohn, Manual of Harmony, 147.
31
Ibid., 183.
Thurmaier – ives’s harmonic Training 145
“enter freely anywhere without preparation of the seventh” contradicts his earlier
chapters about the diminished seventh chord where he requires preparation.32
As shown in “At Parting,” Ives adopted some of Jadassohn’s suggestions, with
examples of extended passages of diminished seventh chords moving between keys
to modulate. Another later example of this technique can be found in the “Intermezzo
for String Quartet” from Ives’s sacred cantata, The Celestial Country (ca. 1898-1902, a
piece that was started with Parker, and finished after graduation). This piece is one
of Ives’s most ambitious early works, scored for vocal quartet, mixed chorus, organ,
string quartet, brass, and timpani. The “Intermezzo” is cast in ternary form, and the
outer sections remind one of Schubert with a predominantly lyrical melody and simple
accompanimental texture. But like “At Parting,” the harmonic language grows more
chromatic and wandering in the middle section of the piece, leaving the home key of
B-flat major for more unstable regions; this segment seen in Example 6 is ignited by
an extended section of diminished seventh chords.
Example 6. Ives, The Celestial Country, “Intermezzo,” mm. 61-77.
32
See pp. 82-83 of the Manual of Harmony for Jadassohn’s explanation of voice leading for the
diminished seventh chord.
Theoria 23/2016146
Beginning at m. 61, marked “Tempo di scherzo,” Ives demonstrates his facility
with chromatic harmony by using sequences of diminished seventh chords to
modulate from B-flat to D major by m. 90. He builds intensity through dynamics
and articulations, particularly the accent-staccato gesture found starting at m. 61.
Ives scores this section artfully, following proper rules of voice leading and at its
conclusion, even forges a smooth common-tone modulation using D back to the A
section’s home key of B-flat major. It is likely that this movement was at least started
under Parker’s supervision, given that his own cantata Hora Novissima was used as
the model for parts of The Celestial Country, hence the “correct” resolutions of the
diminished seventh and chromatic modulations.
In addition to an emphasis on verticality and unusual approaches to modulation
with constant use of the diminished seventh chord, Jadassohn’s text examples also
illustrate some archaic harmonic principles as well. For instance, Jadassohn designates
the augmented triad as a primary triad in minor keys; in his discussion of the mediant
chord in minor keys, Jadassohn explains that “on the 3rd degree we find a new form of
chord, a triad having a major third and an augmented fifth. This we call the augmented
triad.”33
He calls this a “dependent” triad because of its dissonant properties, but gives
no further explanation for its construction. The mediant triad in minor has long been
the subject of debate, but the idea of it becoming a “primary” triad again seems to
stem from Richter.34
Including the augmented triad in this category leads to unusual
and awkward progressions, as seen in Example 7.
33
Ibid., 46.
34
David M. Thompson, A History of Harmonic Theory in the United States (Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press, 1980), 17. Thompson notes that Weber omitted spelling any harmony on scale degree
3, thus avoiding augmented triads altogether (13).
Thurmaier – ives’s harmonic Training 147
Example 7. Jadassohn, Manual of Harmony, p. 38 (Augmented Triad).
As before, this example vividly shows Jadassohn’s vertical bias, as the III+ has no
passing function (as it later would in most analytical explanations) and stands on its own
without any particular harmonic function. Use of the augmented triad as an individual
sonority occurred in the late nineteenth century (e.g., notably in Liszt’s Nuages Gris)
and thus, Jadassohn appears to be reflecting the music of his time. However, devoid
of any examples from the literature, the progressions come off as awkward at best,
unidiomatic at worst, with an unusually brisk harmonic rhythm that disregards any
large-scale harmonic function (peruse Jadassohn’s own Roman numeral analysis for
proof).
Ives was particularly fond of the augmented triad and its functional ambiguity
throughout his compositional career. In his early tonal music, the chord stands out as a
pungent dissonance in much of the overall bland harmonic landscape. But, in addition
to being used as an independent sonority, Ives also uses the augmented triad as a voiceleading
structure in ways that Jadassohn does not explain—as an altered dominant, for
example—such as in a progression like V-V+
-I, when ascends chromatically to create
tension. Such an example appears in the second measure of “Crossing the Bar,” a
Theoria 23/2016148
work for mixed choir and organ written around 1891. Example 8 shows the first three
measures of the piece.
