The Tanglewood Linde Center, Nov. 23, 2025
Program
Charles Ives, String Quartet no. 1 (“A Revival Service” [etc.] 1896)
Amy Cheney Beach, Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor, op. 67 (1905)
Performed by:
Members of the Boston Symphony
Catherine French and Bernadette Wundrak, violins
Daniel Getz, viola
Owen Young, cello
Jonathan Bass, guest pianist
Important chamber works by contrasting figures in American music made up the program at the Linde Center on Sunday, November 23. The performers were three members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) joined by a BSO guest violinist from Leipzig who completed the quartet at second violin. Pianist Jonathan Bass augmented the group for the piano quintet by Amy Cheney Beach. The two works on the program underscored the stylistic divergence of these two composers. Ives wrote most of his quartet at age 22 while an undergraduate at Yale, under the tutelage of Horatio Parker. Beach was already an established and well-recognized professional pianist and composer, aged 38, when she composed her quintet.
Parker, who was only four years older than Beach, was a member of the so-called “Boston classicists,” a group of European-oriented composers whose late-Romantic stylistic approach was grounded in the works of Schumann and Brahms. The membership of Parker, John Knowles Paine, Edward MacDowell, George Chadwick, Arthur Foote, and George Whiting also included Beach. As a student of Parker’s, Ives learned many of the traditional elements of compositional craft, but he had already absorbed counterinfluences from his father George, who encouraged an individualist, non-conformist, and experimental approach to musical materials. Professor Parker and his student often clashed, and at one point Parker accused Ives of “hogging all the keys in one meal.”
Ives’ String Quartet no. 1 of 1896, composed when he was a sophomore, goes by varied names: “A Revival Service,” “Prelude-Offertory-Postlude,” and “From the Salvation Army.” It has a controversial history, but one thing is clear: His concept of the work is structurally and stylistically very different from what Parker expected. While the Boston group sought to continue the traditions of central European Romanticism, Ives drew upon his own boyhood musical experiences, especially playing organ in local churches in the small town of Danbury, Conn., starting at age 11. As such, he was steeped in the dual influences of Bach and New England Protestant hymnody, both reflected in his quartet. Ives built all four movements of the quartet around Protestant hymns that were popular in New England (and that audiences today may not recognize). Despite Dvorak’s famous recommendation to use “American materials,” the idea of incorporating vernacular or folk materials was still uncommon in 1896, and Dvorak was not referring to these hymns. (When asked about performing Ives’ quartet, a member of the Budapest String Quartet demurred, claiming that it was built around “gutter tunes.”)
The controversy about his quartet concerns an additional independently composed movement that Ives added later and which has been generally included in performances as a first movement. It is a fugal setting of the “Missionary Hymn” (“From Greenland’s Icy Mountains…”) in the form of a chorale prelude. Each phrase of the hymn is subjected to contrapuntal presentation, a process found in Bach’s organ chorales. (Ives swaps out the last phrase for one “borrowed” from the much older hymn “Coronation.”) The composer later took it out and rescored it for orchestra as the third movement of his magnum opus, Symphony no. 4. While performers such as the present quartet like to include it, many Ives scholars feel that it does not fit the highly unified nature of the original three movements, replete with common materials. But I find it adds heft and variety to the composition. Its more transparent use of the hymn and its familiar fugal procedure balanced nicely with the more subtle transformations that Ives applied to the remaining hymns, which include “Beulah Land,” “Shining Shore,” “Nettleton,” and “Webb” (the latter perhaps the most familiar as “Stand Up for Jesus”). Despite the nominally conventional tonality (mostly G major), Ives’ flexibility of phrase structure, with audible meters varying continuously and unpredictably, and unconventional voice leading present a gentle foreshadowing of many of the modernist procedures that the mature Ives would regularly employ. At the same time, the work is easily accessible to audiences who are leery of the gnarly, mature, maverick composer. Even when the music gets rowdy, in the polymetric passage near the end where we hear “Webb” (“Stand up…”) in multiple simultaneous time signatures, the music retains its freshness and youthful enthusiasm, reminding us that Ives grew up experiencing this music as a deeply meaningful part of his daily life.
