John Kirkpatrick, American music, and the printed page 9781580464048, 1580464041

Table of contents :
Introduction : strange stopping places --
Beginnings --
Mentorship : music publishing --
Collaboration : Ruggles's Evocations --
Performance : Ives's Concord sonata --
Imagination : Ruggles's Mood --
Voice : the prose works --
Institution : the Charles Ives Society --
Conclusion : Kirkpatrick, compared --
Works of John Kirkpatrick.

Citation preview

“A substantial and provocative contribution to our understanding of Kirkpatrick as a man, performer, editor, and scholar. This book’s implications reach beyond the particular composers and works involved and will interest readers concerned with American music generally, as well as those interested in the history and practice of editing in the twentieth century.”

John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page

or over sixty years, the scholar and pianist John Kirkpatrick tirelessly promoted and championed the music of American composers. In this book, Drew Massey explores how Kirkpatrick’s career as an editor of music shaped the music and legacies of some of the great American modernists, including Aaron Copland, Ross Lee Finney, Roy Harris, Hunter Johnson, Charles Ives, Robert Palmer, and Carl Ruggles. Drawing on oral histories, interviews, and Kirkpatrick’s own extensive archives, Massey carefully reconstructs Kirkpatrick’s collaborations with such luminaries, displaying his editorial practice and inviting reconsideration of many of the most important debates in American modernism— for example, the self-fashioning of young composers during the 1940s, the cherished myth of Ruggles as a composer in communion with the “timeless,” and Ives’s status as a pioneer of modernist techniques.

John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page

—Tom C. Owens, editor of Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives

Binghamton University. Cover photo: Kirkpatrick seated at clavichord, ca. 1925. MSS 56, the John Kirkpatrick Papers in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. Photographer unknown. Cover design: Frank Gutbrod

Massey

Drew Massey is assistant professor of music at

Drew Massey

John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page

Eastman Studies in Music Ralph P. Locke, Senior Editor Eastman School of Music Additional Titles of Interest The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss Wayne Heisler Jr. Dane Rudhyar: His Music, Thought, and Art Deniz Ertan Intimate Voices:The Twentieth-Century String Quartet, Volumes 1 and 2 Edited by Evan Jones Irony and Sound: The Music of Maurice Ravel Stephen Zank Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher Robert Riggs The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology Edited by Arved Ashby Portrait of Percy Grainger Edited by Malcolm Gillies and David Pear Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music Edited by Ray Allen and Ellie M. Hisama The Substance of Things Heard: Writings about Music Paul Griffiths Widor: A Life beyond the Toccata John R. Near

A complete list of titles in the Eastman Studies in Music series may be found on our website, www.urpress.com.

John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page Drew Massey

The University of Rochester Press gratefully acknowledges generous support from the Manfred Bukofzer Endowment of the American Musicological Society. Copyright © 2013 by Drew Massey All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2013 University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.urpress.com and Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-404-8 ISSN: 1071-9989 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Massey, Drew (Drew Michael), author. John Kirkpatrick, American music, and the printed page / Drew Massey. pages cm. -- (Eastman studies in music, ISSN 1071-9989 ; v. 98) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58046-404-8 (hardcover : alkaline paper) 1. Kirkpatrick, John, 1905–1991. 2. Music--Editing--History--20th century. 3. Music--United States-20th century--History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Eastman studies in music ; v. 98. ML427.K45M37 2013 780.92--dc23 2013005009 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America. Musical excerpts from John Kirkpatrick’s edition of Carl Ruggles’s Mood are reproduced with permission from the John Kirkpatrick Estate. Musical excerpts from Carl Ruggles’s sketches of The Sunken Bell and Mood are reproduced with permission from the Carl Ruggles Estate.

The more credit accrues to Mr. Kirkpatrick for this labor and devotion on his part, because, truth to tell, much of the music heard last night was ugly and tedious to a degree.

—Olin Downes, New York Times, March 27, 1940 I haven’t been able to get a calm and collected view on the patch you sent. . . . So far my impression is of the painter who said that it took two men to paint a picture: one to do the painting and another to shoot him when he had painted enough.

—Kirkpatrick, letter to Carl Ruggles, January 30, 1943 The next researcher on Ives will have to do some researching on your technique.

—Nicolas Slonimsky, letter to John Kirkpatrick, November 16, 1960

Contents List of Musical Examples

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Strange Stopping Places

1

1

Beginnings

8

2

Mentorship: Music Publishing

28

3

Collaboration: Ruggles’s Evocations

50

4

Performance: Ives’s Concord Sonata

73

5

Imagination: Ruggles’s Mood

92

6

Voice: The Prose Works

118

7

Institution: The Charles Ives Society

129

Conclusion: Kirkpatrick, Compared

153

Notes

157

Works of John Kirkpatrick

181

Bibliography

187

Index

197

Plates follow page 100.

Musical Examples 2.1 Hunter Johnson, For an Unknown Soldier, mm. 1–7 2.2

39

Hunter Johnson, Piano Sonata, mvt. 3, mm. 212–15; Roy Harris, Piano Sonata, coda, mm. 1–5

40

Hunter Johnson, Piano Sonata, mvt. 3, mm. 1–4; Roy Harris, Piano Sonata, mvt. 3, mm. 2–6

41

2.4

Finney, Third Piano Sonata, mvt. 2, mm. 1–6

43

2.5

Robert Palmer, First Prelude, mm. 1–6

46

2.6

Palmer, Second Prelude, mm. 1–6

46

3.1

J. S. Bach, Fugue in B Minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier, book 1, mm. 1–4

60

Ruggles, Evocation for Ives, mm. 1–5, multiple states

62

2.3

3.2

3.3 Ruggles, Evocation for Ives, mm. 21–26, multiple states

64

3.4 Ruggles, Evocation for Ives, mm. 30–32, multiple states

68

3.5

70

Underlying fundamental sounding, “Ives” Evocation, mm. 1–5

4.1 Charles Ives, Concord Sonata, variant readings, pp. 5–6 5.1

87

Kirkpatrick edition, Mood, mm. 22–25, violin part, and related material

98

5.2 Kirkpatrick edition, Mood, mm. 61–65, and related material

98

5.3 Kirkpatrick edition, Mood, m. 10, and related material

105

5.4

Ruggles, sketches for The Sunken Bell

107

5.5

Kirkpatrick edition, passages from Mood

109

5.6

Ruggles, sketch material for Mood, not included in Kirkpatrick’s edition

111

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list of musical examples

5.7 Kirkpatrick edition, Mood, m. 3–5, violin part, and related material 112 5.8 Kirkpatrick edition, Mood, m. 22 and related material 5.9 7.1 7.2

113

Ruggles, marginal notation in The Sunken Bell play and related material

114

Ives, Psalm 54, original version (used by Smith/Kirkpatrick), mm. 50–57

143

Ives, Psalm 54, final version (from Ives’s manuscript), mm. 50–57

144

Acknowledgments This project got its start while I was still an undergraduate at Indiana University, working with J. Peter Burkholder on a summer research project about Ives and the Concord Sonata. Had I not gone to Yale that summer, and had my imagination not been sparked by the rows and rows of boxes all bearing the label “John Kirkpatrick Papers” that were scattered around the Yale Music Library reading room, I probably would not have undertaken this project. I am indebted to Peter for his enthusiasm for and continued interest in this project. It was in Denise von Glahn’s seminar on the music and writings of Ives, which I took during my first year in graduate school, that this project really began to develop. Her enthusiasm bolstered my own. Many individuals and institutions were crucial for bringing this project to fruition. Support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the US Department of Education (under the auspices of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship) provided vital support, as did a number of research grants from Harvard University. This book is partially supported by a subvention from the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Suzanne Eggleston-Lovejoy, Richard Boursy, Emily Ferrigno, and Remi Castonguay at the Yale University Music Library were masterful stewards of their special collections, providing me both valuable insight and thought-provoking conversations during my visits there. This work has benefitted from the comments of many readers. I owe special thanks to Ryan Bañagale, Sheryl Kaskowitz, Carol Oja, David Paul, Gina Rivera, Anne Shreffler, David Trippett, Christoph Wolff, and the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for the University of Rochester Press for providing valuable critiques and insight into the work and giving it a shape it otherwise would have lacked. I am also grateful for the support that Julia Cook, Carrie Crompton, Suzanne Guiod, Ralph Locke, and Ryan Peterson offered at University of Rochester Press. For permissions to quote archival and published material, I would like to thank Jennifer Szwalek (Lawrenceville School); Mary Kirkpatrick (Kirkpatrick Estate); Nancy Young (Smith College); Aida Garcia-Cole (G.

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acknowledgments

Schirmer); Kevin Justice (Ruggles Estate); Gayle Sherwood Magee (Ives Society); Earl McCullers (Hunter Johnson Estate); Patricia Harris (Roy Harris Estate); Richard Dana (Richard Dana Estate); Henry C. Finney (Ross Lee and Theodore Finney Estates); David Plaine (Robert Palmer Estate); The David and Silvia Teitelbaum Foundation (Henry and Sidney Cowell Estate); Elliott Carter; Peter Burkholder; and Vivian Perlis. Some material from this book has been previously published in the following articles: “Imagining the Infinite in Carl Ruggles’s Evocations,” Music & Letters 92, no. 4 (2011): 582–606, and “The Problem of Ives’s Revisions, 1973–1987,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 60, no. 3 (2007): 599–645. Thanks most of all to my husband, Gabe, who was with me tirelessly through the whole writing process. The whole journey would have been a lot less pleasant without him. This book is dedicated to him.

Introduction Strange Stopping Places

It makes the most sense to begin near the end. In 1985 John Kirkpatrick (1905–91) celebrated his eightieth birthday at the Graduate Club at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. The scholars Vivian Perlis and H. Wiley Hitchcock organized a gathering of Kirkpatrick’s friends and colleagues from across the country for an event that included dinner and an exhibition of photos, printed music, and ephemera at the Yale Music Library, and unofficially marked Kirkpatrick’s retirement from the position of executive editor of the Charles Ives Society. Everything about the event reinforced what the attendees would have already known about the guest of honor. Kirkpatrick was the benevolent patriarch of the Ives revival, a position he had earned through decades of commitment to the composer’s music. Kirkpatrick had become a hero of American musical modernism when he gave the first New York performance of Ives’s Second Piano Sonata (the Concord Sonata) in 1939, and the music critic Lawrence Gilman christened him an “unobtrusive minister of genius” in his review of the performance.1 After Ives’s death in 1954, Kirkpatrick became one of the most important shepherds of Ives’s posthumous legacy. Kirkpatrick catalogued Ives’s music manuscripts (resulting in the Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue); edited Ives’s autobiographical writings (published in Memos); recorded his works (including an important first recording of some of his songs with Helen Boatwright, as well as a second recording of the Concord Sonata); and served as both curator of the Ives Collection at Yale and executive editor of the Ives Society. Although the exhibition at Yale’s Music Library acknowledged his work with numerous American composers, including Aaron Copland, Arthur Farwell, Ross Lee Finney, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson, by 1985 Kirkpatrick’s efforts on behalf of Ives had come to be seen as his chief contribution to American music. As part of the festivities, Kirkpatrick gave a short talk about an edition of Ives’s Concord Sonata that he had been working on during the early 1980s.

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introduction

It was his fourth attempt to edit Ives’s labyrinthine masterpiece, the last edition he would complete. In discussing Ives, Kirkpatrick grouped him with Carl Ruggles, another American modernist: “The two great composers I knew well, Ruggles and Ives—I can see now that they were both unaware of coming to a strange stopping place in their composing—Ruggles to the inability to integrate a musical form in his own style after 1945—Ives to a blind spot in failing to grant his masterpieces certain rights of their own.”2 Kirkpatrick’s decision to focus his comments on editing is noteworthy for a man who is mainly remembered as a pianist. But for Kirkpatrick to conclude after a lifetime of study that the paths of two major figures in American modernism were both crucially flawed is nothing short of stunning. This book is about how Kirkpatrick defined, mediated, and sought to overcome these “strange stopping places” in the music of Ives, Ruggles, and other American composers. Although I seek to provide as broad a view as possible of Kirkpatrick’s relationship with various composers, I argue that his contributions shine through most clearly in his role as an editor of music. Kirkpatrick advocated on behalf of many composers in a variety of ways: he befriended them, secured patrons to support them, and performed their music for much of the twentieth century. But Kirkpatrick’s work as an editor—which, in itself, took a variety of forms during his career—stands out among these other activities because it was the primary means through which he addressed what he saw as these composers’ faults. In this book I view Kirkpatrick’s editorial output primarily as a detailed and sustained commentary on the past and present state of American musical composition. This approach is suggested by the unusual contour of Kirkpatrick’s editorial career, which included both collaboration with living composers and retrospective promotion of dead ones. Although he began his career working alongside living composers, he gradually shifted his attention almost exclusively to the posthumous editing of Ives. This fact alone makes Kirkpatrick’s career noteworthy, since scholarship on editing frequently considers collaborative and retrospective modes as distinct spheres of editorial practice. Time and again, Kirkpatrick’s specific editorial approaches for composers, whether he was working directly with them or editing their works after they had died, reflected his understanding of their particular position in history. For example, Kirkpatrick’s editions of Carl Ruggles’s Evocations, created in close consultation with the composer and explored in chapter 4, recapitulated discourses of timelessness that had already circulated around Ruggles. Similarly, Kirkpatrick’s work with Robert Palmer, discussed in chapter 3, attended carefully to the needs of a young composer working his way up the academic ladder during the 1940s. At the

strange stopping places

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3

same time that he was working with Palmer to sculpt an image of professorial propriety, he sought to emphasize the “native” qualities in the music and public personae of Hunter Johnson and Arthur Farwell. Kirkpatrick went far beyond clerical work in his editions, and had an ability to step back from a piece, see it in a broader historical and musical context, and map a composer’s work into that context by means of specific editorial interventions. By the time Kirkpatrick began his retrospective editions of Ives, he was accustomed to considering the historical position of a composer as part of his editorial approach. Kirkpatrick’s editions of Ives’s music, almost all of which were prepared after the composer died, were predicated on an understanding of Ives that heavily emphasized Ives’s priority in the use of certain kinds of dissonance. As a result, during Kirkpatrick’s tenure as executive editor of the Charles Ives Society (1973–85), he explicitly downplayed revisions Ives made later in life, telling his fellow editors to have a “skeptical but open view of [Ives’s] later revisions, which were often touches of genius illuminating the original concept, but too frequently were unnecessary added dissonances or elaborated details sidetracking the original directness.”3 As chapter 7 will show, Kirkpatrick’s stance toward editing Ives in the 1970s and 1980s asks us to reconsider some of the important debates about Ives scholarship and American music that circulated at the same time. In other words, one reason Kirkpatrick makes a claim on our attention is that he forged collaborative and retrospective editorial methods into a new hybrid editorial practice in which his own understanding of history played a central role. To make sense of such a perspective, one must remember that history shapes not only our understanding of the past but also our view of the present. Hence, I am proposing that we consider Kirkpatrick to be, if not quite a historian in the traditional sense, then an editor using his view of history to help define the terms of his editorial approach. With this approach, a veil of inscrutability is lifted from the editorial process, and the means and aims of Kirkpatrick’s work become more intelligible.4 The main task for understanding Kirkpatrick’s editions is to take the decisions he made (many of which, in the context of a critical report, resist generalization into a larger trend) and attempt to contextualize them as constructed historical observations. My goal is to find the historiographic ends that reside in the editorial means. As I visited those “strange stopping places”—and retraced the paths that led Kirkpatrick to them—I found contemporary observers sometimes disagreeing with Kirkpatrick’s evaluation of different composers’ respective strengths and weaknesses. Although many praised his commitment to American music, in the course of my research I have also heard Kirkpatrick called “quite a piece of work,” a man “swallowed by

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introduction

the leviathan of [his] own conceit,” and someone who deserved a “punch in the mouth.”5 Such comments usually were made after Kirkpatrick was thought to have crossed an invisible line past which editors ought not to tread. The implication that an editor may have violated a composer’s sovereign domain over a piece of music can quickly stir the passions of musicologists, performers, and audience members alike. I see these reactions as a consequence of the long shadow that ideologies of Romantic genius—and the concomitant infallibility of the composer—have cast over Western concert music since the nineteenth century. But music making is also a social phenomenon, and in this book I draw on the ideas of sociologist Howard Becker, who posited the idea of an “art world,” and viewed art as the product of coordinated efforts by groups of individuals, rather than the result of a single person’s inspiration.6 Collective action serves to regulate the final product, in Becker’s view, by creating a set of norms to which works of art adhere. Becker suggested that scholars attend carefully to moments of disagreement between members of an art world, since these situations—these “punches in the mouth,” so to speak—are often when participants in a creative relationship articulate their value systems most clearly.7 Colleagues have asked me if I thought Kirkpatrick had done the right thing at various junctures while creating his editions. Did he intervene too much on behalf of Ives? Did he not intervene enough for young composers struggling to get published? Since musicologists are themselves sometimes editors of music (rather than merely disinterested observers of an exclusively historical phenomenon), scholarship about editing is situated at a peculiar crossroads between subject and object, between the analysis of historically situated instances of editing and a temptation to—intentionally or not—articulate best practices for those currently active in the field. But this book is not, in the end, a handbook for editing, and one of its central claims is that it is not always meaningful to evaluate an editorial approach in the abstract, without reference to the underlying purpose of a given edition. I do not seek to judge Kirkpatrick’s editorial output in terms of a fixed external set of criteria, since his own values for an edition changed from project to project. For example, in the speech he gave at his eightieth birthday party, he remembered visiting Ives and declaring to the composer: “Every time anyone tries to make something clear to somebody else, whatever it might lose of its unique character or stamp, it will more than gain in universality.”8 When it came to the Concord Sonata, Kirkpatrick found striving for the “universal” to be among the ultimate purposes of his editorial interventions. (This is also why portions of his final Concord edition also sound like a very late Brahms sonata, with many of Ives’s sevenths and ninths rewritten by Kirkpatrick as octaves).9 But other priorities bubble to the

strange stopping places

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5

surface of his editions as well, sometimes more mundane than this lofty reach toward the universal. Kirkpatrick prized notational clarity and idiomatic writing for the piano; he demanded scores that were both easy for performers to use and rigorously edited. Given these multiple goals for his editing, which changed depending on the composer and context, I try to avoid prescriptive claims that Kirkpatrick should have taken a particular course of action. Instead, I seek to describe as clearly as possible the terms of his engagement with composers and their music. If, from time to time, the paths Kirkpatrick chose seem unorthodox, that does not change the greater or lesser degrees of influence he exerted over the pieces he edited and the legacies of the composers who wrote them. Although Kirkpatrick’s editions could sometimes provoke vitriolic reactions, one of the primary challenges in assessing Kirkpatrick’s impact stems from the fact that he, like many editors, tended to maintain a low profile. The coin of the editor’s realm, the critical apparatus, is not a genre of writing known for its transparency. The trappings of an edition—sober processions of lists of lists, source comparisons, and cryptic bundles of sigla—lend an apparatus its air of rigor and authority, but usually do not readily indicate a larger meaning. Beyond this inherent challenge to assessing an editor’s written work, editors themselves often participate in their own erasure from the historical record, carefully covering their tracks as they go. The literary scholar Jack Stillinger, in his analysis of editors’ impact on twentiethcentury American novels, noted: The one recurring oddity in all the evidence concerning their relationships with authors is . . . editors’ continual insistence on the supreme importance of the author and the downplaying of their own contributions to the work in which they are, in fact, collaborators. . . . It would appear that the myth of the author’s preeminence is strongly cherished by the very people who have the greatest knowledge of authors’ failings and needs for assistance.10

For his part, Kirkpatrick reflected these trends in his editions. Kirkpatrick was an extraordinarily patient, exacting man, willing to work for decades to get an edition just right, often producing vast critical apparatuses in the process. He also had a lifelong habit of deflecting attention away from himself. Gilman’s description of Kirkpatrick as an “unobtrusive minister of genius” at the piano bench during the Concord Sonata premiere could apply equally well to Kirkpatrick’s approach to editing.11 Nor was Kirkpatrick alone among music editors in attenuating his own agency. When the musicologist Leo Treitler described his teacher Oliver Strunk (a scholar from the same generation as Kirkpatrick), he could just as easily have been writing about Kirkpatrick: “the shrewdest of scholars, this man who loved musicological puzzles and whose style of

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introduction

reasoning and writing—in his own voice—was his unmistakable calling card, yet acted as though the scholar’s role in the public delivery of history is ideally to be kept well behind the footlights.”12 For Kirkpatrick, editing occupied an uneasy position between agency and mediation. On the one hand, he took decisive action to render the music he edited into a particular, if not always permanent, form; on the other, he believed that his actions should never distract from or subvert the composer’s original creation. This book is oriented around six overlapping themes in Kirkpatrick’s editorial career, in order to offer multiple perspectives on his editorial practice. Three of these themes are about his various roles—as a collaborator and mentor to composers, as a representative of music publishing firms early in his career, and as a leader in the Ives Society later in life. Two themes provide the points of departure for contemplating his own agency—his imagination as an editor (particularly in his reconstruction of Ruggles’s violin piece Mood) and his voice as an author (in his work on Ives’s Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue and Memos). A final theme is the relationship between his career as a performer and his editorial practice. Following an introductory chapter about his upbringing, each chapter showcases one of these facets of his career. Of course, there is not always a sharp distinction between these themes; the activities he undertook during his collaboration with Ruggles share a number of characteristics with his mentorship of other composers during the 1940s. He performed virtually all of the music he edited, but his relationship with the Concord Sonata is special in the degree to which editing and performance were intermingled. By framing each chapter as not only an investigation of a particular aspect of Kirkpatrick’s career, but also in terms of an overarching theme for his entire editorial output, I seek to illuminate the ways in which his editorial presence contributed to a significant body of American concert music over the course of the twentieth century. Kirkpatrick’s career engaged developments in the culture of concert halls, libraries, recording studios, sources of patronage, and centers of learning in both the United States and Europe across more than six decades. Untangling this conceptual and historical briar patch requires sorting through Kirkpatrick’s own recordings, writings, and archives, as well as the archives of composers he knew, not to mention the available and relevant intellectual, cultural, and oral histories, some of which are explored here for the first time. While I move across different planes of analysis over the course of this book—considering national, local, and interpersonal dynamics, as appropriate—my chief concern is to consider the particular actions and intentions that lay behind the creation of these editions. In other words, I am primarily interested in exploring the tangible outcomes of

strange stopping places

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7

Kirkpatrick’s efforts. Although I draw on biographical methods, this is not a biography; nor is it strictly a cultural, institutional, or reception history, nor a philological review of Kirkpatrick’s editorial process. What follows is a mixture of all of these, an account of Kirkpatrick’s participation in the art world of American music as revealed through his efforts ultimately directed at the printed page.

Chapter One

Beginnings John Kirkpatrick had two major careers—one as an editor and one as a pianist. Although the two are related, this study will primarily focus on how he helped to shape the music he edited. To do so, however, we have to ricochet back and forth between two ways of thinking about Kirkpatrick, one indicated by a photo of him as a young man, and the other by an anecdote from much later. Kirkpatrick is on the periphery of his senior class photo at Lawrenceville School, taken in 1922 (fig. 1.1). The eighteen-year-old Kirkpatrick is in the upper left corner of the photo, sitting on a concrete embankment with his friend and fellow pianist Giles Gilbert. His hands are thrust in his pockets, and his brown hair—which was usually held rigidly in place with a healthy dose of pomade—sticks up in a shock. His scuffed shoes dangle off the edge of the overhang, as if, even as the photo is taken, he is preparing to leap to the grass and return to his room. Kirkpatrick’s expression is not exactly blank; it suggests rather that he is thinking of something else, and that the momentary interruption of the posed photo shoot is a distraction from another task, one which did not require careful grooming. He squints out at the viewer as if the blinds had suddenly opened on his darkened study. This is a photograph of a man whose business is scrutiny, not being scrutinized. Leaping forward fifty years, to July 10, 1972, we find Kirkpatrick arriving at Charles Ives’s old house in West Redding. It is a dry, hot day, ninety degrees in the afternoon. Kirkpatrick has taken H. Wiley Hitchcock and Vivian Perlis to see Ives’s home, since Hitchcock has never been there. They wander into the barn, where Kirkpatrick finds an old box of copies of the first edition of Ives’s self-published 114 Songs. Murmuring to himself, “I’ll just take the liberty,” he presents Perlis and Hitchcock each with a copy of the Songs.1 Kirkpatrick’s offer of a rare copy of the Songs to Perlis and Hitchcock speaks volumes about his position with respect to Ives—one of prerogative and authority. One can hardly imagine the disheveled youth at the corner of the early photo acting so boldly. Reconciling these two images of Kirkpatrick—a man seated off to the side, seemingly reluctant to be noticed, and one who nonchalantly

beginnings

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9

bequeathed Ives’s Songs to Perlis and Hitchcock as if they were his own—is one of the chief challenges of coming to grips with Kirkpatrick and his contradictions. Kirkpatrick was alternately shy and forceful. Sometimes, he seemed to embody both qualities in equal measure simultaneously. The music critic Lawrence Gilman hinted at Kirkpatrick’s dynamic temperament in his review of Kirkpatrick’s premiere of Ives’s Concord Sonata. Gilman declared the pianist an “unobtrusive minister of genius.”2 Although Gilman clearly saw Kirkpatrick as the “minister” and Ives as the “genius,” there was something of genius in Kirkpatrick as well—at least insofar as a bold new vision of a common phenomenon (in this case, editing) might also lead one to speak of genius. The depth of Kirkpatrick’s editorial vision, and his quest for scores which were both musically and metaphysically pure, distinguished his career as an editor from those of many other musical editors. There are other stories to tell along the way, too. Kirkpatrick’s career traced not only the trajectory of an American pianist living and working in the twentieth century, but also the increasing role of universities in supporting American concert music. His tale is one of a mediator, and such figures have been more or less obscured in composer- and work-centered accounts of the musical past. Yet despite his association with American music, Kirkpatrick’s education was not, for the most part, struck and forged in the United States. He received the bulk of his musical training in France, and even when he returned to the United States in the 1930s, he spent the better part of a decade working in and around Connecticut, not in a major center of American musical activity. It was only after his performance of Ives’s Concord Sonata at Town Hall in 1939 that Kirkpatrick emerged as a fully formed, independent musician.

Early Years (1905–26) Prior to his departure for France in 1926 for full-time music study, there was little to indicate that John Kirkpatrick Jr. would pursue a career in music. “Jack,” as he was called in his youth, was born on March 18, 1905, into a third generation of jewelers from midtown Manhattan. The family lived at 67–69 West Forty-Seventh Street, only five blocks from Times Square; the Kirkpatrick jewelry business on Park Avenue was a relatively short walk.3 His early years were idyllic, peaceful, and what one would imagine for the child of a wealthy Manhattan family: boarding schools, summers in the Hamptons, and an Ivy League matriculation through examination. Until John Kirkpatrick Sr.’s unexpected death in 1928, and the Great Depression that began the year after, the Kirkpatricks were a family of means, one that had accrued wealth through generations of good

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fortune. Kirkpatrick had a lifelong interest in his family’s genealogy, and eventually traced his line back to sixteenth-century Scotland. The branch of the family that came to America was led by another John Kirkpatrick, who was born October 24, 1806, in Bridge-of-Dee, Scotland, and died January 2, 1873, in New York.4 This man married Janet Dalling (1802– 88) in 1826, and, together with their six children, arrived in New York in 1844. The New World was not necessarily good to the Kirkpatricks at first—by 1854, four of the six children had died. The pianist John Kirkpatrick’s grandfather Thomas (1834–1906), however, survived, and in 1859 founded a jewelry business, T. Kirkpatrick, Inc.5 Thomas experienced early success, and quickly came to be on good terms with the mayor and other powerful New Yorkers.6 The business stayed in the family for three generations, passing from Thomas to John Kirkpatrick Sr. (1859–1928) and then to Jack’s older brother, also named Thomas (1902–80).7 Unfortunately, but also typically, the Kirkpatrick genealogical records as represented in the John Kirkpatrick Papers are overwhelmingly patrilineal. It is worth noting, however, that his mother, Marguerite, also had a distinguished pedigree. A native of Greenwich, Connecticut, her family—the Havilands—traced its lineage to Jeffrey Ferris, one of the founders of Greenwich in 1640.8 Jack’s mother, who had been an actress in her youth, encouraged her son’s nascent creative ambitions, since she “was full of the glamour of having an artist in the family.”9 Both Jack and his brother Tom took piano lessons beginning at age seven with Henrietta Cammeyer, a cousin of one of their mother’s friends.10 Cammeyer was Kirkpatrick’s only childhood teacher, and he studied with her until he began college. The earliest program that survives in his papers is from a 1917 performance at Lawrenceville school, when he was twelve. He performed a musical interlude at the annual debate between the Calliopean and the Philomathean Literary Societies on March 24; his two selections were “Invitation to the Dance,” by Carl Maria von Weber, and “Murmuring Zephyrs,” by Adolph Jensen. The school newspaper reported that Kirkpatrick “very creditably executed” the two pieces.11 Throughout his tenure at Lawrenceville, he played piano selections at these annual debates, and also participated in both the mandolin club (in which he played bells) and the chorus. The scattered reviews from the school newspaper The Lawrentian were politely favorable, and Kirkpatrick later acknowledged that he had a natural talent at the keyboard. Although Vivian Perlis described Kirkpatrick as “somewhat of a piano prodigy as a boy,” his development as a pianist did not follow the trajectory of a student who had a particularly special ability at his instrument: he studied with a teacher who was more convenient than distinguished, and gave few performances, not mounting a complete recital until his early twenties.12

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The picture of Kirkpatrick as a boy is almost a mirror image of his adult self. As a man, Kirkpatrick tended to be withdrawn and quiet, even among his closest associates, yet forcefully opinionated and capable of an extraordinary thoroughness in his scholarly affairs. But Jack, gregarious and amicable, appeared to drift through school. Following a few years at the Bovee Day School (4 East Forty-Ninth Street in Manhattan), and a year at the Westminster School in Simsbury, Connecticut (1915–16), Jack attended Lawrenceville School from 1916 until 1922. Lawrenceville School, located five miles south of Princeton in New Jersey, was essentially a feeder school for Princeton University. His report cards from Lawrenceville suggest a distracted if capable student: “Jack has caused all of his masters a great deal of worry and concern,” his house master wrote in Kirkpatrick’s spring 1917 report, “by his indifferent and lackadaisical manner.”13 The report speculated that he simply lacked discipline: “His dilatory habits are a great handicap to him and give others a wrong impression of his abilities.” This pattern appears to have continued throughout his stay at Lawrenceville. Two years later, his master’s report declared him a “voluntary failure. With a false reliance on his ability to ‘slip through,’ he seems to sag in will power before any task that requires continued exertion.”14 At the same time, though, he seemed to adjust well to life at boarding school. His house master qualified his critique of Jack by noting that, “as a companion and friend,” the young Kirkpatrick was “delightful.”15 One of his closest friends at Lawrenceville was Giles Gilbert, a pianist who followed a path similar to Kirkpatrick’s. Gilbert is pictured next to Kirkpatrick in many photographs from Lawrenceville, and the two performed together occasionally while at the school. They also cowrote one of Kirkpatrick’s only compositions, the class ode for his graduation.16 After graduation, Gilbert went directly to Europe to study at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and wrote Kirkpatrick to tell him of his adventures in and around Austria. Although the two men drifted apart over the years, Gilbert seems to have been one of the crucial early voices luring Kirkpatrick to a career in music. A few years later, Kirkpatrick would follow his example and set sail for Europe. But first, he attended Princeton. Admitted through examination, he waffled between studying classics and art history before being dismissed, and his stiff body language from one contemporaneous photograph suggests resignation or at least disengagement (fig. 1.2).17 In 1951, Princeton sent him an alumni questionnaire in preparation for the class of 1926’s twenty-fifth year reunion; not surprisingly, the university was eager to claim him as an alumnus now that he had established himself as a successful musician. In his reply, Kirkpatrick gave direct commentary on his time at Princeton. “Do you think that Princeton prepared you realistically for life?” the questionnaire asked. “No,” Kirkpatrick wrote. “This is hardly a

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fair question, either to the Univ. (because I was then very lazy) or to me (because being obviously a one-track musician I should never have been sent to a college with no music dept.). Otherwise I can’t help regarding the then country-club character of the social atmosphere as the worst possible training.” In response to the question immediately following (“Would you say that you are happier today than when you were an undergraduate?”) Kirkpatrick answered “Yes, much,” and further hinted at his discontent while at Princeton: “I’m grateful to have been given a perspective in which life (in toto) is deeply satisfactory with constantly inspiring horizons. And then, who would want to compare a happy marriage with the emotional nightmare of adolescence?”18 A combination of laziness and general unhappiness led to a poor showing in the classroom for Jack. Although it was socially acceptable to bring home a steady stream of report cards filled with the “gentleman’s C”—as Charles Ives called his own performance in college—outright expulsion was stigmatizing.19 The embarrassment of his expulsion is suggested by the manner in which later publications give mixed messages about how he ended his time at Princeton: he is alternately described as either having graduated or having dropped out of his own volition.20 Neither account quite captures the dramatic bumpiness of his college career. He was expelled because of bad grades at the end of his second year (June of 1924), only to be readmitted that same fall on the condition that he repeat his sophomore year.21 He remained on probation throughout the 1924–25 academic year, and in the fall of 1925 was expelled permanently because of continued poor performance. Of the thirty-nine courses that he took during his time at Princeton, he received a grade of “fair” or higher in only thirteen of them. This is not to say that Princeton was wasted on him; during his time in France he voraciously read Catullus’s poetry (he had chosen classics as his first major based on his fondness for Catullus, before switching to art history a few semesters later), and his appetite for Goethe and Schiller also seems to have been an outgrowth of several semesters of German.22 Although he may have felt himself a failure in college, his family—whom he described later as “wealthy enough to spoil the children”—seems to have quietly accepted that Princeton was not right for their youngest son.23 Later in life, when asked if his parents were dismayed by his expulsion, Kirkpatrick simply stated that “it wasn’t brought to my attention in a drastic way.”24 They fully supported his musical study in Europe, and he was at least partially dependent on his family until late in the 1930s. Even though Princeton lacked a music department while he was there, Kirkpatrick had a reputation there as a talented and involved amateur pianist. He wrote program notes for the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, which reveal a flair for colorful descriptions of music. His commentary on Mililotti’s aria “Povero Marinar,” which was performed at a concert in

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January of 1924, is typical: “This delightfully characteristic and unhackneyed aria, from the old Italian school, of the heartbroken mariner ends with a mellifluent barcarolle to which the strings contribute a pizzicato accompaniment.”25 The high point of his performances at Princeton came in May of the same year, when he was featured as a soloist with the orchestra, performing the first movement of MacDowell’s First Piano Concerto. The next day, the campus newspaper ran an enthusiastic review, declaring that “John Kirkpatrick 1926 made a brilliant debut as a pianist of real genius.” The description of his playing suggests that he was among the finest performers at Princeton: “Kirkpatrick throughout the concert played like a real artist. His interpretation and tone shadings were always graceful, while his technique is astonishingly complete. Every selection and every note he played with absolute ease and confidence to be found in few artists of his age.”26 Kirkpatrick was uncomfortably positioned as a promising performer in an environment that could not help him to develop his interest or skill. Throughout his stay at Princeton, he remained more interested in performing than in coursework, and as time went on, the stifling social atmosphere, combined with the lack of a music department, led Kirkpatrick to reconsider his options. By the spring of 1925, Jack had cast his eyes across the Atlantic toward France. Before his final term began, in September 1925, he spent the summer in France, at Nadia Boulanger’s Conservatoire Americain in Fontainebleau. Between July and September, the twenty-year-old Jack began to think of himself as a pianist, and he opened up to the possibility of seriously pursuing a career in music. When he returned to Princeton in late September 1925—so late that he missed the first few days of classes— Kirkpatrick was unable to sustain serious study in an environment that lacked the musical stimulation that Fontainebleau had afforded him.27 After he was expelled from Princeton for the second and final time in February of 1926, he lived at home, anxiously waiting to go back to France in July of that year. Although he did not immediately reform his “lackadaisical manner” upon arrival in France, for the rest of his life his worldview would be colored by his experiences there.