Example 8. Ives, “Crossing the Bar,” mm. 1-3.
This brief example is abrupt, as it is played by solo organ and the augmented chord
occurs as the second chord of the piece, but it follows appropriately in the progression
with the D-sharp leading to E and the B leading to C, while holding the G constant
in the choral entry on a C-major triad. Other later examples of the augmented chord
in “Crossing the Bar” are treated in ways more like Jadassohn describes, as a true
sonority. In m. 24, the choir sings an unaccompanied passage that repeats the same
augmented triad at the beginning (though spelled differently, this time as E-flat-G-B)
answered by short motives in the organ. This usage of the augmented triad differs
Thurmaier – ives’s harmonic Training 149
from the previous example, as it does not function within a tonal progression; the
progression of triads reads as follows, starting at m. 23:
E major----E-flat+----G-flat, moving toward A major in m. 32.
All three triads can be connected by half-steps, but here the augmented triad is treated
as an equal sonority within the context of the major triads around it. Whereas this
usage of the augmented triad appears in late chromatic harmony, the frequency with
which Ives uses the augmented triad in such a short piece, as well as other later pieces
raises the question of where he might have discovered such sounds during his early
development as a composer.
Ives may have also been influenced by Jadassohn’s solution for how to connect
nearly any one chord to another: through common tones. By holding common tones
between as many chords connected in a progression as possible, a myriad of common
and unusual relationships can be formed. Jadassohn explains that:
In general, any chord-connection is good where one or two tones belonging to two
chords in common are retained in the same voice. But even without the natural bridge
of a sustained tone, the connection of two chords may be good when the several
voices are led from the tones of one chord to those of another in a manner well
adapted to singing.35
See Examples 9 and 10 for the accompanying musical examples.
Example 9. Jadassohn, Manual of Harmony, p. 97.
35
Jadassohn, Manual of Harmony, 98.
Theoria 23/2016150
Example 10. Jadassohn, Manual of Harmony, p. 98.
The first example shows how common tones can be held to produce chromatic
chords, and the second example illustrates the second part of Jadassohn’s directive,
showing “good progressions” without common tones but “led in true vocal style.”
Apart from producing some peculiar harmonic progressions, Jadassohn’s analysis is
remarkable, interpreting consecutive chords as being in different keys and completely
ignoring tonal syntax as in his Wagner analysis. Tellingly, the striking aural effect of
these progressions was not lost on Jadassohn, who included a disclaimer that should
they sound “harsh and strange” it is because the examples lack “preceding or following
chords.”36
As with the preceding techniques, Ives also adopts Jadassohn’s method of chord
connection through common tones to achieve striking and unusual chord connections.
“Songs My Mother Taught Me,” from around 1895 when Ives was at Yale, serves as a
representative example of using common tones both to extend a phrase harmonically
as well as to set up a modulation. The poem by Adolf Heyduk, which Antonín Dvořák
famously set as the fourth of his Gypsy Songs, Op. 55, paints a picture of nostalgia
and yearning for the past, similar to the text by Frederick Peterson that Ives set in
“At Parting.” Also similar to “At Parting,” “Songs My Mother Taught Me” is cast in a
loose ternary form and stylistically resembles parlor song in its outer sections that are
flanked by a more chromatic and melodically fluid middle section. It is unclear if Ives
36
Ibid.
Thurmaier – ives’s harmonic Training 151
knew Dvořák’s setting, which is largely diatonic until its climax toward the end, but
Ives’s own setting incorporates a liberal use of chromaticism in its middle section that
subscribes to Jadassohn’s guidelines regarding chord connection.
The first instance of Ives using common tones to guide a progression occurs at
mm. 14-17, seen in the piano part from original score as well as in my reduction in
Example 11.
Example 11. Ives, “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” mm. 14-17, with reduction.
