Bard College — Asking Charles Ives guru Donald Berman to sum up his approach to the composer’s “Concord” Sonata” in 10 minutes is like asking him to write his life story on a piece of confetti. But in advance of his performance of the piece on November 9 at Bard College, I asked him to give it a try.
Donald Berman is chair of the piano department at the Longy School of Music of Bard College and is president of the Charles Ives Society. To say that he lives and breathes Charles Ives might sound like an exaggeration, but his three-volume critical edition “The Complete Shorter Works of Charles E. Ives” suggests otherwise.
I spoke with Berman by telephone this week. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
EDGE
What led you to specialize in the music of Charles Ives?
BERMAN
In the ’80s I became the student of John Kirkpatrick, who premiered the “Concord Sonata” in 1939. I was his only student. He was my only teacher. It was around the third year that I took on one of the pieces he had recently edited. And I really loved all the polyrhythms and other challenges of the piece. On Kirkpatrick’s 80th birthday, there was a big party at Yale for him. And he was talking about the “Concord Sonata,” and he was trying to fashion his own versions of the piece based on the various revisions that he had either accepted or rejected from Ives. It was very interesting, and I was helping him copy that and doing other tasks. And I decided at that point, that I would learn all of the small pieces that were studies and other variants of the “Concord’s” mountains before I tackled it, because it was such a big Mount Everest.
He gave me some unpublished studies at that time, which was very exciting. He referred to it as a third piano sonata, but actually it was just a compilation of three studies that had not been published yet. So I published them: 15, 16, and 23.
All these pieces took 30 years to learn, perform, and record. And it was during that process that I learned all the scraps of music that Ives wrote as offshoots and variants of the “Concord Sonata,” and then I finally turned my attention to learning the full piece in its larger form.
EDGE
Did you have any familiarity with Ives before you met Kirkpatrick?
BERMAN
Not really. I went to Wesleyan, and two of my teachers had studied with Kirkpatrick. So I was introduced to a couple of pieces, “The Unanswered Question” and other things. But it wasn’t ’till I studied with Kirkpatrick and really started learning that music. Then it was John Heiss at New England Conservatory, who taught a course called “Ives, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky.” It was kind of an infamous class. I met David Sanford in that class and some other wonderful musicians.
EDGE
I’d like to talk about the public perception of Charles Ives. Is it safe to say that he’s been a bit misunderstood over the years?
BERMAN
Yes.
EDGE
So the question is, if people tend to misunderstand Ives, then correcting their misunderstandings should change the way music actually sounds in their ears. Right?
BERMAN
That’s my hope.
You know, the things that are so intriguing and quirky about Ives are the things that stand out. The music is very difficult, and it’s easy to sort of be pulled in by the craziness and by the more obvious quotes. But as I’ve lived with this music for years and years, I’ve realized that all that material is just the DNA of his music and that they’re thoroughly composed.
In fact, I treat the “Concord Sonata” like late, late Brahms. It’s so thoroughly, beautifully worked out, melodically structured. And I think as it gets played with more sense of clarity and structure, its unique qualities will just grow. But it’s not going to fundamentally change who Ives is.
EDGE
You just answered my main question: what do you bring to the “Concord Sonata” that nobody else brings to it? And I think your answer is going to be clarity and structure.
BERMAN
Clarity, structure, and a real endeavor to bring out the different layers of the music—the music that’s far away, and the music that’s close.
As I’ve learned the piece, I’ve seen that virtually everything on page one of that sonata is developed throughout the next 66 pages, or, in my case, 69 pages. Like Brahms, except that the material is so unified and kind of compact. It’s the same music for 45 minutes that’s just so cleverly adapted for the different moods and different styles of each of the movements. It’s quite remarkable.
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Hear Donald Berman perform Charles Ives’ “Concord Sonata” on Saturday, November 9, 6 p.m., in Olin Hall at Bard College. Admission is free. More information is available here.