The Young Virtuoso: France (1925–31) In the six years that Kirkpatrick spent shuttling back and forth between France and New York, almost every major feature of his career fell into place. He established himself as a powerful interpreter of new music, a provocative foil to composers, and a sensitive teacher. His sometimes obscure religious and spiritual beliefs were cultivated and began to find their first

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expression as he moved among intellectual and musical circles in and around Fontainebleau, Paris, and Gargenville. At the same time, his family was in turmoil, with the jewelry business beginning to fail following his father’s death in 1928. That same year, Jack suffered a massive crisis of confidence in his pianistic abilities. Kirkpatrick arrived in Paris at the peak of the roaring, vibrant artistic scene of the late 1920s. Americans had streamed into the city since the end of World War I, buoyed by the favorable exchange rate of the dollar against the collapsed franc. Musicians, artists, and writers—Stravinsky, Picasso, Diaghilev, Stein, Pound, and Joyce, to name a few—concentrated around Montparnasse and contributed to one of the most exciting creative centers of the twentieth century. Considering the fame and brilliance of the artists assembled in Paris during this period, the fact that John Cage, who arrived in the spring of 1930, singled out Kirkpatrick in a 1991 interview is bound to seem surprising. Joan Retellack: Who were the artists whose work you were enjoying in Paris? Cage: There was a pianist, John Kirkpatrick, or was it Ralph? There were two Kirkpatricks, one is John and the other Ralph. Retellack: I associate Ralph mainly with the harpsichord. Cage: Yes. So it’s John, who gave a concert that included Scriabin and Stravinsky and this led me to—I was given to sight-reading—to buy a book called Das neue Klavierbuch that had short easy pieces by all the modern composers, including Schoenberg and Satie. . . . But in the twenties I was impressed by the whole thing—from John Kirkpatrick, and the way modern music sounded, to the way modern painting looked. I went to the galleries in Paris and saw the different kinds of modern art.28

Jan Swafford, in his biography of Charles Ives, did not accord Kirkpatrick the same degree of importance that Cage had, but placed Kirkpatrick within the Parisian expatriate community, offering a sketch of the young pianist in 1927. Swafford depicted Kirkpatrick as “a spoiled and lazy rich kid,” who “hated to practice” and was “handsome and dandyish.” In Swafford’s account, Kirkpatrick circulated among Katherine Ruth Heyman’s “arty, polysexual Parisian crowd”; he “kept a mistress financed by his brother and flirted with the occult.”29 On its own, Swafford’s swift thumbnail of Kirkpatrick—not quite a man, no longer a boy, caught up in a heady mixture of money, music, and sex— could lead one to imagine Kirkpatrick as the protagonist in the opening pages of some bildungsroman. There are details which must be fleshed out now, however, that were not necessary for Swafford’s purposes. For example, the rosy financial situation that Swafford painted was not uniform across this period; by the time Kirkpatrick returned home, the family had begun a gradual drift away from New York society and into the ranks of the

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upper middle class. Jack’s return to the United States in 1931, final and abrupt as it was, reflected the changing financial picture of the Kirkpatrick family. Swafford’s reference to Kirkpatrick’s budding sexuality causes pause. In his letters home, Kirkpatrick vehemently defended the mistress that Swafford mentioned—referred to only as “Marjorie” in the surviving correspondence—against allegations by his family that she was a “gold-digger.”30 Swafford alludes to other tastes by locating Kirkpatrick among a “polysexual” crowd. Although Kirkpatrick publicly identified as heterosexual for his entire life, he privately acknowledged his own attraction to men. It rippled to the surface only once in his correspondence, in the draft of a letter to Rosalyn Tureck from 1953. Kirkpatrick burst out: “I am not ashamed to confess that my tendency to succumb to the temptation of homosexual thinking is heightened by practicing music by a composer who has accepted a homosexual life, but lessened when practicing music by a ‘normal’ composer.”31 Kirkpatrick’s language reveals tangled layers of conflict: he claims not to be “ashamed” of his own feelings toward men, yet simultaneously depicts homosexuality as a “temptation,” suggesting an attraction that he saw at some level as dangerous or immoral. At the same time, Kirkpatrick keeps the issue at arm’s length by proposing that it is only “homosexual thinking,” rather than any physical act, that is risked by playing the music of gay composers. While in Paris, however, Kirkpatrick appears to have moved comfortably in social circles with gay composers. He joked with Virgil Thomson about Roy Harris’s “tender buttocks,” and affectionately closed his letters to Thomson and Thomson’s lover, Maurice Grosser, with “Love, John.”32 Thomson appears to have been equally at ease with Kirkpatrick, beginning one letter with a flippant “Thanks music thanks trouble thanks baiser,” a reference to Stravinsky’s ballet Le Baiser de la Fée, which premiered in Paris in 1928.33 As I argue in chapter 2, at a few crucial points in Kirkpatrick’s career, his multifaceted sexuality intermingled with his professional life as he negotiated delicate relationships with his sometime patron Katherine Perkins, or in his editorial work with Robert Palmer. Finally, if Kirkpatrick did hate to practice, as Swafford wrote, it is not evident in his surviving correspondence from Paris. Jack’s letters home during that first summer practically burst with excitement at studying music fulltime. Early in the 1925 summer course, he began to realize that music and Princeton may have been incompatible, writing to his mother: You’ll be terribly surprised at my increased technique. I think I’ve advanced more in this one month than in the past year. It’s going to be awfully hard to start in college again. I find that in practicing it takes about 2 hours to recapitulate the progress of the previous day, and then the remaining 3 hours are progressive— and of course at Princeton even 3 hours will be more or less out of the question.34

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Almost immediately upon arriving in Paris, he began intensive technical work with Isidor Philipp and Camille Decreus, and also started to study conducting.35 Although he would quit the conducting course by the end of the first summer, and his relationship with Philipp would sour during the summer of 1928, his detailed and extravagant letters home reveal a young man who felt that he belonged somewhere for the first time. He described Philipp as “encouraging,” and compared the gleanings from one lesson to “finding ten dollars in an old suit.”36 Philipp and his assistant Decreus honed Kirkpatrick’s technique, concentrating on a method that was significantly different from what he had learned in the United States. Decreus put Kirkpatrick on a steady diet of scales, arpeggios, and octaves, emphasizing the use of the fingers alone.37 Freed from what he saw as Princeton’s stifling social scene, Kirkpatrick began to refashion himself as a thinking musician and a brash, perhaps even self-parodying, artiste. He described his morning ritual to his mother in florid detail: You have no idea how deeply my innate epicurean instinct is touched daily. The studios for practicing are used, each by 2 pianists, arranging the day to suit themselves. The boy who has the same studio with me insists on doing all his work in the morning, so I let him go right ahead with his good intentions. Whereupon I have breakfast in my room, while reading Catullus, Goethe, or Schiller, and enjoying Grandfather’s blue dressing gown and red morocco slippers to the full—and thus I read and write letters and usually dress shortly before lunch, having passed the ideal “gentleman’s morning.”38

Even at this young age, Kirkpatrick was outspoken and judgmental about music that he encountered. These missives reveal an opinionated young man, holding forth sometimes to the point of arrogance. During the summer of 1925 alone, he ranted about Stravinsky’s “rotten” piano sonata and Beethoven’s “outstandingly mediocre” sonata op. 26, while praising Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin.39 He also criticized harshly—perhaps even cruelly— some of his friends’ music during this time in France. One of his first important contacts in France was the American conductor, composer, and flautist Quinto Maganini, with whom he would perform often during his early career. Maganini was studying composition with Boulanger, and Kirkpatrick declared him the “most interesting” student at Fontainebleau that summer, writing that “we disagree on just enough to make the world go round.”40 In 1927, Kirkpatrick transcribed Maganini’s piece “La Rhumba” for piano solo, making it one of his earliest published editions (it sold a respectable 150 copies).41 Maganini frequently appeared in Kirkpatrick’s letters home as a dear friend with whom he took trips, talked about music, and developed as a musician. Yet Maganini could also feel the full force of Kirkpatrick’s burgeoning critical

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vocabulary. A 1929 letter to Maganini shows just how blunt Kirkpatrick had become in critiques of his friends’ music. Kirkpatrick wrote: “Your concert, as a whole, left me with a pretty definite idea that you’re on the wrong track in pursuing with such tenacity your ambition to write the sort of serious music to which you aspire. Well as I know yourself and your music, I could recognize no main current of thought or expression to form the backbone of your composition as a whole.”42 Maganini and his bruised ego returned fire, cutting to the heart of Kirkpatrick’s dandyism of that period: “It seems that you are perilously near that stage of superciliousness which eats its way like a poison. To be sophisticated is one thing but to be so far gone as to become immature is another.”43 Despite the vitriol of this exchange, the two quickly smoothed things over, and Kirkpatrick’s performances with Maganini during the early thirties were among his few steady engagements after he left France. Between the summer of 1926 and the end of the summer session at Fontainebleau in September of 1927, Kirkpatrick followed a fairly steady trajectory in his development as a pianist. He continued to be supported by his family, receiving $1,000 to study during the course of the winter, and he took his first professional position as a pianist, accompanying Boulanger’s conducting class for 200 francs a month.44 He considered studying at Juilliard, but dismissed the school: “The Juilliard place seems to be exclusively for those who can’t get their musical educations otherwise than by charity and so that’s that.”45 Instead, he moved to Paris in October of 1926, and stayed at 38 Rue Vaneau through Christmas, studying with Philipp and Boulanger.46 Although ostensibly enrolled in the École Normale de Musique, he lamented the fact that he seldom went there, since all of Boulanger’s classes were at her home.47 Despite the subsequent prestige of being a Boulanger pupil, Kirkpatrick wrote little about his own time with the famous teacher. She received only passing mention in his entire correspondence from 1925 onward. Eventually he settled on taking her course at the École Normale and one private lesson a month.48 A later Boulanger pupil and friend of Kirkpatrick, Elliott Carter, wrote a detailed memoir of his own work with her. Carter’s essay, written in 1985, gives some impression of what it was like to be Boulanger’s pupil during the 1920s and 1930s.49 Carter studied with Boulanger from 1932 until 1935. In several important respects his situation was similar to Kirkpatrick’s. He was an American; he had attended an Ivy League school (Harvard), but had not majored in music as an undergraduate; he was talented but not conservatory trained. During his studies with Boulanger, Carter was even on the same allowance—$1,000 per year. Carter also provides a clue as to where Kirkpatrick may have gotten his start as a fastidious copyist: Boulanger insisted on immaculate copies of counterpoint exercises. Carter

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himself recalled walking across Paris at night just so that he could copy Bach cantatas for Boulanger from ten at night until two or three in the morning. Kirkpatrick’s beautifully clear manuscript, which he achieved with only a fountain pen—no ruler—was one reason he began copying music for composers living and working in Paris at the time. Carter remembered that Boulanger emphasized discipline and an attention to craftsmanship in every musical detail in her lessons, and “while the teaching . . . was in many ways immediately effective, it produced no real result until a number of years after I had left.”50 She insisted that Carter work through the strictest exercises in two-part harmony, and master them completely before proceeding to three-, four-, and up to eight-part counterpoint exercises. If Kirkpatrick’s experience with Boulanger was anything like Carter’s, Boulanger’s impact on his sensibility is best observed through the systematic discipline that Kirkpatrick brought to his projects later in life. Giles Gilbert, Kirkpatrick’s childhood friend, reconnected with Kirkpatrick in Paris during 1927. Although the two had played four-hand piano together while they were students at Lawrenceville, their encounters in Europe were fraught with the tension of competitive young men vying for the same career path. Gilbert wrote to Marguerite Kirkpatrick in June, noting that Jack was “musically far above most of our well-known pianists, and mechanically just about their equal.” Gilbert described himself as a “pupil” in relationship to Jack, and even though Jack could be “tight as a clam as to his opinions,” Gilbert thought of himself as having “nothing to give in exchange.”51 Some of Gilbert’s awe of Kirkpatrick could be attributed to youthful insecurity, since Gilbert would go on to have a fine career on the West coast, playing with orchestras in Portland, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.52 Yet he was also one of the first to comment on the paradoxical combination of Kirkpatrick’s capacity to teach his peers and his aloof, enigmatic bearing. Gilbert was also there when Kirkpatrick played his first reviewed concert in Paris on June 14, 1927, accompanying Magdeleine Greslé in the Salle de L’Hotel Majestic. Kirkpatrick and Greslé paid seventy-six dollars of their own money to stage the concert, which received mildly favorable reviews.53 The Galois found his playing “almost like marble—of fine material, but cold”; Le Courier Musical found his playing “more charming than powerful,” and his accompaniment “delicate and nuanced.”54 Even at this early date, Kirkpatrick had some status in the Parisian musical scene. He made the cover of the musical concert periodical Le Guide du Concert et des Théâtres Lyriques on June 10, 1927—during a week when Cortot was giving master classes every day, and Casals, Hess, Thibauld, and Guilbert were also engaged to perform (fig. 1.3).55 Bit by bit, Kirkpatrick was starting to specialize in the American repertoire with which he later became so closely associated. Near the end

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of the summer, Daniel Gregory Mason came to Fontainebleau to give a lecture recital (assisted by Kirkpatrick, Maganini, and others) about “The Present Situation of the American Composer,” which featured Mason’s own works.56 Shortly after Kirkpatrick returned to New York in October 1927, he penned a brief letter to Charles Ives.57 The tone of Kirkpatrick’s note seems positively humble compared to that of the larger-than-life persona in his other correspondence from the time. “Would I be troubling you too much to ask you how I could obtain a copy of your ‘Concord, Mass.’ Sonata?” Kirkpatrick wrote Ives. “I am an amateur musician on the brink of becoming a professional, and very much interested in almost anything concerning American music.”58 Ives replied immediately, promising to send the piece that, twelve years later, Kirkpatrick would play in Town Hall with spectacular results for both composer and performer. In retrospect, the way in which Kirkpatrick came across Ives’s music was quite haphazard. He saw the Concord Sonata almost by accident on Katherine Ruth Heyman’s piano in Paris.59 Although Heyman had been playing Ives’s music both in New York and Paris during the 1920s, Ives was still by no means a well-known composer. Kirkpatrick’s relative distance from New York’s modern music scene would have further insulated him from Ives’s small but loyal following in the late 1920s. The point worth noting here is that Kirkpatrick first encountered Ives in expatriate France, a fact seemingly at odds with Ives’s mythic persona as a thoroughly American composer. In most accounts, Katherine Ruth Heyman is simply described as the woman who introduced Kirkpatrick to Ives’s music.60 In reality, her impact on Kirkpatrick’s life went far deeper. Heyman’s biography has yet to be written, though she was an important champion of Scriabin and Ives in the early twentieth century. The young Ezra Pound was infatuated with Heyman (who did not reciprocate), and her charismatic presence entranced Kirkpatrick.61 In particular, she introduced Kirkpatrick to Christian Science and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy.62 Christian Science represented Kirkpatrick’s first break with the Protestantism of his family, and his correspondence reveals both the zeal with which he practiced it and the dismay it caused his family. He reported in December of 1930 that he was able to stop using glasses and eye drops with the aid of Christian Science practices; his mother begged him not to “overdo it” or “become fanatical.”63 Some of Heyman’s other theories, drawn from her involvement with the Scriabin circle in New York and the Theosophical Society, also became important parts of Kirkpatrick’s thinking.64 Her book The Relationship of Ultramodern to Archaic Music verges on being impenetrable at points, yet it was at the top of the list of books that Kirkpatrick sent for in 1931 upon his return to the United States, and Kirkpatrick was fascinated with the

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mystical abstraction of Heyman’s writing.65 Kirkpatrick’s interest in esoteric religion continued throughout his life and raised more than one eyebrow among his friends and colleagues: Elliott Carter remembered that Kirkpatrick’s wife, Hope Gardiner Miller, swung a pendulum over her food before eating it, and Helen Boatwright has wondered if John’s conspicuous praying in Sage Chapel at Cornell was meant to cover up other beliefs.66 Kirkpatrick stayed in the United States from October 1927 through April 1928, spending December playing piano in a theater in Washington DC.67 He also played a single concert with Maurice Ravel during this stateside sojourn, in Albany.68 In February 1928, he performed with Aaron Copland (Copland and Kirkpatrick had met two years earlier, as fellow students of Boulanger).69 Later that year, Kirkpatrick became the first person to write an article about Copland. Titled “On Copland’s Music,” the piece appeared in the Fontainebleau Alumni Bulletin, and was also Kirkpatrick’s first published essay. Kirkpatrick’s penchant for expansive prose was evident in the first paragraph of this article: It was by a strange coincidence that, when applications were in order in 1921 for entry into the brand new Conservatoire Americain de Fontainebleau, the first student to register was one whom many of us now consider the most distinguished musician to emanate from the historic palace. We would like to attach thereto some symbolic implication, a sort of mystic inauguration, but we must be content with supposing that, inasmuch as posterity has judged it as the most important of the first year registrations, it may well have been the most impatient.70

As Vivian Perlis has explored, the two enjoyed an active friendship.71 One of Kirkpatrick’s earliest arrangements was a two-piano reduction of Copland’s Piano Concerto, which Kirkpatrick found to be the pinnacle of the young Copland’s output: “It is difficult to think of a more beautiful projection, in modern music, of an intense and healthy ecstasy.”72 When Copland published the piece in 1929 through Cos Cob press, however, Kirkpatrick was upset about not receiving a fee. Godwin Kalamus, the vice-president of Cos Cob Press, smoothed things over by offering Kirkpatrick $15.50.73 Although it may have seemed petty to Kalamus and Copland for Kirkpatrick to bicker about such a small fee, Kirkpatrick’s fortunes—financial and otherwise—had changed rapidly between the time that he wrote “On Copland’s Music” and the time that the Copland arrangement was published. The twelve months beginning in May of 1928, following his return to France, were pivotal and tumultuous for Jack. Although he fell in love and began his career as an editor in earnest, he also suffered a massive crisis of confidence in his abilities as a pianist. His family back home was

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increasingly fractured, too, with his father’s death in the fall of 1928, followed almost immediately by a downturn in the family business and his brother’s high-profile divorce from Anne Waterman, heiress to her family’s pen company.74 His mother returned to Greenwich, Connecticut (her home town) in April of 1929, ending four generations of Kirkpatrick residence in New York.75 The stock market crash of October 1929 appears to have caused further belt-tightening within the family; Marguerite sent a desperate cable to Jack the following month: “COME HOME IMMEDIATELY IF WISH BRING BELONGINGS . . . FINANCIAL STRAIN HEAVY.”76 Marguerite’s outburst made the situation seem much more dire than it was; the family continued to support Kirkpatrick for several more years, and Marguerite herself was able to visit him in Paris in 1930. At the same time, Marguerite’s telegram was the first indication that there might not be unlimited resources to support Jack’s studies, and his return to Greenwich two years later was the consequence of a variety of factors: lack of money, Jack’s sense of his own maturity, and possibly a simple desire to be closer to his family. In June 1928, Jack moved to 49 Rue Bonaparte, along the northern edge of Montparnasse, and promptly sank into a depression. His dreams of a sudden leap forward in his own piano technique—recall that when he had written Ives the preceding October he felt himself on the “brink” of being a professional—had failed to materialize.77 Having committed himself to specializing in American repertoire, he found that the virtuosity required by some contemporary American piano music remained beyond his reach. His increasingly cerebral approach to music led him to doubt Philipp’s intuitive teaching method; he wrote to his mother that “if Philipp told me to insert another arbitrary crescendo, I thought I would go mad.”78 That summer was also the tipping point in Kirkpatrick’s progress from impulsive, lazy student to obsessively meticulous man. He gave a frank assessment of himself in his letter to Philipp explaining his decision to switch teachers.79 He began by characterizing himself as an “instinctive person,” and flagellating himself for his failure to integrate Philipp’s teachings fully into his own technique. He did not blame Philipp, at least not in this letter, for his failure to make satisfactory progress. Instead, his break with Philipp—who stood at the center of the French musical establishment—seems to have been part of a self-conscious decision to restyle himself as an analytically oriented performer of modern music. Kirkpatrick closed his impassioned letter to Philipp with a glimmer of hope for his future as a pianist: “Now I see very clearly my three lazy years, but it was not a complete waste of time, since, in the process of all my activities here and there I feel liberated of all illusions, misunderstanding, and preconceived notions, etc, which made a real beginning impossible. At last I have the first truth.”80

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Shortly thereafter, he began studying with Louta Nouneberg (herself a student of Leschetitzky), whose pedagogic approach seems highly empirical compared to Philipp’s, with its “arbitrary” crescendos. Nouneberg had filmed famous pianists playing, and, by analyzing their movements in slow motion, had found what she believed were the common foundations of virtuoso piano technique.81 Although Kirkpatrick’s musical crisis was simmering below the surface for some time, his father’s death on August 4, 1928, appears to have been completely unexpected.82 Except for providing financial support for Jack’s studies in Paris, John Kirkpatrick Sr. seems conspicuous in Jack’s life mainly by his absence. Kirkpatrick seldom mentioned his father, and almost never wrote to him while he was in France, preferring to address virtually all correspondence to his mother. In a later interview, Kirkpatrick remained tight-lipped about his father, noting only that his father “had inherited a certain vicarious interest in the arts because my grandfather used to be an enthusiast for Italian opera.”83 As a result, Kirkpatrick’s relationship with his father remains somewhat obscure. Kirkpatrick’s brother Tom became something of a surrogate parent following John Sr.’s death, and a bemused audience to his younger brother’s adventures in Paris. “I have often said,” John noted later, “that we divided the family qualities between us. We didn’t share a single one.”84 Tom raised John’s allowance to $150 per month, and was warmly supportive of his younger brother’s career, even as the family fortunes declined precipitously and he considered liquidating the family jewelry business.85 Tom also began attending New York Philharmonic concerts in an attempt to learn more about his brother’s chosen profession.86 His letters to John were always warm, although at times he alludes elliptically to what he must have seen as John’s hedonistic lifestyle, noting that John’s boarding room accommodations were “conducive to . . . bad morals,” and admonishing him to remove “incriminating evidence” from his Paris flat before their mother saw it.87 Kirkpatrick showed remarkable resilience following the setbacks of the summer of 1928. By Thanksgiving of that year, his new commitment to discipline had manifested itself in a series of projects as a music copyist. Although he had copied a few pieces before this point—for example, he had duplicated Copland’s own arrangement of the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra in 1926—it was not until his family’s fortunes began to decline that he began actively looking for outside work.88 That fall he arranged Virgil Thomson’s Symphony on a Hymn Tune for two pianos.89 By February 1929, Kirkpatrick was copying Roy Harris’s American Portrait, and was also helping Harris with his Piano Sonata. Kirkpatrick’s work with Harris is of particular interest; while working as a copyist, he started to suggest revisions to Harris’s works. He began modestly, with some suggestions

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on pedaling in December 1928, which Harris appreciated.90 By November 1929, however, Harris had tired of Kirkpatrick’s comments, and imperiously closed a letter to Kirkpatrick: “Please; sir John, don’t try to convince me that the piece is not right—it would be such a pity to waste both of our talents.”91 Although increasingly focused on American music, Kirkpatrick also befriended Igor Stravinsky near the end of his studies in France. He enjoyed a close relationship with the Stravinsky family, taking several lessons with Stravinsky about his Concerto (1923–24) while other members of Stravinsky’s family watched.92 Kirkpatrick played four-hand piano with Stravinsky’s son, and had even vacationed with the whole family in April of 1931.93 Earlier that spring, Kirkpatrick was almost selected to play piano at the Paris premiere of Symphony of Psalms.94 He was also starting to meet important European performers, as well. He played in a master class for Cortot in 1930 and was scheduled to meet the French conductor Pierre Monteux (but apparently never did) in the spring of 1931.95 Kirkpatrick’s time in Paris ended with a triumphant recital on April 14, 1931, at Salle Chopin, a smaller hall in the same building as the Salle Pleyel. He played a massive, demanding program (which, notably, featured no American music): Bach’s Italian Concerto, nine Chopin études, Scriabin’s fourth sonata, Stravinsky’s Serenade, and Debussy’s Homage à Rameau and L’isle joyeuse. The Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune declared that he had “a fine mechanism, power, [and] authority.” Gustave Bret, writing for the French newspaper L’Intransigent, declared that “M. John Kirkpatrick has seduced the establishment by his playing.” Other reviews in Excelsior, Journal des Debats, Semaine à Paris, and Figaro were similarly enthusiastic.96 When Kirkpatrick returned stateside in May 1931, he brought with him a well-developed network of contacts. Stravinsky, Boulanger, Harris, Thomson, Copland, Heyman, Ravel, and others all knew Kirkpatrick, and admired his commitment to new music.97 He could have continued to cultivate these connections more easily in Paris or New York than in Connecticut, where he lived with his mother for most of the 1930s. Yet the reality of his financial situation loomed, and, having given a major recital that was favorably reviewed, perhaps Kirkpatrick felt that he had the experience necessary to return to the United States and build a career there. He wrote to Katherine Ruth Heyman in November 1931, asking her to pack up his belongings at 49 Rue Bonaparte; the fact that he did not move out of his apartment himself suggests that he may have planned to return, to maintain a presence in Paris, only to swerve away from that course of action at the last moment.98 Whatever the reasons, Kirkpatrick returned home a mature musician, but maintained a fairly

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low profile: he did not play another major recital until his Town Hall debut in 1936.

Struggling in Connecticut (1931–39) Marguerite Kirkpatrick’s home at 171 Field Point Road in Greenwich served as John’s base of operations during the 1930s, and was well situated for a pianist who had completed his education but was not yet financially independent. The Kirkpatrick house was a short walk to the train station, and from there it was less than an hour to Grand Central Station. The small town was also close to Stamford, Cos Cob, and only a little more than an hour’s drive from Ives’s home in West Redding. Kirkpatrick took advantage of this particular location, increasing his contact with American composers, demonstrating a penchant for grandly conceived concerts in Stamford, and giving two major solo recitals in New York. Kirkpatrick essentially stopped editing between 1931 and 1937, restarting his editorial engagement with American composers only near the end of the decade. Instead, Kirkpatrick focused on establishing himself as a performer in and around New York. A list of performances that Kirkpatrick compiled shows that he conceptualized his performing career in terms of three overlapping spheres. He categorized his performances depending on whether he played as an assisting artist, a soloist, or a participant in an extended concert series.99 Kirkpatrick gave comparatively few solo recitals during the 1930s, only about two every year. It seems that playing with others was his preferred mode of making music in the 1930s and after. Kirkpatrick wasted no time in getting to know composers active in New York. Aaron Copland introduced Kirkpatrick to Henry Cowell early in 1932, and Kirkpatrick played Copland’s Piano Variations at the New School for Social Research in New York for a lecture given by Cowell on February 10.100 Another important performance venue for Kirkpatrick was the Yaddo festival in Saratoga Springs, New York. In April 1932, Kirkpatrick played Harris’s Piano Sonata at the first Yaddo festival.101 Yaddo was a major site for the development of American music in the first half of the twentieth century; the 1932 festival was particularly significant, since Copland, together with the baritone Hubert Linscott, premiered seven of Ives’s songs. This was Kirkpatrick’s introduction to Ives’s songs, which eventually became a source of fascination to him. Kirkpatrick’s repertoire was not limited to American music; he continued to fill in gaps in his own musical education. In 1934 and 1935, for example, Kirkpatrick began a series of concerts with Ann Luckey, a private music teacher based in Stamford. Over the years, the series varied from between

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eleven and eighteen concerts per annum, and was designed to survey the whole history of Western music. Kirkpatrick and Luckey had a steady following in eastern Connecticut: they gave eight distinct series between February 1934 and December 1939. A 1937 concert program explained that the concerts were “designed to bring the hearer into intimate contact with certain important compositions, the plan being to choose one work for each meeting and perform it twice, introducing it the first time with general references to its background as a work of art, and the second time with a brief analysis, playing over such parts as seem of special moment, or as may be requested.”102 These ambitious series probably also had an autodidactic purpose for Kirkpatrick, since he did not study music history at Princeton, and made no mention of it during his training in France (beyond what he gleaned from Boulanger during her analysis course). These concerts help to show that although Kirkpatrick became known chiefly for his involvement with American music, he had a broad base of general knowledge from which he constantly drew. Kirkpatrick gave two Town Hall recitals while he lived in Connecticut: one in 1936 and one in 1939. Taken together, they constituted his major efforts to enter into the American concert scene. Prior to his concert in 1936, the thirty-one year old Kirkpatrick acquired professional management for the first time. Kirkpatrick’s first agent was Richard Copley, whose roster included the celebrated pianist Josef Hofmann. The fact that Copley took on Kirkpatrick as a client gives some impression of Kirkpatrick’s rising stock in the United States. Yet he was still far from independent: Kirkpatrick’s brother essentially underwrote the 1936 concert by purchasing 100 tickets.103 Kirkpatrick performed the Griffes Sonata, the Copland Variations, “Emerson” from Ives’s Concord Sonata, the Harris Sonata, and three short pieces by Gottschalk.104 The New York Times ran a moderately favorable review, declaring that the concert “rendered more than ample approval for his strong propensity for the modern school of music.” The unnamed critic also noted, however, that the program “did nothing in any way to test the keyboard capabilities of the recitalist. It was quite apparent, however, that the pianist’s firmness, sureness, strength and unerring technical facility in the projection of these rhapsodic harmonies did strike a responsive chord in the listeners.”105 By contrast, no critic who reviewed Kirkpatrick’s Town Hall concert on January 20, 1939, in which he premiered the Concord Sonata and also played Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata, criticized him for lack of ambition. Robert A. Simon, writing for the New Yorker, gushed “What was easily the most astonishing achievement of the week was John Kirkpatrick’s performance of Charles E. Ives’ second piano sonata. . . . Mr. Kirkpatrick handled it with no apparent effort, and lent to it an improvisatory manner that seemed exactly right for this music.”106 With the benefit of hindsight,

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it is clear that Kirkpatrick’s performance was more than just the achievement of the week. This concert has gone on to acquire the glow of a watershed moment, both for Kirkpatrick and for American concert music at large. The recital was years in the making: Kirkpatrick had been playing the Waldstein since 1935, and he had owned the score to the Concord since 1927 (though he did not commit to learning it until 1934).107 This Town Hall recital was much more challenging than his first: both the Concord and the Waldstein are massively demanding pieces, and he had premiered the Concord only in the fall of 1938 in Cos Cob. The risk, however, brought rewards. The concert solidified Kirkpatrick’s reputation as a serious performer of new American music, and precipitated his entrance into the American academic system, where musicians were increasingly turning in order to find long-term employment. By the time the congratulations started pouring in following this landmark recital, it was clear that the eight years Kirkpatrick spent struggling to find his place in the American music milieu had been largely successful. The thirty-three-year-old Kirkpatrick did not become a star overnight, exactly, following the premiere of the Concord Sonata. The game he was playing, however, had changed. He had gone from the status of an aspiring pianist, to one who had demonstrated a level of professional accomplishment that warranted a career. If he had felt close to musical maturity in 1927, when he first wrote to Ives and saw himself being on the “brink,” the New York premiere of the Concord marked the beginning of the professionally mature Kirkpatrick: well-connected, irrepressibly opinionated, and increasingly independent. Although there was no way to predict it at the time, the premiere of Concord was the beginning of a circuitous path, as full of coincidence as it was intention, that ended with Kirkpatrick firmly situated within American higher education—the very system he fought so hard to escape as a young man—by the 1950s. The many chapters of Kirkpatrick’s life defy easy summary. Despite his interest in genealogy, he seldom reflected on his own past as his life went on, and at times it requires effort to remember that the diverse personae he embodied—lazy teenager, dandyish twenty-something, struggling recitalist, tenured professor—were in fact all the same person. No phase in Kirkpatrick’s life necessarily predicted the next one. At some essential level, he was a wanderer; his career took on its accepted meaning as Ives’s amanuensis only after decades of musical exploration. In this respect, Kirkpatrick’s gradual withdrawal from the busy, bright life of a concert pianist and his decision to live within the more insular halls of academe makes his life’s path not unlike that of the narrator in Ives’s song “The World’s Highway,” who toured the world only to retreat to contemplative peace. In the final stanza of that song, the narrator sings:

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I left my wandering far and wide, The freedom and far away; But my garden blooms with sweet content That’s not on the world’s highway.108

The editorial Kirkpatrick—the sober and diligent scholar-performer whose interventions are the primary concern of the following chapters—was part self-invention, part professional necessity, and part historical happenstance. It is to his verdant and exquisitely cultivated editorial garden that we now turn.

Chapter Two

Mentorship Music Publishing It was a strange group: a destitute Southerner, a spy, and a wunderkind. Yet Hunter Johnson (1906–98), Ross Lee Finney (1906–97), and Robert Palmer (1915–2010) shared a relationship as Kirkpatrick’s main collaborators during the 1940s. The Second World War was raging, and Kirkpatrick was establishing himself in American academe.1 It was a decade full of struggle for each of these composers—Johnson trying to gain recognition, Finney trying to return to composition after a harrowing experience in Europe during the war, and Palmer trying to come out from under the wing of his mentor Roy Harris. The fruits of these composers’ labors with Kirkpatrick during this decade were published by Valley Music Press and Music Press, two firms that flourished in the years during and immediately after the Second World War. Between the two presses, Kirkpatrick worked on twelve editions which spanned most of the decade. His involvement with both presses is summarized in tables 2.1 and 2.2. This chapter offers an account of Kirkpatrick’s role in these two presses.2 He was a founding member of Valley Music Press, and supervised a special American Piano Music imprint at Music Press. Finney, Johnson, and Palmer stand out as the composers with whom Kirkpatrick developed particularly close working relationships in these contexts. What ricocheted between Kirkpatrick and his composers ran the gamut from the most intimate aspects of their lives to broad questions of American musical culture. Over the course of their work together, national, political, and cultural identities became inextricably entangled. Furthermore, these composers and their editor make a claim on our attention because of the degree to which they reveal a largely forgotten slice of American musical life: university-based composers struggling to write publishable music during a pivotal period in American concert music composition. Broadly speaking, the works Kirkpatrick issued through these two presses reflect the move toward tonally oriented composition, and the related

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Table 2.1. Kirkpatrick’s Music Press editions Composer

Work

Year

Chanler, Theodore

Toccata

1947

Farwell, Arthur

Navajo War Dance No. 2, op. 29

1947

Finney, Ross Lee

Fourth Piano Sonata

1947

Foster, Stephen

“Anadolia,” Old Folks Quadrilles [Planned, never published]

n/a

Gottschalk, Louis Moreau

El Cocoyé, Grand Caprice Cubain di Bravura

1947

Gottschalk, Louis Moreau

Souvenir de Porto Rico, March des Gibaros, op. 31 1947

Johnson, Hunter

Piano Sonata

1948

Lessard, John

Mask

1947

Table 2.2. Kirkpatrick’s Valley Music Press editions Composer

Work

Year

Carter, Elliott

Voyage

1945

Finney, Ross Lee

Third Piano Sonata

1945

Johnson, Hunter

For an Unknown Soldier

1944

Palmer, Robert

Three Preludes

1943

search for a national style, that took place in America during the late 1930s and early 1940s. This shift toward musical accessibility had its origins during the Great Depression. It took many forms, from Aaron Copland’s overt populism to Virgil Thomson’s scores for WPA-sponsored films (and his later operas with Gertrude Stein) to Roy Harris’s theory of “autogenetic” composition to Ruth Crawford Seeger’s work on behalf of American folk music to Elie Siegmeister’s, Marc Blitzstein’s, and other composers’ efforts to write music for the burgeoning labor movement.3 If any single trend in concert music were to be highlighted from the United States during the 1940s, many might choose the search for a symphonic style that would be recognized as distinctly national in flavor—a goal to match the ideal of the great American novel. Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, and William Schuman were at the forefront of this movement, writing symphonies, ballets, and other large orchestral pieces that have largely been viewed as a retreat from the iconoclasm of high modernism and a search for a more broadly appealing idiom. Although by the 1950s much of the impetus for this style had passed, with serialism, electronic music, and

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indeterminacy moving to occupy central positions in American compositional practice, the intensity with which nationalism permeated the forefront of American compositional practice—a vanguard which, both before and after, was defined by technical innovation—is an important context for understanding what was considered publishable at the time. The composers with whom Kirkpatrick worked found themselves both inside and outside of this cultural context of accessibility, conservatism, and nationalism. On the one hand, Johnson, Palmer, and Finney were writing in predominantly tonal idioms that can be identified with the prevailing trends of the 1940s. Hence their works could potentially be profitable if and when they were published, and financial concerns were central to all decisions made at these presses. But there were forces working against them, as well. Finney, Johnson, and Palmer were part of a distinctly later generation than the modernists who started to write music during the 1920s and who continued to dominate American composition. Although Finney, Johnson, Palmer, and others have been largely neglected by a historiographic mainstream that has emphasized developments for symphonic writing around this time, these composers remain important to the present story because they provide a clear sense of how Kirkpatrick related to composers as colleagues and peers during the period in which he established himself as a professional editor. Kirkpatrick’s work with these composers might be most productively understood in terms of mentorship, even if some of them embraced this kind of relationship more readily than others. Johnson and Palmer were eager for a guiding hand to aid their development as composers; Finney and Roy Harris brushed off much of Kirkpatrick’s advice. Seeing Kirkpatrick as a mentor—a coach, even—also underscores the fundamentally practical nature of these editorial collaborations. The overarching goal was to get composers’ music out in front of the public, and while the process was not always swift—some of these editions were almost ten years in the making— the elaborate philosophical and ideological edifices that undergirded his editions of the music of Ives and Ruggles are mostly absent from his editions for Valley Music Press and Music Press. As a mentor, Kirkpatrick assisted these composers in ways that went beyond preparing their music for the printed page; he personally underwrote publication costs, paid for composers’ travel expenses, performed their music extensively, and solicited patrons on their behalf. His generosity went hand in hand with his growing sense of prerogative both as an editor and as an agent of the presses who published these editions. With Finney, Johnson, and Palmer, we find Kirkpatrick not only skillfully wielding the editorial pencil, but also gingerly operating the levers of power at these music publishing firms to promote a particular view of what these composers had to offer. Kirkpatrick’s efforts to reconcile these two roles—friend

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to the composers, representative of the presses—animated his interactions with the dynamic personalities at these two presses, the fortunes of which overlapped, intersected, and sometimes collided.

Music Press and Valley Music Press By the mid-1940s, several dozen small music publishing firms were issuing the music of American composers. Although detailed legal arrangements, frequent advertising, and fancy letterhead gave organizations like Music Press and Valley Music Press an aura of heft and institutional gravity, in reality they were small firms, and their borders were more permeable than their public façades suggested. Both were run on a shoestring—each had but a single employee who was paid on a regular basis—and were sustained more by the passion of their members than by their financial solvency.4 Individuals moved freely among many presses; few composers had exclusive contracts with a single publisher. Kirkpatrick himself, although associated with Valley Music Press and Music Press, also arranged one of the first pieces for Cos Cob Press, Copland’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.5 The composers Theodore Chanler and Virgil Thomson were both published first by Cos Cob and then later by Music Press; Aaron Copland helped to lead both Cos Cob and Arrow Music Press; Alma Wertheim, the primary patron of Cos Cob, also supported at least one Arrow Music publication; and Quincy Porter and Ross Lee Finney issued works with both the Society for Publication of American Music and Valley Music Press. Music Press was founded in 1940 and remained a small operation throughout its existence. It was initially run out of 113 West Fifty-Seventh Street in New York, in the Steinway Building, just two blocks from Arrow Music Press and the recently relocated New Music. By the end of 1949, when Mercury Music acquired Music Press, the small startup had published more than 250 works.6 These ranged from seventeenth-century Italian music all the way to the most recent compositions and included both of Virgil Thomson’s operas that featured libretti by Gertrude Stein (The Mother of Us All in 1947, and Four Saints in Three Acts in partnership with Arrow Music Press the following year).7 In 1948, the Music Library Association named Music Press as the publisher of five of the ten best works issued that year: Thomson’s Four Saints, Richard Donovan’s Two Choral Preludes, Elliott Carter’s Piano Sonata, Ned Rorem’s “The Lordly Hudson,” and Paul Nordoff’s Lachrimae Christi.8 Richard Dana, the president of Music Press, wrote Kirkpatrick to inform him about its founding, but Kirkpatrick did not became involved with the firm as an editor until 1946.9 Dana, a great-grandson of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a New York socialite, a close associate of the Rockefeller family, and a book publisher by training, was an impatient man, prone to firing off

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daily letters to composers without waiting for a reply.10 He started Music Press with Carleton Sprague Smith, founder of the Music Library Association and head of the New York Public Library’s music division from 1931 to 1959, who was also his cousin. Music Press incorporated immediately, with Dana as president, Philip James as vice-president, Sprague Smith as secretary, and Moses Smith and Edwin J. Stringham as members. Taken together, this group constituted a largely conservative cross section of the musical establishment at the time. James, a composer, taught at New York University, and became known for his choral and vocal works. Moses Smith was originally a Boston-based critic writing for the Boston Evening Transcript, who later became notorious for writing a biography of Serge Koussevitzky that resulted in the conductor suing him for defamation.11 Stringham was an occasional composer and author of the music appreciation textbook Listening to Music Creatively. This pursuit of a corporate structure is one way in which Dana sought to organize his press differently from, for example, the composer-run model of Henry Cowell’s New Music. At the same time, although Dana was an amateur musician, he was an outsider to the existing networks of composers and performers in New York, which created something of an obstacle to cultivating the professional relationships needed to issue successful works through his press. On more than one occasion, he asked composers for “leads” to other composers, suggesting that he was trying to develop his own network of musical contacts from a relatively modest start.12 Dana’s work with the press was soon interrupted by the Second World War—the war’s impact surfaces throughout the story of these two presses, affecting both individuals and the music they were writing—and he did not write Kirkpatrick again until he was decommissioned from his post as an intelligence officer in early 1946.13 By that time, Music Press was launching a series of imprints revolving around the tastes of individual performers. Dana proposed that Kirkpatrick edit one such series and wrote to him that “I firmly believe it can be a useful and profitable thing.”14 By the fall of that year, Music Press had committed to carrying a series entitled “American Piano Music edited by John Kirkpatrick.” Kirkpatrick would publish a total of seven editions through this series, choosing works that ranged from Gottschalk to pieces completed just weeks before going to the printer. By March of 1947, Kirkpatrick’s new series was announced in Notes and Musical Quarterly with five titles: Stephen Foster’s “Anadolia,” and Old Folks Quadrilles (which was never published because of a copyright dispute); Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s Souvenir de Porto Rico, Arthur Farwell’s Navajo War Dance No. 2, Theodore Chanler’s Toccata, John Lessard’s Mask, and Ross Lee Finney’s Sonata No. 4.15 Dana and Kirkpatrick had agreed that the press would bear all the costs of publication, and after 200 copies of a work sold, Kirkpatrick would begin to collect a five-percent royalty. A year

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after that, Kirkpatrick had plans to publish works by Vincent Persichetti, Robert Palmer, and Hunter Johnson.16 Kirkpatrick’s editions did moderately well—in the first year of their publication, his editions for Music Press had sold 868 copies.17 No single piece, however, had sold more than the 200 copies necessary for Kirkpatrick to collect royalties. Kirkpatrick’s editions through Music Press were partially supported by Katherine Perkins, a wealthy resident of Greenwich (her first husband, James H. Perkins, was chairman of the board at the National City Bank of New York). She was an amateur musician herself (she played violin, musical saw, and cello) and keen to support Kirkpatrick’s musical development. In September 1938, she paid Roy Harris $1,000 to write a piano piece (which was never completed) for Kirkpatrick; in the 1940s she helped defray the cost of publication for Hunter Johnson’s For an Unknown Soldier and his Piano Sonata.18 Perkins supported Kirkpatrick’s projects for decades, sending Kirkpatrick $500 to partially underwrite his 1942 Town Hall recital, and later establishing a scholarship for one of Kirkpatrick’s more promising students at Cornell in 1950.19 They continued to correspond until shortly before Perkins’s death in August 1977.20 In response to a flattering letter from Perkins’s daughter later in the 1970s, Kirkpatrick wrote: “The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that I could never have grown into giving anybody anything like such an impression [of generosity] . . . without all the dear opportunities that Katherine kept putting in my way, all during a crucial growing time, bless her heart!”21 Despite fresh injections of cash from patrons like Perkins, by the fall of 1948 Music Press’s financial situation had become precarious. The first tremors became apparent that June, when Dana confided in Kirkpatrick that, for the first time, a composer, rather than Music Press, was bearing the costs of printing: Elliott Carter had offered to pay the expenses associated with his Piano Sonata.22 Within a year, Dana realized that the press had overreached by publishing so many works so quickly, and by April of 1949 they had suspended all publishing operations.23 Dana simply could not generate enough revenue to keep Music Press solvent, even as he attempted to expand the business by securing a distribution contract for the West Coast.24 By November 1949, Music Press was forced to sell its inventory to Mercury Music, a larger firm that was, in turn, acquired by Theodore Presser. By the time Music Press was sold, Kirkpatrick had made thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents for the seven editions he had edited for the firm.25 By contrast, Valley Music Press, which Kirkpatrick helped to found, sought the institutional support of Smith College and Mount Holyoke College to help sustain its activities. (The press took its name from the Connecticut River Valley, in which Smith and Mount Holyoke are situated.) As John Verall explained in a letter to Virgil Thomson:

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In this venture we gained the support of Smith College and Mount Holyoke College, where we all taught at the time. Our feeling was that it was most proper for the colleges to promote such an undertaking. We had a particular reason for this. It was our hope that many colleges throughout the country would follow our lead by creating similar publication ventures to serve the composers in their sections. . . . The colleges of America strike me as the correct sponsors of such publications because of the increased responsibility they have assumed in advancing the cause of music.26

Valley Music Press ran for twenty years, from 1942 until 1962, at which point Smith College became entirely responsible for its operations, and changed its name to New Valley Music Press.27 By that point, the press had issued fifty-five works. Though its output was small compared to that of Music Press, which issued almost five times as many works in less than a decade, Valley Music Press’s editions nevertheless represented a range of contemporary composers, with a particular emphasis on the music of Ross Lee Finney and Quincy Porter.28 Finney had been leading an early music editing operation under the auspices of Smith College Music Archives since at least 1938; Valley Music Press can thus be seen as a continuation of a relationship with an institutional patron that Finney had already cultivated.29 Smith College and Mount Holyoke College each contributed $200 per year to Valley Music Press to sustain its publications; New Valley Music Press, by contrast, received $400 per year exclusively from Smith College.30 Kirkpatrick’s edition of Palmer’s Three Preludes was among the first works issued by the press, and the arrangement with Palmer gives some impression of how the individual financial arrangements worked. John Verall explained the terms to Palmer in a letter: Valley Music Press would print 500 copies; Palmer would pay for half of the publication costs out of pocket, which totaled about thirty-five dollars in the case of the Preludes; for each copy that was sold, the revenue would be split equally between the composer and the press. After the press had recovered its portion of the publication costs, its fifty percent would go into a general publication fund. As the editor, Kirkpatrick would collect his fee up front, at a rate of fifty cents per page.31 Another piece by Palmer, his Second Piano Sonata, shows how Kirkpatrick served as an intermediary between the two presses, and reveals their fluid institutional boundaries. Kirkpatrick and Palmer began collaborating on the work in 1942.32 The Second Sonata resurfaced in 1946 when Palmer sought to publish it at Valley Music Press. Finney rejected the work, but wrote a conciliatory letter to Kirkpatrick, who had encouraged Finney to publish it. Finney defended his decision to Kirkpatrick, writing: “The Valley Press, as I have found by experience, is an expensive way for a composer to publish his music if he can publish through a commercial firm or even the Arrow Press. Since we have no hook-up with ACA or ASCAP the composer will receive a very much smaller income from the Valley Press publication.”33

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Kirkpatrick sent the piece to Music Press on Palmer’s behalf. But Dana was nervous about the publication prospects on financial grounds. Calculating that a run of 500 copies of the sonata would cost $425, Dana insisted on a guarantor for the publication: “Our Board feels at the moment with costs as above that we must have the full cost of manufacture guaranteed. In return we would pay a greater royalty to the composer, also to the guarantor, if desired. . . . We simply do not have the capital at the moment to invest more than four hundred dollars in the Palmer edition.”34 Kirkpatrick conceded the point, and ultimately Palmer’s Second Sonata was simply issued as a mimeographed printing of Kirkpatrick’s fair copy.35 Although Kirkpatrick helped to found Valley Music Press, he ultimately edited only a handful of works: Robert Palmer’s Three Preludes (1943), Johnson’s For an Unknown Soldier (1944), Elliott Carter’s song “Voyage” (1945), and Finney’s Third Piano Sonata (1945).36 The organization rapidly became geographically far flung: Verall left for Hawaii to work as a cryptographer during the Second World War, but later returned; Kirkpatrick moved to Ithaca in 1946 to begin his long tenure at Cornell; and Finney, after returning from service in France, subsequently left for the University of Michigan to become composer-in-residence in 1950.37 Even if Valley Music Press was more circumscribed in its goals than Music Press, it helped to bolster Kirkpatrick’s academic pedigree and provided an important counterbalance to his editorial work with the more commercially oriented Music Press.