Original:
Reduction:
From the E-flat tonic in m. 14, Ives holds its G (implied in m. 14) and E-flat pitches
while ascending chromatically in the soprano and bass parts. The progression moves
from a I to an “inverted” augmented tonic (another Ives favorite), to vi (Cm), to what
would function as an It6 in the key of G major—the key where the music moves next.
The use of the It6 as a dominant substitute instead of its usual subdominant function
Theoria 23/2016152
is not only striking, but also supports Ives’s history of employing a vertical conception
of chords, instead of the linear view of an augmented sixth chord serving as a voiceleading
phenomenon that moves stepwise to the dominant. In other words, while the
G and E-flat common tones continue to sound, Ives uses the top voice C-sharp in
the It6 not as #4 moving to the root of a dominant chord in G major (D major), but
rather as #4 leading to 5 in a tonic G-major chord in m. 17. This unusual resolution is
made possible by the use of common tones that allows Ives to modulate from E-flat
major to G major.
Another example of this common-tone technique occurs toward the end of the
song, from mm. 20-26. This excerpt is shown in Example 12.
Example 12. Ives, “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” mm. 19-29, with reduction of mm.
20-26.
Original:
Thurmaier – ives’s harmonic Training 153
Reduction:
Immediately after the G-major section, Ives suddenly shifts to a B pitch center (first
in major, then in minor) by writing a first-inversion F-sharp half-diminished chord
at m. 20 that will serve as the basis of another chromatic passage that ends with a
modulation back to the song’s home key of E-flat major (thus creating an overall key
structure of E-flat/G/B/E-flat; an augmented triad). In this case, the progression
starts with the C, E, and F-sharp held to m. 22, when the “tonic” B remains fixed
as Ives writes a B-major triad, a B major-minor seventh chord in third inversion to a
G-sharp diminished seventh chord (CT0
7), followed by a B minor and F-sharp major
chord. The text at this point refers to the narrator teaching his or her children songs
“flowing from my mem’ry’s treasure”; Ives repeats the text to emphasize the commontone
progressions, ending on F-sharp, the dominant of B major, before returning
to E-flat major. While there is a break between the F-sharp major and E-flat major
chords at m. 26, the remote modulation is facilitated more smoothly by the common
tone A-sharp/B-flat that links them.
As before, in a song from this early period (Ives was studying with Parker at this
point)—also in a sentimental, parlor style tinged with late-nineteenth century harmonic
structures—Ives employs compositional techniques that can be found in Jadassohn’s
harmony textbook resulting in progressions and transitions that may reflect this
influence. Unlike the contrived examples in Jadassohn’s book, however, Ives skillfully
maneuvers the use of chordal connection with common tones allowing him to write
chromatic lines on top that touch on remote key areas.
Theoria 23/2016154
A Matter of Aesthetics
As I have shown, Jadassohn’s harmony text contains a mixture of techniques and
concepts still in practice today, as well as more anachronistic directions and suggestions
for a “theory of chords and their interconnections.”37
Yet perhaps the most revealing
and pertinent passages from Jadassohn’s text as they pertain to Ives occur in the final
chapters of the Manual of Harmony, entitled “How to Listen to Music.” In this and the
following chapter, “Substance and Form,” Jadassohn elucidates what he calls the “ideal
musical listener,” someone who should be able to develop an ability to hear a work in
its entirety in full score without actually hearing it. After decrying the contemporary
practice (as of the 1880s) of bringing scores to performances as “sheer nonsense”
and admonishing “trifling disturbances” such as coughs in a concert hall, he echoes
German critics and writers such as Hoffmann, Schopenhauer, and Hanslick who
elevated the supposed abstraction and supremeness of instrumental music such that
it “has no meaning but a purely musical one.”38
To emphasize this point, in a passage
about different types of listeners, Jadassohn declares that only the “ideal musical
listener” is allowed to enter the “temple of music,” whereas most listeners only get
into the “vestibule.”