Amy Cheney Beach grew up in an even smaller New England town, Henniker, N.H. She was born seven years before Ives, and like Ives, she was a virtuoso pianist and composer whose creative impulse showed at an early age. She was a genuine prodigy, writing waltzes at age four. By the time she was a teenager, she was getting a thorough European-oriented music education, with piano lessons from Liszt student Carl Baermann and theory lessons with Junius Hill, as well as reading every book on the subject she could find, including Berlioz’s treatise on orchestration, in their original languages. Although Ives had been tutored in music theory by his father before going to Yale, George Ives was himself almost self-educated and took a very eccentric approach to the subject. Amy Cheney was performing classical piano recitals by age 17 in the Boston area and to critical acclaim at an age when Ives was playing baseball and football at Hopkins Grammar School. She appeared with the then-new Boston Symphony at age 20. Two years later, she married an eminent physician 24 years her senior and was able to devote all her time to performing and composing. Ives was a C-plus student at Yale, although his average for music classes was somewhat higher, but upon graduation, he moved to New York to earn his way as a clerk in an insurance office and Sunday church musician. He continued to compose, but his music was not being performed except by himself in part-time church jobs, and after one big push at a career in 1902, he “gave up music.” He meant that he allowed himself the freedom to develop musical ideas unencumbered by professional or audience expectations, as well as by the need to earn a living in that way. He went on to become a successful and wealthy insurance executive.
Beach’s music is very polished and inventive in a late-Romantic vein that is usually identified with various better-known composers. This may not do justice to her individual voice but serves as useful indication of the influences. The obvious one for the present work is the Piano Quintet in F minor of Brahms, a work that she performed in 1900, five years before her own quintet. I was expecting to hear a strong resemblance, and indeed there are a few, between the remarkable, tonally ambiguous introduction to Brahms’ last movement and various such moments throughout the Beach. Alongside that, however, I heard French influences, particularly of Fauré, with some Debussian whole-tone harmony as well. The mysterious, atmospheric slow introduction foreshadows the poetic use of ambiguity, harmonic instability, feelings of restlessness, overt Romantic pathos, and sense of tragedy throughout. Unlike the Brahms quintet, and despite the virtuosity of the piano part, there is a tendency for phrases to die away rather than drive forward. The unifying melodic idea is a descending Phrygian tetrachord, or, put another way, the top four notes of a descending minor scale (F#-E-D-C#) which, taken alone, feel like breath leaving a body. This softens the outlines of the classical forms which are present but not obvious. It feels like a work that has one foot in the German academic tradition and one in fin de siècle French impressionism. Beach’s own pianistic prowess manifests in the robust and idiomatic piano writing, while the work’s expressive impulses, often found in the string writing, pull in a different direction. (For a Beach composition that seems a more consistent expression of her musical personality, listen to her wonderful “Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet,” op. 80.)
Juxtaposing Ives and Beach is a study in contrasting tendencies in late-19th-century American music. Beach is rooted in two European traditions, German and French (she was fluent in both languages), while Ives happily mixes selected European influences like Bach’s organ music with American vernacular materials and a personal New England small-town background to start on the road to a thoroughly original style. In a sense you could say that Beach, who concertized extensively in Europe, was conforming to the “cultured” expectations of a well-trained New England musician, while Ives was increasingly realized for his role as an American maverick.
The performances by the BSO players were spirited and expressive, and in the Beach, pianist Bass provided solid support to the strings when accompanying and virtuosic brilliance where the piano was featured. To an extent, the string players’ sonorities sometimes did not match, perhaps a sign that they are not a regularly constituted group; however, their unanimity of expression and precision of ensemble allowed both works to make a strong case for themselves, making for a stimulating way to spend a late-November Sunday afternoon at Tanglewood.