Kirkpatrick’s Selection Criteria At first glance, the sheer diversity represented within Kirkpatrick’s editions for these two presses suggests there was no overarching logic to his selection process. He included pieces by both living and deceased composers, music that ranged from short character pieces (Farwell’s Navajo War Dance), to longer, more abstract works, like Johnson’s sonata. Although his work with the presses does not constitute a tidy portrait of a particular editorial aesthetic, when placed against the backdrop of larger contemporaneous trends, it points up many of the debates about composition that were active at the time. Kirkpatrick’s edition of Arthur Farwell’s Navajo War Dance for Music Press gives one example of how his selection process intersected with larger discourses in American music during the 1940s. Farwell, born in 1872, was a contemporary of Ives, and in the first decade of the twentieth century he had already established himself as a composer strongly associated with the use and arrangement of Native American music. In this respect Farwell can be seen as a pivotal figure in the history of American nationalism in music, since he followed MacDowell’s and Dvořák’s lead in using indigenous folk melodies as the basis for his compositions.

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For his part, Kirkpatrick appears to have been particularly interested in the “Indianist” facet of Farwell’s output. In 1941, Farwell already saw Kirkpatrick as a champion of his music, writing to him, “Fire away! I’m delighted to hear you play my ‘Horses’ and ‘War Dance’—and anything else you want to, anywhere, any time and any place on the program consistent with your taste.”38 Despite the vitality of Farwell’s letter, he and Kirkpatrick did not reach the proof stage of Navajo War Dance with the press until January of 1947.39 After the publication of Navajo War Dance Farwell hinted that some contemplation of his voice and place as a composer had come up while they were preparing the edition. “You have said you like me best in my Indian musical costume,” Farwell wrote to Kirkpatrick. “But I am nonetheless going to send you several of my polytonal studies which are creating something of an eager interest in certain pianistic circles.”40 It is not clear if Kirkpatrick ever received or commented on Farwell’s polytonal studies, op. 109, and Farwell died a few months after writing this letter. In Kirkpatrick’s listing of performances, however, the only Farwell works he played in public were Navajo War Dance, Pawnee Horses, and Plantation Melody.41 In other words, given the wide variety of music that Farwell wrote, Kirkpatrick’s choices of which pieces not to play were significant. This letter is of particular note because it also reveals that Kirkpatrick, consciously or not, was involved in the larger trend of promoting music that, through its incorporation of existing melodies, sought a distinctively American voice. The few times Dana sent Kirkpatrick unsolicited scores, Kirkpatrick tended to rebuff them, justifying his decisions with a rhetoric of “quality” and “maturity.”42 In 1947, for example, Dana sent him a number of works by composers who were not well known: one each by John Verall, Gardner Read, Vivien Harvey, Jeanne Behrend, Leonard Basham, Walter Spry, and Joseph Alexander, and two by Charles Jones. That Kirkpatrick dismissed them all could be seen merely as a sign that he wanted control over his series. But his reasons for dismissing these pieces hint at his vision for Music Press; above all, Kirkpatrick seemed concerned with presenting solidly constructed music by composers that he considered to be fully formed. As he put it in his one-line critique of Alexander’s Little Suite: “A little-artisanmusic, not at all an artist-music.” Other works suffered similar assessments: Jones’s pieces were “too generally affected”; Spry’s piece was “amateurish”; and Behrend’s Sonatine was “awfully nice first-rate-student’s music.”43 Behrend’s case underscores the power that an editor could have over a composer, as well as the whiff of patriarchy that clings to these presses: according to her New York Times obituary, Behrend stopped composing around the time that Kirkpatrick wrote this letter to Dana, as she “felt that opportunities for women in composing were too limiting.”44 Rather than relying on Dana, Kirkpatrick seems to have preferred to publish music that he had discovered on his own, as was the case with the music of Johnson, Finney, and Palmer.

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Kirkpatrick’s role as a mentor was not always appreciated. His relationship with Roy Harris, which had been uneasy since they met in the late 1920s, came to an abrupt end in 1943 for reasons related to Kirkpatrick’s spiritually inflected critique of Harris’s Fifth Symphony. Kirkpatrick had helped Harris copy various works during the time that they were both in France, and their relationship seemed tense even then. Yet they continued to correspond throughout the 1930s. In 1938, Harris was in the process of revising his song “La Primavera” with Kirkpatrick’s help and Katherine Perkins’s financial support.45 By 1943, the project had still not been finished, and their relationship fell apart in the wake of the premiere of Harris’s Fifth Symphony. This symphony was “dedicated to the heroic and freedom loving people of our great ally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” and was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Koussevitzky, followed by broadcast via shortwave in February of that year at the request of the USSR Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.46 Kirkpatrick listened to the broadcast and wrote a scathing letter quoting scripture at length to remind Harris of his duties as a leading American composer. “The soul doesn’t seem to be in a state of action,” Kirkpatrick wrote, “and the vertical chord-sequences absorb all the polyphonic strands in a kind of immense, static basket-weave.”47 Harris’s enraged reply, with its emphasis on the spiritual strand, hints that this may have been a recurrent theme in Kirkpatrick’s criticism of his music: “In one hearing by air waves of my new symphony you gave me a first class psycho-analysis: I am not consecrated to my art, I accept without returning, I am surrounded by “yes men” and I should get down on my knees more often.”48 Although not explicitly mentioned in Kirkpatrick’s letter, the overt Soviet sympathies on which Harris’s symphony were based likely formed part of the core of Kirkpatrick’s problem with the work—“an acceptance of a status quo,” as Kirkpatrick put it.49 More fundamentally, Kirkpatrick found the symphony, and perhaps Harris himself, lacking in spiritual depth. Kirkpatrick’s row with Harris is doubly significant here since it forms part of the background of his work with Hunter Johnson, a former student of Harris, who was preoccupied with Harris’s influence during his work with Kirkpatrick.

Hunter Johnson Hunter Johnson is barely remembered today, but during his life he managed to garner several important awards—a Rome Prize when he was twentyseven years old, a Guggenheim fellowship, an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters—and he was named the first composer laureate of his home state, North Carolina. He also wrote a number of ballets for Martha Graham’s dance company, including Letter to the World and The Scarlet Letter. His Piano Sonata was a particularly significant piece in Kirkpatrick’s

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repertoire—he performed it almost twice as many times as he did Ives’s Concord Sonata.50 Johnson’s most productive time as a composer was during the late 1930s and 1940s, the decade in which he did the bulk of his work with Kirkpatrick. During that time, his music was characterized by bold lyricism, striking chromaticism, and vital rhythmic drive. Richard Monaco, in his Grove article on Johnson, compared Johnson’s sound to that of Ives and Copland; Johnson himself saw his music in line with the work of Harris.51 When Kirkpatrick met Johnson in 1939, Johnson was living on the family farm with his parents in North Carolina (who, according to him, were “utterly disgusted” by his “inability to earn any money composing”), and he was penniless and thirsty for recognition.52 By that time, Johnson had already finished his schooling (first at the University of North Carolina, then at Eastman, where he studied with Harris) and taught at the University of Michigan (between 1929 and 1933). He had won a Rome Prize (in 1933), and also a MacDowell fellowship (1937). Yet he was unable to parlay his early successes into a self-supporting career. Kirkpatrick’s editorial work with Johnson was just one part of a broader lattice of support— money, career advice, and friendship—that he offered the composer. When Johnson complained to Kirkpatrick about being “broke flatter ’n a pancake,” Kirkpatrick sent him money in North Carolina so that he could come north to visit.53 He was also instrumental for Johnson professionally, writing in support of his 1941 Guggenheim Fellowship and helping him to secure a professorship at Cornell from 1948 to 1953.54 Kirkpatrick’s almost paternal relationship with Johnson is vividly evoked in one photograph of them together (fig. 2.1). Kirkpatrick dominates the frame, marking up a score, while Johnson looks on. If one didn’t know who these men were, it would be easy to believe that Kirkpatrick was correcting a student’s work while the pupil lingered to the side in attentive silence. Kirkpatrick’s work on Johnson’s For an Unknown Soldier (1938, rev. 1944), a piece for flute and strings, offers an example of how he also sought to help clarify for the composer the social context in which their work would be both placed and understood. This was the only piece that Johnson published with Valley Music Press. Johnson, who had been ill for much of 1943, convinced Kirkpatrick to advance him one hundred dollars so he could spend more time composing.55 He decided to focus on his Andante for Flute and Strings, since Carleton Sprague Smith had requested it.56 The piece, with its plaintive lament and understated string writing, opens with a haunting, meandering flute line which then develops into a dialogue with the string accompaniment (ex. 2.1). Although scored for somewhat different instruments, its overall aural effect is not unlike that of Ives’s wellknown The Unanswered Question. In 1944, Johnson and Kirkpatrick worked quickly to establish a performing score for the work, with much of their energy devoted to selecting an

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Example 2.1. Hunter Johnson, For an Unknown Soldier, mm. 1–7. © 1949 by the Valley Music Press.

appropriate title. Johnson explained to Kirkpatrick that the piece was written in response to the Spanish Civil War, and reflected Johnson’s “feelings as the loyalists faced defeat, for I was strongly partisan in their favor. It is not an expression of defeatism but rather one of pity.”57 Johnson suggested a profusion of titles. Kirkpatrick discarded “Litany for Flute and Strings: Not the Glory of War but the Pity,” “History for This Time,” “Prelude for This time,” “Prelude for Flute and Strings,” “Lento for Flute and Strings,” “Dark Lyric,” “Lyric Piece for Flute and Strings,” “Music for a Solemn Occasion,” “For Those Who Mourn,” and “For a Fallen Soldier.”58 Kirkpatrick drafted, but did not send, a letter opining on the first of these titles, and it stands as one of the few moments in which he directly commented on war in his correspondence: What worries me is that with that subtitle the piece would seem to pooh-pooh the Glory of War somewhat. . . . Actually the miserable or ghastly tragedies that characterize so many lives are the necessary, inevitable results of past causes, and being the perfect complement or (one might consider) the perfect teaching (to be reviewed, I suppose, in retrospect afterwards), they are, in their ultimate significance, supremely happy, because so necessary (as fulfillments of past Karma, or even as opportunities for self-sacrifice) to the soul’s growth and liberation.59

Kirkpatrick’s strange mix of rapture and indifference toward war’s atrocities is in keeping with his own belief on reincarnation—but also underscores how different his experience of the Second World War was from the that of the men with whom he collaborated. Over the course of their work, Kirkpatrick often seemed to be a teacher to the petulant Johnson. Johnson’s tone with Kirkpatrick ranged from defensive

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(“I don’t subscribe to the idea that there is one and only one way of writing a thing—in general yes, but there are many places where two or three ways are equally good,”)60 to starry-eyed (“I think every composer should have a friendly goad like you! One learns a lot of things about one’s own music that one never noticed before, besides learning more about composition in general,”)61 to borderline obsequious (“Incidentally I’m beginning to realize that American piano music only half ‘existed’ before you came along and completed the process,”)62 to anxiously confessional (“I hope to be able to compose again soon. If I have to stop now, my name, too, would have been writ in water.”).63 Johnson considered his Piano Sonata (1933 rev. 1947), to be a central work in his career—a casting off of insecurity and an assertion of his compositional maturity. The work was colored by his infatuation with Roy Harris’s music; he called Harris’s Piano Sonata a “Declaration of Independence” for American composition.64 In listening to Harris’s and Johnson’s sonatas one after the other, one hears passages of Johnson’s work that sound derivative to the point of paraphrase, particularly in his use of a declamatory passage to signal the beginning of the coda (ex. 2.2); bold handfuls of chromatic harmonies; the theme of his third movement, a scherzo (ex. 2.3); and finally the resolution of a lingering C♯/C♮ tonal ambiguity in the closing measures of the sonata. Example 2.2. (a) Hunter Johnson, Piano Sonata, mvt. 3, mm. 212–15. © 1949 by Theodore Presser Company. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission. (b) Roy Harris, Piano Sonata, coda, mm. 1–5. © 1931 by Cos Cob Press.

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Example 2.2. Concluded.

Example 2.3. (a) Hunter Johnson, Piano Sonata, mvt. 3, mm. 1–4. © 1949 by Theodore Presser Company. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission. (b) Roy Harris, Piano Sonata, mvt. 3, mm. 2–6. © 1931 by Cos Cob Press.

Johnson told Kirkpatrick that the Piano Sonata was “his earliest acknowledged work in the larger forms—obviously influenced in spots by Harris, but no more so, I trust than Mr. Beethoven was influenced by Pappy Haydn!”65 He described writing it “amid the rotting splendor of Rome,” during his year on the Rome Prize, and was eager for Kirkpatrick’s validation: “I’m curious to know how you feel this sonata compares with other contemporary American piano sonatas that you have played.”66 Even though Johnson recognized it as an important work for him as soon as he wrote it, he continued to revise it. In 1936, before he had even met Kirkpatrick, he completely

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rewrote it. With Kirkpatrick’s advice, he expanded the trio of the Scherzo in the summer of 1941. It was not until the fall of 1947, when Kirkpatrick had begun the series at Music Press, that they decided to issue a revised edition of Johnson’s sonata, which until then had circulated only in manuscript copies.67 Kirkpatrick’s editorial hand was surprisingly light in this revision. As he explained, their work during 1947 was “confined to details of harmony, instrumentation and timing, and to recomposing several transitions.”68 While confident about the sonata’s merit, Johnson, too, felt revisions were necessary. “It really is a rather astonishing piece,” he wrote to Kirkpatrick, “and now that I have really taken a look at it for the first time in ten years, I too am exasperated with parts and details of it.”69 Johnson had also come to reconcile his position vis-à-vis Roy Harris, writing: “The Harris influence, in general I mean, I consider quite legitimate—in fact I think mine is the more significant of the two [sonatas], if you’ll pardon me!”70 Kirkpatrick and Johnson completed their revision in a blistering six weeks. The collaboration gave Johnson occasion to articulate his vision of the sonata in prose, and his comments to Kirkpatrick suggest how deeply the influence from Harris ran. At the beginning of October, as they completed the revisions, Johnson wrote to Kirkpatrick: I really think it’s sort of a terrific sonata. As American (and Southern) as Thomas Wolfe, without (now, I hope) his inchoateness. . . . It has strong romantic elements, but in a strictly contemporary sense. It is an intense expression of the South, but hardly the moonlight & roses stuff. The nostalgia, dark brooding, frenzied gaiety, high rhetoric, & just plain brutal realism are all intermingled, with perhaps an element of naiveté you wouldn’t find in any other American composer except Ives.71

Considering the similarities between Johnson’s sonata and Harris’s, it is noteworthy that both men sought to style themselves not simply as American composers, but as regionalists, separate from the perceived hegemony of New York’s compositional scene.72 The rhetoric of the rural followed Johnson throughout his life. His obituary in a North Carolina newspaper continued this trope of regionalism and a retreat from both the urban and the urbane: “Although his talent as a composer drew him into the high society music scene of New York and other great cities in the United States . . . he always returned to the solitude and natural beauty of his family’s farm, where he lived alone in an isolated three-room cottage he called his studio.”73 Kirkpatrick himself wrote of the sonata: “In his first contacts with Europe, Johnson, like many young Americans, reacted strongly from the older civilization and felt impelled to assert his native qualities.”74 Kirkpatrick’s juxtaposition of “civilized” Europe with “native” America subtly suggests that he, too, saw Johnson as standing apart from more urban trends in American composition.

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Ross Lee Finney Ross Lee Finney could not have been more different, temperamentally, from Johnson. Today, Finney is remembered primarily as a teacher—Roger Reynolds and George Crumb are among his most well-known students. But when Kirkpatrick met him at Yaddo in 1940, the thirty-three-year-old Finney was actively cultivating what he called his “Americana” style of musical composition.75 In his memoirs, Finney explicitly related his compositional style to the political climate, writing: The mood of isolationism coupled with the increased demands on my time had, of course an effect on my creative production, both in the amount and quality of what I wrote. I had turned increasingly to “Americana,” both popular and folk, not always using material that was a part of my own Middle Western background, and the result was a superficiality that made the music unconvincing. Most of these works composed between 1938 and 1942 are not now available, but several are published.76

Although he later disavowed these works, they indicate Finney’s involvement in the larger debates about the use of borrowed folk material, and the desire to evoke a specifically American sound. Finney singled out his Fantasy and his Third Piano Sonata as works that were written in this “Americana” style. While Finney isn’t explicit about whether or not his compositional approach for these particular pieces included musical borrowing, the beginning of the slow movement of his Third Piano Sonata (1942; ex. 2.4) incorporates a straightforward, singing line, a spare texture, and an easy-to-grasp harmonic language reminiscent of a parlor song. Example 2.4. Finney, Third Piano Sonata, mvt. 2, mm. 1–6.

Yet despite the nostalgic sensibility in several of his works from this period, Finney remained a direct and no-nonsense man, often deflecting Kirkpatrick’s more sentimental notions about his music. This was particularly evident in their work together on Finney’s Fourth Piano Sonata, a work informed by Finney’s experience in Europe during the war (it was subtitled “Christmastime 1945” and dedicated to “Fred, Stan, Ralph, Bernie

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and Jack in memory of common experiences”).77 Finney had worked as an intelligence officer during the Second World War. His primary task was the collection of published materials of various kinds on behalf of the OSS.78 He recounted his experiences in Europe at length in his memoir, including his encounter with a land mine: I got out of the car at Eze, the better to examine a villa we had been asked to report on, and stepped on a mine. It must have been defective or it would have blown off my legs. . . . One fragment hit me high in the back, so Beau drove us to the army hospital in Nice. After making X-rays, the surgeon, using a local anesthetic, operated and got out a big slug that had stopped just short of puncturing my lung. He gave me a lot of penicillin and taped me up so that I looked like a General Electric refrigerator.79

Finney’s account of dodging death reads with the same matter-of-fact tone as his description of the plumbing in his Paris apartment just a few pages earlier in his memoir.80 He was awarded a Purple Heart after the incident, but seemed eager to put it behind him almost immediately, returning to his duties the next day. Kirkpatrick wanted to write a program note about Finney’s Piano Sonata No. 4, suggesting a relationship between this sonata and Finney’s time in France. The problem was arriving at a mutually agreeable tone and content for the note. Part of Kirkpatrick’s initial draft read: In October he came near to being a casualty when he stepped on a land mine at Nice, but he recovered and continued to gather information meriting a distinguished service citation. The first draft of the sonata was written down quickly during Christmas week, 1945, at Northampton, Mass (where he had resumed teaching at Smith College). While this sonata is a rather personal Christmas rhapsody, the way the music unfolds is programmatic. The first three movements express the season’s reverence, gaiety and awe, but the Toccata is a sudden harking back to memories of the previous December, when Mr. Finney was engaged in OSS work in France, and to the grim excitement and confusion of the time of the “bulge.”81

Although it was Finney himself who juxtaposed the upheaval of the Second World War with the religious tenor of Christmas in his subtitle, he had reservations about Kirkpatrick’s note on several levels. Throughout the 1940s, he was guarded about his time in France during the war. In 1944, prior to his assignment in Europe, he was under orders to keep it secret. He wrote sternly to a secretary at Smith College: “It may be some time before I can let you release any information concerning my work with the OSS. . . . I found that people in Northampton were guessing as to what my foreign service would be. It is very important that nothing of this sort get into a publicity story.”82 After Kirkpatrick sent him the program

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note, Finney wanted to downplay his own work with the OSS: “I always cringe a little anyhow with the mention of my ‘war service’ particularly the mine episode etc. It seems very personal. I am so afraid that someone may feel that I am trying to play it up—that I am trying to capitalize on it. . . . Wouldn’t it be better to let the music speak for itself.”83 Finally, he wrote to Richard Dana, worried that it would make the sonata seem excessively programmatic: “There is a strong intention behind the work, but it never seems to me wise to say anything much about it. After all the notes have to do the speaking and it is very apt to detract to have to [sic] definite background stuff.”84 Kirkpatrick eventually capitulated, and the sonata was published without any note.85 Finney suggested in his memoirs that Kirkpatrick was instrumental in guiding his compositional path in the 1940s, although he remained vague about exactly how. It may never be possible to know precisely, because Finney discarded most of the letters that Kirkpatrick sent him.86 Yet almost fifty years after the founding of Valley Music Press, Finney offered a retrospective glance at Kirkpatrick, music publishing, and their respective influences on his compositional technique: I have had a special feeling for little presses, though I have come to realize that they are not always as helpful for the composer as I had first hoped. . . . The problem is always distribution, and how to make the music available through music stores so that they can make a profit. At least I learned a lot about publication. I owe both Kirkpatrick and [John] Verrall a great debt, because they, more than any others, kept me from sinking too deeply into the Americana phase of my work.87

Finney’s move toward serialism in the 1950s can be seen as reflective of the larger rise of aesthetic formalism after the Second World War. His singling out Kirkpatrick at this point in his memoir underscores the role Kirkpatrick played in his development as a composer.

Robert Palmer Unlike Finney or Johnson, Robert Palmer rapidly ascended through the ranks of American academic composition, earning a professorship at Cornell by the time he was twenty-eight. Kirkpatrick edited a number of Palmer’s works, including two piano sonatas, his quintet, and his three preludes. He especially liked the preludes—at one point he called Palmer’s first prelude his “pet encore.”88 Palmer’s music, although infrequently performed today, shared much with Johnson’s overall compositional language. Rhythmic angularity, a largely diatonic idiom that occasionally lists into nonfunctional modality, and clear lyricism are hallmarks of his style from

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the 1940s, and his Three Preludes exemplify these aspects of his compositional language (exx. 2.5 and 2.6). Example 2.5. Robert Palmer, First Prelude, mm. 1–6. Reproduced with permission from the Robert Palmer Estate.

Example 2.6. Robert Palmer, Second Prelude, mm. 1–6. Reproduced with permission of the Robert Palmer Estate.

Perhaps the most distinguishing aspect of Kirkpatrick’s work with Palmer is the manner in which it brings to the fore the tense sexual politics that lay just below the surface of the conservative milieu of mid-twentieth century music publishing, and how those tensions were conditioned by the university environment. Palmer, like Kirkpatrick, was attracted to men, but also like Kirkpatrick, married a woman and identified as heterosexual throughout his life. Kirkpatrick helped guide Palmer through the fraught path of securing university employment at a time when colleges, like many middleclass institutions in America, exhibited intense anxiety about any sexual behavior that was perceived as deviant.89 Palmer’s concern about presenting a sexually “normal” exterior was well warranted, given the situation at Eastman, where he studied. During the 1940s, the director of the school, Howard Hanson, was actively purging suspected homosexuals from the faculty.90 Palmer even suggested that he was being targeted by the institution when he wrote to Kirkpatrick that “the placement bureau of the Eastman

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School is looking for purely Rotarian type people for teaching jobs, and since I do not fall into that class they are making not the slightest effort to get me a job.”91 Palmer’s invocation of Rotary International—for much of the twentieth century a symbol of straight male fraternity—reads as a comment on the general culture of conformity that was cultivated at the school at the time. Nor was the problem limited to Eastman. The composer David Diamond, for one, found himself unable to secure a university appointment in the United States during the 1940s because of his open homosexuality.92 Hence, when Kirkpatrick and Palmer first met in 1938, anxieties about homosexuality in their immediate circle hung heavy in the air, even if they were seldom discussed explicitly. Palmer and Kirkpatrick became fast friends, though, and Palmer’s letters to Kirkpatrick through the spring and summer of 1939 bubble with affection: “You certainly were a prince to me while I was in N.Y.,” Palmer wrote to Kirkpatrick in early March, “and your friendship has already been one of the most gratifying I have been privileged to have.”93 After Palmer spent some time at Kirkpatrick’s home in August, his letters began to address issues of sexuality more frankly. Kirkpatrick lent Palmer a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, banned in the United States from 1930 to 1959 as obscene.94 Kirkpatrick appears to have viewed Lawrence’s book, which shocked readers with its sexually explicit passages, as a kind of marital aid for Palmer.95 Palmer wrote to Kirkpatrick “My girl and I are reading Lady Chatterley according to your directions. We have decided that it is more important than Dr. Stopes, and that Stopes could hardly have written it (I think a remarkable deduction!) I promise to take very special care of it.”96 Kirkpatrick’s suggestion that Lady Chatterley replace Marie Stopes’s book Married Love, an early-twentieth-century sex manual, indicates that Kirkpatrick may have thought that sexual behavior could be conditioned by exposure to appropriate literature—and that, in Kirkpatrick’s mind, Palmer was in need of just such treatment. Palmer reached a crisis point in his sexual self-questioning by the end of 1939, and sought Kirkpatrick’s advice. As Palmer’s wedding day approached, he suddenly postponed it, after Kirkpatrick’s expressed surprise. “I wish we had talked about my apparent ‘immaturity’ last summer,” Palmer wrote to Kirkpatrick.97 In keeping with theories about homosexuality at the time that viewed it as a stunted version of “normal” sexual development, Palmer felt “great mental anguish”: This is my weakest link of character. I recognize it and try to combat it as much as possible—not always with success. The question is, is there any hope for me, . . . [do] authorities think that it is something that will remedy itself with time, or am

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I to be permanently a child? One thing is certain, my music can’t be more than I, and unless I grow, it cannot. I hope you will be more specific in exactly how, and by what behavior I show that I am young for 24.98

In this respect Palmer saw his musical and professional future intimately related to how he self-identified sexually. Despite this outburst, though, Palmer’s marriage did ultimately go forward. Kirkpatrick’s work as Palmer’s editor shows how the ostensibly neutral use of language that emphasized “quality” and “maturity” in music could reverberate within larger contemporary social and cultural corridors where such concepts had become euphemisms for “straight.” Despite the absence of most of Kirkpatrick’s side of the correspondence, at some points the question of Palmer’s “maturity” bubbles to the surface. Replying to criticism from Kirkpatrick about his Sonata for 2 Pianos, 4 Hands, Palmer wrote: “Your various warnings and theories of self-indulgence don’t seem to me to have any legitimate application to the ‘2 Piano Sonata.’ I think you tend to over-emphasize the whole idea a little, and as is often true in such instances you find things where it can supposedly be applied.”99 Palmer continued: “My complete acceptance of your original views that music should look as it is, and not as it is not, has been reached after long and careful consideration and weighing of eventualities including the ones you mentioned.” One might initially interpret this comment by Palmer as a defensive reaction to a simple request on Kirkpatrick’s part to make aspects of the notation more legible. Yet elsewhere Kirkpatrick equated “self-indulgence” with vulgar enactment of gay desire, for example in the previously mentioned draft of a letter to Rosalyn Tureck in 1953. In that letter, Kirkpatrick rejected a piece by Herman Berlinski that Tureck has asked him to play on the grounds that it was “fashionably perverse” and wrote that “there is, in this century, considerable precedent and contagious fashion for homosexual self-indulgence.”100 Furthermore, the actual letter he sent to Tureck, with all explicit reference to sexuality removed, shows how silence and coded language took the place of disclosure in discussions about composition at the time. Kirkpatrick’s final letter read: “The pieces remind me of the promising potentialities of some young composers whose developments have been disappointing. I hope he gets steered in the way of a normal fulfillment of his talents and life.”101 By 1956, when Palmer was promoted to full professor at Cornell, whatever concerns may have circulated between him and Kirkpatrick about writing and publishing “normal” music (and, by extension, living a “normal” life) subsided. In his letter in support of Palmer’s tenure, Kirkpatrick wrote that the composer’s music “represents the best kind of musical conservatism”— a compliment which, in light of Kirkpatrick’s and Palmer’s history, makes Kirkpatrick seem almost relieved about the direction that Palmer’s career

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had taken.102 Sexual connotations aside, Kirkpatrick’s comment shows how highly prized traditionalism had become within some academic environments. William Austin, a music historian who was also on Cornell’s faculty at the time, echoed Kirkpatrick when he lionized Palmer’s compositional achievements in terms of craftsmanship rather than innovation. “Even if the later course of history should prove that Palmer’s style was like some sandbar about to be washed away by the current of the twelve-tone technique or musique concrete,” Austin wrote in 1956, “he need have no regrets, for the works that he creates are taut and sturdy.”103 More than anything, Kirkpatrick’s apparent counsel to Palmer—to marry, suppress attraction to men, and write music that was more “mature” and less “self-indulgent”— shows how the publication process required its actors to confront larger concurrent problems of self-fashioning in American composition, and how an editor was uniquely positioned to influence them. Kirkpatrick’s involvement with Valley Music Press and Music Press engaged some pivotal dynamics in composition, performance, and publication at mid-century in the United States. In the 1940s, especially after the Second World War, music publishing formed a kind of crucible in which the mutual interests of the composers, editors, and publishers—namely, publication and dissemination of American music—occurred within a carefully constructed framework of what was considered “American.” Put another way, composers active in the United States during the 1940s could expect that well-written works could be published and distributed—provided that they did not stray too far outside that aesthetic boundaries articulated by individuals such as Kirkpatrick and institutions such as Valley Music Press and Music Press. Only a few of the works produced ever became even marginally profitable, and in this respect much of the story of music publication during the 1940s is the story of the uneasy tension between patronage, the marketplace for printed music, and composers writing music for public consumption.

Chapter Three

Collaboration Ruggles’s Evocations For most of the twentieth century, commentators have drawn on tropes of space and timelessness to describe the music of Carl Ruggles (1876–1971). A collective vision, as articulated by Dane Rudhyar, Charles Seeger, Lou Harrison, Virgil Thomson, and others, has emerged that presents Ruggles as a composer in touch with the infinite, able to render the mysteries of the universe in thimble-sized musical spaces. This trend is vividly captured in an anecdote recounted by Henry Cowell in his introduction to Lou Harrison’s monograph on Ruggles from 1946: One morning when I arrived at the abandoned school house in Arlington where he now lives, he was sitting at the old piano, singing a single tone at the top of his raucous composer’s voice, and banging a single chord at intervals over and over. He refused to be interrupted in this pursuit, and after an hour or so, I insisted on knowing what the idea was. “I’m trying over this damned chord,” said he, “to see whether it still sounds superb after so many hearings. . . . If I find I still like it after trying it over several thousand times, it’ll stand the test of time, all right!”1

Cowell’s nostalgic vignette is particularly appropriate to begin with, because it features four main characters in the story that I want to tell: Ruggles, an individual chord, a very long period of time, and a piano. This chapter explores how Kirkpatrick’s editorial collaboration with Ruggles on Evocations participated in and reflected broader discourses about Ruggles’s music. The two men worked together for some sixteen years, from 1940 to 1956, issuing two editions of that piece in the process (one in 1943, the other in 1956). Evocations, Ruggles’s only work for piano solo, is a suite of four brief musical portraits of some of Ruggles’s closest friends and family: the sculptor and philanthropist Harriette Miller, Kirkpatrick himself, Charles Ives, and Charlotte Ruggles (Carl’s wife).2 Lasting approximately ten minutes in performance, it bears many of the signature characteristics of Ruggles’s music—thunderous registral effects, profoundly austere counterpoint, and finely wrought brevity.

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Ruggles’s work with Kirkpatrick on Evocations relates to Cowell’s anecdote because their collaboration inscribed editorial changes into the score that would withstand this “test of time.” Moreover, Ruggles’s and Kirkpatrick’s creative process in Evocations was intimately bound up in the musical possibilities and acoustic properties of the modern grand piano. As I will explore in the second half of this chapter, many of Ruggles’s revisions over the course of his work on Evocations revolved around questions of orthography, and two characteristic techniques: aftertones (in which the notes are sustained by the fingers, rather than the pedal, to give more precise control over their endings) and tempering (Ruggles’s term for the practice of adding a note that is consonant to one note in a dissonant sonority.) These idiomatic aspects of his compositional style will be seen in relation to his use of pitch nonrepetition and dissonant counterpoint—the latter two concepts being aspects of his style that have received the bulk of discussion in existing scholarship.3 This chapter, therefore, will offer an account of the ways in which Ruggles and Kirkpatrick worked together on Evocations, but will also consider broader issues about analytical approaches to Ruggles’s music. This point of departure prompts the question: Why is the test of time particularly special in the case of Ruggles? He is by no means the only composer who hoped that his music would be played after his death; as Peter Burkholder and Lydia Goehr have explored, the establishment of a canon of musical works over the course of the past two centuries has made durability one of the most widely accepted metrics for measuring the significance of a composer.4 Forward-looking music often brings with it a retrospective gaze as well, and for Ruggles, as for other composers, the anticipated durability of his music went hand in hand with an emphasis on its “ancient” affinities. For example, when Maynard Solomon wrote that Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was “redolent of the Antique, [but] also supremely modern and innovative,” he could just as easily have been describing Evocations and other works by Ruggles, such as Organum and Parvum Organum.5 Nevertheless Ruggles’s work on Evocations stands apart from other examples for several reasons. Perhaps most importantly, the degree to which Ruggles has been associated with the very distant past separates him in crucial ways from the circle of iconoclastic American composers with whom he is typically grouped. Kirkpatrick once wrote to Ruggles that he found his best music possessed an “ageless freshness”;6 Nicolas Slonimsky wrote of Ruggles that he was “scaling heights, plumbing depths, proclaiming polysyllabical millennia.”7 Comments like these contributed to a conception of the “infinite” Ruggles—a composer who transcended his particular circumstances to a remarkable degree. Kirkpatrick and others sought to place Ruggles apart from fellow American modernists by endowing him with unique access to great eternal truths.

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The present chapter departs from existing studies of Ruggles’s music in another way: it concerns itself with a text—Evocations—that is not fixed. To study an editorial collaboration is to study a fluid text, and in this respect it involves assessing Ruggles’s intentions as well as Kirkpatrick’s role in the whole endeavor, and addressing complicated questions about editorial agency. At some points, Kirkpatrick was actively involved in making decisions, clarifying notation, and stating a preference for variants among drafts that Ruggles had shared with him. At other times, though, Kirkpatrick’s role is not as clear. Ruggles was a composer who, throughout his career, relied on the feedback of others to help him compose.8 While Kirkpatrick did provide substantive input in many instances, sometimes his function was simply to “be there,” as someone to whom Ruggles could send revised passages. At times Kirkpatrick would let several letters in a row from Ruggles go unanswered, but merely by receiving them, he served as a witness to Ruggles’s compositional process. As will be explored below, his work with Ruggles reveals a dynamic array of different practices that ultimately played a part in determining the final version of Evocations. Some of these fall outside the borders of what would traditionally be considered editing. Yet lest it be said that the nature of Ruggles’s and Kirkpatrick’s collaboration is too subtle, or the concept of withstanding the test of time too nebulous, to undergird a reading of Evocations, consider the following passage from a letter written by Kirkpatrick to Ruggles in 1947. Kirkpatrick was forty-two years old, at the beginning of his tenure as a professor of music at Cornell University. He had already established himself as an important advocate for contemporary music in the United States. Ruggles was seventy-one and nearing the end of his compositional career. Kirkpatrick gave Ruggles a general assessment of his music: It seems to me that you have a kind of choice of range—that the more you limit yourself in the direction of dissonance the more your music dates itself as of the twenties and the smaller its real audience will be—or the more you simplify the harmony (letting it partake of the triad-sound where it seems natural, letting the middle, or accompanying, voices serve to tie things together rather than point up intensifications) the more the hearer will get a melodious effect and a timeless or undated impression and more hearers will find it palatable.9

Although Kirkpatrick never wrote an editorial policy for Ruggles, this passage indicates his priorities during his editorial work on Evocations. The goal, in Kirkpatrick’s mind, was to arrive at a final version that did not conjure up a particular historical moment in the listener’s ear—and the way to do that was to rein in the dissonance, and let the inner voices “tie things together.” The specific revisions that he and Ruggles undertook help to show how a dynamic relationship between sounds and ideas informed their editorial collaboration.

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Furthermore, Kirkpatrick’s letter exemplifies a trend present in other writings on Ruggles: the elision of a variety of concepts that, strictly speaking, have different meanings. In the final sentence of Kirkpatrick’s letter, he seems to suggest that the words “timeless” and “undated” are, if not interchangeable, both more or less applicable when it comes to Ruggles’s music. Kirkpatrick was not alone in allowing a certain conceptual fluidity to color his writings on Ruggles. Ruggles’s idea of durability overlaps in the critical discourse not only with “ancient” music but also with themes such as universality and Ruggles’s all-encompassing “sublime,” a word that Robert McMahan called “Ruggles’s favorite adjective.”10 It may be impossible to achieve a rigorous typology of the thicket of terms commentators used in an effort to describe Ruggles’s music, but their circulation hints at the permeable boundaries of the critical vocabularies that have been applied to it. It is appropriate to continue, therefore, with a consideration of how Ruggles’s comment about the “test of time” resonates with the views of these contemporary observers.