Where Jadassohn, Parker, and Ives intersect most closely is through a lengthy
discourse about what Jadassohn calls “form” and “substance.” He explains that there
is a difference between the “form” and “substance” of a musical work; but he also
acknowledges that both processes and constructions must belong together, “for how
and where can form and substance be separated,” but then provides examples of the
importantdistinctionbetweenthetwo.Notsurprisinglyfor acontemporaryandstudent
of the philosophers and critics listed above, Jadassohn selects Beethoven’s Seventh
Symphony as a model example of a piece that contains great “substance,” though
he asserts that it takes form to realize these ideas.39
By contrast, Chopin is branded
as a composer whose First Piano Concerto has beautiful themes, but “scarcely one
musician of even average refinement of taste could be found, who would approve of
37
Ibid., 233.
38
Ibid., 239ff. See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, translated by
E.F.J. Payne (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1966); Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, translated
by Gustav Cohen, edited with an introduction by Morris Weitz (New York: The Liberal Arts Press,
1957); E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Review of the Fifth Symphony” (Beethoven), reprinted in Ludwig van
Beethoven, Norton Critical Score: Symphony No. 5 in C Minor (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 150-63.
39
Jadassohn, Manual of Harmony, 243.
Thurmaier – ives’s harmonic Training 155
the movement as a whole.”40
Jadassohn takes issue not only with Chopin’s “substance,”
finding it pretty, but vapid artifice without “depth,” but also with how the concerto
movement is put together formally; in a nutshell, it is a work that appeals on the
surface, but fails to hold up under formal and structural scrutiny, which one assumes
could have been avoided had Chopin used the principles laid out in Jadassohn’s own
book.41
This binary opposition between “form” and “substance” is also echoed in the
writings of Horatio Parker. In an address to his colleagues at Yale about his sabbatical
year in Europe, Parker frames this idea of “form” and “substance” in directly
nationalistic terms. He argues that “music among the Anglo-Saxons is built upon a
more solid foundation” whereas music from France and Italy is “superficial” or filled
with “manifest limitations that one may regard it [Italian music] as outside the sphere
of reasonable activity.”42
The key terms “form” and “substance” are used in reference
to how contemporary composers tried to create a “new vocabulary,” and as a result
they “lost sight of form and substance” because for Parker, traditional means were
still adequate for musical composition. For Jadassohn, Chopin’s music was suspicious
because of its poor formal structure and surface beauty (and one may infer that his
national heritage may have played into Jadassohn’s judgment), and similarly for Parker,
conservative German music was superior because of its supposed divine inspiration
and its accomplished formal prowess.
The idea that a musical composition should stand on its own (i.e., “art for art’s
sake”), contain “substance” and be constructed with solid “form” resonated with
Jadassohn and Parker, and this argument was later adopted fervently by Ives. For all
of Ives’s innovations and adventurous compositions, his aesthetics were still a product
of the late nineteenth century. As J. Peter Burkholder explains, “His mature works
40
Ibid., 243-44.
41
It is worth noting that Ives also held a negative view of Chopin’s music largely for the same
reasons as Jadassohn—that it lacked “substance”—but he framed it within an overtly patriarchal narrative
whereby Chopin’s music was viewed as overly feminine: “One naturally thinks of him with a skirt
on, but one which he made himself.” See Ives, Memos, pp. 134-35, Jeffrey Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries:
Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), and Judith Tick, “Charles
Ives and Gender Ideology,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. by
Ruth Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 83-106.
42
William Kearns, Horatio Parker, 1863-1919: His Life, His Music, His Ideas (Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow Press, 1990), 49-51.