The Public Career (and Subsequent Retirement) of the “Infinite” Ruggles As Carol Oja has shown, Dane Rudhyar was among the first to give extended consideration to Ruggles’s position within American and European musical culture.11 Writing in 1927, Rudhyar argued that Ruggles’s significance lay primarily in his access to “ecstasy,” which for Rudhyar was a mystical, universal, and necessary feature of great art. Quoting the Welsh author Arthur Machen, Rudhyar explained that “if ecstasy be present, then I say there is fine literature; if it is absent, in spite of all the cleverness, all the talent, all the workmanship and observation and dexterity . . . then, I think we have a product—possibly an interesting one—which is not fine literature.”12 Rudhyar found that Ruggles was among the handful of composers who had avoided vacant historicisms, instead seeking to craft lasting, forward-looking compositions: “Ruggles is one of these rebels who did not join the march into the past, who refused to revive the corpse, Tonality, and are molding the musical substance of tomorrow.”13 By contrast, Charles Seeger’s 1932 article on Ruggles centered around a concern with his position in history.14 The account effectively takes the form of a lament for Ruggles’s misfortune to live in America when he did. “Here is a man who has an unusual number of the attributes of genius,” Seeger wrote. He continued: Might it not be that if he had been born at another time or in a different place he would have been able to make his grandiose dreams more palpable, turn out a bulk of work that would compel the acceptance of his notions of beauty as the standard of his day, and fix him in the honored position as the first great

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musician of an epoch? Of all the men past or present in American music, who has come nearer to filling this hypothetical position?15

For Seeger, Ruggles’s story was a reflection of the “Tragedy of American Music,” the expression Seeger coined to denote the conservatism of the institutions and networks of patronage that failed to recognize the new musical language being formulated by contemporary composers.16 At the same time, Seeger found Ruggles’s music inevitably and intimately bound up in traditions of the distant past. For Seeger, this took the form of the “sublime,” a term that has had many meanings in the history of aesthetics but which Seeger, taking his lead from Ruggles, used in a specific way. Seeger, like subsequent commentators, seized on sublimity as a concept that Ruggles himself had used to describe his music. For Seeger, the sublime in Ruggles’s music is located in its attempt to strive toward the transcendence of certain earlier composers, while using a contemporary musical language to achieve its goals. Seeger explains: “To Carl Ruggles, there are not different kinds of Beauty: there is only one kind, and that he prefers to call the ‘Sublime.’ What he wants to see in music is that quality which makes him steadfastly call Händel and Bach the greatest composers. He merely tries to achieve it in a different way. . . . [it is] the attempt to convey the oldest ideal by the newest means.”17 Seeger was the first among several other commentators who saw Ruggles effectively continuing the “true” thread of music, one that strove for a single, ostensibly universal form of beauty. Yet Seeger, unlike others, saw Ruggles’s project as essentially a failure, on account of its materials and the environment in which Ruggles found himself. This failure, in turn, only reinforced the “Americanness” of Ruggles’s work. Seeger decries the situation in a sentence which, lacking a verb, seems to reflect Seeger’s frustration with the stasis of the American musical establishment: “The best that has come from America—as distinctive as Poe and Whitman—almost to be valued for what it tries to do rather than for what it actually achieves—promising great things for the future of American music—but tragic in its plucky but hopeless attempt to grow in such musically arid ground, such musically rare atmosphere as that of the great New Rome’s.”18 Stephen Slottow has explored how Seeger also played a major role in articulating and influencing Ruggles’s compositional technique.19 Some of Seeger’s more technical observations about Ruggles’s music—for example the implications of enharmonic spellings—will be considered in the analysis of Evocations. Lou Harrison’s monograph on Ruggles from 1946 perpetuated the view of Ruggles as a composer in communion with the ancients. Drawing on a tradition of praising work by comparing it to a much older repertory, Harrison defines the “classical” period of Western music as the one that ranged for the five centuries between Léonin and Bach (1250–1750),

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insofar as “the tradition governing personal art composition remained in important things [recte: ways] unchanged throughout its duration.”20 For Harrison, the paradigmatic compositional technique was what he called “total polyphony”—a practice that, in Harrison’s mind, was lost following Bach and not resurrected until Ruggles. Harrison, too, invoked the nebulous concept of the sublime: “The means by which Ruggles arrives at his ‘sublime’ expression points out the especially polyphonic character of his technique and draws attention to the elevated, reflective purpose of his music.”21 Like Seeger, Harrison is vague about what, exactly, the sublime is. Yet it remains relevant to Harrison’s view of Ruggles because, however it is achieved, it guarantees that Ruggles is drawing on a transhistorical (which is not to say ahistorical) feature of great composition: “The quality of sublimity which Ruggles professes as his desideratum,” Harrison wrote, “is surely native to the spirit of great religious or philosophical composition in any age.”22 For Harrison, sublimity is not necessarily expressed through any particular compositional strategy. At the same time, he places Ruggles’s ends, if not his means, outside of a particular historical moment. Virgil Thomson, writing in 1971, the year of Ruggles’s death, had the advantage of a multidecade perspective, which allowed him to synthesize trends in Ruggles’s output as a whole. Thomson continued the invocation of past centuries, tracing what he called Ruggles’s “secundal counterpoint” back to 1200 and comparing Portals and Angels to “Gothic arches” and “the engravings of William Blake,” respectively.23 Thomson also sought to link Ruggles’s notion of the sublime to Rudhyar’s metaphysically tinged discussion of Ruggles. Thomson offered his own criteria for sublimity, writing “I should say that this word, when applied to a work of art, can only mean that the work expresses and hence tends to provoke a state of ecstasy so free from both skin sensuality and cerebral excitement, also so uniformly sustained, that the ecstasy can be thought of as sublimated into the kind of experience known as ‘mystical.’”24 In this respect Thomson’s notion of the sublime has nothing to do with what happened in the past. Indeed, Thomson argued that one of Ruggles’s burdens was “an almost complete lack of usable history” for a composer in America.25 Instead of declaring Ruggles’s project a failure, though, Thomson suggested that Ruggles overcame this obstacle by the construction of a deliberate working style inexorably directed toward creating music that would remain forever relevant. Ruggles’s solution, Thomson wrote, “was to slowly construct for himself a method for testing the strengths of musical materials and a system of building them so complex, so at every point aware of tensile strengths and weaknesses, that by this seemingly neutral application of psychological and acoustic laws, works were constructed that are not only highly personal in content but that seem capable of resisting wear and time.”26 For Thomson, then, musical durability in Ruggles’s work was decoupled from a universal sublime as Seeger had

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explained it. Instead, Ruggles’s “seemingly neutral” approach resulted in works which, being “highly personal,” possess the marks of a particular kind of beauty that bear the marks of his own idiosyncratic compositional style. When these commentators—who, it might be noted, were all composers, all more or less Ruggles’s contemporaries, and all personally invested in his music to a greater or lesser degree—sought to place Ruggles within a broad historical context, they tended to employ some combination of rhetorical strategies. First, by portraying his career as a struggle to transcend the limitations of his national culture, some would align Ruggles with modernist discourses advocating separation of an artwork from the historical and cultural circumstances of its creator. Second (and, I would argue, without contradiction), these commentators might also summon the distant past (or, alternately, the indefinite future), not only as a way to situate Ruggles historically, but also in order to argue for his music’s universal merit. This is evident to some extent in all of the articles considered above. Also, there is a consistent awareness of the gap between process and product in accounts of Ruggles, and a question of how his materials relate to his aesthetic project. All these authors point to a specific set of compositional strategies that Ruggles employed, chief among them the “ancient” practices of counterpoint and polyphony, and yet they differ in their assessments of the degree to which these practices resulted in an actual impression of timelessness for the listener. Later writers on Ruggles—who tended to be academically trained music theorists rather than composers—gradually abandoned the conceptual language that gave rise to the “infinite” Ruggles, choosing to rely instead on pitch-class set theory. This is unsurprising, given Ruggles’s own reticence in discussing his compositional technique, and also given the dominance of pitch-class set theory in American music theory practice from the 1960s onward.27 Because of the dearth of commentary from Ruggles himself, late twentieth-century theorists were left on their own to develop analytical approaches to his music. Their decision to move away from the spiritual dimension celebrated in the commentary of Rudhyar, Seeger, Harrison, and Thomson is largely attributable to the rise of music theory as an academic discipline in the mid-twentieth century. As Aaron Girard has explained in his dissertation, “Modern theory was stripped of its abiding metaphysical and political aspects. The belief that Western harmonic materials were derived from natural law was unsuitable for research universities focused on empiricism and wary of dogmatism.”28 A few scholarly works are particularly clear examples of the trend in favor of more formalist frameworks for discussing Ruggles’s music.29 Stephen Gilbert’s 1970 article on Evocations emphasized Ruggles’s allegiance to serialism and the Second Viennese School. James Tenney’s 1977 article used a computer to analyze pitch repetition within some of Ruggles’s compositions. More recently, Stephen Slottow’s 2001 dissertation used interval classes as one

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of its primary units of analysis.30 My goal here is not so much to revisit these studies, but rather to show how Ruggles’s and Kirkpatrick’s collaboration exemplifies and accommodates early commentators’ notions of Ruggles’s expansive ambitions, while at the same time revealing other aspects of his compositional approach besides those that theorists have already explored.

The Ruggles-Kirkpatrick Edition of Evocations During the sixteen years that Ruggles and Kirkpatrick collaborated on Evocations, they worked in fits and starts as their schedules allowed, proceeding from one section to the next, seldom considering more than one passage at a time. Table 3.1 gives a chronology of their collaboration on the set of pieces. The men rarely saw one another in person, since Ruggles divided his time between Miami, Vermont, and New York, and Kirkpatrick held several academic positions before arriving at Cornell University in 1946. Their well-preserved correspondence, therefore, reveals in great detail the decision-making process involved in their editing. This process is most evident in the Evocation dedicated to Charles Ives, the first one that they edited; as such, it required the most explicit communication for the two men to understand one another’s working styles. Hence, I will explore it in detail, since many of the practices found here appear in the other three Evocations that they worked on together. Kirkpatrick’s involvement with Evocations has been previously explored by Marilyn Ziffrin, who devoted a significant part of a chapter in her Ruggles biography to detailing the compositional development in the pieces.31 According to Ziffrin, what Ruggles needed was “someone to push

Table 3.1. Ruggles-Kirkpatrick editorial collaboration on Evocations Evocation dedicatee

Bulk dates of editorial collaboration

Number in 1943 edition (New Music Quarterly 16, no. 3 [April 1943])

Number in 1956 edition

Harriette Miller

Unknown

1

1

John Kirkpatrick

November 1941– December 1943

2

2

Charlotte Ruggles

August 1943– July 1944

Published separately 3 (New Music Quarterly 18, no. 2 [January 1945]).

Charles Ives

December 1936– December 1942

3

4

Micah Ruggles

n/a

Unpublished

Unpublished

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him, someone like Seeger, who could encourage, criticize, advise, perhaps even edit a bit. But in Carl’s mind that person had to be someone special, with impeccable credentials. He was lucky. There was such a person, both available and interested.”32 Ziffrin astutely notes that the nature of Kirkpatrick’s agency constantly shifted throughout his work with Ruggles. As Ruggles’s biographer, she places their encounter in the context of Ruggles’s other contemporaneous activities, with Kirkpatrick taking the somewhat secondary role as a friend “on whom Carl leaned heavily for advice and consultation.”33 Here, rather than treating their collaboration as a chapter in Ruggles’s creative life, I seek to set it against the larger backdrop of musical modernism, and underscore Kirkpatrick’s own agency in helping to give the Evocations their ultimate shape. By the time Kirkpatrick and Ruggles started collaborating, they had already known each other for several years. In his own files, Kirkpatrick recorded receiving a copy of the Evocation dedicated to Harriette Miller in the summer of 1935; Ziffrin places Ruggles’s and Kirkpatrick’s first meeting in the winter of 1936, following a private concert in New York hosted by Geoffrey Parsons, a writer for the New York Herald Tribune.34 At the time, the thirty-one-year-old Kirkpatrick was concertizing frequently, and still struggling to establish himself as a concert pianist in the United States. Ruggles, almost thirty years Kirkpatrick’s senior, was beginning to attract a larger audience with his music. His Men and Mountains was performed by the New York Philharmonic that year, and in the spring of 1937 he began teaching at the University of Miami. It was not until 1940, though, that they began a concerted collaboration on Evocations. Ruggles had clear expectations for what Kirkpatrick’s editorial help would provide. His first letter to Kirkpatrick as editor—concerning the climax of the Evocation dedicated to Ives (ex. 3.3, discussed below)— helped define these expectations. Ruggles wrote of the patch he enclosed: “I think it sounds grand. If you have any suggestions as to the spelling, or criticisms rhythmically or harmonically, please send them as soon as possible.”35 In addition to highlighting Ruggles’s characteristic self-assurance, this request to Kirkpatrick is remarkable for what is missing. The words melody, nonrepetition, and counterpoint—terms typically found in analyses of Ruggles’s music—are conspicuous in their absence from this letter. Rather, the three musical dimensions that Ruggles wanted Kirkpatrick to help with—spelling, rhythm, and harmony—offer a springboard for exploring the kinds of revisions that Ruggles and Kirkpatrick undertook. Ruggles’s theory of spelling had already been explored by Charles Seeger. Seeger proposed that Ruggles imagined the chromatic scale as a group of twenty-one pitches, rather than twelve. Invoking Rameau’s concept of the double emploi, Seeger argued that dodecaphonic music is a “serious come-down from the pitch resources during the period from 1700 to 1900, when there

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were certainly not less than forty or fifty [pitches] to the octave.”36 In other words, G♯ and A♭ were not the same, since each was, to use Seeger’s terminology, “served from four to eight other tones.”37 In the case of Ruggles, the editorial process frequently involved questions of note spelling. Seeger explained: For the present, Ruggles’ tacit adoption of a 21-tone scale (seven “white” tones with a sharp and a flat for each) is in keeping with the best practice in present-day notation and certainly has good sense back of it [sic], though one often wonders why he uses accidentals as he does. Often as not, ease in reading seems to be the guide—convenient for the player, but devastating to the student.38

Although Seeger’s essay was written a decade before Kirkpatrick and Ruggles started collaborating, and it drew its examples from Portals, the issue was still at hand in Evocations. For example, Ruggles and Kirkpatrick decided to respell certain retrogressions, which made the score easier to read but obscured the compositional procedure.39 Over the course of their collaboration, Kirkpatrick and Ruggles also addressed questions of rhythm and harmony. One primary concern was in developing what Harrison later termed the “aftertone” technique. Harrison vividly described the effect in his 1946 essay: [The technique] consists of a manually controlled sustaining of the after-ring of various tones, which may have been originally struck melodically or whatever, but whose lengths are different, so that common pedaling would not give the special result. In the Evocations these tones constitute a kind of shadow of resonance which follows along behind the curves of a single melody. The individual tones, caught after striking by other fingers, drop out at specified places so that the delicate sustained radiance is constantly changing and seems to cling at a distance to the melody. The simple device of emphasizing the end of a tone (which is what seems to result from the technic) is new to keyboard music as such an advanced thing.40

Based on the direction taken in their revisions to Evocations, Ruggles and Kirkpatrick were clearly at least as preoccupied with the release of the notes as they were with the attacks—in essence creating a twofold aural profile of the work. At the same time, emphasizing the end of a tone was not in fact something completely new, as Harrison argues. Concerns with precise releases had long been an established aspect of organ technique, and Kirkpatrick was fascinated by the idiomatic possibilities of different keyboard instruments. Ruggles shared with Kirkpatrick an intense concern with precisely timed attacks and releases on the piano, such that the sonorities would be able to sound with maximum impact. For Kirkpatrick, though, the question of tone duration was intimately bound up with his feelings for the pipe organ both as an ancient and symbolic instrument and as one that could sustain its sound indefinitely. Kirkpatrick, who sometimes played the organ himself, extolled the virtues of the instrument in his unpublished treatise on piano performance from the 1950s, Making a Piano Sing:

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With its uniform air supply, the organ has . . . a constancy of . . . volume . . . that, to a singer or flutist, would appear stiff and unimaginative. But this very uniformity can give to a fine texture an impersonal serenity and power that inspires real awe. Every pianist has longed for this sustained tone and been exasperated with his string’s ebb; in fact this longing is essential to a pianist’s imagination and is best cultivated by actual experience. . . . Only after communicatively moulding the completeness of sustained tone, will your polyphonic playing on the piano find the right volumes for any texture, which will give both fullness and smoothness. And only after communicatively balancing the contrast of organ . . . registration, can you understand the potentialities of piano pedals as registration rather than shading.41

The conceptual relationship, for Kirkpatrick, between an organ’s sustained tone and its “impersonal serenity” is an example of how a musical device could be employed as a signifier for a loftier philosophical ideal. The question of tone sustainability was not strictly limited to Ruggles’s music; the two men considered the question of duration in other contexts, as well. For example, Kirkpatrick did not share Ruggles’s enthusiasm for programming the Bach B Minor Fugue (ex. 3.1) from book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier alongside contemporary works in a piano recital, for the precise reason that its labyrinthine subject could not be sustained adequately on the piano.42 Example 3.1. J. S. Bach, Fugue in B Minor from The Well Tempered Clavier, book 1, mm. 1–4.

In a 1968 article about Ruggles, Kirkpatrick singled out another technique that he called “tempering” as a central part of Ruggles’s compositional style, and one that is present in Evocations. Although the two men tended not to use the term “tempering” in their correspondence, Kirkpatrick defined it as the act of adding “an interval consonant to one of the dissonant notes.”43 The gradual process of tempering individual sonorities was one of the most important harmonic changes made among the various states of Evocations. One example of tempering may be found at the beginning of the Evocation dedicated to Ives (ex. 3.2). Doubled fifths and octaves were gradually added over the course of their collaboration, and while the same notes are, strictly speaking, sounding in the first version, their prominence becomes much more explicit by the final one. Furthermore, tempering seems to have been tied up with writing idiomatically for the piano. In Kirkpatrick’s article, he introduced the term by quoting a letter from Ruggles, in which the composer wrote, “My piano is damned out of tune—perhaps I like it that way—that it is next to

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impossible to do any tempering.”44 In other words, for Ruggles the practice of tempering was intimately related to the specific acoustic attributes of a given piano. A properly tuned modern piano is in reality slightly out of tune, a fact required by the well-tempered system that allows performance in all twenty-four keys. For Ruggles, simply imagining a sonority was not enough—it had to be played on an actual piano in order to be evaluated. Perhaps equally importantly, both men describe tempering as an additive process, something that is undertaken after a version of the music has been committed to paper. In this respect, the act of revision was inseparable from the act of composition during their work together on Evocations. In short, Kirkpatrick and Ruggles had fairly specific goals for their collaboration on Evocations. The issues of spelling, rhythm, and harmony that Ruggles mentioned in his 1940 letter seem almost too vague to be meaningful on their own. The orthographic, rhythmic, and harmonic changes that actually took place in the course of Kirkpatrick’s and Ruggles’s work together were largely limited to the narrower concerns of legibility, the “aftertone” technique, and tempering, respectively. The first Evocation they worked on together, the one dedicated to Ives, offers some particularly clear examples of this process. The Evocation dedicated to Ives is essentially in A-B-A′ form, bookended by long, plaintive phrases, and features a rhythmic canon that builds to a devastating climax in the middle. Kirkpatrick and Ruggles focused on three passages: the opening five measures, the climax, and the final three measures. Selected states of each of these passages, drawn from the published versions and the patches they sent back and forth, are provided in examples 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4. The opening phrase (ex. 3.2) is remarkable for its textural ambiguity. Depending on how one listens, it can be heard as essentially monophonic or as a series of slowly rolled chords.45 For example, the first measure can be heard as a melodic line, aiming for the F♮ on the fourth beat, but, depending on the performance, can also be heard as a slowly aggregating chord of interlocking fifths (D and G, F♯ and C♯, F and C). Measures 2 and 3 do little to clarify this textual ambiguity, since they continue the pattern initiated in the first bar. The revisions do not change the rhythm of attacks that are heard; they focus mostly on doubling or clarifying the notes to be held. Explicit pedal marks are present in all versions except the earliest one. The development of this first phrase over the course of Kirkpatrick’s and Ruggles’s collaboration illustrates the use of the “aftertone” technique as well as “tempering.” For example, in the first measure, the 1943 version requires precisely timed releases in order to achieve the notated effect. The two versions from 1950 both have a slurred half note in the upper staff, which raises the question of whether the notes are to be sustained

Example 3.2. Carl Ruggles, Evocation dedicated to Ives, mm. 1–5, multiple states. © 1943 and 1956 by Theodore Presser Company. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission.

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or restruck. By 1956, the notation required the silent depression of certain keys, in order to lift their corresponding dampers. Kirkpatrick called this a “slightly ticklish manouevre [sic].”46 Kirkpatrick explained the notation to Ruggles in a letter, writing that “the extra note (ppp) is less to enrich that melody-note than to provide a pivot to control the pp chord from.”47 Yet if one does not have access to Kirkpatrick’s letter, the notation creates some ambiguity of its own. The indication to silently press the key occurs while the pedal is down (with the dampers lifted from all the strings), obviating any particular need to depress the note silently in the first place.48 Indeed, silently raising a given damper would cause the string to resonate sympathetically only if a note was struck which included the silently held note as part of its overtone series, enhancing the “shadow of resonance” (to use Harrison’s phrase) so central to this piece’s effect. Clear examples of tempering are also evident in this passage, for example on the third beats of measures 1 and 2. At that point, there is a bare minor second sounding in the 1943 version (with the residual pitches struck earlier in measure 1 still sounding), which is subsequently changed to an octave (1950 version), then a fifth (1950 proposed segment), and then an octave and a fifth (1956 published version). The piece’s climactic phrase also changed a great deal over the course of the collaboration (ex. 3.3). Initially, Ruggles had not even conceived it as a retrogression of the preceding phrase (not included in the example); instead, the phrase achieved the climax through a snaking ascending line in the right hand accompanied by bombastic chords in the bass. During a particularly intense month beginning on October 10, 1940, the passage changed drastically each time Ruggles wrote to Kirkpatrick. They finally decided to use a retrogression, though it is difficult to see the retrogression in the score, as the notes in the final version have been respelled to make them more legible for the performer. The preceding phrase, beginning in measure 15, continues through to measure 18, beat 2. Following a brief interlude, a retrogression of the notes in the right hand begins, starting on the last eighth note of measure 20 (the first measure of ex. 3.3). An E and an F have been interpolated as the second and third notes, though, and the fourth note is spelled as a B♮ instead of a C♭, obscuring the retrogression. Over time, the “aftertone” techniques became more pronounced in this passage, as well. In addition to accenting and holding the highest note of each triplet in the ascending sequence, the version from November 3, 1940, takes it one step further, delaying the attack for a thirty-second note to allow the resonance to hang in the air for just a fraction of a beat. “I like the delayed beat,” Ruggles explained to Kirkpatrick, “which gives it added stress.”49 In Kirkpatrick’s September 1, 1949, “patch” (the term he applied to most of his suggestions) that he sent to Ruggles, he suggested using silent notes in this passage as well, this time in the left hand, to help with the pivoting.

Example 3.3. Carl Ruggles, Evocation for Ives, mm. 21–26, multiple states. © 1943 and 1956 by Theodore Presser Company. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission.

Example 3.3. Continued.

Example 3.3. Concluded.

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Moments of tempering (although Kirkpatrick and Ruggles did not call it that at the time) appeared relatively late in their editorial process. Of particular note here is how the tempering (in the added E and F♯ in the left hand of the second bar, as well as the A♭ of the third measure, in the final version of the phrase) also helped to reinforce the canon that was already implied. Also, both men were concerned with preparing the final climactic chord and the subsequent return of the opening material. Since the measure immediately following the end of example 3.3 repeats the first measure of example 3.2, they strove to minimize (through tempering) the impact of the low E in the left hand. Ruggles thought that this kind of alteration would obscure (or at least deemphasize) the much softer E in the following measure.50 In the summer of 1954, Ruggles worked through a number of variants of the final measures of the Evocation dedicated to Ives (ex. 3.4). Kirkpatrick kept silent for much of the summer. An exasperated Ruggles finally wrote to him, “It might not be a bad idea if you answered one of my communications.”51 Yet Kirkpatrick was unmoved, and he saw the new musical ideas that Ruggles was fleshing out as mere distractions from the essence of Evocations. Kirkpatrick wrote with the gentle sternness of a composition teacher: “These patches make me suspect that this new piece is something with a strong individuality that has reorientated your musical thinking in a somewhat different direction.”52 Since Kirkpatrick and Ruggles had finally decided that the Ives Evocation would close the set as a whole, it became especially important for them to lend a conclusive air to the final, ethereal, phrase. With Kirkpatrick’s encouragement, Ruggles continued to work on the ending. Kirkpatrick’s reply to Ruggles’s last solution (the penultimate system in ex. 3.4, which Ruggles sent him on December 27, 1954) is revealing. “That final chord is wonderful!” he wrote to Ruggles. “At first I was skeptical about including the E natural (it had been so recent it seemed unnecessary)—but it does contribute both to a certain bell-like something & also to a sense of completeness, though actually one hardly hears it.”53 Bells achieve their sound—their tintinnabulation—by a highly irregular profile of partials sounding from a fundamental. The “ring” of a bell is a result of a number of different partials sounding at almost equal intensity at the same time. The tightly nestled aftertones in this chord are more dense than the other aftertone effects in the piece—a pileup of minor seconds superimposed on a B♭ major triad—and they bring the piece to rest on a bed of swiftly fading sympathetic vibrations. Kirkpatrick and Ruggles arrived at a simplified notation for this passage that was easy to read, but still, strictly speaking, required impossible things from the performer. Although the 1943 edition closes with a three-staff notation, Kirkpatrick disliked the solution, insisting on two staves wherever possible. In other Kirkpatrick editions, he viewed the staves of the piano part as embodied notation for the right and left hands, rather than as a more abstract representation of contrapuntal lines. Yet this preference

Example 3.4. Carl Ruggles, Evocation for Ives, mm. 30–32, multiple states. © 1943 and 1956 by Theodore Presser Company. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission.

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Example 3.4. Concluded.

for two-staff notation did not keep him from suggesting a notation that required the pianist to project certain physical motions which could not have had a literal effect on the sound, for example in the final three chords, where hairpin dynamics are included underneath sustained notes (ex. 3.4; final system). Kirkpatrick’s notation seems to encourage the performer to sustain the chord psychologically, in order to project the “impersonal serenity” that he valued so highly in organ music.

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Temperings and aftertone revisions were present in the other Evocations as well. Simply comparing the two published versions shows a number of changes that were variously proposed by either Ruggles or Kirkpatrick, or arrived at by consensus. For example, in the Evocation dedicated to Harriette Miller, there are instances of refining the aftertone of notes (mm. 1–4; mm. 19–20), as well as tempering (mm. 6–7). In the Evocation dedicated to Kirkpatrick himself, there is a reworking of the temperings in measures 13–14, and measure 17, and the aftertone notation has been reworked in measures 43–45. Tempering can also be seen at certain points in the Evocation dedicated to Charlotte Ruggles, as in measure 4 and also in measure 28. On the whole, then, Kirkpatrick served in a variety of roles while preparing Evocations. Sometimes, his mere involvement caused Ruggles to try out new techniques, documented in long strings of unanswered letters from Ruggles to Kirkpatrick. Sometimes Kirkpatrick tried to help Ruggles find a clearer way to notate an idea, which often revealed some of the thinking behind a given passage. On other occasions, Kirkpatrick was actively involved in rewriting, in ways that he believed would be faithful to Ruggles’s vision for the piece.

Editing and Analysis A common thread among most of the revisions discussed here is their conscious use of the overtone series. The modern grand piano opened a world of possibilities for the manipulation of overtones, and adding fifths and octaves (the first and second partials of the overtone series) contributed to the strikingly resonant sound of Evocations. Elliott Carter, for example, singled this out as one of the most distinctive aspects of the sound of Evocations, writing to Kirkpatrick, “The thing I always remember about Example 3.5. Underlying fundamental sounding, “Ives” Evocation, mm. 1–5.

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these works is how beautiful the sound of the ring of the piano after it has been struck can be, and how evocative. I somehow don’t remember any other pieces that show off the gradual dying away of chords and the conflict of beat notes that constantly redefines itself as moments elapse so well.”54 Awareness of the importance of overtone series to Ruggle’s compositional objectives also allows us to integrate aspects of Ruggles’s style which are typically considered peripheral, such as register and pedaling, into close readings of Ruggles’s music. For instance, the mysterious opening of the Evocation dedicated to Ives can be heard at least two ways—as a slowly rolled chord or as a descending line. One can also imagine that the written notes imply a fundamental, in which case the texture can be seen as a manifestation of a descending chromatic scale in a much lower register (ex. 3.5). The underlying continuity of the fundamentals is not obvious from the musical surface, but helps to offer a more precise account of how the “resonant” effect is achieved when the piece is heard. Similarly, the “bell-like something” that Kirkpatrick sensed in the final chord of the same piece can be understood as an indirect reference to the overtone series. Reintroducing the overtone series to the discussion of Evocations aligns it with earlier views, such as those of Dane Rudhyar, who saw modern music, spirituality, and the creation of “natural” music as overlapping spheres. Henry Cowell, writing in his landmark treatise New Musical Resources (1930), put it most forcefully: For the sake of the exquisiteness of emotion which music may express, as well as for the sake of perfection of the music itself, therefore, there is a place for the formalization and co-ordination of different contemporary musical resources by means of the common relationship with the overtone series, which, although it forms a mathematical, acoustical, and historical gauge, is not merely a matter of arithmetic, theory, and pedantry, but is itself a living essence from which musicality springs.55

Although Ruggles did not subscribe to the overarching project of New Musical Resources—the coordination of all the parameters of music by means of the overtone series—Cowell’s emphasis on overtones as a “living essence” underscores how central this technique was to certain modernists in their approach to composing. Dane Rudhyar also spoke ecstatically of overtones, and, as discussed above, was one of Ruggles’s earliest advocates. Using a more metaphysical language than Cowell’s sober theoretical writing, Rudhyar exclaimed: A dazzling profusion of new materials will flood the imagination of future creators. . . . Not only upper partials will be used, but lower partials, as they have been detected recently in such abundance in the tone of bells. In fact, the prime sound—the only one we consider now—will appear then as a radiating center of dynamic tonal energy, as a Sun surrounded by the double series of planets, the over- and under-tones.56

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Rudhyar extolled elsewhere the virtues of Ruggles’s “mysticism,” in part because of Ruggles’s mastery of what Rudhyar called the “alchemy of tones.”57 The above quote reveals how, in Rudhyar’s mind, the overtone series could be a means of accessing celestial harmonies and eternal truths through music. The ideas of overtones, the infinite, and pianistically idiomatic writing form a proscenium that framed a slow-motion drama starring the actors I introduced at the beginning of this chapter: Ruggles, Kirkpatrick, a piano, a long period of time, and an individual chord. Over some sixteen years, Ruggles and Kirkpatrick undertook a conversation in an effort to determine, how, exactly, to realize their multifaceted vision in the musical text of Evocations. The success of their project, as well as Ruggles’s ultimate significance as a composer, remains contested to this day. For some, Ruggles is an also-ran alongside Ives. The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross stated this point of view especially succinctly when he wrote that “Ruggles is like Ives without the tunes.”58 Yet focusing on Ruggles’s and Kirkpatrick’s application of aftertone and tempering techniques does more than broaden our perspective on Ruggles’s compositional style. If we consider these techniques within a historiographic context that has depicted Ruggles’s music as simultaneously ultramodern, durable, and in communion with the “ancient,” his music can correspondingly be recast as a particularly clear example of certain features associated with American modernism. In other words, Ruggles assumes renewed significance for helping to articulate the nature of American modernism’s relationship to the Western musical canon. In the end, the craggy, granite phrases of Evocations form a landscape all their own. During their collaboration on these pieces, Kirkpatrick and Ruggles managed to carve out a promontory from which we may survey aspects of Ruggles’s impact as a whole.

Chapter Four

Performance Ives’s Concord Sonata Whatever fame Kirkpatrick enjoys is due mostly to the January night in 1939 when he gave the New York premiere of Charles Ives’s Second Piano Sonata, the so-called Concord Sonata, at Town Hall in Manhattan. This fourmovement work includes musical portraits of American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Alcott Family, and Henry David Thoreau. That 1939 concert—arguably among the most important of the century for American concert music—precipitated the discovery of Ives and his music by a wider audience, while establishing Kirkpatrick as a major figure in the performance of contemporary American music.1 His relationship with the Concord Sonata shows in vivid detail the tension between his dual careers as a pianist and an editor. Kirkpatrick had an ambivalent relationship with the sonata. On the one hand, he wanted to—indeed, was obligated to—deliver a fixed impression of the Concord in any given concert. This was a task for which he prepared diligently throughout his life, even to the point of carefully writing down notes to himself for certain performances. For example, figure 4.1 shows a chart of relearnings that Kirkpatrick made for the Concord, where he meticulously notated the changes he had made in February 1953, January 1957, and June 1961; a page following the one reproduced here also shows what he was playing in 1981, shortly before the stroke that ended his performing career.2 On the other hand, Kirkpatrick also sought to do justice to the Concord’s fluidity, since Ives himself had expressed hope that the work would remain ever-changing, always slightly short of being completely finished. J. Peter Burkholder remembered that Kirkpatrick spoke about “playing at” the Concord, rather than simply “playing” it.3 The tension between the poles of fixedness and fluidity propelled Kirkpatrick through his sixty-year relationship with the Concord, a lifetime of contemplation and study that resulted in two recordings, at least five editions, and hundreds of live performances (table 4.1 provides a list of the main sources considered here). Kirkpatrick’s

Table 4.1. Main Concord sources and editions used and created by Kirkpatrick Date

Movement

Description

Citation

1920

Complete sonata

Ives’s first edition.

Redding, CT: Charles E. Ives, 1920 [privately printed].

October 14, 1927

Complete sonata

Kirkpatrick’s copy of Ives’s first edition, with Kirkpatrick’s markings.

MSS 56/74/716; Kirkpatrick, register of Ives-Kirkpatrick correspondence, MSS 56/18/203.

1934

Emerson

Kirkpatrick’s “working copy.” [presumed lost]

Kirkpatrick, letter to Ives, 12 July 1934, MSS 56/30/13, reproduced in Owens, 223.

1940

Complete sonata

Another copy of Ives’s first edition that belonged to Kirkpatrick, marked with errata for Ives’s second.

MSS 56/74/717

October 4, 1941

Complete sonata

“Third Proof” for Ives’s second edition, brought by Harmony Ives to Kirkpatrick at Windways.

MSS 56/74/717

1945

Complete sonata

Kirkpatrick’s first recording.

Columbia ML 4250

1947

Complete sonata

Ives’s revised edition.

New York: Arrow Music Press, 1947.

1947

Complete sonata

Kirkpatrick’s primary copy of 1947 edition, with copious multicolored pencil annotations. Red = “passages which are different from the set of proof-sheets which Mrs. Ives brought to Windways on October 4th, 1941.” Green = “JK Plays more according to the 1st ed.” Blue = “JK Emendations.”

MSS 56/75/718

1950s?

The Alcotts

2 pages, Maestro 12-staff paper, with corners identifying the paper cut out. Complete movement.

MSS 56/74/714

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Table 4.1. Concluded Date

Movement

Description

Citation

1950s?

Emerson

2 pages, Maestro 12-staff paper. Beginning to 2:4:14.*

MSS 56/74/711

1953

Emerson

Kirkpatrick ink copy. 5 Pages. Beginning to 6:5:1.

MSS 56/75/718

1953

Hawthorne

Kirkpatrick ink copy. 5 Pages. Beginning to 22:1:1, 24:4:5 to 26:1:3, 27:4:1 to 28:3:7 (but with a different ending); and 46:2:7 to end of the movement.

MSS 56/75/718

1953 (rev. 1980s)

Other

“The Player’s Apology:” Critical commentary and introduction.

MSS 56/75/718

1968

Complete sonata

Kirkpatrick’s second recording.

Columbia MS 7192

1980

Complete sonata

Footnoted reprint of Ives’s first edition.

MSS 56/74/710

After January 27, 1982

The Alcotts

Critical commentary (second state).

MSS 56/74/714

After March 4, 1982

Thoreau

Critical commentary.

MSS 56/74/715

After November 26, 1982

Emerson

Critical commentary.

MSS 56/74/712

After September 25, 1986

Hawthorne

Critical commentary.

MSS 56/74/713

1987

Complete sonata

Kirkpatrick’s final edition.

MSS 56/75/719

* Citations are relative to Ives’s 1947 edition.

lifelong fascination with preparing editions alongside his recordings and performances remained primarily a private affair, since Kirkpatrick did not edit either of Ives’s published Concord editions, and only his final 1987 edition is publicly available from Associated Music Publishers—if one takes the trouble to contact the publisher and specifically request it.

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In this chapter, I explore the nature of Kirkpatrick’s ambivalence toward the Concord, arguing that his editorial and performing activities were coterminous in important ways. In other words, Kirkpatrick’s work with the Concord was aimed at an ultimate goal that does not rest comfortably as either a traditional edition or a definitive performance. One of the most striking aspects of the chronological breadth of his work on the Concord is that it was so uncharacteristic for Kirkpatrick. Although he took as long as was necessary for his editions—recall the sixteen years on Ruggles’s Evocations—in virtually every case except the Concord, there was always a finished product in mind for Kirkpatrick. One of the reasons that Kirkpatrick continuously revisited his written work for Concord is that his editions of this piece were concerned not only with fixing a text, but also with providing interpretive suggestions for performers. In other words, his written work on behalf of the Concord probed aspects of it that are typically considered the province of performance. This tension between the fixity of the page and the fluidity of performance also places Kirkpatrick’s time with the Concord at the center of one of the most critical scholarly debates about the work: its relative status as either a work which invites the performer into a special degree of re-creation of the music alongside Ives, or a work which may comfortably nestle in among the repertoire of large-scale Romantic piano sonatas.4 By chronicling Kirkpatrick’s long relationship with the sonata, I seek to demonstrate that he was also the intellectual fountainhead of both of these views of the work, and that for Kirkpatrick, these were not mutually exclusive viewpoints.

Kirkpatrick’s Absorption of the Concord, 1927–39 Kirkpatrick first happened on the luxuriant red cloth binding of Ives’s self-published Concord edition while in Paris at Katherine Ruth Heyman’s apartment in 1927. At the time, Kirkpatrick was still a young pianist struggling to find his voice as a musician. During the twelve years between this initial encounter with the Concord and the Town Hall concert, Kirkpatrick laid much of the groundwork for his lifelong involvement with the sonata. The key aspects of Kirkpatrick’s overall relationship with the Concord—tackling its difficulty, coming to grips with its underlying philosophy, and, most important, viewing editing as an integral part of his approach to the work— emerged gradually over the course of the 1930s. By 1939, a number of factors contributed to Kirkpatrick’s multifaceted view of the Concord, chief among them the existing critical reception of the work, his correspondence with Ives, and Ives’s own writings on music. The Concord was an intermittent project for Kirkpatrick during this early period; after Ives sent him a copy of the score in 1927, the two men were

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not even in touch for another six years. Beginning in 1933, Kirkpatrick gradually learned the sonata, occasionally performing individual movements in concert.5 During this gestational period, Kirkpatrick started to correspond with Ives about the Concord, writing letters that are remarkable for their candor and restless curiosity. Kirkpatrick tirelessly probed the musical issues involved in the Concord as well as the weighty ideas that undergirded it.6 For Ives’s part, he appreciated Kirkpatrick’s interest in the sonata, while at the same time remaining reclusive: although the men lived less than an hour apart, they did not meet in person until May 12, 1937.7 In the absence of face-to-face encounters, and with only a few phone calls known to have occurred, the carefully preserved correspondence constitutes an almost verbatim record of their relationship during the 1930s. Early commentators (including Ives himself) helped set the stage for Kirkpatrick’s penetration of the sonata. A common theme among these early essays was a consideration of the relationship between Concord’s tremendous technical difficulty and its lofty philosophical ambitions—a theme also present in nineteenth-century discourses about virtuosity.8 The piece achieved such great heights, several writers posited, because it plumbed the depths of the performer’s technical command of the instrument. One of the most direct statements of this attitude was by Henry Bellamann, an early advocate for Ives. Writing of the “Emerson” movement, Bellamann noted: The first movement is not pianistic—little of the sonata is—probably no effort was made to make any part of it pianistic. It must have been conceived abstractly. One misses, almost throughout, familiar pianistic outlines. In reading it away from the piano there is almost the feeling of perusing an orchestral score. The hand does not unconsciously grope for the keyboard. Yet many purely pianistic effects are contrived and effectively used. The beauty of this division of the work is severe and difficult. It is a beauty of high and remote things. It is austere. It is informed with the stark and ascetic beauty of lonely and alien reaches of human imagination.9

Ives’s detractors also latched onto the difficulty of the work. For example, an anonymous review of the Concord published in the Musical Courier in 1921 commented tartly: “We are sore afraid we shall never know whether or not we can stand his music. Unless Charles drops into our sanctum some time and insists upon playing ‘Emerson,’ ‘Hawthorne,’ ‘The Alcotts,’ and ‘Thoreau . . . we know we shall never know, for nobody else will ever be able to play it for us, since the musical nomenclature of Charles is entirely a personal affair.”10 Ives himself helped to advance the idea that the difficulty of his works pointed to his own musical idealism—that he would not compromise the

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integrity of his musical imagination, even if it meant forgoing public performance of his works. Bellamann quoted Ives as saying, “The sonata is an experiment which perhaps goes too far. It was not written primarily to be played—certainly not to be played with two hands.”11 Although a selfeffacing tone is suggested in Bellamann’s essay, Ives did grow exasperated with the notion that his “difficult” music might remain unperformed. Ives exclaimed near the end of Essays Before a Sonata, “Why must the scarecrow of the keyboard—the tyrant in terms of the mechanism . . . stare into every measure? Is it the composer’s fault that man has only ten fingers?”12 At other times Ives simply refused to admit that his writing could be hard to execute; Elliott Carter remembered that he asked Ives “why he didn’t write his work more practically, so that performers could play it more accurately. He would reply that it was written as simply as possible, and then play over precisely what was written indicating that it was not as hard as all that.”13 Peter Burkholder has traced in a systematic way what Carter hinted at: namely, that Ives’s abilities as a performer contributed to his uncompromising stance about his notational decisions. In Burkholder’s words, Ives’s conviction “that professional musicians should be able to play anything put in front of them probably derived from his own total command of the organ.”14 Writing in Memos, Ives articulated a particularly clear relationship between difficulty and transcendence: Now the Hawthorne is fundamentally a scherzo, a joke—and I explained that—a kind of program and take-off music—the opposite of Emerson, which is serious, goes to the deeper things (I like to think it does—it did as far as I was concerned), and for that reason not as clear to get. [It is] more difficult to sense and feel its substance than Hawthorne, but less difficult to play—that is, Emerson is more difficult mentally, perhaps spiritually, but Hawthorne is more difficult physically.15

In Kirkpatrick’s hands, editing would become the hinge on which these twin difficulties of physical execution and spiritual exaltation would swing. Like many performers, Kirkpatrick viewed technical difficulty as a roadblock, not a pathway, to spiritual profundity. As he explained his practice methods to Ives, he insisted that it was only through patient, calculated study that he could deliver what he called the “superconscious” in performance: I find that I need more and more of the sort of minutely detailed practicing that leads one, for instance, to learn the left hand part through an entire piece, then the right, just to clean out all the silly little unnecessary motions and mistakes that one might not have noticed, —and all those corrections have to be salted down into subconscious habits. So all the changes in text or fingering should have been made about a month before, or one runs the danger of being suddenly pulled back from the superconscious to the conscious, that is if one has been lucky enough to achieve the superconscious at all.16

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This insistence on rigorous preparation prior to a performance of Concord continued throughout Kirkpatrick’s life, and is demonstrated by his meticulous preparation of editions as well as by his aforementioned chart of relearnings. Kirkpatrick’s letters to Ives reveal that his editorial and performing activities with the Concord intermingled early on, and his editions began as an attempt to facilitate his learning of the work.17 By the summer of 1934, he had prepared a “working copy” of “Emerson,” although when he described the process to Ives he hastened to emphasize that very little had changed: It all started a couple of months ago when I got so put out with the page turning in the Indians (Cos Cob ed.) that I copied it out just to see what it sounded like when you got it all together, and as I hardly ever copy anything out without a few orthographic changes, a whole set of problems was opened up before I could decide what I thought was the clearest way to write it down (No changes in note values—just what you might call the optical presentation).18

Although the whereabouts of Kirkpatrick’s “working copy” are unknown,19 this snippet from his correspondence indicates that Kirkpatrick’s main motivation was the production of an easy-to-read performing edition for his own private use, assuring Ives that the only changes were to the “optical presentation.”20 As will be shown below, the earliest surviving evidence of Kirkpatrick’s editorial work on the Concord shows a much heavier editorial hand, and his emphasis on performance in his mention of the “working copy” suggests that he continued to identify himself mainly as a pianist tackling a difficult piece while he was working on Concord in the 1930s. While Kirkpatrick focused on “salting down” his interpretation and preparing a “working copy” of the piece, and the music started to attract more attention from a broader audience, Ives began to relax his attitudes toward the performers of his music. Ives’s permissiveness, in turn, created the possibility of greater editorial intervention on Kirkpatrick’s part. Although Ives’s notation, at first glance, sometimes gives the impression of impenetrability, by the middle of the 1930s Ives began to encourage musicians to come up with their own solutions to performance difficulties. He effectively gave Kirkpatrick such liberties in a 1935 letter. In his typically diligent way, Kirkpatrick had written to “bother” Ives about “a bit of documentation,” posing a series of detailed questions to the composer about the Concord’s genesis.21 Ives’s reply has become a signal document in his correspondence—a fact attested to by Kirkpatrick’s decision to include it in Memos among only a handful of other Ives letters in that volume. In the letter, Ives apparently settles a question Kirkpatrick raised about the relationship between the first movement, “Emerson,” and an earlier related

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work, the Emerson Overture. Ives wrote: “It seems to me usually (perhaps not at every time of day) that the printed movement [the first movement of the Concord] is nearer Emerson [the person] than either the first score [the Emerson Overture] or the transcriptions by themselves, and I think you are right in keeping to that.”22 Yet in the following paragraph, Ives gave Kirkpatrick a somewhat different—and ultimately more influential—piece of advice, couching it in reference to Emerson: Do whatever seems natural or best to you, though not necessarily the same way each time. The music, in its playing as well as in its substance, should have some of Emerson’s freedom in action and thought—of the explorer “taking the ultimate of today as the first of tomorrow’s new series.” It is said that Emerson seldom gave any of his lectures in exactly the same way, and that the published essays were not kept to literally. . . . Apparently Emerson liked to trust to the mood of the moment—perhaps too much.23

Ives’s most empowering line to Kirkpatrick—“Do whatever seems natural or best to you”—is carefully qualified, nestled between his suggestion to “keep to” the printed movement and a hint that there should be limits to trusting what Ives called Emerson’s “mood of the moment.” Initially, Kirkpatrick interpreted Ives’s comments as an invitation to improvise, and shied away from them.24 In time, however, Kirkpatrick embraced the prerogative that Ives’s passing comment accorded him, and cited Ives’s letter frequently when he discussed the Concord.25 Once he had fully apprehended Ives’s instructions, editing became Kirkpatrick’s way of fulfilling Ives’s request while at the same time working in a manner that met his own exacting standards of preparation for performance. Although Kirkpatrick remained primarily concerned with establishing a clear and legible performing score prior to 1939, parts of his correspondence nevertheless portend the more symbiotic relationship that his editorial and performing activities would eventually take. In particular, Kirkpatrick became aware of the thread of incompleteness that ran through Ives’s view of the Concord, which led Ives to myriad reconsiderations of the work over the course of his life. The vast complexity of the sonata—its relationship to numerous sources and related works—dawned on Kirkpatrick gradually during the mid-1930s; the instability of the work—its many changes of form in the hands of its composer—Kirkpatrick discovered almost accidentally, when he requested a copy of the Emerson Transcriptions from Ives in 1934.26 Kirkpatrick’s initial reaction to the Emerson Transcriptions was one of bafflement—and surprise: I must confess being quite mystified as to the significance and relation of the arrangements to the original. Evidently I hadn’t realized the extent to which your music may be considered in a state of flux, so to speak. Emerson had

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always seemed a perfectly satisfactory piece, having come to that degree of focus where its form becomes recognizable and strong. . . . So it was rather a shock to find it could so readily be dismembered and reassembled by its own maker.27

As Kirkpatrick would eventually learn, Ives’s sonata bears relationships to a number of other works (not only the Emerson Overture but also pieces such as The Celestial Railroad), and Ives had marked up at least fifteen different copies of the first edition alone.28 As the decade came to a close, Kirkpatrick began to confront one of the primary questions confronting a performer of the Concord: Does realizing Ives’s intention mean following Ives’s notated score or following through with the license Ives granted in prose?

Kirkpatrick and Ives’s Second Edition: An Ambiguous Alliance, 1939–41 Kirkpatrick had an opportunity to reconcile this dilemma in the years immediately following the Concord premiere. Even if Kirkpatrick had not given the first New York performance of the Concord in 1939, and even if Gilman had not written his landmark review of that concert, the Concord was on its way to getting a new lease on life in the guise of a second edition. If Kirkpatrick and Ives had been able to arrive together at a composer-approved edition of the Concord early in the 1940s, it seems likely that Kirkpatrick’s relationship with the work would have taken a different path. But that is not what happened. The politely contained rancor that simmered just below the surface of their brief collaboration on Ives’s second edition served to magnify, rather than resolve, Kirkpatrick’s ambivalence about the Concord. In 1938, the composer and conductor Lehman Engel became president of Arrow Music Press. Arrow was a newly formed organization that had acquired an existing press, the Cos Cob Press, an important institution for the dissemination of modernist music.29 By June 22, 1938, when Engel first wrote to Ives about publishing something with Arrow Music, Engel probably already knew that Ives tended to give generous support to those who promoted his work.30 As Engel recalled in a later interview, Ives was eager to help: He said, of course we were at liberty to publish any of his music that we wanted, and he would pay the bills, and the first thing we contracted for was the Concord Sonata for piano. . . . We also published the Sixty-Seventh Psalm and a few other pieces. Ives not only paid for these works, but told us that we could keep all money that came in from them, so that we would have some money to run the

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press with, and perhaps publish some worthy composer’s work who was in no position to raise the money himself.31

Kirkpatrick was the most obvious choice to edit the sonata, a man with both experience as an editor and the most intimate knowledge of the sonata besides Ives himself. A few weeks after the Town Hall concert, Kirkpatrick wrote to Ives, eager to arrive quickly at a new edition: “How grand about publishing the sonata! I remember your saying you still had the plates. I imagine it would be quite simple to correct them, much as you did the New Music reprints.”32 Work proceeded rapidly during the summer of 1939, with Kirkpatrick visiting the Ives house in West Redding twice in August.33 The project began to stall, however, as Ives and Kirkpatrick came to see the work in different ways, and mutual frustration escalated over the course of the fall. On February 10, 1940, Harmony Twichell Ives, Charles’s wife, wrote to Kirkpatrick, asking him to return all of the Concord material, and also, apparently for the first time, informing Kirkpatrick that George F. Roberts, a copyist at NBC and an Ives advocate, had been tasked with doing the edition instead.34 In Kirkpatrick’s recollection of his abortive editorial involvement on the second edition, which he shared in a 1988 interview with Ives biographer Jan Swafford, he spoke of a struggle between the old and new: “I wanted it more like the first edition,” Kirkpatrick told Swafford. “I wanted to fight shy of modernities and go for the logicalities, so I procrastinated.”35 Ives’s work with Roberts was more fruitful, and Roberts’s recollection of the Concord suggests that at least in the spring of 1940, Ives had a definite shape in mind for the Concord Sonata, and believed that it was nearing completion. For his part, Roberts was already familiar with editing Ives, having worked on numerous Ives pieces in the 1930s, including Central Park in the Dark, the Trio, and On the Antipodes. Roberts related his experience editing the Concord in an interview with Vivian Perlis: I did some of the Concord Sonata. Every time I went there it was new. The printers were on his neck all the time. He used to laugh about it. He didn’t care; he was in no hurry, and he always had something new to put in. His handwriting wasn’t any too good and his hand was shaky too, later on. The earlier scores were all right, but when he made those additions! If he wanted to add something, he’d put a little mark on the spot and say “See page twenty-five.” This would be on page two, and he’d have the change on the back of page twenty-five. Sometimes we couldn’t find where he had put the change.36

In Robert’s recollection, the revision of the Concord seems quite haphazard, a chaotic project by an old man who was indifferent to the exigencies of music publishing. Yet although Robert’s work on the Concord is

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mostly lost, there are other traces of correspondence which suggest that he and Ives pursued the revision in a rather systematic way. As Roberts explained to Kirkpatrick in 1958, while Kirkpatrick was assembling his Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, “In the Spring of 1940 the corrected copy of the Piano Sonata was finished, but on Nov 21, 1940, the Arrow Press claimed to have lost the copy. I did some more work on it with Mr. Ives, but do not know whether those changes were incorporated into the final printed version.”37 Roberts may have been referring to a letter that Ives sent to him on November 21, 1940, inquiring as to the status of the Concord edition. The tone of Ives’s letter suggests something different from what Roberts remembered during his interview with Perlis— namely, that Ives and Roberts had arrived at an agreement on the text of the new version, and that the revised edition had been completely settled. “Possibly the engraver got somewhat mixed up about it all,” Ives wrote to Roberts. “I remember when we went over it all together last spring it was quite clear to you—you made corrections in ink and the few passages & pages which you copied were all well & correctly done & put in their right places.”38 Nevertheless, the project dragged on. Harmony wrote to Kirkpatrick about the Concord in August 1941, informing him that it was nearly done.39 When she visited Kirkpatrick later that fall to give him a copy of the proofs, Roberts and Ives had made sufficient progress that she was able to offer him the whole sonata. In 1943 Kirkpatrick asked about the second edition once again, but the majority of the Ives-Kirkpatrick correspondence from the 1940s, when it mentioned the Concord at all, centered on preparations for the recording that Kirkpatrick made in 1945. There may be no satisfactory explanation for why, if Kirkpatrick preferred the first edition so strongly that he risked souring his relationship with Ives over a refusal to revise it, he adopted the second edition almost as soon as he had a copy. In a conciliatory letter he sent later to Ives, Kirkpatrick suggested that it was sheer obstinacy: “Having gone at it at first from the first edition, I got so fond of many of those details that I’m afraid I was slow to the point of Scotch stubbornness at accepting many of your revisions. So many of them now appear to me as real improvements.”40 Although Kirkpatrick’s motives for abandoning the collaboration with Ives on the second edition may never be totally understood, the outcomes were clear. First, correspondence that circulated to and from Roberts, Ives’s eventual amanuensis for the project, suggests that Ives was approaching a fixed state of the work early in 1941. This is noteworthy, since scholars have emphasized Ives’s view of the “Emerson” movement in particular as a perpetually unfinished work.41 Second, the whole experience, culminating with his receipt of the proofs from Harmony in 1941, gave Kirkpatrick two decidedly different versions of

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the sonata. Finally, Kirkpatrick began to question Ives’s ultimate authority on matters relating to the Concord. This questioning (he would later explain it by claiming that Ives had failed “to grant to his masterpieces certain rights of their own”), combined with his own increasing confidence as an editor, exerted a sweeping impact on his future relationship with the Concord.

The Player’s Apology, 1941–87 From his receipt of the second proof onward, another important change took place with Kirkpatrick’s relationship to the Concord: for the first time, he began to edit the work of a living composer without consulting him. Although Kirkpatrick and Ives continued to correspond throughout the 1940s and up until Ives’s death in 1954, they seldom discussed specific passages of the Concord. Kirkpatrick himself understood that this new, independent relationship with the Concord was different from the editing he had already done on behalf of other composers. At the beginning of his critical commentary for his unfinished Concord Sonata edition of 1953 (which bore the title “The Player’s Apology”), Kirkpatrick suggested that writing the music of Concord down was an open-ended, fluid activity: This copy is not an ‘edition.’ It is a personal solution to the problem of playing a work which will always be, for its performers, as it has been for its composer, an endless experiment. This particular solution implies no thought that other players should follow it, but simply that it might be useful either as an introduction or as a springboard towards other solutions.42

At other times, however, Kirkpatrick seemed to prefer to think of the Concord as a work that should be approached by a performer as a continuation of Romantic performance practice, wherein a pianist might have some flexibility in pedaling and rubato, for example, but would stop short of amalgamating sources. In 1934, while he was still learning it, Kirkpatrick referred to it in a letter to Ives as “one of the most interesting modern variants of the old sonata machine, just as valid as Liszt’s or any other.”43 Also, in his 1968 recording of the Concord he made a point of stating in his liner notes that he followed the second edition in almost every aspect, suggesting a high degree of fidelity to the text.44 Because of comments that Kirkpatrick made near the end of his life, he is remembered as mostly preferring the first edition. In an interview, Peter Burkholder noted that “I think he might have had a prejudice towards the first publication of the Concord Sonata since that is after all what he premiered in the late ’30s. I think he never really liked the second edition.”45

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Similarly, H. Wiley Hitchcock recalled that Kirkpatrick “didn’t want to get in John’s [recte: Ives’s] way about the Concord Sonata, because he, John, preferred the first edition.”46 While these recollections are in keeping with Kirkpatrick’s own thoughts on the sonata from the 1980s, they do not reflect how his attitude shifted over the course of his entire career. As a result, the aspect of Kirkpatrick’s relationship with the sonata which aligned it with the Romantic piano tradition—and the notion of a more or less fixed score for performance—has received more emphasis recently than his work to promote variety in the musical text.47 Yet Kirkpatrick’s career from 1941 onward reveals a far more complicated picture, and it is worth probing at least a few examples of how Kirkpatrick’s thinking about the sonata developed over time. The very opening of the sonata reveals some aspects of Kirkpatrick’s “playing at” the Concord. Ives’s two versions of the first two staves of “Emerson” differ significantly (fig. 4.2). Generally speaking, Ives’s revisions alter our understanding of the contour of the phrase. In the first version, Ives used a single barline, in the second system, coupled with a thinner texture in the passage immediately following. Related to that is the addition, in Ives’s second version, of the “Beethoven motive” (the first theme of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony) in the bass at the end of the second system. Although this motive is embedded in the pitches earlier in the phrase, the effect would be much less overt without this statement in doubled octaves in the low register. Geoffrey Block has argued, however, that Ives’s second version actually “marks a return to an idea that precedes the first edition,” since it is present in the Emerson Overture, a planned orchestral work that was ultimately abandoned by Ives in favor of the sonata.48 In both of Kirkpatrick’s recordings of the work—one made in 1945 and the other in 1968—he included this “Beethoven motive” in the opening phrase, suggesting an affinity with the second edition. Block has already noted this; but in some performance details, it is clear that he oscillated between Ives’s two versions.49 While both recordings lack the diminuendo in the second system, there is also a certain broadening at this point in the second recording, and a careful sculpting of the accents, which seems to emphasize even more dramatically than the first recording a barline in the middle of the second system. In other words, the shape of Kirkpatrick’s phrase in the 1968 recording seems to favor the first edition. Kirkpatrick’s 1953 edition illustrates the ambivalence Kirkpatrick felt about this particular passage (fig. 4.3). He prepared this edition during his 1952–53 sabbatical from Cornell, and it is the first version that survives in Kirkpatrick’s hand. A comparison of this edition with Ives’s second edition shows numerous changes, the most significant of which is the addition of barlines. At the end of the first system, for example, Kirkpatrick crossed

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out the 9/8 and 3/2 time signatures, which alter where the downbeat falls at the beginning of the second system. Other changes are also present, and include frequent respellings, general disregard for courtesy accidentals, changes in slurs, certain chords borrowed from the first edition and, on an apparently inconsistent basis, the deletion of certain dissonant notes.50 In short, despite Kirkpatrick’s frequent declarations about favoring Ives’s original intentions, in this instance he seemed to privilege neither of Ives’s published editions. Looking at Kirkpatrick’s final edition from 1987 shows yet another interpretation of this passage (fig. 4.4). This edition also features barlines, respellings, accidentals, added slurs and accents, and a few added notes. It goes even further than the 1953 edition, however, in interpolating a whole different passage for the second half of the second system. While this new passage is much more closely aligned to Ives’s first version than to his second, it constitutes a drastic departure from both published versions. Indeed, the aural effect of this version is much thinner, with its purified intervals and different phrase climax, than anything else published by Ives. Kirkpatrick posed numerous interpretive questions to Ives about particular places in the sonata while he was learning it, some of which influenced his editions. Despite having studied the work so carefully and for so long, Kirkpatrick only discussed a few specific musical passages with Ives in their correspondence; Ives’s reluctance to answer specific questions about his music probably discouraged Kirkpatrick from doing so. One letter from 1935, however, does reveal them discussing specifics: “There are two passages that worry me:—the first line on page 6 and the Beethoven chords on page 17 (I don’t think their inner voices have found their final or most appropriate spacing)—and I suspect and hope that the overture will throw some light on the polyphonic intentions involved.”51 Ives’s reply was typically noncommittal, and he ultimately recommended to Kirkpatrick “to do whatever you think best.”52 Left to his own devices, Kirkpatrick appears to have pursued simultaneously the never-ending goal of “playing at” this passage, which yielded a process of gradual refinement over the course of his life: a clarification not just of the “optical presentation,” but of the actual notes. These two goals are particularly well represented by the first passage Kirkpatrick mentions in the quote above—the beginning of page 6— since each edition, performance, or score by Kirkpatrick reveals something different.53 Ives himself sought to thicken the texture of this passage considerably between the 1920 version and the 1947 version (ex. 4.1). In Kirkpatrick’s copy of the first edition of Concord, the one that he received in 1927, there is little to indicate any change in the passage, save the addition of barlines, a common technique throughout Kirkpatrick’s copies of the

Example 4.1. Charles Ives, Concord Sonata, variant readings, pp. 5–6. © 1947 by Associated Music Publishers.

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Concord.54 Kirkpatrick later acquired another copy of the first edition, which he consulted in the 1940s during the fitful collaboration with Ives as he prepared the second edition. In it, Kirkpatrick incorporated the thickening of the texture from Ives’s second version near the end of the system. Hence the relationship between Kirkpatrick’s second copy of the first edition (fig. 4.5) and yet another source which was roughly contemporaneous—the proofs of the second edition that Kirkpatrick received from Harmony Ives in 1941 (fig. 4.6)—is ambiguous. Even though Kirkpatrick noted the new figuration at the end of the system in his second copy of the first edition, in the proofs he boldly crossed it out with red pencil. Kirkpatrick also crossed out some of the inner notes at the end of the passage in the proofs in order to lend clearer voice leading to the beginning of the “Beethoven” theme which recurs throughout the work. It is not clear if Kirkpatrick ever discussed the proofs with Ives, and between 1941 and the publication of the second edition of 1947, the passage in question was not emended by Ives (or the man who actually edited Ives’s second edition, George Roberts). What is clear is that Kirkpatrick consulted these proofs while preparing the 1945 recording of the work. “That was my bible, so to speak,” Kirkpatrick said of the proofs, “and so a year or two after that I was playing from that more, just restoring a few details from the old first printing.”55 The 1945 recording incorporates many features of the revised passage, such as the doubled fifths in the middle of the system, and is a composite of the proofs (including a minor seventh ascending figure at the end of the passage), and the material from Ives’s first edition (avoiding the rapid filigree in the right hand present in the proofs but not in the first edition). If anything, the source that appears most closely to represent Kirkpatrick’s performance in the 1945 recording is his incomplete 1953 edition (ex. 4.1, third system). Like the 1945 recording, the doubled fifths are included, and the minor sevenths match closely, if not exactly, what Kirkpatrick recorded. Also, the inner voices of the “Beethoven” motive at the end of the example follow the second edition. This raises the possibility that some features of the 1953 edition may actually have been gestating in Kirkpatrick’s live performances well before the edition was committed to paper. In short, by 1941 Kirkpatrick had at least two distinct choices for the passage that begins at the bottom of page five. Despite the emphasis that scholars have placed on Kirkpatrick’s preference of one version of the sonata or the other, it appears that his copy of the 1947 edition ultimately became an amalgam of the two published editions (fig. 4.7). At the beginning of Kirkpatrick’s copy of the 1947 edition (fig. 4.2), he provided a legend for

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his multicolored annotations in the score: places marked in red are “passages which differ from the set of proof sheets which Mrs. Ives brought to Windways on October 4th, 1941”; passages marked in green indicate where “JK plays more according to the 1st edition”; and anything that is in blue is a “JK emendation.” In this passage, Kirkpatrick simply circled the more densely textured passage in green, showing that he preferred the first edition. Yet even Kirkpatrick’s decisive pencil strokes in both his copy of the 1947 edition and the proofs did not stay with him forever. In his 1968 recording, Kirkpatrick follows the second edition exactly in this section, including the rapid passagework at the end of the system—suggesting that his thinking had changed once again. As Kirkpatrick explained in his liner notes to the 1968 recording, “In the 30’s I had modified the first editions with some of the revisions, by the 50’s it was the other way around. . . . Nearly all the details of this performance that differ from the second edition are from one source or another.”56 Kirkpatrick’s decision to use Ives’s second edition as the primary source in this recording is frequently overlooked, and on its own is a caution against categorical statements about Kirkpatrick’s preference for either of Ives’s published editions. The corresponding passage from Kirkpatrick’s final edition from 1987 (ex. 4.1, fourth system) exemplifies both his “playing at” the work, and Kirkpatrick’s goal near the end of his life to create a “purified”—and very heavily edited—Concord.57 Here, many of the sevenths and ninths have been rewritten as octaves, and the contrapuntal language is radically simplified. The barlines have been reinterpreted once again, to what is arguably the most predictable metric arrangement for this passage. But this passage also reveals the network of material that Kirkpatrick was drawing on. Throughout this edition, Kirkpatrick notated above and around the staves each source that he was drawing on.58 Kirkpatrick relied on several different groups of sources: s, “preliminary sketches”; M, “ink manuscripts”; r, “copies of the first edition revised by Ives”; and P, “proofs for the 1947 edition.”59 The ways in which the end of the second movement, “Hawthorne,” changed over the course of Kirkpatrick’s time with the Concord also show how his multiple editions helped him to weigh more subtle performance decisions. “Hawthorne,” Ives’s scherzo, includes frenetic changes of textures before concluding with a fugato that is quickly abandoned in favor of a passage marked “as fast as possible” (beginning on p. 45 in the first edition, and p. 46 in the second). This finale features some of the most bravura technical passages in the entire sonata. In the first edition, however, Ives attenuates the precipitous texture by providing the tempo marking “a little slower” at the bottom of page 49, and then marking

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the top of page 50 “from here on, evenly and slower,” saving one final frantic “very fast” outburst for the very end. In Ives’s second edition, by contrast, he asks the performer to continually accelerate: he writes “rush it” on page 49; halves the rhythmic values of what Kirkpatrick called a “drumroll” figure on page 50; and in the penultimate system, instructs the player to play still “faster if possible.” The only marking requesting a slower tempo is in the brief quote of the beginning of the “human faith” melody immediately before the end. Even here, Ives made the tempo change even more dramatic, by doubling the values of the “human faith” melody and writing “very slowly” instead of merely “slowly.” Furthermore, in the first edition the left hand plays a B♭, concluding the fragment of the “human faith” melody within the prevailing tonal context of E♭, while in the second edition he instead opts for a jarring A♮—which is made all the more dissonant by filling out the E♭ major harmony that precedes it. Kirkpatrick’s 1953 and 1987 editions both tend toward a more oratorical—as opposed to vitriolic—conclusion to the movement. In both instances, he preserves the drumroll notation and the tempo markings of the first edition. Perhaps most significantly is how Kirkpatrick treats the final “human faith” melody at the very end. Ives had used eighth notes marked “slowly” in the first edition, and then progressed to quarter notes marked “very slowly” in the second. Kirkpatrick went further still, notating the passage in half notes. Both editions retain the B♭ in the left hand, and the 1987 edition includes the C♯ octave on the final note, as opposed to the dissonant C♮ that Ives had used in the second edition. Kirkpatrick’s recordings of this passage reveal a different path through this concluding passage. They both slow down more and more in the measures leading up to the “human faith” melody, an idea from Ives’s first edition. Yet Kirkpatrick plays the A♮ in the bass at the end of this quote in both, rather than the B♭, and concludes with the C♮ accent in the upper voice, following Ives’s second edition. Taken as a whole, Kirkpatrick’s subtle changes here suggest that he was also using these editions to sort out not only the notes and barlines, but the aggregate musical affect of certain passages. This concluding passage also provides an example of what Kirkpatrick may have meant when he saw Ives’s revisions as preferring “modernities” over “logicalities.” It is not possible to trace Kirkpatrick’s thinking about the Concord at this level of detail across the entire sixty years that he worked on the piece, in part because Kirkpatrick’s edition of 1953 only included fragments of “Emerson” and “Hawthorne.” While a truly exhaustive source comparison of all of Kirkpatrick’s changes to the Concord would fill many pages, the passages discussed above exemplify Kirkpatrick’s continued exploration of the sonata through recordings, notes, and editions.60 Although the 1987

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edition appears to have been an attempt to fix a definitive state of the work, it continues the practice that Kirkpatrick had begun almost as soon as there were variant readings available: “playing at” them was an end in itself. I would like to offer a few final observations about Kirkpatrick’s relationship with the Concord. First, it is worth noting that by and large, Kirkpatrick’s changes were composed of Ives’s variants. Ives’s written statements encouraging freedom of interpretation do not insist that these liberties be culled from his own source materials—that seems to have been Kirkpatrick’s idea. Kirkpatrick’s insistence on drawing on Ives’s variants also underscores the centrality of practices typically considered to be editing to the manner in which he carried out Ives’s vision for the Concord. Second, there may be a temptation simply to throw one’s hands up when looking at Kirkpatrick’s multifaceted variations, and declare them, if not random, not very meaningful. Yet Kirkpatrick’s general approach to editing was transactional; his other editing projects tended to have a readily identifiable beginning, middle, and end. In this respect Kirkpatrick’s relationship to the Concord is special not only because of the sonata’s singular status in the American canon, but also because of the open-ended way he related to it as a fundamentally unstable text. Third, Kirkpatrick may have stated a preference for one of Ives’s versions or the other at various times, but his recordings and editions show that he never settled for very long. Kirkpatrick seems to have understood that the freedom of variation in the Concord, alongside its irreducible textuality, existed in an uneasy, but necessary, interrelationship. Finally, although the printed and recorded artifacts of Kirkpatrick’s work with Concord are but a few threads in the larger aesthetic, technical, and philosophical fabric that informed his conception of the sonata, they allow us to knit Kirkpatrick the performer and Kirkpatrick the editor together in a way that does justice to the subtlety, complexity, and contradiction inherent in this material.

Chapter Five

Imagination Ruggles’s Mood Discovering an unknown work by a composer is always an exciting event. Finding one from a figure like Carl Ruggles, with only eight published pieces to his name, is doubly so. In the 1960s, Kirkpatrick was sorting through Ruggles’s early manuscripts when he discovered sketches for a work for violin and piano titled Mood. This material was commingled with Ruggles’s voluminous studies for his abandoned opera, The Sunken Bell. Over time, Kirkpatrick prepared an edition of Mood, which he performed with violinist Daniel Stepner. Kirkpatrick was worried that Ruggles would destroy Mood if he were reminded about the work, and as a result kept his work a secret from the composer. By the time Kirkpatrick was ready to share his work, Ruggles had long since passed away.1 Mood occupies a special place in Ruggles’s output for a variety of reasons. It was Ruggles’s only work for violin, his own instrument. Although Kirkpatrick prepared editions of other incomplete works by Ruggles (including Symphonia Dialecta/Affirmations, the Largo Expressivo from Portals, the songs “Windy Nights” and “The Prayer,” March, Visions, Parvum Organum, Valse Lente, and Four Untitled Piano Pieces), Mood was the only one he spent significant time trying to publish. Kirkpatrick offered a “conjectural date” of 1918, “based on the way these sketches seem to antedate the bits of The Sunken Bell, on which Ruggles was still working in 1923—also on his saying that Toys (1919) was his earliest acknowledged music.”2 Although it is impossible to date Mood decisively, the fact that Kirkpatrick thought that it was one of Ruggles’s earliest works helps to explain the lengths he went to on its behalf. This chapter explores Kirkpatrick’s editorial work on Mood. Copyright disputes prevented the work from being published, despite Kirkpatrick’s efforts to claim that he had partial ownership of the work as a “posthumous collaborator.” In this respect, the medium of the printed page

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required Kirkpatrick to articulate his relationship to Ruggles’s work in a way that never would have been necessary in the absence of copyright law. Although the piece has remained unpublished, its editorial history reveals Kirkpatrick at his most meticulous and inventive. In the editions of other pieces he executed after Mood, Kirkpatrick’s sense of prerogative in handling both Ruggles’s and Ives’s music became more pronounced, to the point where he sometimes imagined the composer observing him as he worked.3 In order to evaluate Kirkpatrick’s edition, this chapter delves into a new consideration of Mood’s relationship to The Sunken Bell. An examination of the source material for The Sunken Bell shows that there are several ways to interpret Mood’s relationship to the opera, each of which complicates the precise status of Mood’s position in Ruggles’s output. One reason Mood matters is that it poses some difficult questions about what editing is and is not. First, there is the obviously divisive issue of whether an editor should attempt to prepare a piece in the absence of a fair copy. But Mood also raises more complicated issues about what constitutes a source, where a sketch ends and a work begins, and the distances to which an editor can or should go in an effort to recapture a piece by a composer, especially one with a works list as modest as Ruggles’s. In the end, I am not interested in passing judgment on Kirkpatrick’s edition. As his correspondence shows, he knew as well as anyone the problematic situation of this piece. Rather, my goal is to consider Mood with an eye toward the larger concerns it raises about how Kirkpatrick was forced to fill in significant gaps in materials that Ruggles left behind, and how that informs a view of his editorial practice.

Kirkpatrick’s Sources for Mood Kirkpatrick’s edition of Mood: Prelude to an Imaginary Tragedy for Violin and Piano consists of what he called four “paragraphs,” each standing more or less independently as a musical gesture. The third paragraph recapitulates material from the first, giving the work a basic overall form of ABA′C. The piece unmistakably reflects Ruggles’s sensibility as a composer: intense, highly concentrated bursts of music permeate the texture; carefully calibrated contrapuntal lines snake between the piano and violin; and boldly declaimed dissonances sometimes seem to serve as ends in themselves. The whole piece lasts a scant five minutes in performance, from the jarring unison opening of the violin to the ethereal tenths of the ending. Ruggles gave some hint about his inspiration for the piece by including an epigram. It is a slightly modified excerpt of a poem entitled “Fragments” by the British author George Meredith:

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Meredith Our Earth is young; of Measure passing bound; Infinite are the heights to climb, The depths to sound.4

Ruggles Our world is young, Young, and of measure passing bound, Infinite are the heights to climb, The depths to sound.

This literary allusion aligns Mood with a number of Ruggles’s other works which used texts from Romantic English and American poets including Blake, Shelley, Browning, and Whitman. Ruggles biographer Marilyn Ziffrin noted that Ruggles was able to charm patrons because he “could quote at length from the nineteenth-century poets and put on grand airs with a great flourish.”5 Kirkpatrick worked on Mood intermittently for more than ten years. He started sorting Ruggles’s manuscripts “sometime in the 1960s.”6 In July 1974 he sent Ruggles’s son Micah a copy of the score. He performed the piece for the first time at Yale on January 19, 1976.7 Even after this first performance, he was still not completely satisfied. In May of that year he wrote to Micah that he had yet to declare the edition finished, and gave further details about his progress and motivation in another letter that fall: “I’d approached the Mood with considerable hesitancy and with no thought at first of performance, let alone publication,” Kirkpatrick explained.8 “But when I found how well it could fit together, and how good it was, and finally realized what the sketchy patches not-all-written-out really meant . . . , then it seemed a duty to let it take its place in the all-too-meager list of his works.” Kirkpatrick based his edition on what he counted as six sources, listed in table 5.1. Even a casual inspection of these leaves raises a host of questions. Ruggles left no thoroughgoing fair copy of the work from beginning to end, nor any explicit indication of how the material fit together. The longest stretch of continuous music in the sketches is only sixteen out of the almost seventy measures of Mood. The sources Kirkpatrick labeled S, t, and M all include vocal material from The Sunken Bell (table 5.2); he also marked a number of passages in the second and third sketch as “etc.” rather than accounting for them as material that is related to Mood. The first sketch offers contradictory instrumentation “for violin and piano” and “for symphony” at the top of the page, while “piano” is the only instrumentation given on the first system (fig. 5.1). Underneath “for symphony,” Ruggles wrote “dev.,” possibly signaling “development,” which would place this passage in the middle, not the beginning, of whichever piece it was originally intended for. The third sketch features a full title block on the first page, perhaps suggesting it started as a fair copy, but has only fourteen measures of continuous music, stopping midway through the first paragraph. One might even argue that there are only four sources, rather than six, since, as Kirkpatrick noted, the source that he labeled as “M” is part of a double leaf that was separated from “s,” and “t” has only the title, but no music, for Mood.

Table 5.1. Kirkpatrick’s sources for Mood Sigla Description

Position in Mood

Measures of continuous music

s

Single leaf 12-staff Ditson brand #2; pencil with blue pencil addenda (once part of a double leaf with M). Kirkpatrick labeled this source “first sketch.”

p. 1: Mood, mm. 1–4; 12–15.

4

M

Single leaf 12-staff Ditson brand #2; pencil with blue pencil addenda and ink fair copy. Kirkpatrick labled this source “ink patch.”

p. 1: Mood, mm. 62–69.

7

S

3 single leaves, 12-staff paper, no brand indication. First and third leaves were possibly once part of a double leaf, based on staining and tear patterns. Pencil with addenda in red, blue, and orange pencil. “Mood, Second Sketch” written in red pencil by Ruggles, then erased, at top of p. 1.

p. 1: Mood, mm. 1–7. p. 2: Mood, mm. 43–44, 16–21. p. 3: Mood, mm. 10–18. p. 4: Mood, mm. 48–51. p. 5: Mood, m. 22. p. 6: Mood, mm. 54–64.

10

p

1 -Art brand #10. Pencil with blue and red pencil addenda. Kirkpatrick labeled this source “third sketch.”

p. 1: title block in bold blue pencil. p. 2: Mood, mm. 1–8. p. 3: Mood, mm. 8–14; 40–44. p. 4: Mood, mm. 45–47; mm. 22–30. p. 5: Mood, 59–61; 52–58. Most of this page was not transcribed by Kirkpatrick. p. 6: Mood, 61–62; mm. 33–38.

14

P

Double-leaf 12-staff Art brand #10; pencil with blue pencil and ink addenda. Kirkpatrick labeled this source “fourth sketch.”

p. 1: Mood, mm. 22–32 (with significant erasures in mm. 24–25). p. 2: Mood, mm. 53–61; 63–69. p. 3: Mood, mm. 58, 63, 50 (fragmentary)

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Table 5.1. Concluded Sigla Description

Position in Mood

Measures of continuous music

t

“Prelude to a[n] Imaginary Tragedy for Violin and Piano” written boldly in blue pencil on the cover; otherwise mostly continuous sketch material for The Sunken Bell.

0

Double-leaf 12-staff Art brand #10; pencil with blue, red, and orange addenda

Note: Measure numbers refer to those in Kirkpatrick’s final fair copy of Mood.

Table 5.2. Texted Sunken Bell material in Kirkpatrick’s sources for Mood Sigla

Notes

s

p. 2: Act 3, p. 75 (“kind and gentle rain didst raise them from . . .”)

M

p. 1: Act 3, p. 76 (“his prisoned limbs shall stir . . .”) p. 2: Act 2, p. 57 (“for though hast seen the fair green island”)

S

n/a

p

n/a

P

n/a

t

p. 1: Act 4, p. 86 (“He’s deaf and blind”) p. 2: Act 4, p. 86 (“while crookback imps do creep . . .”) p. 3: Act 4, p. 86 (“threaten / Now they go wringing them . . .”)

None of these considerations posed insurmountable obstacles to Kirkpatrick. He had already edited Ruggles’s Evocations, charting a course through the sea of variants Ruggles offered for those pieces. What had changed, though, was that Kirkpatrick was now working independently from Ruggles on Mood, and the paper trail which led to Kirkpatrick’s eventual edition seems like an extended conversation with himself. Kirkpatrick created diplomatic transcriptions of these source materials, a technique he used with other incomplete pieces by Ruggles that he edited in the 1960s and later.9 These transcriptions of Mood, while faithful to the mise-en-page of the original sketches, reveal a number of interpretive decisions of their own. Kirkpatrick did not necessarily copy everything that was on each page. For example, pages 4 and 5 of the third sketch show that he skipped several systems and transcribed only parts of others (fig. 5.2). Kirkpatrick also

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used his own judgment about whether or not to include an erased marking by Ruggles in his own transcription. For example, Kirkpatrick wrote in “Mood, Second Sketch” at the top of the transcription of one source when it had been erased in the original. On the first page of in the fourth sketch, Kirkpatrick filled in erased material twice: on the second system he transcribed a passage that Ruggles scratched out in blue pencil, and on the following system Kirkpatrick included in his transcription a passage which had been erased (fig. 5.3). At several points Kirkpatrick referred to erased material in his source comparison, even calling one variation in measure 29 a “palimpsest of revision,” which, although erased, was “better left in.”10 Kirkpatrick also had to decide how the various passages should fit together. Since the first and third sketches both open with a forcefully articulated F in the violin, his decision to place it at the beginning of the piece seems reasonable. Kirkpatrick elaborated on the process in his preface to the edition: “The form in four paragraphs was dictated by the way the ‘molto sostenuto’ page [mm. 22–32] made a contrasting tenderness, the restatement of the opening started a varied recapitulation, and the antiphonies could start an extended coda—a basic shape (ABAC) that he adjusted in later pieces with more subtlety and mastery.”11 Perhaps most striking here is how Kirkpatrick pried apart the material for the restatement of the opening (mm. 33–51) from what is present in the sketches. It is not clear from the sketches that the passage beginning with measure 33 should follow the paragraph that ends in measure 32. The first, second, and third sketch show, if anything, that what Kirkpatrick called the “recapitulation” is continuous with the opening material. Similarly, material for the contrasting paragraphs, which begin in measures 22 and 52 of Kirkpatrick’s edition, respectively, are freely deployed throughout the sketches. It would be difficult to show from the sketches alone how Ruggles had meant for the piece to unfold. It is also worth noting that there is significant variation in the ideas that Ruggles did leave in the sketch material for Mood. For example, the version of the violin melody in Kirkpatrick’s measures 22–25 is more ornate than a variant given in the third sketch (ex. 5.1). Similarly, the climatic passage of Kirkpatrick’s version of Mood is a thrice-repeated ascending figure (mm. 61–65; ex. 5.2a). Yet it is difficult to establish from the sources that Ruggles actually wanted this gesture repeated so many times. In the second sketch (ex. 5.2b), two variations are notated on the same system of S6, but divided by a circled blue line. The passage which definitely places this at the end of the work has the figure repeated only once before the final chords are struck by the violin and piano, as shown in the ink manuscript Kirkpatrick labeled “M.” Ruggles circled the opening chord in yet another source (to which Kirkpatrick assigned the sigla p5, given in ex. 5.2c), marking it “bis” (a marking he used throughout to signal repetition). Kirkpatrick explained his decision cursorily in the critical commentary: “Repeating these 2 beats

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would sound redundant, but repeating 61 as 62 [is] so excellent that one may presume that this is what is meant.”12 Example 5.1. (a) Kirkpatrick ed., Mood, mm. 22–25, violin part; (b) Carl Ruggles, sketch for Mood (Kirkpatrick sigla: p4), m. 22, MSS 56/81/768.

Example 5.2. (a) Kirkpatrick ed., Mood, mm. 61–65; (b) Carl Ruggles, sketch for Mood (Kirkpatrick sigla: S6); (c) Ruggles, sketch for Mood (Kirkpatrick sigla: p5), top system, MSS 56/81/768.

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Example 5.2. Concluded.

Kirkpatrick used his transcriptions as the basis for his edition, which survives in two copies. As with his work on Ives’s Memos, he assembled the edition by carefully noting in the margin of each system which sources were composited together to arrive at the edited text. These notations were then omitted in the second version, which, with the exception of some minor changes in the hand distribution of the piano part in measures 4, 24, and 36, is an exact copy of the first version’s musical text. Kirkpatrick’s critical commentary on the work spans six single-spaced pages and reveals the speculative dimension of his work on Mood. Although many of Kirkpatrick’s notes are qualitative judgments (“less good,” “excellent,” and so on), there are several points in the commentary which also show Kirkpatrick’s reliance on his familiarity with Ruggles’s work. Kirkpatrick wrote that “Ruggles would almost certainly have deleted” a note from one chord; any number of details were dismissed by Kirkpatrick as “formative” without further comment; and he wrote of a tie in measure 56: “It would have been like Ruggles to delete this.” Arguably the most important change between the two copies of Kirkpatrick’s edition is one that has nothing to do with musical notation. In the first copy, Kirkpatrick called Mood a “conjectural realization by John

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Kirkpatrick [1970–72].” The top of the second version, by contrast, merely reads “edited by John Kirkpatrick.” Although the difference between how Kirkpatrick described his two fair copies—one as a “conjectural realization,” the other as an “edition”—may at first glance appear to be merely a cosmetic change as Kirkpatrick cleaned up the copy for use in performance, it encapsulates many of the problems presented by Kirkpatrick’s version of the work. At every point in the process of preparing Mood—selecting the sketch material, transcribing it, preparing source comparisons, and ultimately inking the final version—Kirkpatrick made a host of interpretive choices, some clerical, and some strikingly bold. The most noteworthy of his editorial decisions on Mood—including erased material, leaving out passages from the sketches while preparing the transcriptions, freely choosing among multiple states of a passage—are different, perhaps not in nature but certainly in degree, from what many might characterize as critical editing. Kirkpatrick’s change in terminology also suggests that he may have had some ambivalence about the precise relationship between his own work and Ruggles’s in the preparation of the final version. The correspondence that surrounds his efforts to publish Mood shows that this balance between his own contribution and Ruggles’s became a critical point of disagreement among those responsible for Ruggles’s posthumous legacy, and one that presented Kirkpatrick with a dilemma about how to characterize his work on Mood.

Attempts to Publish Kirkpatrick undertook a number of activities to promote Ruggles’s music in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to his work on Mood, he published an essay about Ruggles in Perspectives of New Music in 1968; worked with the Ruggles family (following Ruggles’s death in 1971) to settle Ruggles’s musical estate; sorted the manuscript materials for The Sunken Bell; and served as a musical consultant to the Yale Music Library while the finding aid for Ruggles’s papers was prepared. Given this degree of involvement, it is perhaps surprising that Kirkpatrick’s precise relationship to the estate became less and less clear over time. Ruggles signed two short documents in the 1960s, apparently granting Kirkpatrick broad authority in settling his affairs. The first read, in its entirety: “In the event of illness or incapacity, my money in the Bank of New York is to be under the supervision of Henry Schnakenberg and John Kirkpatrick (also my music and paintings).” The second read: “This is to certify that I hereby designate John Kirkpatrick as my sole musical executor, to take complete charge of all my music manuscripts and miscellaneous papers from whatever time I may pass on.”13

Figure 1.1. Lawrenceville senior photo (MSS 56/95). Kirkpatrick is in the upper left. Photographer unknown. Reproduced with permission from the Lawrenceville School.