Theoria 23/2016156
are in the standard concert genres of the symphony, overture, etc. Like the Romantic
composers he had taken as models, Ives adopted a conception of music as an art
practiced for its own sake, in which the experience of the individual listener was
paramount, rather than a communal experience of entertainment or worship.”43
Thus, Ives’s concepts of “manner” and “substance” as explicated in the Essays
Before a Sonata published in 1920 resonate strongly with views championed by Jadassohn
and Parker. This dualism for Ives morphed and took on several iterations throughout
his writings, but the essence of it can be explained as follows: “substance” refers to
the “reality, quality, spirit” of an artwork, one that has “conviction,” “its birth in the
spiritual consciousness,” but is “practically indescribable.”44
By contrast, “manner”
is the way the “substance” is “translated into expression,” and of decidedly “lower”
aesthetic value. For Ives, composers and authors who exude “substance” are figures
like Bach, Beethoven, Emerson, and Thoreau, while those dependent on “manner”
include Debussy and Poe. So Ives does not exclude sorting artists from a nationalistic
perspective particularly in music where German composers (e.g., Bach, Beethoven)
are exalted over others (especially French composers like Debussy), but he hinges
this duality on this belief explained by Philip Lambert: “Manner that does not reflect
substance is bad, and that in such cases the manner itself receives undue attention.”45
We cannot be certain if Ives’s aesthetic beliefs about art were developed and formulated
through study with his father, Parker, or perhaps even his other experiences at Yale, but
the appearance of such ideas in Jadassohn’s final chapters, as well as Parker’s teachings
likely influenced by his study in Germany suggests that Ives may have constructed his
most famous artistic binary comparison as filtered and handed down from within his
harmony textbook.
Conclusion
Shortly after Horatio Parker passed the teaching of harmony onto his colleague Harry
Jepson, the Yale Chapel Organist and Choirmaster, Jepson swapped Jadassohn’s Manual
43
J. Peter Burkholder, “Ives and the Four Musical Traditions,” in Charles Ives and His World, ed.
by J. Peter Burkholder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 11.
44
Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata: The Majority and Other Writings, ed. by Howard Boatwright
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), 77.
45
Lambert, 6.
Thurmaier – ives’s harmonic Training 157
of Harmony for George Whitefield Chadwick’s Harmony published in 1897. Chadwick,
who had studied with Jadassohn, organized his harmony textbook differently than
his teacher, and more similarly to the presentation of topics in today’s textbooks; for
example, he devotes individual chapters to chords built on each diatonic scale degree
(e.g., the submediant, mediant, etc.) and puts the book’s focus on practicality, but with
basis in actual music (of which there are many examples). In the preface, Chadwick
writes:
The object of this book is to give the student a working vocabulary of chords for
the harmonizing of melodies in the order of their practical value and harmonic
importance. The author has endeavored to encourage the student to use his everincreasing
chord material, — not so much by warnings against what is bad, as by
examples of what is good, as musicians understand it, and by maxims deduced from
such examples.46
Gone is the lengthy discussion of aesthetics and the “ideal listener,” and though the
mediant triad is still designated as an augmented triad in minor keys, Chadwick warns
that “this chord is not used for the present for harmonizing purposes, but will be
considered later on under chromatic passing tones” subscribing to its contrapuntal
usage.47
His discussion of modulation is divided into closely-related keys and
remote keys, and while there are few examples from the literature in this section, the
progressions resemble actual practice. Finally, as to the idea of verticality, Chadwick
explains that:
The harmonic combinations formed by extending the series of thirds upwards
from a given chord of the ninth, or secondary seventh (chords of ninth, eleventh,
and thirteenth), have not been specially discussed in this book, for the reason that
thorough practice in the use of the secondary seventh chords and suspensions has a
tendency to develop these combinations in their most practicable form.48
In short, most of what Chadwick advocates either contradicts or smooths out what
Jadassohn advocates in the Manual of Harmony. In light of what has been discussed
in this paper, one wonders if Ives’s music may have sounded different had he used
Chadwick’s text.
46
George Whitefield Chadwick, Harmony (Boston: B.F. Wood Music Co., 1897), iii.
47
Ibid., 50.
48
Ibid., 235.
Theoria 23/2016158
But Ives did use the Jadassohn text for at least six years, and I have argued that
some of the book’s teachings may have influenced the compositional decisions Ives
made in his early tonal music. To be sure, Ives was familiar with vernacular music,
hymnody, and European classical music—all of which fused together with Ives’s own
originality to create the beginnings of what would become an individual and striking
American musical voice at the turn of the twentieth century. But his early music has
often been overlooked because of its apparent derivative nature and awkward technical
and compositional craft. Considering how Ives may have been influenced by Jadassohn’s
textbook can provide another angle toward understanding the development of
his compositional technique, and may help explain how and why his music sounds as
it does.
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