Figure 1.2. Kirkpatrick on Cannon Green at Princeton (MSS 56/56/537). Kirkpatrick is in the center, with dark hat, looking toward the camera. Photographer unknown.

Figure 1.3. Cover of Le Guide du Concert et des Théâtres Lyriques, June 10, 1927 (MSS 56/46/485).

Figure 2.1. Kirkpatrick with Hunter Johnson, n.d. (MSS 56/19/218). Photographer unknown. Reproduced with permission from the John Kirkpatrick Estate.

Figure 4.1. Kirkpatrick’s table of Concord relearnings (detail) (MSS 56/75/720). Reproduced with permission from the John Kirkpatrick Estate.

Figure 4.2a. Kirkpatrick’s first copy of Charles Ives, Concord Sonata, “Emerson,” 1920 edition (MSS 56/74/716). Reproduced with permission from the John Kirkpatrick Estate.

Figure 4.2b. Kirkpatrick’s copy of Charles Ives, Concord Sonata, “Emerson,” 1947 edition (MSS 56/75/718). Reproduced with permission from the John Kirkpatrick Estate.

Figure 4.3. Kirkpatrick, 1953 edition of “Emerson,” opening (MSS 56/75/718). Reproduced with permission from the John Kirkpatrick Estate.

Figure 4.4. Kirkpatrick, 1987 edition, “Emerson,” opening (MSS 56/75/719). Reproduced with permission from the John Kirkpatrick Estate.

Figure 4.5. Kirkpatrick’s second copy (errata for second edition) of Charles Ives, Concord Sonata, first edition, p. 6 (MSS 56/75/717). Reproduced with permission from the John Kirkpatrick Estate.

Figure 4.6. Charles Ives, Concord Sonata, 1941 proofs, p. 6 (MSS 56/75/717). Reproduced with permission from the John Kirkpatrick Estate.

Figure 4.7. Kirkpatrick’s working copy of Charles Ives, Concord Sonata, 1947 edition, p. 6 (MSS 56/75/718). Reproduced with permission from the John Kirkpatrick Estate.

Figure 5.1. Carl Ruggles, sketch for Mood, s1 (MSS 56/81/768). Reproduced with permission from the Carl Ruggles Estate.

Figure 5.2a. Carl Ruggles, sketch for Mood, p4 (MSS 56/81/768). Reproduced with permission from the Carl Ruggles Estate.

Figure 5.2b. Carl Ruggles, sketch for Mood, p5 (MSS 56/81/768). Reproduced with permission from the Carl Ruggles Estate.

Figure 5.2c. Kirkpatrick, transcription of p4 (MSS 56/81/768). Reproduced with permission from the John Kirkpatrick Estate.

Figure 5.2d. Kirkpatrick, transcription of p5 (MSS 56/81/768). Reproduced with permission from the John Kirkpatrick Estate.

Figure 5.3a. Carl Ruggles, sketch for Mood, P1 (MSS 56/81/768). Reproduced with permission from the Carl Ruggles Estate.

Figure 5.3b. Kirkpatrick, transcription of P1 (MSS 56/81/768). Reproduced with permission from the John Kirkpatrick Estate.

Figure 5.4. Carl Ruggles, sketch for The Sunken Bell (RYM U 9) (MSS 26/28/134). Reproduced with permission from the Carl Ruggles Estate.

Figure 5.5. Carl Ruggles, sketch for The Sunken Bell (RYM II 3) (MSS 26/28/135). Reproduced with permission from the Carl Ruggles Estate.

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These documents conflicted with the family’s copy of Ruggles’s will, dated March 27, 1961, which vested the entire authority for Carl’s estate with Micah.14 Although Kirkpatrick believed that the document naming him musical executor constituted a codicil to Ruggles’s will, neither Micah nor Ruggles’s lawyer recognized it as such.15 Meanwhile, Ray Green, a composer and publisher, surfaced around this time, also eager to become involved in Ruggles’s posthumous legacy. Green and Kirkpatrick had crossed paths once before, in 1948, when Green had asked Kirkpatrick for feedback on his work Festival Fugues.16 Although Kirkpatrick had replied politely to the work, he declined to perform it, and no further correspondence between the two men was preserved between 1948 and the 1970s, when Green claimed the publication rights for all of Ruggles’s publicly available music. Green produced signed contracts for Angels, Evocations, Men and Mountains, Organum, Portals, Sun Treader, Toys, and Vox Clamans in Deserto, all executed between 1955 and 1957. At first, Micah dismissed Green as a “crooked bastard” and the contracts as “forged.”17 Despite these initial suspicions, Micah continued to work with Green. In a striking reversal, Micah signed over to Green the rights to several of his father’s unpublished pieces in 1976, including Mood.18 Kirkpatrick was reluctant to vest too much power in Green. “I’ve always like the idea of de-centralization in publishing,” Kirkpatrick wrote to Micah, after hearing that he had signed a contract for Mood, “especially whenever placing a work with someone to whom it would mean a great deal might get it better emphasized and better handled than where it’s just another item in a kind of blanket package.”19 In an effort to mollify Kirkpatrick, Green offered him a larger-than-usual share of the royalties.20 Kirkpatrick refused Green’s offer, and began to put pressure on Micah to cancel the contract, writing: If you wanted Ray to return that contract you’d signed for the Mood, you could put it on the basis of its not being merely Carl’s work but a posthumous collaboration between him and me—so it wasn’t really yours to sign away without checking with me. I hadn’t thought of this earlier, because I don’t like to blow up my part in it, or blow my own horn—perhaps also because of Carl’s oft expressed disapproval of posthumous tinkering.”21

This was the first time that Kirkpatrick proposed to Micah that his work on Mood may have been something other than what was commonly understood as editing. Green, concerned that his deal with Micah might fall apart, asked a lawyer to represent his intellectual property claim on Mood.22 Frustrated with what he saw as Green’s overreaching, Kirkpatrick sought the advice of a lawyer himself. Kirkpatrick asked Ellis Freedman, an attorney who also represented the Ives Society, to evaluate the possibility of

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claiming that Mood was a “posthumous collaboration” between Kirkpatrick and Ruggles. If such a claim were found valid by a court, it would mean that Micah had no standing to assign the publication rights. Freedman advised Kirkpatrick that if Mood was a “posthumous collaboration,” then either party—that is, either Kirkpatrick or Ruggles’s heirs—could license it however they liked without consulting the other. If, on the other hand, Mood was a “derivative” work, then it could not be licensed without Kirkpatrick’s consent.23 With all the parties now retaining their own legal counsel, Micah began to distance himself from questions about Mood. He wrote to Kirkpatrick that such legal maneuvering wouldn’t “hold up because Dad wanted it [Mood] destroyed. At the present time I am only interested in Dad’s music being played and getting paid for it. These royalties will be used for the education of my grandchildren.”24 He also suggested that Kirkpatrick deal directly with Green regarding the contract for Mood. Publishing the work stalled: even though Micah sent Green a copy of Mood in 1977, Green was understandably reluctant to publish it given the ongoing dispute. Kirkpatrick became increasingly furious over the legal gridlock surrounding Mood. In his last letter to Green, also from 1977, Kirkpatrick declared him a “cheat,” who “deserves no respect.”25 The matter lay dormant until Kirkpatrick asked Micah once again to cancel the contract in 1980, and the following year dispatched one last sternly worded letter to Micah: “If you would still like me to have any respect for your moral sense and for your intelligence, you will demand those contracts back from Green. Tell him . . . that you had no right to sign away works that are essentially my collaborations with Carl. . . . I find your unilateral action absolutely unacceptable.”26 At the end of this letter, he summarizes his entire view of his work on Mood, which by now had begun more than a decade earlier: So you see, even though all the material (the melodic and textural stuff) was his, the pulling together and balancing of the forms had to be mine. Of course I tried my best to make them the way I could imagine him making them, or thinking back to the way he often left it up to me to focus the piano-scoring of the Evocations. Thus they really were and are collaborations, no matter who tries to tell you otherwise, and you had no right to sign them away as if my part in them had been merely as a routine copyist.27

Kirkpatrick suffered a debilitating stroke that summer, and pursued Mood no further. For his part, Micah was evasive to the end. His last letter to Kirkpatrick, and his apparent reply to Kirkpatrick’s heated missive, was a short note wishing him a speedy recovery from the stroke.28 It is easy to see how Green’s maneuvering and Micah’s prevarications would have infuriated Kirkpatrick. By the end of the exchange, these letters capture the typically genteel Kirkpatrick seething with rage. But Kirkpatrick’s

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anger with both Green and Micah hides a deeper dilemma, one that was especially pressing as he tried to position himself as a curator of Ruggles’s legacy. When it came to Mood, Ellis Freedman may have provided him with his best option to assert control over his part of the work. If Kirkpatrick described Mood as a “derivative” work, based on material by Ruggles, but ultimately authored by Kirkpatrick, then under copyright law Kirkpatrick would have had certain rights that were independent of Ruggles’s estate. At the same time, adopting such a stance would have required Kirkpatrick to qualify his claim that Mood’s importance stemmed from its status as an unknown work by Ruggles, which Kirkpatrick had simply “pulled together” and “balanced.” As the conflict unfolded, Kirkpatrick ultimately gravitated toward a rhetoric of collaboration to characterize his work on Mood. This allowed Mood to retain its cachet as a piece authentically by Ruggles, even if it weakened Kirkpatrick’s negotiating position. It is also reasonable to believe that Kirkpatrick was concerned that declaring Mood “derivative” would have undermined both Ruggles’s piece and Kirkpatrick’s authority as an editor. Ultimately, the entrenched interests of the parties made any resolution impossible, and Mood remains unpublished to this day.

An Alternative Account Having examined the source material for Mood, I find that multiple accounts for Mood’s status as a work are plausible. These issues are worth considering here because they both color an understanding of Kirkpatrick’s relationship to Mood and raise broader questions about the nature of Kirkpatrick’s editorial interventions. The evidence is unequivocal on only a few points: Ruggles planned and made some progress toward a piece for violin and piano titled Mood, which cohabited on the page with The Sunken Bell. It is perhaps more important, although less obvious, that the two works also seemed to intermingle in Ruggles’s mind, and Mood accordingly shares a number of thematic, melodic, harmonic, and textural elements with parts of the opera. The goal of the second part of this chapter is to trace some of those overlaps, in an effort to gain a perspective on where Mood is situated in Ruggles’s output. The genesis of The Sunken Bell has been well documented by other scholars but deserves a synoptic account here.29 In 1912, Ruggles was working as conductor of the Winona Symphony, with hardly any published music to his name. Around this time, he met the author and critic Charles H. Meltzer. In 1900, Meltzer had published a verse translation of Gerhart Hauptmann’s play Die versunkene Glocke. Soon after their initial meeting, Ruggles and Meltzer began planning an opera based on Meltzer’s translation. Ruggles’s biographer Ziffrin has noted that undertaking the

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opera was hugely ambitious at the time, completely out of proportion with Ruggles’s standing as a composer: As far as we know, Carl had never written or even attempted any large compositions before this time. . . . One wonders why his friends . . . thought of him as a modern composer, and the answer is simply that Carl said so. None had heard his music, but he spoke so eloquently and persuasively about his art . . . that each assumed this little man with the big voice really composed the way he talked.30

The composition of the opera became a full-time job, and he abandoned his conducting position with the Winona Symphony while his wife Charlotte supported the family. In 1917, Ruggles moved to New York, and in 1918 there were efforts to arrange a production at the Metropolitan Opera, with Meltzer meeting with Met director Giulio Gatti-Casazza about the work.31 The opera was not produced, not least because the prima donna they sought to recruit, Mary Garden, thought the music was ugly, and even Ruggles admitted the story might be considered too “German” to be produced while the country was embroiled in World War I. By 1921 Ruggles began to work on other projects, and the last date given in the source material for The Sunken Bell is 1927.32 Around 1940 Ruggles destroyed whatever fair copies of the opera existed. Kirkpatrick spirited away the sketches that were housed in the shed of Ruggles’s home in Arlington, fearing that Ruggles would throw those out as well. The sources Kirkpatrick preserved for The Sunken Bell are vast, spanning hundreds of pages. They include three sketchbooks and several marked-up copies of the play, as well as extensive single and double leaves of studies for various parts of the opera. In the process of preserving the opera, Kirkpatrick rescued not only Mood but several songs that were tucked among the sketches for The Sunken Bell, including “One Last Kiss,” “A Clear Midnight,” and “Lyric.” The title and inscription of Mood offer the first tenuous hints of its relationship to The Sunken Bell. Ruggles referred to The Sunken Bell as a “musical tragedy,” offering the first point of comparison between Mood (an “imaginary tragedy”) and the opera. The plot of the opera revolves around the tribulations of Heinrich, a bell maker who moves in a forested world that would be familiar to anyone acquainted with certain strains of German Romanticism, inhabited as it is by elves, witches, and wood sprites. Heinrich has made a magnificent bell, which is to be installed in a chapel perched atop a mountain, but a wood sprite has toppled it off the mountain and into the depths of the lake below. From there, a pair of interlocking love triangles develops: one incorporating Heinrich, the well-dwelling spirit the Nickelmann, and the seductive elf Rautendelein; the other between Heinrich, Rautendelein, and Heinrich’s human wife Magda. The opera twists and turns, ultimately ending in Heinrich’s and Magda’s death, with Rautendelein consigned to live forever with the Nickelmann. In addition

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to Mood’s and The Sunken Bell’s shared status as “tragedies,” the excerpt Ruggles chose from Meredith’s poem as the inscription for Mood (“infinite are the heights to climb / the depths to sound”) has clear affinities with the opera’s central image of the bell descending to the bottom of a lake. Kirkpatrick knew that there was source material from The Sunken Bell intermingled with Mood, a fact that would have been apparent from the piano-vocal passages, interspersed among music for violin and piano. Kirkpatrick also knew that there was at least one instance in which a snippet of Mood appears in the source material for The Sunken Bell. A brief quote of measure 10 of Mood was identified by Kirkpatrick as residing among loose sketch leaves for act 4 (ex. 5.3). Example 5.3. (a) Kirkpatrick ed., Mood, m. 10, MSS 56/81/768; (b) Carl Ruggles, sketch for The Sunken Bell, m. 10 (RYM IV 2), MSS 26/28/137.

Kirkpatrick’s identification of a single measure of Mood within the sketches of The Sunken Bell is important for a few reasons. First, it is one of the only untexted passages Kirkpatrick identified specifically in his index of The Sunken Bell, underscoring the fact that Kirkpatrick relied primarily on the text, rather than the music, to organize the sketches to the opera. He placed most of the leaves without text at the front of the collection, and may have been reluctant even to do that; on some pages he penciled, “Sunken Bell?” as if uncertain of their relevance to the opera. Second, this particular snippet comes from the middle of a phrase in Mood, apparently unrelated to The Sunken Bell sketches that surround it. In this respect it underscores an unusual dynamic in Ruggles’s compositional style: although he was known for crafting soaring and spun-out melodic lines, he built them by concentrating on extraordinarily short passages, sometimes consisting of just a few notes.

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Finally, this stray measure from Mood raises the possibility that there are other short bits of Mood residing in the sketch material for The Sunken Bell. One of the clearest connections between the musical material of Mood and The Sunken Bell is indicated in a disregarded source, Ruggles’s annotated copy of Meltzer’s published play.33 This copy is extensively marked throughout with musical notation. Because the copyright page of this reprint of the play is missing, it is difficult to place it decisively in Ruggles’s creative process for The Sunken Bell, but McMahan has argued that this copy is from either 1906 or 1907. Kirkpatrick has noted that the only dates in this copy in Ruggles’s hand are “Feb. 1921” and “Sep/26.”34 McMahan was therefore reluctant to assign much importance to Ruggles’s markings in this source: A comparison between the music found in the play copy and that in the manuscripts reveals very few similarities. . . . There are only a handful of instances where it could be imagined—but only in the most tenuous way—that some musical notations therein have any relationship at all to certain opera sketch pages. . . . It may be that the musical scribbling in the play represents impulsive and unfulfilled ideas which arose as Ruggles scanned the text or that they would have been found in earlier, possibly lost, opera sketches. . . . With few exceptions, both copies of The Sunken Bell in Ruggles’ possession do not bear markings which prove to play a decipherable or significant role in the composition of the opera, as seen through its extant sketches.35

Placing this source in Ruggles’s creative process requires some interpretive leaps, since firm chronological reference points are few. McMahan’s speculation that the marginalia may represent “ideas which arose as Ruggles scanned the text” seems a reasonable guess. Looking at Mood, one can make the case that at least some of this musical marginalia was not as “impulsive and unfulfilled” as may have originally appeared. Two key focal points here are pages 76 and 86–87 of Ruggles’s copy of the play. Ruggles agonized over the music for these portions of the opera, sketching out more music for them than for any other passage.36 Given the narrative significance of these two passages, Ruggles’s investment in them is unsurprising. Page 76 holds the bulk of Heinrich’s soliloquy, one of the most dramatically tense moments in the entire opera. Heinrich declares that he is working on a new bell to replace the one that the wood sprite has destroyed. In his speech, delivered in the presence of the Vicar (for whose church the original bell was intended), Heinrich declares that the bell itself shall foretell the arrival of a messiah of the sun. Following the soliloquy, Meltzer called for a brief pause during which Heinrich, ecstatic, paces; Rautendelein collapses in tears at Heinrich’s apparent turn toward pagan sun-worship; and the Vicar writhes with horror at Heinrich’s vision. The second passage, which begins on page 86, occurs while Heinrich “lies dreaming, with wide-open eyes.” The Nickelmann appears, and delivers a soliloquy of his own, while Heinrich sleeps. He foretells Heinrich’s death,

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singing that “the bell is choked with blood! / Woe, woe, to thee, man, when it tolls again!” Taken together, they are the major soliloquies in their respective acts, and pivotal moments in the overall action of the play. While I focus on the musical content of page 76, Nickelmann’s soliloquy provides important textual clues to which I will return, and is featured prominently in Mood’s source material (table 5.2). One of the single most compelling links between the two works (ex. 5.4a)—an insistent, repeated note lurching across tied triplets, eventually joined by either a minor or major second—appears in different versions in both the opera and in the sketches for Mood. On page 76 of his copy of the play, Ruggles wrote “Int” over this idea, possibly to indicate either an interlude or an introduction. A number of melodic figures elsewhere in the opera share a similar rhythmic profile (exx. 5.4b and 5.4c), and it arguably forms the basis of a recurring accompaniment figure (exx. 5.4d, 5.4e and 5.4f). Each of these figures appears at a structurally significant place: example 5.4a appears next to a pause marked in Meltzer’s verse; example 5.4b is written at the bottom of a page which opens either act 1 or act 2 (Ruggles wrote “Act I Opening Measures,” and scratched out “Prelude to Act II”); example 5.4c has “see beginning” written over the top of it (although is not clear to which “beginning” Ruggles is referring in the context of the cramped sketch leaf, reproduced as figure 5.4); example 5.4d appears at the entrance of the character Wittikin in act 1 (and also shows how the monophonic idea from the marginalia of the play could be transformed into a chordal accompaniment with a similar rhythmic profile); example 5.4e occurs at the entrance of the Vicar in act 3; and example 5.4f is a discarded sketch for the prelude to act 4. Example 5.4. (a) Carl Ruggles, marginal notation in The Sunken Bell play, p.76, MSS 26/28/132; (b) Ruggles, sketch for The Sunken Bell (RYM II 3), MSS 26/28/135; (c) Ruggles, sketch for The Sunken Bell (RYM U 9?), MSS 26/28/134.

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Example 5.4. Concluded. (d) Ruggles, sketch for The Sunken Bell, act 1, p. 8 (RYM 014), MSS 26/26/139; (e) Ruggles, sketch for The Sunken Bell, act 3, p. 66 (RYM 08), MSS 26/26/139; (f) Ruggles, sketch for The Sunken Bell, act 5 opening (RYM 031), MSS 26/26/139.

Taken as a whole, these examples might be grouped together as a motivic family that signals an arrival or introductory moment. McMahan noted that Ruggles’s use of leitmotif in The Sunken Bell was relatively spare, yet even if these fragments are not elevated to the level of narrative significance, they might also be thought of as Ruggles’s reimagining of a familiar topos, the use of a repeated note as a fanfare. There is some evidence to suggest Ruggles thought of at least one of the themes from this group as possessing some structural significance even if it did not carry the full connotative weight of a leitmotif. In the sketch from which example 5.4b

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is drawn (fig. 5.5), Ruggles wrote: “above phrase, tonal grouping, or polychord, chime-like in character, symbolizes the aspirations of Heinrich.” Presumably referring to the rhythmic notation, he continued: “Later in the tragedy, [during] Heinrich’s rhapsodizing in Act III [i.e., Heinrich’s soliloquy], comes this tonal grouping or polychord, loud and majestic in its mighty voice.” In Mood, a similar figure works as the opening gesture (ex. 5.5a). It appears in various guises throughout the piece, not only declaring the return of the initial material in measure 33 (ex. 5.5d), but also appearing at phrase beginnings in measures 5 and 11 (exx. 5.5b and 5.5c), at the opening of the second paragraph in measure 22 (ex 5.1a) and measure 37 (ex 5.5e), and at the end of the work in measure 68 (ex 5.9c). These various restatements of the theme in Mood not only give coherence to the work, but also suggest that the family of themes in Mood and The Sunken Bell may have served similar functions within their respective pieces, given the fact that they introduce structural units in this “prelude to an imaginary tragedy.” It is difficult to assign meaning to the untexted sketch material in the sources that Kirkpatrick consulted for Mood, but the correspondences are clear; there are a number of passages that he did not consider to be part of Mood, which, when compared to the sketch material for The Sunken Bell in example 5.4, show a further overlap between the works (ex. 5.6). The tied repeated figure in example 5.6c, for example, closely resembles the figure that Ruggles used for the entrance of the Vicar in example 5.4e. Although it is possible to account for example 5.6c as merely a sketch for The Sunken Bell among the material for Mood, the marking of “Piano” in Ruggles’s hand above the sketch suggests he may have intended it for the piano and violin work. Example 5.5. (a) Kirkpatrick ed., Mood, mm. 1–2; (b) Kirkpatrick ed., Mood, m. 5; (c) Kirkpatrick ed., Mood, mm. 11–12; (d) Kirkpatrick ed., Mood, m. 33; (e) Kirkpatrick ed., Mood, m. 37, MSS 56/81/768.

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Example 5.5. Concluded.

Other material from page 76 of The Sunken Bell seems to gesture toward music that is also present in Mood. The pitches of a marginal marking, labeled “radiant with joy,” correspond almost exactly to the violin figure that begins in measure 3 (ex. 5.7). Moreover, this marginal note was written directly underneath the note reproduced in example 5.4a, so that the two adjacent ideas from the margins of page 76 are placed consecutively in Mood. Recalling that measure 10 of Mood was included seemingly

Example 5.6. (a) Carl Ruggles, sketch material for Mood, not included in Kirkpatrick’s edition (Kirkpatrick sigla: s); (b) Ruggles, sketch material for Mood, not included in Kirkpatrick’s edition (Kirkpatrick sigla: S6); (c) Ruggles, sketch material for Mood, not included in Kirkpatrick’s edition (Kirkpatrick sigla: p5); (d) Ruggles, sketch material for Mood, not included in Kirkpatrick’s edition (Kirkpatrick sigla: p6); (e) Ruggles, sketch material for Mood, not included in Kirkpatrick’s edition (Kirkpatrick sigla: P3), MSS 56/81/768.

Continued

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Example 5.6. Concluded.

haphazardly in the source material for The Sunken Bell, one could also draw parallels between other moments in Mood and the sketch material for The Sunken Bell. For example, the piano accompaniment in measure 22 is directly quoted in sketch material for act 5 of The Sunken Bell (exx. 5.8a and 5.8b). Allowing for a certain elaboration of the passagework running up to the G and F♯ dyad, one could also argue that other material from The Sunken Bell is also related to Mood (exx. 5.8c and 5.8d). Example 5.7. (a) Kirkpatrick ed., Mood, mm. 3–5, violin part. MSS 56/81/768; (b) Carl Ruggles, marginal notation in The Sunken Bell play, p. 76, MSS 26/28/132.

Most generally, Mood and The Sunken Bell seem to inhabit the same sound world, even if there is not always a clear connection between specific gestures. Ruggles’s freely atonal, through-composed style for both works defies simple description, but extremely widely spaced chords are found at numerous points in both pieces. For example, another figure in the upper-right-hand corner of page 76 of the play appears to be spaced for a violin, with open G and D strings (ex. 5.9a). It is not unlike the open, quasi-quintal sonority that brings Mood to its close (ex. 5.9c). These open

Example 5.8. (a) Kirkpatrick ed., Mood, m. 22, MSS 56/81/768; (b) Carl Ruggles, sketch for The Sunken Bell (RYM V 7), MSS 26/28/138; (c) Ruggles, marginal notation in The Sunken Bell play, p. 84, MSS 26/28/132; (d) Ruggles, sketch for The Sunken Bell (RYM U 2?), MSS 26/28/134.

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sonorities could also be compared to a chordal study in another sketch for The Sunken Bell (ex. 5.9b), and a chord that Ruggles labeled “Bell” on page 98 of the play (ex. 5.9d). When considered alongside some of the clearer intertextualities between the works, it seems safe to say that a number of aspects of The Sunken Bell and Mood flowed from a common font. But it is still worth considering whether, and how, these overlaps should impact an understanding of Kirkpatrick’s version of Mood. Example 5.9. (a) Carl Ruggles, marginal notation in The Sunken Bell play, p. 76, MSS 26/28/132; (b) Ruggles, chordal study for The Sunken Bell, beginning of act 1 or act 2 (RYM II 3), MSS 26/28/135; (c) Kirkpatrick ed., Mood, mm. 66–69, MSS 56/81/768; (d) Ruggles, marginal notation in The Sunken Bell play, p. 98, MSS 26/28/132.

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Editing’s Values All this boils down to a simple question: How real is Mood? Or, more precisely: Is Mood real enough to be edited in a critical edition, or should efforts to bring it into a shape adequate for performance be more appropriately understood as “conjectural restoration,” “posthumous collaboration,” or on some other terms? In each of the paragraphs of Mood there is material from The Sunken Bell, and the source material for Mood was tucked in amid material from the opera. These facts allows us to consider several possible scenarios—not necessarily mutually exclusive—that may most accurately describe the status of Mood: Scenario 1: “Mood” is basically a freestanding piece. In this view, the third sketch is close to being a fair copy, suggesting that the work had reached a level of clarity in Ruggles’s mind and was simply awaiting some finishing touches. Apart from his decision to separate the A section from the A′ section, Kirkpatrick’s version relies most heavily on this third set of sketches. The surrounding material helped Kirkpatrick write a musically coherent version of what was already an intelligible autonomous piece which, like several other pieces buried within The Sunken Bell, Ruggles chose not to complete for whatever reason. Scenario 2: “Mood” was once part of the opera. The proximity of Mood’s sketch material to particular scenes in the opera, especially the one immediately preceding the Nickelmann’s dream sequence (act 4) and Heinrich’s soliloquy (act 3), suggest that it could have been conceived as an instrumental interlude. The fact that the first sketch offers both “violin and piano” and “symphony” as potential instrumentations indicates that this may have indeed been Mood’s function at some point. Perhaps Ruggles had originally intended to orchestrate it before he decided to spin it off into another work. The subtitle of Mood, “Prelude to an Imaginary Tragedy,” even suggests a possible location within the opera: an instrumental interlude which preceded the Nickelmann’s soliloquy in act 4, during which Heinrich sleeps while the Nickelmann predicts his downfall. In this interpretation, the violin and piano piece remains, but is less significant than Mood’s textual affinities—and obvious narrative congruence—with the opera. Scenario 3: “Mood” is an amalgam of discarded parts of “The Sunken Bell” and other sketch material. The intermingling of the sketch material for Mood and The Sunken Bell is not unique in Ruggles’s output. While they collaborated on Evocations, Ruggles would sometimes send Kirkpatrick bits of other pieces he was working on. Even so, it is plausible that Mood can be thought of as a concatenation on Kirkpatrick’s part of musical ideas by Ruggles. Kirkpatrick once mused that his work on Mood was “like stringing pearls,” suggesting that even he appreciated the special efforts that bringing together the fragmented sources demanded.37 In this interpretation,

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Ruggles’s annotated copy of the play stands out in particular as a site where several ideas apparently intended for the opera ultimately found a home in Mood. Considering the relationship between Ruggles’s sketch material and Kirkpatrick’s edition allows for a changed listening experience of Mood. While one can admire the smooth flow of the musical ideas in Kirkpatrick’s finished version, it can also be heard as a series of brief gestures by Ruggles which retain their own identities even as they are delivered in a parcel packed by Kirkpatrick. Scenario 4: “Mood,” in its edited state, is a fabrication on Kirkpatrick’s part. This is perhaps the least generous view of Kirkpatrick’s efforts, and I think requires a rigorous commitment to valuing certain types of editing over others. Yet Mood cannot be performed directly from Ruggles’s sketches, or even from diplomatic transcriptions thereof, without significant intervention. Perhaps paradoxically, Kirkpatrick’s own struggles with Ray Green and Micah Ruggles required him to articulate this very position to a greater or lesser extent, and part of what was so painful to him about the situation was the degree to which he felt his own work was being stolen. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, I am not interested in providing a value judgment for the reader about Kirkpatrick’s work on Mood. For performers, Mood will likely remain a freestanding piece. Perversely, Kirkpatrick could have best protected his own stake in Mood if he had argued to Green and the Ruggles estate that Mood was mostly his own invention. The second and third scenarios discussed above, that Mood was either some flotsam of Ruggles’s discarded ideas or jetsam from The Sunken Bell, are musicologically titillating but offer no substantive guidance for an editor preparing a score. Making matters more complicated, each of these viewpoints may be defended both by evidence relevant to Mood and by conceptual tools developed by music scholars considering analogous situations for different repertoires.38 Kirkpatrick’s difficulties with Mood suggest that even he, a lifelong editor with dozens of editions to his name, had trouble adopting a single position on what Mood essentially was. Ultimately, taking any unqualified stance on Mood’s disposition disregards the fundamentally equivocal body of evidence relevant to the work. Kirkpatrick’s edition is one possible solution to this problem, but other editions could be made, conditioned not only by their fidelity to Ruggles’s intention, or even by their suitability for performance, but also according to the particular utility and capacity for a version to illustrate a dimension of Mood which is otherwise obscure. For example, one might imagine a realization of the material that attempts to adhere more closely to a particular source, or one that attempts to cleave the material apart from The Sunken Bell.39 Kirkpatrick’s edition of Mood was a case study in how quickly an editor may swim away from the shore of secure knowledge in the pursuit of an edition. To some, Mood may not be as fully authentic as a work endorsed

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by a composer and left in a definitive state. On the other hand, if this is to be the standard, numerous works securely within the Western canon suffer the same flaw, to say nothing of what such an attitude implies about aural repertoires. But my interest here is less to settle the question of Mood’s ultimate position among Ruggles’s output—and I doubt performers of Ruggles’s music would stop playing Mood regardless of arguments about its ontology—than to illustrate how this short piece embroiled an experienced editor in some tricky questions about how one can and should negotiate the hazy borderlands between editing, realization, and composition.

Chapter Six

Voice The Prose Works Although this book focuses on Kirkpatrick’s career as an editor of music, his work as an author is an important part of the story of his relationship to the printed page. He was a fine, vivid writer on music, yet disliked placing his own opinions, particularly about Ives, in the foreground.1 Kirkpatrick’s reluctance to state his opinions should not, however, be interpreted as a lack of them. He wrote numerous shorter essays throughout his life: he was one of the first to write about Aaron Copland, and during the 1940s he contributed several reviews and short essays to Notes, Modern Music, and Musical Courier. He contributed a few articles to the Cornell University Music Review in the 1960s, and in the 1970s offered a smattering of reviews of new books on Ives. This chapter traces the genesis and reception of his two book-length works—A Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue and Memos. The first was impressive by any measure: an inventory of Ives’s manuscripts, assembled in a scant five years. Memos, a compendium of Ives’s autobiographical writings and twenty-one appendixes of biographical information, was published in the years immediately leading up to Ives’s centennial, as well as the American bicentennial. Kirkpatrick did not describe himself as the author of either book: the Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue was “compiled by” him; he is listed as the editor of Memos, even though his appendixes are lengthier than the actual autobiographical writings by Ives by some 100 pages. One of the central arguments of this book is that Kirkpatrick exerted a subtle but definite influence on the music that he edited, and it is worth noting that his major prose works continued in this vein of indirect agency. As the correspondence and reviews relating to Memos and the Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue indicate, there is a dualistic quality to both works: they appear to present documentary information about Ives as neutrally as possible, yet Kirkpatrick also sought to bring the reader around to a

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particular view of Ives without appearing to persuade. One example of these paired purposes occurred near the end of Kirkpatrick’s work on the Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue. Kirkpatrick solicited advice from the US Copyright Office about registering the Catalogue for copyright, since, as one official explained to him, “a mere list of works might be lacking in sufficient creativity to warrant issuance of a copyright registration.”2 Kirkpatrick’s draft reply suggests that he felt the work to be creative at both the bibliographic and the interpretive level. He quoted the librarian Brooks Shepard, who had pointed out that in the Catalogue Kirkpatrick had done “a surprisingly creative job in its improvising of systems of cross reference etc. to cope with an incredibly complicated mass of data.”3 But he also suggested that he provided an interpretive thrust of his own throughout the work, one that he intended to amplify in an imagined, but never completed, final version of the Catalogue: “What seems most creative about it to me is in retrospect the constant search for chronological order, which I hope will be expressed when eventually published by means of explanatory paragraphs introducing each item, but which, in this temporary format, is indicated mostly by brief suggestions in square brackets.”4 The second “creative” element Kirkpatrick emphasized here—his own detective work in dating Ives’s music—became a major topic of scholarly debate in the decades after the completion of the Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue. By the manner in which it was organized, and the matrix of questions which animated its creation, the Catalogue helped to establish a research agenda for source studies of Ives. It is also clear from considering Memos and the Catalogue that Kirkpatrick anticipated the rising significance of Ives in the decades following his death, and worked to shape the discourse around the composer. What is less obvious is that Kirkpatrick’s Catalogue and Memos also participated— likely without Kirkpatrick’s knowledge—in a more subtle struggle for the best methodological approach to Ives. Kirkpatrick’s books were a reflection of the dominance of source studies in musicology in the 1960s, and of bibliography as the intellectual birthright of American music scholars. In this sense, these books also reflect the priorities of many musicologists during the 1960s.

Ives’s Posthumous Bandwagon Kirkpatrick’s path to becoming Ives’s musical executor followed the general shape of his professorship at Cornell. Kirkpatrick’s time at Cornell was divided into three periods, each punctuated by a sabbatical. The years leading up to his first sabbatical, in 1952–53, were a stock-taking, in which he solidified and brought to fruition the projects he already had underway. His

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editions of different composers reached a high-water mark at that time. In the years following Ives’s death in 1954, and especially during his 1957–58 sabbatical, Kirkpatrick laid much of the groundwork for his—and anyone else’s—future work on Ives. During his final years of residence in Ithaca (which included a sabbatical in 1966–67), Kirkpatrick completed his major prose writing about Ives. Once he moved to New Haven in 1968, and with Ives’s words in an accessible format, Kirkpatrick would turn his attention to beginning a complete critical edition of Ives’s music. During Ives’s lifetime, however, Kirkpatrick was not as close to him as he was to his other collaborators. While they corresponded occasionally, Kirkpatrick visited Ives only once prior to the 1939 Town Hall concert.5 It was not until the 1940s that Kirkpatrick began seeing Ives socially at his home in West Redding. Years later, a graduate student named Sarah Hanks wrote to Kirkpatrick, asking about Kirkpatrick’s friendship with Ives. Kirkpatrick’s reply indicated more distance than genuine familiarity. He wrote back that Ives, first of all, was thirty-one years his senior (apparently ruling out the possibility for true camaraderie in Kirkpatrick’s mind), and, was “rather formal . . . [yet] surprisingly knowable.” He lamented that he could remember only a few of the things that Ives had said to him: “I now wish I had jotted down what I could have remembered on going out the door [after meeting with Ives]. Ditto for all the times I saw him—alas! (then I was just a pianist playing his music—with no idea of the catalogue or anything else).”6 When Kirkpatrick wrote about Ives during the composer’s lifetime, his prose did not anticipate the degree of his own eventual involvement with Ives’s posthumous legacy. For example, Kirkpatrick published a number of reviews in the Music Library Association’s journal Notes during his first years at Cornell.7 One of them, his 1949 review of the Cowell editions of Ives’s Three-Page Sonata, Some South-Paw Pitching!, and The Anti-Abolitionist Riots is surprisingly aloof, considering the reverential tone Kirkpatrick eventually came to employ when discussing Ives: “Just what relation this music has to public usage is for anybody to decide for himself. They are completely uninhibited moments out of the life of an extraordinarily interesting man, and it is quite understandable how devotees feel for them something analogous to the hilarious reverence accorded to Beethoven’s more outrageous bagatelles.”8 Kirkpatrick’s ambivalent tone—is he trying to distance himself from Ives’s “devotees” or laughing along with them?— may mean at least two things. First, Kirkpatrick may have thought it necessary to keep a certain critical distance from Ives in the course of the review. More likely, though, Kirkpatrick considered Ives simply another composer with whom he worked, and, even as late as 1949, did not anticipate that his own story would become so enmeshed with Ives’s. In the immediate aftermath of Ives’s death on May 19, 1954, Kirkpatrick undertook a flurry of activity to align himself closely with Ives’s posthumous

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legacy. Although he had already begun to write more loftily about Ives as part of his first editorial effort at the Concord during his 1952–53 sabbatical—he wrote in the preface to that edition of a sonata that had “always fought shy of letting its rhapsodic fire cool into a precise formulation”—he moved quickly to position himself as Ives’s musical executor.9 He wrote an account of Ives’s funeral to Carl and Charlotte Ruggles, and later edited it down to two pages for public reading, titling it “Envoi.” This version was published at the end of his Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue. In both the original and the published version, Kirkpatrick recounted the details of the funeral—who was there (he was the only professional musician), what was eaten for lunch (chicken pies and tuna-and-tomato salad), and what music was performed (the hymn “Abide with Me,” played by a local amateur organist). In the original letter, two paragraphs foreground Kirkpatrick’s relationship to Ives and his music. In the first, Kirkpatrick reflected on the Concord, and alluded to the possibility of “channeling” Ives, while at the same time suggesting the nascent stages of what would become his approach to editing Ives: George [Tyler, Ives’s son-in-law] mentioned (very flatteringly) how he thought some of Charlie’s genius had descended on me,—but I tried to explain to him that I play Concord very differently from the way Charlie would have—that I’ve always wondered if I regularized it too much. But I’ve tried to do it (as far as I could imagine) more from the point of view of eternity (or perhaps the eternal qualities of his soul), and minimizing the accident of the rebellious character of his personality. I don’t think he would have been content with that.10

As will be explored in the final chapter, Kirkpatrick’s “point of view of eternity” developed into a radical policy toward Ives’s revisions when he came to be executive editor of the Ives Society in 1973. Also, Kirkpatrick did not necessarily disagree with Tyler’s assessment of having Ives’s genius “descend” on him; Kirkpatrick’s increasing openness about his spiritual beliefs, in which channeling and reincarnation played key roles, provided part of the edifice of prerogative and propriety that characterized his handling of Ives’s posthumous legacy. In both versions of the letter, Kirkpatrick concluded by ruminating about the future. Yet a key phrase from the original, italicized here, was left out of the “Envoi”: “Anyway it will be fascinating to see what develops in the way of regard for Ives’s music (inherently it so invites any and all kinds of different reactions both to and from)—and to see how much the posthumous bandwagon is climbed onto. But let us thank God for its core of unshakeable reality, so warmly human, so sure in form, so high in impulse.”11 It is not clear from the context whether or not Kirkpatrick considered himself to be on the “posthumous bandwagon” when he wrote this closing paragraph. However, since the other changes that he made in the “Envoi” were aimed

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at removing himself from the narrative, it is a possibility. The main point is that in May 1954 he acknowledged the existence of the bandwagon, and over the course of the next twelve months maneuvered nimbly in order to become its de facto driver. Kirkpatrick’s primary competitor for musical executor was Henry Cowell. Cowell was an ardent supporter of Ives; his activities to promote Ives’s music reached back to the mid-1920s, before Kirkpatrick had even heard of Ives.12 When Ives died, Henry and his wife Sidney were in the process of finishing the first biography of Ives, Charles Ives and His Music, which was published in 1955. A small blizzard of correspondence took place between Ives’s widow, Harmony Twitchell Ives, and these two men. Despite the similarities of their goals, Kirkpatrick and Cowell seldom contacted one another directly. Cowell would propose projects to Harmony, and she would then solicit Kirkpatrick’s opinion. Kirkpatrick disagreed with Cowell over several pivotal decisions. In September, Cowell asked about publishing twenty-four Ives songs, which Kirkpatrick opposed, suggesting a complete critical edition instead; by December, Kirkpatrick had persuaded Harmony to deposit her husband’s papers at Yale, in contradiction to Cowell’s suggestion of the Library of Congress.13 Kirkpatrick became more and more involved with Ives’s estate, while the Cowells’ involvement in Ives’s posthumous legacy dwindled rapidly after 1955.14 Although Kirkpatrick briefly and diplomatically acknowledged Henry’s work in his introduction to the Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, and no overt rancor passed between the men in their correspondence, some traces of an uneasy relationship remain. Sidney Cowell wrote to Kirkpatrick in 1966: “I don’t think you ever credited Dr. Brauenstein [Cowell’s representative from the New York Public Library] with the really big job he did [in helping to catalogue the manuscripts]. . . . Nor did you realize the amount of work Henry put in.”15 Harmony likely played her own part in steering the project toward Kirkpatrick; when Cowell was arrested in the spring of 1936 on charges involving a sexual relationship with a seventeen-year-old boy, Harmony was taken aback by “this hideous thing about Henry Cowell—that he has been guilty of Oscar Wilde practices.”16 However it happened, Kirkpatrick ultimately became responsible for all of Ives’s manuscripts, and held a hugely influential position as both curator of Ives’s legacy and gatekeeper for other researchers.

The Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue Kirkpatrick proceeded systematically as Ives’s executor. With Ives’s massive collection of papers to deal with, Kirkpatrick’s spent his second sabbatical, during 1957–58, gradually refining a catalogue of Ives’s work.17

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With financial support from Yale, Kirkpatrick spent most of his time at the family home, Windways, only a few minutes by car from Ives’s home in West Redding, and about an hour from Yale. In a letter to Lou Harrison in December of 1957, he noted that the work was progressing “slowly but steadily,” and that “the question-mark file, which was fattest in 1954, is now the thinnest.”18 He pursued the Catalogue with a single-mindedness that was eerie at times. On the day of his own mother’s funeral, for example, he related to Harmony his detailed research activities: Tuesday, between the interment at Greenwood and my plane back here, I realized a long cherished project of seeing what the 42nd St. library had in the way of old N.Y. phone books. They have films of an almost complete file from 1878 on. So I took down the listings of Charlie’s business addresses and found a lot more questions to bother Mr. Myrick with. There wasn’t a single residence listing for Charlie. I must write the N.Y. Telephone Co. and ask if they have any archives of listings of numbers not in the phone books.19

On August 28, 1960, most of Kirkpatrick’s magisterially titled work, A Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue of the Music Manuscripts and Related Materials of Charles Edward Ives (1874–1954), Given by Mrs. Ives to the Library of the Yale School of Music, September 1955, was sitting in 279 uncollated piles in Sprague Hall at Yale University, each pile containing 104 copies of one page of the catalogue. Kirkpatrick enlisted his children, Daisy, David, and Mary, to walk down the row of acid-free pages “in an assembly-line picnic,” taking one sheet from each, until there were 104 collated copies. Ultimately there would be 114 copies, an unintended reference to Ives’s 1920 volume 114 Songs—to be bound and sent to libraries and private researchers.20 The Catalogue became the Rosetta Stone for an entire generation of Ives scholarship. Despite its titular qualifier “temporary,” it would not be superseded until 1983, when Vivian Perlis assembled a register for the literary writings, and it remained the standard reference for Ives’s musical manuscripts for almost forty years, until James Sinclair issued A Descriptive Catalogue of Charles Ives’s Music in 1999. The Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue was bestowed upon its recipients with a degree of reverence that lent the actual bound volume an almost talismanic aura. Each copy of the Catalogue was numbered by hand and was sent with a printed acknowledgment form to be returned. Several recipients wrote letters back thanking Kirkpatrick not just for the Catalogue, but the particular number within the print run they had received. Kirkpatrick kept an index of who received the copies; he also drew a map of the United States indicating the geographical distributions of the Catalogues. Many copies were sent to institutions, although without an entirely clear logic: in addition to the Library of Congress and major research institutions, smaller institutions like the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library

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also were sent copies. Kirkpatrick jealously guarded the copies that were sent to individuals, giving them outright to only a select few. Henry and Sidney Cowell received copy 29, while the conductor Leopold Stokowski had to settle for being loaned copy 98. Kirkpatrick asked Richard Bales and Leonard Feist to donate their respective copies to institutions; they both balked at the suggestion. When Hunter Johnson received his copy, his letter back to Kirkpatrick reflected a hyperbolic—but also half-serious—concern about safeguarding the volume: “I haven’t dared show it to the library people here. Should I? It should be available of course, but would have to be kept under lock and key with a chain attached, or something.”21 The replies Kirkpatrick received reflect how the significance of the Catalogue was understood at the time. Some of Kirkpatrick’s colleagues focused on the personal qualities of the volume. “I too like the ‘human’ aspect, the revelation of Ives’ personality and the minute traits that show his ways of thinking and living and working,” Gilbert Chase wrote. He continued: “As I told my students, this is a bright example of humane scholarship.”22 James Sykes, a professor at Dartmouth, wrote “The task must have been in part autobiographical, for I have thought your own point of view about the goodness of man and the nature of music changed after the Ives music took hold.”23 Another common thread among the responses to the Catalogue was a recognition of its place within the study of American music. John Edmunds, at the New York Public Library, gushed: “It is certainly one of the most impressive monuments of American musical scholarship that has ever been accomplished.”24 Arthur Mendel wrote that Kirkpatrick “outbibliographed the bibliographers.”25 Theodore Finney wrote, “Yale ought to give you a double Ph.D.”26 James Coover, at Vassar College, suggested that it filled an important gap in the very practice of music librarianship: “I wonder if you know that, in addition to presenting the musical world with the raw materials for any subsequent Ives research, you have also perhaps provided a system, or a method, or a framework by which other persons’ manuscript collections may be cataloged.”27 This breathless admiration for Kirkpatrick’s accomplishment—which, in the twenty-first century, is all the more remarkable for having been achieved without a computer—reflects the centrality of source studies to the discipline of musicology in 1960. Furthermore, Kirkpatrick’s exquisite attention to detail in the Catalogue and Memos occurred against the backdrop of an approach toward American music that was overwhelmingly bibliophilic. In this sense Kirkpatrick’s books were a continuation of the projects of Oscar Sonneck and Irving Lowens, both of whom espoused the absolute primacy of complete bibliographic control over a subject before any other inquiry should be undertaken. This was encapsulated in

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Lowens’s oft-repeated formulation that “bibliography is the backbone of history.”28 In the years between the publication of the Catalogue and Memos, however, there was an increasingly public discussion about what the appropriate methods were for the study of musicology in America, and major bibliographic projects became suspect as the hegemony of positivism was both challenged and defended. Among the most important contributors to that debate were Joseph Kerman, Edward Lowinsky, Donald McCorkle, and H. Wiley Hitchcock.29 Kerman’s essay, from 1965, was one of the first sustained attacks on bibliography as an end in itself. He argued that “the less thoughtful [American musicologists] are collecting all kinds of information in the vague expectation that someone—someone else—will find it useful in the same great undertaking.”30 While Kerman’s arguments did not achieve a critical mass until the 1980s, and were not directed at Kirkpatrick per se, it is worth remembering that even as Kirkpatrick completed these studies, more and more musicologists were questioning the value of such spadework for its own sake. As time went on, even scholars who embraced the avowedly bibliographic project of the Catalogue began to suspect that a revised version might be in order. James Sinclair, who wrote the successor to Kirkpatrick’s Catalogue, explained some of the issues that he sought to address. Sinclair wanted to “avoid too many cryptic abbreviations and sigla, and focus the presentation by omitting some of the information in Kirkpatrick’s 1960 catalogue that threatens to bury the more universally sought data. Thus, omitted here is Kirkpatrick’s information identifying the paper types for each leaf, ‘other music,’ the ‘see’ references for the physical location of a given page in the Ives Papers, and the old negative photostat numbers.”31 In other words, it is the very overabundance of information in Kirkpatrick’s Catalogue that Sinclair—as well as others who worked to update the volume, including Paul Echols—sought to remedy in the revised version. The written evidence does not suggest that Kirkpatrick was preoccupied with any of the disciplinary debates that may have been fomenting in the 1960s. Rather, he saw the documentary edifice he provided in the Catalogue as an essential element in securing Ives’s position in history, and his personal approach to scholarship emphasized bibliography over narrative. Yet others around him understood that the ostensibly neutral activity of assembling information on Ives went hand in hand with arguing for his music’s worth. In a letter to Kirkpatrick expressing enthusiasm for the Catalogue, Gilbert Chase seemed to suggest that Ives would benefit from a scholarly process of bibliography, interpretation and advocacy, and only then retrenchment as necessary: “I think we need now firmly establish Ives’s place as ‘our greatest American composer,’ then when that’s done,

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criticize all we please.”32 What Chase does not spell out, but what is implicit in his letter, is that Kirkpatrick had taken the all-important first step with his Catalogue.

Memos Kirkpatrick’s next major effort on behalf of Ives was Memos, “a source book incorporating all the most important unpublished writings of America’s great composer.” The main body of Memos depended on stitching together a coherent whole from Ives’s scattered autobiographical writings. Kirkpatrick had begun refining such a patchwork approach to editing in shorter essays as early as 1961, and, as previously discussed, this approach had parallels in his music editing in his editorial work on Mood and his 1987 edition of the Concord Sonata.33 As Kirkpatrick explained in his introduction to Memos, his editorial approach was aimed “primarily at a readable continuity,” and that “through editorial freedom in all such choices, the text here given has become a composite, from all the sources, of whichever words best serve the thought or sound most like [Ives].”34 Kirkpatrick’s work on Memos followed not only his own work on the Catalogue but also Howard Boatwright’s edition of Essays Before a Sonata and other prose works by Ives, published in 1962 by Norton. Kirkpatrick submitted a draft of Memos to Norton in the spring of 1968; it was quickly accepted, and Norton offered Kirkpatrick a 10 percent royalty.35 The reader’s report from Norton commented: “The style is prickly and lively, although occasionally repetitive (it’s hard to see what can be done about this).”36 Kirkpatrick’s exacting attention to detail is on ample display in his work on Memos. After he received page proofs in November 1970, for example, he complained that the font for the marginal markings did not differentiate between roman and italic enough.37 Even after receiving the page proofs, Kirkpatrick asked for still more changes, racking up a bill for $2,144.40, of which Norton paid half. Luckily, the book sold well—more than 1,500 copies in its first year—and both Norton’s and Kirkpatrick’s expenses were covered. Memos, like the Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, also became a definitive volume for Ives researchers, and was recognized as such in the reviews following its publication. Contemporary reviewers thought the book brought into focus a number of issues about Ives. With the benefit of hindsight, Peter Dickinson’s list seems particularly prescient in describing themes that would become central to Ives historiography: the refusal of performers and listeners to tolerate anything off the well-worn track of classical music . . . ; the apparent dishonesty of critics and impresarios

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who were mainly interested in preserving the status quo . . . ; the inanity of people who assumed Ives had been influenced by Schoenberg, Stravinsky or even Hindemith . . . ; the cult of the virtuoso . . . ; the disloyal and unpatriotic attitude of those who would not countenance a real American music and support it.38

Other reviewers also seized on the trope of Ives as a lone maverick, a view that became central to Ives’s image in the 1970s. Alan Mandel noted that “the Memos reveal a man of simple, spartan life, hard work, and enormous dedication to the important tasks at hand; indeed, he had little time for much else.”39 Laurence Wallach pointed out the darker side of romantic genius when he wrote that the picture of Ives that emerged in Memos was one of “enormous bitterness and confusion.”40 Of these reviewers, only Wallach suggested that Kirkpatrick’s editorial hand, like that of a documentary filmmaker, might steer an audience to certain contentious conclusions while presenting ostensibly neutral information. “There is a tendency,” Wallach wrote of Kirkpatrick’s style, “to create a cult of personality by lovingly revealing biographical trivia.”41 Wallach continued: “The rather parochial upper-middle-class circles in which the Iveses moved socially,” that is to say, the same circles that Kirkpatrick himself inhabited, “are treated with an uncritical reverence which fails to indicate their culpability in Ives’s neglect.”42 Both before and after the publication of Memos, as both Ives’s centennial year and the American bicentennial loomed, some of Ives’s supporters thought he might be receiving too much attention, or interest in his work might be merely fleeting. David Hamilton, who reviewed the work for Norton, took a publisher’s interest in riding the crest of Ives’s popularity, noting that Ives was “currently much in vogue.”43 Wladimir Lakond noted that while it was “gratifying to see what has taken place during the recent years,” on behalf of Ives, overexposure could be a burden: “I hope that Ives will not be played too much, so that he may sink in solidly and lastingly and not become a fad.”44 The Catalogue and Memos, alongside a few other works, such as Howard Boatwright’s edition of Essays Before a Sonata and other writings by Ives, Vivian Perlis’s Charles Ives Remembered, and Clayton Wilson Henderson’s dissertation on Ives’s musical borrowing, provided the documentary edifice for much of the celebration of Ives during the 1970s. As I write this, musicologist David Paul is in the process of completing a study on the intellectual history of Ives. In his book, Paul finishes his discussion of the historiography of Ives within the field of history and American studies by noting its relatively brief heyday. “What looked to be an incipient interdisciplinary engagement with Ives in his centenary year has turned out, in retrospect, to be an aberration.”45 In a parallel chapter, he underscores how style criticism—a practice he traced back to the earliest days of the field of

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musicology—continued to retain its cachet in Ives studies even while the field as a whole sought to accommodate multiple modes of inquiry. Paul’s analysis helps to explain why Kirkpatrick’s scholarly work on Ives focused on laying a documentary foundation, and how those foundations steered the main course of Ives studies for so long. Both the development of musicology and American musical studies contributed to an environment in which foundational studies of sources were highly valued. Kirkpatrick, for his part, wanted to demonstrate his scholarly credentials on the terms of the prevailing methodologies. It is tempting to seek fault with Kirkpatrick’s writings in that they did not engage Ives at a higher interpretive level; he was certainly capable of writing critically penetrating prose about music, as is evident in his short essays for the Cornell University Music Review.46 But Memos and the Catalogue were part of a larger field of activity Kirkpatrick undertook on behalf of Ives which included concertizing and music editing. At the same time, Memos and the Catalogue were carefully constructed so that they bore as little trace of Kirkpatrick’s own hand in assembling them as possible. Ultimately, it was Kirkpatrick’s work as executive editor of the Charles Ives Society, rather than his prose on Ives, led him to articulate his most fully formed vision for the significance of Ives’s music.

Chapter Seven

Institution The Charles Ives Society By the time of the American bicentennial in 1976, Ives’s reputation as a towering patriarch of American composition seemed solid. Leonard Bernstein called him “our Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson of music,” celebrating Ives’s output as a pinnacle of the first two hundred years of musical achievement in the United States.1 Ives’s mystique loomed so large that Frank Rossiter, in his 1975 biography of Ives, oriented his discussion of the composer’s reception in terms of an “Ives legend.”2 For Rossiter, the legend had eight aspects, leading off with “Ives’s precedence as a musical pioneer and ‘father of the moderns.’”3 In 1987, this “precedence” was challenged by Maynard Solomon in “Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity.”4 Published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the article had special importance because it was the first time the journal—the so-called journal of record for American musicologists—had devoted an article to Ives. Solomon argued that Ives’s autobiographical writings “crossed the line between delusion and deception”5 and that his re-dating of manuscripts “suggests a systematic pattern of falsification sufficient for the prudent scholar to withhold acceptance of Ives’s datings pending independent verification.”6 “Questions of Veracity” attracted a great deal of attention, ranging from pointed correspondence between Solomon and Philip Lambert in a subsequent issue of the journal to a lengthy write-up in the New York Times.7 At a 1988 conference about “Questions of Veracity” sponsored by the Greater New York chapter of the AMS, Peter Burkholder summarized the effect of Solomon’s essay, writing that “the main reason [it] has caused such a stir is that it calls into question this view of Ives as the great American innovator—which is also why I think it is such an important contribution.”8 In this chapter, I argue that Solomon’s article, which Kirkpatrick himself reviewed prior to publication, can be seen as a continuation of preexisting skepticism in the scholarly discourse about Ives’s revisions—skepticism

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that Kirkpatrick had articulated in his role as Ives’s musical executor. In other words, the issue of Ives and revision is not only a paleographical one, as Solomon and others have already demonstrated, but also a problem of intellectual history. This problem had been fermenting since Elliott Carter’s review of Kirkpatrick’s premiere performance of Ives’s Concord Sonata in 1939, but it gathered considerable momentum following the reactivation of the Ives Society in 1973.9 This intellectual history is special because, alongside the essays, polemics, and other writings that typically characterize debate on a scholarly matter, the problem of Ives and revision was handled, albeit implicitly, in the fabric of the Ives Society’s complete critical edition. By the time “Questions of Veracity” was published, the Ives Society’s editors, following Kirkpatrick’s lead, were already seeking out the earliest possible version of certain works by Ives in an attempt to deemphasize later revisions. An examination of critical notes to editions, correspondence between members of the Society, and other documents from the fourteen years prior to Solomon’s article reveals a complex network of individuals—including but not limited to Solomon, Kirkpatrick, and Carter—all keenly aware of the problems posed by Ives’s revisions, and all attempting to illuminate one of the most durable and hotly contested puzzles of American music studies: the actual chronology of Ives’s compositions.

The Open Letters between Kirkpatrick and Carter In 1973, two events brought the issue of Ives’s revisions into a sharper focus than had previously existed. First, the Ives Society was reactivated, and its editors began work in earnest on a complete Ives edition, as will be discussed later in this chapter. Second, Carter and Kirkpatrick exchanged a pair of open letters that explicitly addressed the problem of Ives’s myriad revisions. Both letters, originally intended for publication, are important not only for their content, but also for their timing. Broadly speaking, Kirkpatrick aimed to solidify a view of Ives-as-innovator, while Carter sought to reinscribe Ives’s use of dissonance within a broader— and specifically transatlantic—historical narrative. In terms of chronology, Kirkpatrick’s letter is a snapshot of his thoughts just as he was beginning his tenure as executive editor of the Ives Society, while Carter’s is a valedictory glance over more than thirty years of writing about Ives. Before turning to the details of the letters, however, a bit of background is in order. Some of the earliest indications of Ives’s fraught revisions can be observed in the immediate aftermath of Kirkpatrick’s New York premiere

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of the Concord Sonata on January 20, 1939, in Town Hall. The recital generated such a stir in spite of the small audience (which included Carter) that Kirkpatrick scheduled an encore performance for February 24, 1939. This time, the critics who had overlooked the first concert—among them writers from the New York Times, Musical Courier, and Time—were in attendance. Lawrence Gilman’s enthusiastic review of the premiere emphasized many of the themes that had been repeatedly invoked by Ives’s early supporters. Gilman, the music critic for the New York Herald Tribune, hailed the Concord as “exceptionally great music—it is, indeed, the greatest music composed by an American and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication.”10 In his review, Gilman made a special note of Ives’s extraordinary precociousness. He wrote that Ives’s early studies “make the typical utterances of Schoenberg sound like Haydn sonatas. And we are to bear in mind that when Ives was evolving this incredible ultramodernism of the American nineties, Schoenberg, then in his early twenties, had not yet ventured even upon the adolescent Wagnerism of his “Verklärte Nacht”; and the youthful Stravinsky was playing marbles in Oranienbaum.”11 Gilman’s ecstatic language was not without precedent: the tropes of priority and American identity surrounding Ives had been established by Henry Bellamann, Henry Cowell, E. Robert Schmitz, and others in the years between the writing of the Concord and its premiere.12 Carter’s largely negative review, which appeared in Modern Music, also proved to have an important impact on perceptions of Ives. Carter, who had known Ives since the 1920s and even received a recommendation from him for admission to Harvard, found Ives’s “present canonization” to be “a little premature,” and faulted Ives’s pioneer status on two counts.13 First, the Concord was essentially a backward-looking piece, and second, Ives’s revisions were so extensive that they made claims of precedence untenable. Of the Concord, he wrote: “In form and esthetic it is basically conventional, not unlike the Liszt sonata, full of the paraphernalia of the overdressy sonata school, cyclical themes, contrapuntal development sections that lead nowhere, constant harmonic movement which does not clarify the form, and dramatic rather than rhythmical effects.”14 His criticism went beyond just the Concord by taking aim at Ives’s pioneer status: “The fuss that critics make about Ives’ innovations is, I think, greatly exaggerated, for he has rewritten his works so many times, adding dissonances and polyrhythms, that it is probably impossible to tell at just what date the works assumed the surprising form we now know.”15 Carter’s comments planted a seed of doubt about Ives’s priority as a modernist innovator, which Solomon would refashion into an indictment of Ives’s character almost five decades later. Yet despite questioning Ives’s

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revisions, it is not at all clear that Carter had any desire to contribute to a project such as Solomon’s. Carter later indicated some regret about his Modern Music review, saying, “The critic’s obligation to speak his thoughts frankly, painful as it was to me as one who wanted to admire Ives, made me very sad. After what I wrote then, I never had the heart to see Ives again.”16 Even as he was writing, Carter sought to soften his critique of Ives’s revisions by noting that he did not consider the issue central to an appreciation of Ives.17 Put another way, Carter was not essentially dismissive about Ives, but rather ambivalent. “My opinions about Charles Ives as a composer have changed many times since I first came to know him during my high school years in 1924–25,” Carter commented in 1959 during a symposium at the Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies, “but my admiration for him as a man never has.”18 Furthermore, Carter’s criticism of the Concord should be considered in light of his own works from the same period, such as the decidedly neoclassical ballet Pocahontas (premiered in 1939). The link between Carter’s neoclassical compositions and his criticism of a too-Romantic Concord was further clarified in his article “Documents of a Friendship with Charles Ives,” published in 1975: With the extravagant, bawling, impassioned demagoguery we witnessed on newsreels and heard on the radio emanating from Italy and Germany, it was hard to be taken in by or even be sympathetic to Romantic flamboyant gestures of any kind. . . . At that particular time Ives’s Concord Sonata, for all its qualities, seemed, at least to me, to have a strong element of extravagant Romantic gestures, however sincere, and it was impossible for me not to express my genuine antipathy to them, even though by doing so I was violating something I treasured a great deal.19

In the same essay, Carter also highlighted his activities from the 1940s that promoted Ives’s music: “From that time the distress caused by my own review, coupled with a growing sense of how remarkable the man and his music were, as I recaptured my early point of view, led me to take practical actions to further Ives’s cause.”20 Among these was an abortive attempt to start a Charles Ives Society in 1944. Writing on behalf of the American Music Center, Carter contacted Ives on October 20, 1944— Ives’s seventieth birthday: “Representing a group of creative people to be known as the Charles Ives Society,” Carter wrote, “I wish to tell you that it is our intention to assist in familiarizing the people with your works.” Ives declined Carter’s offer, writing, “A Charles Ives Society—that’s too much.”21 Although Carter’s attitudes toward Ives’s person and music in the 1940s were increasingly sympathetic, his reservations about Ives’s revisions appeared to remain in effect.22 As late as 1969, in an interview with Vivian

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Perlis, he reiterated his suspicion of Ives’s revisions while recounting a time that he visited Ives in New York in 1929: He was working on, I think, Three Places in New England, getting the score ready for performance. A new score was being derived from the older one to which he was adding and changing, turning octaves into sevenths and ninths, and adding dissonant notes. Since then, I have often wondered at exactly what date a lot of the music written early in his life received its last shot of dissonance and polyrhythm. In this case he showed me quite simply that he was improving the score. I got the impression that he might have frequently jacked up the level of dissonance of many works as his tastes changed.23

Carter’s interview with Perlis, which was not published until 1974, was one of the last times he commented directly on Ives’s revisions in print.24 This has created the misleading impression that the Perlis interview contained Carter’s final thoughts on the matter. Carter’s response to Kirkpatrick’s letter in 1973, however, represents a novel line of argumentation for Carter. With the background of Carter’s ambivalence in hand, we can now turn to his exchange with Kirkpatrick. The exact reasons why Kirkpatrick wrote his open letter to Carter in May or June of 1973 remain unclear. At the time, he would have been thoroughly involved in the nascent Ives Society; his publication of Memos the previous year marked the end of Kirkpatrick’s editorial involvement with Ives’s prose and the beginning of an increasing editorial engagement with the musical manuscripts as a whole.25 Kirkpatrick’s letter may even have been a direct response to Carter’s interview with Perlis: Kirkpatrick was actively involved in supporting Perlis while she was preparing Charles Ives Remembered, and Perlis considers it “probable to me that JK heard it well before the actual book publication in 1974.”26 Regardless of the precise event that prompted the exchange, Kirkpatrick’s letter seems most comfortably situated as an artifact of his thoughts on Ives’s revisions at exactly the time when he, as the Ives Society’s executive editor, had started coming to terms with Ives’s revisions as a whole. Kirkpatrick titled his letter “Ives—How Modern How Soon? An Open Letter to Elliott Carter.”27 In it, Kirkpatrick sought to answer two questions: “How sure can anyone be how early his music was how dissonant? How literally can we believe his own datings of his music?”28 Kirkpatrick concluded that “one can hardly question his seniority in the use of various types of dissonance,” basing his belief on analysis of a copybook that Ives left in Danbury when he went to Yale.29 Kirkpatrick believed that Ives had not seen this copybook between 1893 and 1929. He found that “the only exercises on the extant pages are take-offs, polytonal harmonizations, and a couple of tiny fugues in four keys (in C-G-D-A), each voice keeping doggedly to its own key, come what may.”30 Of these copybook pieces,

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Kirkpatrick singled out Ives’s “Song for Harvest Season.” Calling it “the most important single item for our inquiry,” Kirkpatrick compared the copybook version with the one published in Thirty-Four Songs, concluding that “comparison of the two texts shows that the older is no less dissonant than the newer.”31 The final example used by Kirkpatrick to prove Ives’s “seniority” with dissonance was the piece Hallowe’en, which is not from the copybook, and which reveals something about how Kirkpatrick read Ives’s manuscripts. The inscription on the autograph is “Hallowe’en (on the 1st of April!)— Pine Mt.” Kirkpatrick interpreted this literally. Arguing that Ives could only have gone to Pine Mountain, Ives’s weekend retreat, on a Sunday, Kirkpatrick concluded that it must have been composed during a year in which the first day of April fell on a Sunday. This happened in 1900, 1906, and 1917. Noting the address written on the manuscript—also that the Pine Mountain cabin had not yet been built in 1900—Kirkpatrick dated the piece to 1906. Kirkpatrick did not entertain the possibility, however, that Ives may have written “April 1st” not as a date, but as a reference to April Fools’ Day, in which case this bit of marginalia is not as conclusive with regard to chronology as it seems. The strange, comic nature of this piece, with a bass drum accompanying a string quartet and piano ad libitum, raises the possibility that Ives simply may have been joking when he wrote the inscription. Kirkpatrick’s argument can be viewed in several ways, ranging from imaginative (if potentially flawed) detective work to a desire to make the puzzle pieces fit too neatly together. Whether or not Kirkpatrick was right, however, his interpretations are significant because they ultimately informed the shape of the Ives Society editions during his tenure as executive editor. As I discuss below, Kirkpatrick’s conviction that Ives’s original ideas were already sufficiently dissonant led to editions in which presenting Ives’s initial intention became the goal. In other words, Kirkpatrick and other Ives Society members inscribed Ives’s priority as an innovator into their editions through editorial intervention. Furthermore, Kirkpatrick’s authorial voice in this letter gives pause. Throughout his work with the Ives Society, Kirkpatrick exhibited a distinctive blend of prerogative, meticulousness, and unobtrusiveness, all of which are evident here. Despite Kirkpatrick’s amicable tone and use of insider references (such as calling Harmony Twitchell Ives “our good friend”) to establish a collegial rapport with Carter in the stagy medium of the “open letter,” his letter also seeks to destabilize Carter’s questioning of Ives’s priority. At the end of the letter, Kirkpatrick tidily dismisses Carter’s concerns, writing that “no one can ever blame you (seeing what you saw) for wondering how recently he had become how dissonant.” At the same time, Kirkpatrick’s own argument relies on extremely close

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(and somewhat problematic) readings of the sources, while making no mention of his own involvement in Ives’s music beyond passing reference to his Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue. By deemphasizing his role in assembling and interpreting the evidence, Kirkpatrick allowed points that have competing interpretations—such as the status of the Danbury Copybook, or the meaning of the date on Hallowe’en—to appear as established facts. Carter’s response to the letter from Kirkpatrick, written less than a month after Kirkpatrick contacted him, gave Carter a chance to refine even further his complicated attitude toward Ives. Carter first stated that he believed Ives’s revisions did indeed matter. Recounting his observations about Ives’s revisions, Carter noted that dissonance was significant for Ives “because in the ’20’s and ’30’s many were still acutely interested in the degrees of dissonance and the, so to speak, ‘originality’ or ‘courage’ it took to include extremes of this in scores.”32 Carter then began a subtle—and imaginative—shift from a discussion of Ives’s revisions on their own to a discussion of those changes within a broader historical context. “Today,” Carter continued, “this is of less concern, because it begins to seem that dissonance must have existed ever since it was separated from consonance in Western music.”33 By situating Ives within a tradition of dissonance, Carter allowed him to be an originator within a continuous historical narrative. Although Carter essentially agreed with Kirkpatrick about Ives’s status as a pioneer, he decided to historicize Ives, and in doing so allowed for a synthesis of Ives’s use of dissonance with the tradition from which Ives allegedly sought to escape. While Carter did not erase the question of Ives’s priority, he subtly deemphasized it by discussing uses of dissonance before Ives. Citing examples from Hans Neusidler’s Der Juden Tanz to Scriabin and Strauss, Carter sketched a brief history of dissonance in Western music.34 “What is interesting about Ives,” Carter wrote, “are the many different procedures he thought up . . . to produce his polyrhythmic and dissonant textures. It seems that these were his own invention and not derived from the ‘dissonant tradition’—although the fact that about the same time Bartòk, Schoenberg and others were arriving at similar results without contact with Ives or he with them lends some credence to the ‘tradition’ having certain methods.”35 Carter’s letter was among his last written statements about Ives, and it is an important counterpoint to his previously known writings on Ives’s revision. As the initial agent provocateur on the issue of Ives and revision, in this letter he acknowledged Ives’s development of new techniques—but only on condition that they be part of a continuous historical trajectory. By 1973, Ives had become, for Carter, one of a long line of innovators. Kirkpatrick’s letter, on the other hand, appeared near the beginning of

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an important chapter in his career. Kirkpatrick had just begun his tenure as executive editor of the Charles Ives Society, and was well positioned to shape perceptions of Ives through that crucial medium by which performers come to know a work: the score.

The Ives Society’s Complete Critical Edition The Charles Ives Society as it exists today—which is distinct from Carter’s previously mentioned effort in the 1940s—was incorporated in 1967 by John McClure, Director of Masterworks at Columbia Records, to advance the cause of Ives’s music.36 It was essentially inactive until 1973 when, at Gunther Schuller’s urging, H. Wiley Hitchcock revived the organization “to oversee the edition or re-edition of the musical works of Ives, according to the highest principles of scholarly/critical editorial procedures.”37 Over the course of the 1970s, through the nimble legal maneuvering of its general counsel Ellis Freedman, the Society succeeded in securing editorial rights for all the published works of Ives, as well as for the entire body of manuscripts at Yale.38 As Hitchcock, who was the first President of the Society, explained to Mario di Bonaventura, then director of publications at Schirmer, “Our hope would be that the various copyright assignees of music by Ives could negotiate co-operatively toward an arrangement that would ensure the preservation of their individual rights, and at the same time would permit moving ahead with plans for a complete critical edition.”39 Kirkpatrick had sought such an edition for Ives since at least 1954. In September of that year, only a few months after Ives’s death, Kirkpatrick wrote to Ives’s widow, Harmony: “What I would like to see, now that the mss. are available, and now that Charlie is no longer with us to add further touches of genius (so that they have become, so to speak, something finite)—is a different kind of publication—a sort of cross between a variorum text and the German Gesamtausgaben.”40 Although Kirkpatrick did not elaborate any details about the proposed edition in the letter, he tellingly aligned his project with the tradition of German critical editions. The creation of a monumental collection of a composer’s work had become one of the most important ways of underlining canonical status, and Charles Ives was the first American composer to be the subject of such a project. When the members of the Ives Society did finally begin their edition, they implemented an editorial policy that departed significantly from methods frequently used within the tradition of Gesamtausgaben by emphasizing the earliest versions of Ives’s music available. While this approach resonated

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with Kirkpatrick’s assessment of Ives’s revisions from his letter to Elliott Carter, it broke with a common—although by no means universal—goal of critical editions: to determine the final authorial intent for a given piece. A series of guidelines written by Kirkpatrick and Paul Echols in May 1977 laid out the general editorial policy. Although most of the seven-page document was concerned with technical details of achieving a uniform appearance across publications, the first paragraph of the guidelines stated the goal of the Ives Society edition explicitly:41 The editor’s primary duty is to the composer that Ives was at the time of the composition in question, and to those musical factors that make the piece cohere most strongly and fulfill its expressive purpose most eloquently and naturally. One should hold a skeptical but open view of his later revisions, which were often touches of genius illuminating the original concept, but too frequently were unnecessary added dissonances or elaborated details sidetracking the original directness.42

Ives was a restless reviser who spent the final three decades of his life substantially reworking earlier works, seldom composing new pieces. The Ives Society, in sculpting its editorial guidelines, sought to adjust existing practices to the unique circumstances of Ives’s career. While this showed a sensitivity to the composer’s biography, it was also problematic. For example, the initial sentence of the policy laid out two potentially conflicting goals: fidelity to both Ives’s original intent and the editor’s musical instinct. Additionally, reviews of Ives Society editions (discussed below) suggest that few outside of the Society were aware of this unusual pairing of goals for its Gesamtausgabe, and hence judged the Society’s output against the standards of more traditional critical editing projects. Policy is one thing, implementation another. An examination of forty-seven Ives Society editions prepared during Kirkpatrick’s lifetime reveals a variety of editorial approaches, falling into six loosely defined styles (see table 7.1). Nine of the editions—about one in five—explicitly disregarded Ives’s later revisions. It is not my intention in this chapter to attempt a rigorous typology of editing, either in general or as related to Ives’s work. The categories delineated here are neither mutually exclusive nor rigid; rather, they have been selected as a way of illustrating tendencies in the work of the Ives Society while Kirkpatrick was editor-in-chief.43 Some of the types of the editions, such as best-text, realizations, eclectic, and reprint editions, are familiar to musicologists.44 Best-text editions identify a single source, and use it as the basis of an edition, emending only as necessary from other sources. In realizations, the sources are virtually complete but some details have been added by the editor.45 Eclectic editions use a variety of sources to achieve a single score.46 Reprints have no

Kirkpatrick, John Kirkpatrick, John Kirkpatrick, John

Psalm 25

Study No. 20 for Piano

Sinclair, James B.

Three Places in New England

Fugue in Four Keys on “The Shining Shore”

Echols, Paul C.

The Unanswered Question

Kirkpatrick, John

Peer International

Singleton, Kenneth

Symphony No. 3: The Camp Meeting

*Psalm 90

Associated Music Publishers

Kirkpatrick, John

Set of Five Take-Offs for Piano

Kirkpatrick, John

Peer International

Sinclair, James B.

Ragtime Dances

*Psalm 100

Peer International

Kirkpatrick, John

Forty Earlier Songs

Eclectic

Multiple

Sinclair, James B.

Country Band March

Smith, Gregg

Smith, Gregg

Smith, Gregg

Zahler, Noel

Sinclair, James B.

Merion Music, Inc.

Kirkpatrick, John

Monod, Jacques-Louis

Central Park in the Dark

Merion Music, Inc.

Merion Music, Inc.

Merion Music, Inc.

Merion Music, Inc.

Merion Music, Inc.

Mercury Music

Boelke-Bomart, Inc.

Merion Music, Inc.

Smith, Gregg

Kirkpatrick, John

*Psalm 54

Publisher

Early Preference

Editor(s)

Title

Type

1981

1979

1975

1970

1975

1976

1984

1990

1991

1990

1993

1976

1973

1973

Year

Table 7.1. Selected Ives Society editions. Asterisks indicate works published by Society editors without the Society’s imprimatur.

Realization

Type

Boelke-Bomart, Inc.

Peer International Mercury Music

Kirkpatrick, John Kirkpatrick, John Kirkpatrick, John Kirkpatrick, John Kirkpatrick, John

Sunrise

The Pond

Three-Page Sonata

Trio

Turn Ye, Turn Ye

Associated Music Publishers Associated Music Publishers Associated Music Publishers

Kirkpatrick, John Singleton, Kenneth Singleton, Kenneth

*Crossing the Bar

Charlie Rutlage

Evening

Peer International

Singleton, Kenneth

Mercury Music

Merion Music, Inc.

Merion Music, Inc.

“Gyp the Blood” or Hearst!? Which is Worst!?

Monod, JacquesLouis

C.F. Peters

Kirkpatrick, John

Study No. 23

Sinclair, James B.

Kirkpatrick, John

Study No. 22

Mercury Music

Kirkpatrick, John

Study No. 21: Some Southpaw Pitching!

Publisher

Editor(s)

Title

Table 7.1. Continued

1983

1983

1974

1978

1973

1984

1975

1973

1977

1990

1973

1975

Year

Dapogny, James Sinclair, James B.

Three Improvisations for Piano

Washington’s Birthday

Associated Music Publishers Merion Music, Inc. Merion Music, Inc. Merion Music, Inc.

Kirkpatrick, John Sinclair, James B. Singleton, Kenneth Singleton, Kenneth Singleton, Kenneth Kirkpatrick, John

Easter Carol

Holiday Quickstep

March III

Mists

Postlude in F

Psalm 14

Smith, Gregg

Cox, Jerrold

Kirkpatrick, John

*Waltz-Rondo for Piano

Merion Music, Inc.

Associated Music Publishers

Associated Music Publishers

Merion Music, Inc.

Kirkpatrick, John

*Psalm 150

Best-Text

Merion Music, Inc.

Associated Music Publishers

Associated Music Publishers

Psalm 135 Smith, Gregg

Peer International

Singleton, Kenneth

Remembrance

Kirkpatrick, John

C.F. Peters

Stout, Alan

Quarter-Tone Chorale

Dapogny, Gail

Merion Music, Inc.

Sinclair, James B.

Overture and March: “1776”

Peer International

Kirkpatrick, John

Johnny Poe, for male chorus and orchestra

Publisher

Editor(s)

Title

Speculative

Type

Table 7.1. Concluded

1995

1991

1976

1975

1975

1973

1978

1972

1981

1991

1984

1977

1974

1976

1978

Year

Reprint

Type

Masselos, William Cowell, Henry Kirkpatrick, John

Kirkpatrick, John

*Symphony No. 2

*The Fourth of July

*Washington’s Birthday

Harrison, Lou

Harrison, Lou

Associated Music Publishers

Associated Music Publishers

Peer International

Peer International

Peer International

Elkus, Jonathan

Thanksgiving and Forefathers’ Day

*Sonata No. 1 for Piano

Merion Music, Inc.

Mandel, Alan

Study No. 5 for Piano

Publisher

Editor(s)

Title

1974

1974

1988

1979

1991

1988

Year

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critical apparatus and essentially recreate an earlier edition. Of the fortyseven Ives Society editions in table 7.1, there are ten best-text editions, ten realizations, thirteen eclectic editions, and four reprints. Best-text editions became the rule for Ives editions in the 1990s. The two final categories, “early-preference” and “speculative,” are more novel. Editions that I have classified as “early-preference” use as early a source as possible to establish the piece as it was at the time of composition; a “speculative” edition is one that has required a degree of editorial reconstruction significantly more substantial than a realization, bordering on recomposition. Early-preference editions are not as common as the 1977 policy statement might indicate: they account for fewer than one-fifth of the editions considered here. Of these nine editions, six credit Kirkpatrick as an editor. While I have only classified one work as speculative here, several of Kirkpatrick’s unpublished editions—for example, his work on Ruggles’s Mood—can be classified similarly. In six of the “early-preference” editions (Country Band March, Psalm 54, Ragtime Dances, Set of Five Take-offs for Piano, Symphony No. 3, and Three Places in New England), the editors explicitly stated a preference for a source other than the final one in their introductory comments. Their declared reasons for these choices show that the 1977 policy was interpreted by Society members in a variety of ways. As these examples illustrate, the justifications by Society editors for an earlypreference approach ranged along a spectrum from unqualified subjective statements (most common in commentaries by Kirkpatrick) to detailed— although sometimes equivocal—interpretations of Ives’s manuscripts and correspondence. In at least two editions, Kirkpatrick simply asserts the superiority of an earlier version. Ives’s Psalm 54 has a single manuscript source, which Kirkpatrick and Gregg Smith edited and published in 1973. In it, Ives changed the manner in which the musical material was repeated. It appears that Ives initially intended for the first and second psalm verses to be set to the same music, and for the last two verses to share a musical setting as well. Ives changed his mind, however, so that the first and last verses would use the same music, and the second and penultimate verses would be set to the music originally intended for the last two verses (see exx. 7.1 and 7.2). “In doing so,” wrote Kirkpatrick and Smith in the editors’ notes, “he either forgot that he had composed Amen as a resolution of line 6, or chose to disregard this relation. His first idea was best. . . . The editors used to accept Ives’s final idea until further study convinced them his first one was best.” Another example is Kirkpatrick’s final published edition, Forty Earlier Songs. Although it was published posthumously in 1993, Kirkpatrick had been working on this edition since April 1975.47 It was also one of Kirkpatrick’s most extended efforts to recapture the early Ives—an effort that was spurred on by his conviction that Ives’s earlier songs could

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be musically superior to later ones. Kirkpatrick’s correspondence reveals that the project suffered from massive delays: even as late as 1988, the Ives Society had still not secured a publication contract from the publishers.48 The durability of this project in the face of such obstacles indicates how important these early songs were to Kirkpatrick. Conceived as a follow-up to his 1968 edition, Eleven Songs and Two Harmonizations, Kirkpatrick’s edition of Forty Earlier Songs contained “unpublished Ives songs, many of them prototypes of well-known later adaptations.”49 Beyond their significance as pieces of juvenilia, Kirkpatrick argued for these songs’ aesthetic merit, writing that “a number of these prototypes are more valid settings than their later derivatives.”50 Example 7.1. Charles Ives, Psalm 54, original version (used by Smith/ Kirkpatrick), mm. 50–57. © 1973 by Merion Music Inc. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission.

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Example 7.2. Charles Ives, Psalm 54, final version (from Ives’s manuscript), mm. 50–57 (f5991–92, Charles Ives Papers, Yale University).

Other Ives Society editors tended to cleave more closely to the paleographic evidence in order to justify an approach based on an earlier source. James Sinclair was one of the first staff editors for the Ives Society, and his edition of Three Places in New England was prepared with Kirkpatrick’s encouragement. The piece exists in two versions, one from 1914 and the other from 1929; it has particular significance since it is one of the pieces that Carter singled out. The 1914 version was written for large orchestra but was apparently not performed in the fifteen years between its completion and its revision. Ives reorchestrated the piece in 1929 for Nicolas Slonimsky’s Boston Chamber Orchestra, which required reduced

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instrumentation.51 In the process of preparing the 1929 version for Slonimsky, however, Ives also substantially reworked the musical texture. In his edition, Sinclair sought “a restoration of the full orchestration.” Unfortunately, Ives had literally cut up (with scissors) most of the original score for “Putnam’s Camp,” the second movement, while revising the piece in 1929. As a result, the sources for the 1914 version are incomplete. Sinclair settled on a hybrid approach: “The only proper way to revive Ives’ large-orchestra intentions was to combine the original coloring with the compositional revisions of 1929.” Sinclair’s techniques for incorporating earlier states of a piece into an edition became more nuanced over time. In his 1990 edition of the Ragtime Dances, for example, Sinclair explored the possibility of comparing related works in order to arrive at Ives’s earliest conceptions. There are three main sources for the Ragtime Dances: a set of sketches (1899–1902), a complete pencil sketch (1902), and an incomplete ink score-sketch (1904).52 The ink score-sketch contains a complete version of the second and fourth dances, but the first and third are lacking about thirty percent of their material. Sinclair chose to use the ink score-sketch as his primary source in a besttext approach. At the same time, he noted: Ives copiously revised this manuscript in pencil in preparation for using material from it in the First Piano Sonata (1909). Very few of these revisions have been incorporated in the present edition, the editor believing his duty should be to the Ives of 1904; the exceptions are emendations typical of Ives’s rethinking during the process of orchestrating a work, which are reflected in this edition especially if they were not made a part of the piano-sonata version.53

Sinclair’s approach was a sophisticated one. Although he used the latest available source, he referred to a still later work—the First Piano Sonata— in order to determine which of the pencil revisions were for the sonata and which belonged to the text of the Ragtime Dances themselves. In doing so, he suggested a potential relationship among the scores of Ives Society editions, wherein an editor could choose between competing versions of a revised passage by establishing which one is not included in later works. Paul Echols’s and Noel Zahler’s 1985 edition of The Unanswered Question represented the opposite extreme in editorial prerogative, while remaining grounded in paleographic considerations to justify their approach. In this piece, the editors simply published the 1906 version alongside a later version (1930–35). Echols and Zahler were fortunate that the source material for both versions was substantially complete. The juxtaposition allowed them to avoid the thorny problem of determining either Ives’s first or last intentions about the piece. On the other hand, this edition, unlike virtually every other Ives Society score, does not give a single text for performance.

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Kenneth Singleton, another staff editor for the Society, referred to Ives’s correspondence and writings in order to deal with the status of twenty-four “shadow lines” (brief, softly played contrapuntal figures) in his edition of the Third Symphony.54 These lines were crossed out in the full pencil score of 1904, and are not included in either the 1947 Harrison edition or the 1963 Cowell edition. In Memos, however, Ives indicated that he had reinserted these lines in a lost 1909 ink copy.55 Singleton also cited a letter and a draft letter from the 1940s, which Ives wrote to Bernard Herrmann, indicating that the shadow-lines should be reinserted.56 Contemporary reviews of these early-preference editions show that few outside of the Society were aware of the Society’s rationale for disregarding Ives’s revisions. Charles Hamm was among the handful of advocates for the early-preference approach. In his review of Forty Earlier Songs, Hamm noted that “Kirkpatrick’s approach to these songs is sometimes more in the spirit of creative collaboration than of critical, musicological editing.”57 Despite Kirkpatrick’s occasionally unorthodox practices—such as conjecturally applying Kipling’s text “The Song of the Dead” to the music for “The Ending Year” in order to create a hypothetical earlier version of the song—Hamm gave qualified praise for Kirkpatrick’s method: “The fact that this collection is situated somewhat uncomfortably between a critical and a practical performing edition . . . will make little or no difference to most of the scholars, students, and performers who use it. And musicologists who are not performers have much to learn from Kirkpatrick’s insistently musical approach to editing.”58 Few other reviewers were as optimistic as Hamm, and the Society’s editorial approach was criticized both for its quest for origins and its personalized perspective.59 These complaints originated both within and outside the Society. Gunther Schuller, who had originally spurred on the Ives Society edition, wrote to Hitchcock in 1987 of being “unhappy and frustrated” with the Society’s editions of orchestral music.60 Sinclair, in a letter to Hitchcock from 1986, recounted his sense of a typical Kirkpatrick editorial approach. At the time, Kirkpatrick and Richard Swift were working on an edition of Tone Roads:61 John went to town on TR 1 as one would expect. He found Swift’s work inadequate, the questions raised being greater than those Swift answered. John reconstructed an earlier chamber version of the piece and reworked Swift’s editings to the later small orchestra version, producing a short preface and fulsome footnotes that relate to both versions. Essentially John just blew Swift away (“pushed you off the piano bench” as he apologizes in one May 1980 letter to Swift). . . . I don’t agree with the frequent respellings and renotations. Unless the Society changes its position vis-à-vis producing scholarly editions I won’t allow personalized “performance” solutions in our published scores.62

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Kirkpatrick was singled out by some outside critics, as well. Carol Baron sought to reedit Three-Page Sonata because of her dissatisfaction with the Kirkpatrick edition.63 The violinist Gregory Fulkerson summarized the main critique of Kirkpatrick’s editorial approach when he wrote to Hitchcock about Kirkpatrick’s edition of the Ives Trio: As a record of Kirkpatrick’s own irreplaceable personal experiences his edition has great value, and I do not question the scholarship of the commentary. My difficulties have to do with its status as a critical edition since it contains far more of Mr. Kirkpatrick’s personal preferences than I would consider appropriate. . . . I would be curious to know if there were pressures from the publisher to issue the Trio in such a subjective version.64

By this point in the book, it should be clear to the reader that Kirkpatrick found this subjective realm of “musical intuition” a perfectly valid resource to rely on in his editions. For Kirkpatrick, fixing the musical text through editing was one of his ways of encouraging performance of Ives’s music, and his editorial prerogative stemmed from decades of fruitful collaboration with living composers. Hence there was no real distinction, for Kirkpatrick, between a critical edition and a highly personal one. Criticisms were not limited to Kirkpatrick. A review essay in 1989 by the German musicologist Wolfgang Rathert was among the most sustained critiques of the Society’s editions by an outside observer. “Approximately thirty works in fifteen years have now been published by the Ives Society as ‘Critical Editions,’” Rathert wrote.65 “Do these editions hold their own judged by common editorial criteria or by the specific demands of the works? On the contrary, there are no uniform editorial principles, the musicological underpinnings are obviously inadequate, and there is a resulting carelessness in the handling of the music.” Carol Baron sharply criticized Singleton’s decision to include the “shadow lines” in the Third Symphony edition, published in 1990.66 Baron found the edition “devoid of a reasoned editorial process,” and wrote that “the manuscripts, the published editions, and the related correspondence are not evaluated in regard to Ives’s final statements and decisions, based on what can be objectively known.” She further condemned Singleton’s edition for failing to name a single primary source and for using too much subjective reasoning, with words like “correct” and “best” in the preparation of the edition. However, Singleton’s edition was consistent with the larger project of the Ives Society, and his use of subjective statements in the critical commentary seems to have been an outgrowth of Kirkpatrick’s approach. From a certain perspective, Singleton did not even need to justify incorporating the shadow lines with a reference to Ives’s 1940s correspondence with Bernard Herrmann: the inclusion of the lines, representing as it did Ives’s intention in 1904, was in keeping with the editorial stance of the Ives Society at the time.

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Nevertheless, unhappiness with the editorial policy of 1977, both inside and outside the Society, eventually took its toll. By the mid-1990s the most peculiar goal of the Echols/Kirkpatrick guidelines, to represent Ives at the time of composition, was no longer a priority for the Society’s editorial work. This shift in approach was precipitated by Hitchcock following his tenure as president, which ended in 1993. While staying active in the Society as the chairman of the Board of Directors, Hitchcock also chaired a special committee appointed by incoming President J. Peter Burkholder to overhaul the editorial guidelines.67 By 1996, the guidelines for editors described the editor’s duty to the text in a much different light than the 1977 version had: “In almost every instance, the Musical Text of the critical edition is to be based on a single principal source. . . . Other sources may exist, and if so, editors must take them into account . . . , but collation of sources, to produce a hypothetical “best text,” should never be the goal.”68 This document does not prescribe how editors should approach potentially dubious dates or markings inserted by Ives himself, nor does it give any suggestion about how to handle later revisions. Furthermore, Burkholder suggested that this new policy also marked a shift toward a more self-conscious editorial stance: I think the big thing that changed was the essential principle that the edition should be based on a particular version, and that any alterations, any departures from that version need to be explained. That’s kind of standard. I suspect that Ives must just have seemed like enough of a special case that that very “standard” standard never got thought about beforehand. At least I don’t remember it being discussed before that committee started to meet. I never got the sense—in the ’80s, that is—that there was anything wrong with the editions.69

James Sinclair, in his own recollection of reshaping the editorial guidelines, described the new policy as a reaction to Kirkpatrick’s approach: “We felt that Ives needed to speak for himself in a specific time period. JK [John Kirkpatrick] had done marvelous editions, but too ‘idealized.’”70 Notably, the Society moved toward this editorial approach only after Maynard Solomon’s article appeared.

Solomon’s “Questions of Veracity” Revisited In the spring of 1987 Anthony Newcomb, then editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, sent Kirkpatrick a draft of Maynard Solomon’s essay “Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity,” which had been submitted for publication. As perhaps the preeminent—and definitely the most senior—Ives scholar of the time, Kirkpatrick was an obvious reviewer for such a submission. Unlike many peer reviews, this one

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was not anonymous, and Kirkpatrick kept a copy of his one-page letter to Solomon.71 Solomon’s article supported the musical goal Kirkpatrick had sought in his editions. “I had started out being rather annoyed with what seemed undue exaggerations,” Kirkpatrick wrote to Solomon, “but on page 22 (not the first reading of it) I had to write ‘bravo!’ on the margin, because your phrase, ‘or even from a sense that only constant revision could keep his works from becoming stylistically outdated’ hits the nail right on the head—that’s exactly what happened.” Kirkpatrick used his final edition of the Concord Sonata as a foil to what Solomon’s article implied: “I’ve been working at a special kind of edition of Concord, trying to go back to what it must have been like around 1912 (impossible, too many sketches are missing), but finally settling for taking the first edition as the norm, with variants from other sources, both before and after, but near (except in a few places where he finally found the right solution much later).”72 This mention of the Concord is telling. Even as Kirkpatrick continued his quest for the origins of the Concord, he acknowledged, with frustration, that the 1920 edition had to be reckoned with. Although he designated a primary source— the same technique the Ives Society would later make explicit within their own guidelines—he retained his prerogative as an editor by considering all sources that might yield what he thought was the “right solution.”73 Kirkpatrick further elaborated on his own reasons for suspicion toward Ives’s revisions in the closing paragraph of the letter: “[Ives] was extraordinarily bright, though living vividly in the present, he didn’t have much perspective on himself, and no respect for earlier versions of his music.” If taken out of context, Kirkpatrick’s comment could be applied to any number of composers. It assumes significance here, however, since Kirkpatrick had spent the previous fourteen years preparing editions aimed at remedying what he saw as Ives’s lack of self-knowledge. For Kirkpatrick, the early pieces did have value, both musically and for their demonstration of what Kirkpatrick called Ives’s “spontaneous genius.”74 Hence, Kirkpatrick read Solomon’s essay as a confirmation of Kirkpatrick’s efforts to bring Ives’s earliest ideas—unadulterated by Ives—to the public. In other words, Kirkpatrick approved of Solomon’s article because he sensed a kindred spirit. Kirkpatrick knew he was aging, and acknowledged that he himself was no longer able to keep pace with the demands of scholarship: “I’m 82 now and had a stroke 6 years ago, which is still sprouting symptoms, chiefly on the right side, and an extreme form of absent-mindedness. That’s why this is so late—I wouldn’t blame Prof. Newcomb one bit for giving me up as a bad job and asking someone else.”75 Kirkpatrick did have reservations about Solomon’s article, which centered on Solomon’s assessment of Ives as a person. Kirkpatrick, unlike Solomon, had known Ives, and wanted not only to preserve Ives’s music

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but also to protect perceptions of the composer’s character. In the draft, he disagreed emphatically with Solomon in a few places, most strongly where Solomon attacked Ives’s personality. “You might take to heart also what’s on p. 1 (‘insufficiently thorough readings on Solomon’s part’),” wrote Kirkpatrick, “you get carried away towards undue exaggeration too often. And Ives doesn’t deserve that—he had the kindest heart in the world.” Based on a comparison of the draft of the article that Kirkpatrick read with the published text, it appears that Solomon modified his argument mainly in places where Kirkpatrick offered a concrete rebuttal, and less so where Kirkpatrick took issue with a provocative statement. For example, Kirkpatrick heavily critiqued the closing paragraph of Solomon’s draft section about Ives’s relationship to his father George.76 Solomon subsequently deleted the term “pseudo-Emersonian” from the sentence “We look at the image of George Ives and see his son wearing a Yankee bandmaster’s garb and speaking a pseudo-Emersonian language that his father would never have known,” where Kirkpatrick had noted in the margin “Why? His father was brought up on Emerson.”77 Solomon left unaltered, however, another sentence that was simply marked “hopelessly exaggerated” by Kirkpatrick: “Out of deepest piety, impelled by a compound of love and guilt, Ives has preempted his father’s historical existence, and replaced him with a fabulous personage—who happens to bear the same name.” At the same time, Solomon did not revise his biographical analysis substantially in order to come closer to Kirkpatrick’s view of Ives. For example, in his published article Solomon speculated that Ives may have had difficulty completing pieces between about 1902 and 1912, citing Lucille Fletcher’s unpublished New Yorker profile on Ives. Addressing this period, Fletcher quoted Ives as saying “I resigned as a nice organist and gave up music.”78 Kirkpatrick marked in the margin of the draft, “This is a joke,” and typed underneath Solomon’s corresponding note: The worst thing Ives ever did (as far as I know) was, when Lucille Fletcher sent him the “profile” for The New Yorker, he cut out all the private bits that he didn’t want divulged, and filled it full of calling attention to the music he wanted known, and grateful appreciation of just about everybody who had done something for his music, so that he effectively destroyed it; Lucille hadn’t kept a copy, and it was unusable to the New Yorker.79

Kirkpatrick’s anecdote seems to suggest that he wanted to respect Ives’s privacy, and avoid encroaching on biographical territory that Ives had fenced off.80 One of the common themes of Solomon’s scholarship, on the other hand, is his often provocative psychoanalytical penetration of the biographical subject.81 In this sense, it is unsurprising that Solomon did not change or qualify this passage between the draft and the published article. Furthermore, in his reply to Kirkpatrick, Solomon acknowledged

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Kirkpatrick’s role in shaping the discussion of Ives and revision, while diplomatically avoiding the more biographically incendiary aspects of “Questions of Veracity.” Solomon wrote: “I had the distinct feeling that there is little in what I suggest about Ives’s revisionist propensities that was not already implicit in your own remarks on the subject. And I was always confident that you would recognize my sympathy for Ives, for his music, and his painful predicament as a businessman-composer whose creative efforts were for so long considered faintly comical by the music establishment.”82 The Ives Society’s drift away from the privileging of Ives’s earliest ideas stemmed from many causes, and Hitchcock’s recommendation to revise the guidelines was not exclusively contingent on either Solomon’s article or Kirkpatrick’s death in 1991. Without Kirkpatrick, the Society lost a major voice—one whose proximity to Ives facilitated a certain prerogative in their editorial activities.83 There were other factors at work, as well. Changes in leadership, with James Sinclair becoming editor-in-chief in 1985 and J. Peter Burkholder becoming president in 1993, also accounted for new directions. Solomon’s article generated many responses, but no official one from the Ives Society, making a simple causal connection between “Questions of Veracity” and the newer policies all the more problematic. With Kirkpatrick’s influence waning, editors with graduate training in musicology were more and more the norm within the Society. Moreover, the sustained critical tone of reviews of Ives Society editions during the middle and late 1980s was also an important factor in the decision to overhaul the editorial approach. Solomon himself has written elsewhere that “knowledge of origins cannot exhaust meaning.”84 While today one can say the same about Ives’s compositions, the growth of the “Ives legend” (to return to Rossiter’s term) created a climate in which Ives’s originality became a fundamental part of his perceived importance. The Ives Society’s “early-preference” editions, with their implicit emphasis on Ives’s priority, enacted aspects of the Ives legend, and therefore cannot be neglected as part of the historiographic landscape surrounding the composer. This situation is unusual because it played out in musical editions as well as in prose, but one of the main reasons this debate is so important is that Solomon’s polemic can now be placed in the context of a discussion that started earlier than has been previously realized. Whom ought we to believe? How should one edit Ives’s music, anyway? A philologically oriented reader may be dissatisfied that I have not attempted to prove or disprove the diverse lines of reasoning used by Carter, Kirkpatrick, Ives Society editors, or Solomon as they grappled with Ives’s revisions. I conclude by considering the significance of Solomon’s article some twentyfive years after its publication. “Questions of Veracity” was important not only for its critique of Ives’s revisions, but also because it marked a

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milestone for Ives’s position in the general musicological discourse. As Ives studies enter the twenty-first century, a new shift is apparent: Ives’s critics and advocates increasingly merit examination themselves. Such an approach promises to provide a more useful historiographic apparatus for future Ives studies. This development is most strongly exemplified by David Paul’s recent research and John McGinness’s critique of “modernist” analyses of Ives.85 Although reception history has been central to Ives studies since at least the time of Rossiter’s pioneering biography, Paul’s and McGinness’s approaches are novel because their main focus lies in assessing someone’s view of Ives (for Paul, the Cowells’; for McGinness, the music theory community’s) rather than a revision of the historical Ives himself.86 The move toward historiographic frames of discussion in Ives studies is important because the individuals (like Kirkpatrick) and institutions (like the Ives Society) responsible for the dissemination of Ives’s music left long, detailed, and generally understudied paper trails. These archival materials show how the agency of actors such as Kirkpatrick influenced perceptions of the nominally immutable qualities of Ives’s printed and manuscript sources. Furthermore, by exploring more fully the attitudes and goals of figures like Kirkpatrick, we can ensure that the field of Ives studies—which includes future editorial projects—becomes more able to assess its own assumptions about the composer as he has come to be known.

Conclusion Kirkpatrick, Compared I proposed in the introduction that considering an editor’s view of a composer’s historical or cultural significance can help provide a broader coherence to the editor’s motives and methods. In the case of Kirkpatrick, the historiographic dimension of his editorial practice shines through especially clearly in his work on Ives: it would be difficult to conceive of an editorial approach more firmly directed at advancing a particular view of Ives’s position in the music-historical firmament than Kirkpatrick’s stance of overt skepticism toward Ives’s later revisions. Yet Kirkpatrick subtly conveyed his vision of America’s musical history in his collaborations with other composers as well, including Carl Ruggles, Arthur Farwell, and Hunter Johnson. Of course, it would be pedantic to insist that every editorial decision ever made must be weighed for its historiographic import, when issues such as expedience, legibility, clarity, and interpretation also informed Kirkpatrick’s decision-making process. Furthermore, the hybrid methods of Kirkpatrick’s editorial practice—sometimes collaborative, sometimes retrospective; sometimes a pastiche of sources, at other times a disciplined version of a single one—show that Kirkpatrick was willing to embrace a variety of approaches when bringing his editions to fruition. Taken together, Kirkpatrick’s various concerns as an editor demand an approach that allows for an array of considerations to inform an interpretation of his career. But I do hope to have shown that larger issues loom behind apparently small editorial decisions, and, provided that the archival record is intact, that it is possible to divine how a music editor influenced a repertoire. A study like this one, focused on the editorial practice of a single individual, invites questions about comparative methods: Is Kirkpatrick unique? If so, what are his points of contacts with other editors? If not, what can be gleaned from contemplating his career? Scholarship on music editing has tended to embrace multiple case studies and aim toward general theories.1 Even reviews of musical editions are often couched in arguments that are

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implicitly comparative in nature; the discussions of Ives Society editions show how scholars relied on editorial practices used in other repertoires to come to grips with the Ives Society’s editions. I would tend to argue that Kirkpatrick’s significance lay in the particulars of his career, and how he wielded and invented tools for editorial practice in response to the music in front of him, rather than in the potential for his work to point the way toward a grand theory of editing. This is not the same as saying that Kirkpatrick editions lay totally outside of editorial conventions. To a certain extent, Kirkpatrick was part of a tradition of historically minded editor-activists. In Hans von Bülow’s 1862 edition of C. P. E. Bach’s six piano sonatas, he wrote of “arranging” the sonatas from “the clavichordistic to the pianofortistic,” for example.2 By using such language to describe his approach, von Bülow suggests that an editor’s purview goes beyond establishing and choosing from philological variants. It also involves creating an edition that does justice to the idiomatic possibilities of contemporary instruments, a concern that was present in Kirkpatrick’s work with Ruggles on Evocations. In a somewhat different vein, Katherine Bergeron oriented her account of the late nineteenth-century revival of Gregorian chant at Solesmes in terms of restoring an imagined previous version of the chant. Bergeron explored the ambitious breadth of the enterprise to “restore” Gregorian chant to an ideal, imagined state that it once held in the past—a goal not so dissimilar from Kirkpatrick’s editorial work on the Concord Sonata. Bergeron writes that the monks at Solesmes “intended to fix it [the chant repertoire] for all time, gathering the shards of evidence along a single, aesthetic horizon and producing a composite form whose very aesthetic excess . . . would recover the aura of the lost Gregorian past.”3 Bergeron’s fundamental view of the revival at Solesmes remains analogous to one frame I have offered for interpreting Kirkpatrick’s activities: namely, that certain editorial acts were predicated on a particular, discernible view of the past. In the case of Solesmes, Bergeron makes an even stronger statement—that the monks were actively creating an imagined past as they prepared their editions. Taken together, Bergeron and von Bülow suggest that Kirkpatrick’s editorial stance need not be categorically described as unique, but rather can be situated in a tradition of editions that vividly reflect their creator’s historical imagination. Yet the differences between Kirkpatrick, the Solesmes monks, and von Bülow are considerable, and I think seeking parallels between Kirkpatrick’s editorial practices and those of others might not cast as much light as one might hope. This is partly because, as I have argued throughout the book, Kirkpatrick’s editorial activities are most meaningful when they are understood in terms of the particular purpose he sought to accomplish, rather than when they are judged against a universal standard of an ideal edition.

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Comparing the means of different editorial projects across time and space can only offer so much insight when their aims were so diverse. At the same time, locating Kirkpatrick’s significance among his responses to the specific editorial challenges that he faced does not mean that his career was, in itself, a “strange stopping place,” stimulating but ultimately too idiosyncratic to inform discussions beyond his immediate milieu. For example, Kirkpatrick’s vigorous participation in the printed culture of musical modernism is just one way in which his career intersects larger music-historical issues. The printed culture of American musical modernism—particularly as it was practiced by the group of presses and individuals working in New York and New England—makes a particular claim on our attention because early twentieth-century modernism was the last major musical movement in which composers were obligated to rely on notation to convey their ideas. By the middle of the 1950s, the rise of electronic music, indeterminacy, and the gradual development of new graphical scoring techniques had obviated, although of course not eliminated, composers’ use of standard notation as an intermediary between their ideas and their audiences. In this respect, the practice of music editing came to a crossroads at precisely the time during which Kirkpatrick was working. By century’s end, editing could encompass pursuits as diverse as commercial record production, arrangement, and realizing indeterminate compositions, as well as the more traditional practices associated with preparing a composer’s music for the printed page.4 Kurt Stone (1911–89), an editor who worked for Associated Music Publishers in the 1950s and 1960s, once groused to Elliott Carter: “In the course of my career in music publishing I have found that the word ‘editor’ can mean too many things to be a good label. I have therefore decided to try to avoid this dangerous label in the future.”5 Stone’s comment betrays the problematic status of editing even for those strictly concerned with the printed page. The remarkable variety of individuals working in the twentieth century to advance American modernism via the printed score—including composers such as Lou Harrison and Henry Cowell (both editors in their own right), performer-editors such as Kirkpatrick himself, professional editors such as Stone and Arthur Mendel, as well as publishers such as Lehman Engel and Leonard Feist— is a testament to a vibrant print culture that is all the more remarkable because it continued to adapt and change alongside the rise of mass media, on the one hand, and increasingly widespread and inexpensive photocopying technology, on the other. The career of Kirkpatrick, taken as a whole, exerted a considerable influence on a wide swath of modernist music. Yet his legacy today, like that of many other editors, is more subtle than it is stunning. His last major professional affiliation, the Ives Society, has reorganized itself along different lines than the ones it embraced during Kirkpatrick’s tenure as its executive

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editor.6 Editorial prerogative and speculation were phased out of the official agenda of the Society, and more widely accepted standards of critical editing began to take their place. Few musicologists outside a narrow segment of American music studies know much about Kirkpatrick, or about the music he edited. Like most editors, Kirkpatrick will probably never enjoy status comparable to those whose works he edited. Nevertheless, he showed imagination and adaptability in his performing and editing, and relentlessly sought out the essential in music and channeled it back into his teaching, writing, performing, and editing over more than six productive decades.

Notes Introduction 1. Gilman, “Music.” 2. Kirkpatrick, typescript of comments delivered at his eightieth birthday party, March 30, 1985, MSS 56/61/568. Throughout this book I refer to materials from the Yale Music Library by series, box, and folder, so an item marked MSS 56/61/568 is in series 56, box 61, folder 568. 3. Echols and Kirkpatrick, “Guidelines for Editors,” 1, MSS 56/7/76, John Kirkpatrick Papers. 4. This view of an editor is a stronger statement of an idea that has already circulated in the scholarly literature. Philip Brett noted that there was a “danger of misrepresenting historical fact by superimposing a later sense of what constitutes both text and work,” but thought that “the editor, as historical critic, ought to be in a good position to show us [how to avoid this problem] . . . , because the choice of what to make into a ‘text’ can only proceed from a rather thorough understanding of the historical context and its implications” (Brett, “Text, Context, and the Early Music Editor”). Although elsewhere in his essay, Brett cautions against editions that “owe more to the editor’s overt or covert prejudices than to a historical reading,” I think he would allow for an editor’s subjectivity to be shaped by his or her particular historical context (Brett, 103). 5. Swafford, Charles Ives: A Life with Music, 498; Roy Harris, letter to Kirkpatrick, March 3, 1943, MSS 56/16/181; Kevin Justice [Carl Ruggles’s great-grandson], e-mail to the author, January 16, 2012. 6. Becker, Art Worlds. Becker devotes an entire chapter of his study to editing, and focuses on the idea of an “editorial moment,” when a participant in an art world makes a decision that alters the finished product. In Becker’s view, virtually any choice a member of an art world made counts as “editing.” I emphasize the printed page as a way of distinguishing editing from performance in this book. Furthermore, given the comparative thrust of his study, Becker allows for almost anyone to be a member of an art world, including those who “bring the coffee” (Art Worlds, 4). Kirkpatrick’s art world, at least for the purpose of this study, is more narrowly construed and hence more sparsely populated. 7. Becker, Art Worlds, xv. 8. Kirkpatrick, comments at eightieth birthday party, March 30, 1985, MSS 56/61/568.

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notes to pages 4–12

9. At time of writing, the pianist Martin Perry was in the final stages of releasing a recording based on Kirkpatrick’s final edition of the Concord Sonata. “News,” on Martin Perry’s website, A Different Breath, January 3, 2012, http://www.martinperrypiano.com/news/. 10. Stillinger, Multiple Authorship, 154–55. 11. Gilman, “Music.” 12. Treitler, “The Power of Positivist Thinking,” 387.

Chapter One 1. H. Wiley Hitchcock, interview by the author, February 24, 2007. 2. Gilman, “Music.” 3. Kirkpatrick, interview by Vivian Perlis, February 24, 1983, Oral History of American Music, Yale University, 4. 4. Kirkpatrick, pencil listing of Kirkpatrick fathers and sons, MSS 56/22/244; Kirkpatrick, handwritten genealogical records, MSS 56/22/242. The Kirkpatrick lineage is at times confusing since two names—John and Thomas—were the main names for male children from about 1700 onward. 5. Ibid. 6. See “The Court-House Clocks,” New York Times, August 11, 1871. The author recounted the wide variety of contracts which Kirkpatrick had received from the city, suggesting both cronyism and a tidy profit for the family. 7. Kirkpatrick, pencil listing of Kirkpatrick fathers and sons, MSS 56/22/244. 8. “Thomas Kirkpatrick, 3d Generation to Run Family Jewelry Store,” New York Times, February 6, 1980. 9. Kirkpatrick, interview by Perlis (1983), 6. 10. Ibid. 11. “Philo Wins Annual Debate,” The Lawrentian, March 28, 1917, MSS 56/95. 12. Vivian Perlis, “Aaron Copland and John Kirkpatrick,” 58–65. Kirkpatrick played his first full-length recital on January 21, 1926, during his final semester at Princeton; see Kirkpatrick, interview by Perlis (1983), 9. 13. Report card, Lawrenceville School, 1917, MSS 56/20/227. 14. Report card, Lawrenceville School, 1919, MSS 56/20/227. 15. Ibid. 16. Program for Lawrenceville School commencement exercises, 1922, MSS 56/46/485. 17. Later Kirkpatrick described his arrival at Princeton as follows: “I got sent to Princeton because—let’s see. Tom went to Princeton because Grandmother Kirkpatrick had two distant cousins who went through Princeton Theological Seminary, which has no connection with the university. And I got sent because he was.” Kirkpatrick, interview by Perlis (1983), 9. 18. Undergraduate folder and scholastic card for John Kirkpatrick, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. 19. Ives, Memos, 182. 20. For example, Vivian Perlis described him as having “abandoned college shortly before receiving his degree” (Perlis, “Aaron Copland and John Kirkpatrick,” 58). In various clippings in his alumni folder, he is simply described as “John

notes to pages 12–17

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Kirkpatrick, ’26.” But when Kirkpatrick saw a document that said he had graduated during an interview, he declared it “nonsense.” Kirkpatrick, interview by Vivian Perlis and Leroy Parkins, February 6, 1970, Oral History of American Music, Yale University, 3. 21. Undergraduate folder and scholastic card for John Kirkpatrick. 22. Kirkpatrick, interview by Perlis and Parkins (1970), 3. 23. Kirkpatrick, “The Virtuoso Looks at College Training as Preparation for Professional Life” (lecture delivered on December 30, 1950, at the Society of Music Instructors at Liberal Arts Colleges, MSS 56/62/574). 24. Kirkpatrick, interview by Perlis (1983), 10. 25. Kirkpatrick, program notes for Princeton Symphony Orchestra concert, January 24, 1924, MSS 56/46/485. 26. “University Orchestra Gives Final Concert,” Daily Princetonian, May 7, 1924, MSS 56/46/485. 27. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, September 14, 1925, MSS 56/20/231. Throughout this book, citations to “Kirkpatrick” without a given name refer to John Kirkpatrick. 28. Joan Retellack, Musicage, 84–85. Cage appears to have been referring to a concert that Kirkpatrick played on April 14, 1931, discussed in this chapter. 29. Swafford, Charles Ives, 373. 30. Thomas Kirkpatrick, letter to Kirkpatrick, November 26, 1929, MSS 56/22/239. 31. Kirkpatrick, draft letter to Rosalyn Tureck, February 18, 1953, MSS 56/60/558. The final version of this letter did not include this passage, and the draft is located in an entirely different folder, as the verso of a page from the draft of Kirkpatrick’s unpublished pedagogical book Making a Piano Sing. This draft is the only direct mention of homosexuality that I have found in Kirkpatrick’s papers. In the course of researching this project, several individuals who knew Kirkpatrick, speaking confidentially, speculated about or provided anecdotal accounts of Kirkpatrick’s sexual ambiguity. 32. Kirkpatrick, letter to Virgil Thomson, September 29, 1929, MSS 56/35/387; Kirkpatrick, letter to Virgil Thomson and Maurice Grosser, July 20, 1929, MSS 29/57/17, Virgil Thomson Papers. 33. Virgil Thomson, letter to Kirkpatrick, February 8, 1929, MSS 56/35/387. 34. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, August 2, 1925, MSS 56/20/231. 35. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, July 15, 1925, MSS 56/20/231. 36. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, September 10, 1925, MSS 56/20/231. 37. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, July 30, 1925, MSS 56/20/231. 38. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, August 2, 1925, MSS 56/20/231. 39. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, August 2, 1925, MSS 56/20/231; Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, July 15, 1925, MSS 56/20/231. 40. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, July 15, 1925, MSS 56/20/231. 41. Contract between J. Fischer & Bro. and Kirkpatrick, April 16, 1927, MSS 56/24/263; J. Fischer & Bro. royalty statement, December 31, 1928, MSS 56/24/263. 42. Kirkpatrick, letter to Quinto Maganini, June 13, 1929, MSS 56/24/263. 43. Quinto Maganini, letter to Kirkpatrick, June 14, 1929, MSS 56/24/263.

160

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notes to pages 17–21

44. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, July 11, 1926, MSS 56/20/231; Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, July 28, 1926, MSS 56/20/231. 45. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, August 13, 1927, MSS 56/20/231; Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, June 14, 1927, MSS 56/20/231. 46. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, October 3, 1926. MSS 56/20/231. 47. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, November 10, 1926, MSS 56/20/231. 48. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, September 21, 1926, MSS 56/20/231. 49. Elliott Carter, “Elle est la musique en personne,” 281–92. 50. Ibid., 291–92. 51. Giles Gilbert, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, June 25, 1927, MSS 56/14/157. 52. “Giles Gilbert to Play,” Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1931. 53. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, June 24, 1927, MSS 56/20/231. 54. Concert program, June 14, 1927, MSS 56/46/485. Kirkpatrick pasted the reviews onto a copy of the program. 55. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, June 24, 1927, MSS 56/20/231; Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, May 18, 1927, MSS 56/20/231. 56. Concert program, August 7, 1927, MSS 56/46/485. 57. Kirkpatrick, interview by Perlis and Parkins (1970), 1. Kirkpatrick described himself self-effacingly: “I suppose I was just one of these spoiled brats—when I think back on my first contacts with Ives, I hate to think what they must have thought about me.” 58. Kirkpatrick, letter to Charles Ives, October 10, 1927, MSS 56/18/203. 59. Kirkpatrick, interview by Perlis and Parkins (1970), 1. 60. Kirkpatrick gave a remembrance of her in Kirkpatrick, interview by Perlis (1983), 29. 61. Moody, Ezra Pound: The Young Genius, 39–41. 62. Kirkpatrick, interview by Perlis (1983), 1. 63. Marguerite Kirkpatrick, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 24, 1930, MSS 56/21/234; Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, December 7, 1930, MSS 56/20/231. 64. Heyman’s adoption of Scriabin as a spiritual leader for modernism enjoyed some currency in New York during the 1920s, as well; see Oja, Making Music Modern, 51–52. 65. Kirkpatrick, letter to Katherine Heyman, November 23, 1931, MSS 56/16/191. 66. Helen Boatwright, interview by the author, October 8, 2005; Elliott Carter, letter to the author, November 19, 2005. 67. Kirkpatrick, letter to Jean Townsend, December 4, 1927, MSS 56/35/391. 68. Recital program, March 27, 1928, MSS 56/46/485. 69. Concert program, February 12, 1928, MSS 56/46/485. 70. Kirkpatrick, “On Copland’s Music,” 1. 71. Vivian Perlis, “Aaron Copland and John Kirkpatrick,” 57–65. 72. Kirkpatrick, “On Copland’s Music,” 6. 73. Godwin Kalamus, letter to Kirkpatrick, April 19, 1929, MSS 56/9/90. 74. “Gets Mexican Divorce: Mrs. Thomas Kirkpatrick Obtains Decree in Yucatan,” New York Times, May 9, 1929.

notes to pages 21–24

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75. Thomas Kirkpatrick, letter to Kirkpatrick, April 8, 1929, MSS 56/22/239. 76. Marguerite Kirkpatrick, telegram to Kirkpatrick, November 25, 1929, MSS 56/21/233. 77. Kirkpatrick later commented: “I had no illusions about the quality of my, so to speak, piano technique. I knew that it wasn’t too trustworthy because it was acquired late.” Kirkpatrick, interview by Perlis and Parkins (1970), 5. 78. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, July 30, 1928, MSS 56/20/231. 79. Kirkpatrick, draft letter to Isidor Philipp, July 28, 1928, MSS 56/20/231. The draft was copied on the verso of a letter to Marguerite. 80. Kirkpatrick, draft letter to Isidor Philipp, July 28, 1928, MSS 56/20/231. 81. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, October 3, 1928, MSS 56/20/231. 82. “John Kirkpatrick Dead,” New York Times, August 6, 1928. 83. Kirkpatrick, interview by Perlis (1983), 7. 84. Kirkpatrick, interview by Perlis (1983), 5. 85. Thomas Kirkpatrick, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 22, 1928, MSS 56/22/239. 86. Thomas Kirkpatrick, letter to Kirkpatrick, November 30, 1928, MSS 56/22/239. 87. Thomas Kirkpatrick, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 22, 1929, MSS 56/22/239; Thomas Kirkpatrick, letter to Kirkpatrick, October 19, 1929, MSS 56/22/239. 88. See Vivian Perlis, “Aaron Copland and John Kirkpatrick,” 59–61, for a discussion of Kirkpatrick’s involvement with Copland’s Organ Symphony. 89. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, November 24, 1928, cited in Kirkpatrick, “Letters from John Kirkpatrick to his Mother,” MSS 56/35/387. 90. Roy Harris, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 8, 1928, MSS 56/16/181. 91. Roy Harris, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 8, 1928, MSS 56/16/181; Roy Harris, letter to Kirkpatrick, November 29, 1929, MSS 56/16/181. The ultimate goal for Harris was a publication with the Cos Cob Press; See Oja, “Cos Cob Press and the American Composer,” 240–41. 92. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, December 15, 1929, MSS 56/20/231; Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, January 8, 1931, MSS 56/20/231. 93. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, April 29, 1931, MSS 56/20/231. 94. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, March 3, 1931, MSS 56/20/231. 95. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, May 28, 1930, MSS 56/20/231; Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, November 25, 1929, MSS 56/20/231; Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, February 17, 1930, MSS 56/20/231. 96. Recital program, April 14, 1941, MSS 56/46/486. Kirkpatrick pasted selected reviews to a copy of the program. 97. Kirkpatrick, letter to Marguerite Kirkpatrick, October 23, 1930, MSS 56/20/231. 98. Kirkpatrick, letter to Katherine Heyman, November 23, 1931, MSS 56/16/191. 99. Kirkpatrick, listing of performances 1924–40, MSS 56/46/484. 100. Kirkpatrick played at the New School other times during the 1930s as well, including an all-Copland program on October 11, 1935. Concert program, October 11, 1935, MSS 56/46/486; Cowell, letter to Kirkpatrick, January 23, 1932, MSS 56/10/107.

162

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notes to pages 24–31

101. Concert Program, April 1932, MSS 56/46/486. 102. Program announcement, “Eleven Informal Musical Evenings,” January– March 1937, MSS 56/46/487. 103. Kirkpatrick, letter to Richard Copley, January 2, 1936, MSS 56/9/90. Ives helped, too, sending money both for this concert and Kirkpatrick’s 1939 Recital (Harmony Ives, letter to Kirkpatrick, February 3, 1936, MSS 56/18/203; Harmony Ives, letter to Kirkpatrick, February 2, 1939, MSS 56/18/203.) Carol Oja pinpointed a paradox about Ives’s work as a patron when she wrote: “Ives—the quintessential powerless figure in American composition, the composer whose music had received few public performances before the 1920s and who has come to symbolize the cruel rejection that American creative artists can face—provided the necessary financial base not only for his own music to be unveiled but also for a certain strain of composition to be promoted (Oja, Making Music Modern, 195).” 104. Concert program, January 28, 1936, MSS 56/46/487. 105. “John Kirkpatrick’s Recital,” New York Times, January 29, 1936. 106. Simon, “American Music—Swing Drops In—Recitalists,” 44. 107. Perhaps surprisingly, the Waldstein quickly left Kirkpatrick’s repertoire. Between 1939 and 1954, he only played it four more times, and not at all after 1940. By comparison, he played the Concord at least thirty-two times during the same fifteen-year period. Kirkpatrick, record of concert performances, MSS 56/46/484. 108. Harmony and Charles Ives, “The World’s Highway,” in 129 Songs, 505–6.

Chapter Two 1. Kirkpatrick had brief academic appointments at Monticello College (1942– 43) and Mount Holyoke College (1943–46), before finally arriving at Cornell University (1946–68), where he spent the majority of his professorial career. He was a professor at Yale for only five years, 1968–73, but retained the title of curator of the Charles Ives Papers from 1968 until his death in 1991. Yale issued Kirkpatrick an honorary MA in 1968. 2. This chapter draws primarily from Kirkpatrick’s own papers, but also makes reference to the archives of Virgil Thomson, Quincy Porter, Lehman Engel, and the Smith College Music Department. The late Richard H. Dana, president of Music Press, kept no papers from this time (Richard H. Dana [his son], e-mail to the author, January 23, 2009), nor did his wife, Nina Dana, have any recollection of Dana’s time with Music Press (telephone conversation with the author, January 26, 2009). 3. This is to name just a few of the most well-studied examples of left-leaning music from the time. For one recent overview, see Crawford, America’s Musical Life, 586–96. Broad cultural context is given in Denning, The Cultural Front. Among the important specific case studies are Crist, Music for the Common Man; Levy, “The White Hope of American Music,” 131–67; Oja, “Composer with a Conscience,” 158–80; Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock,” 445–75. 4. Harrison Kerr was the only person who received a salary at Arrow Music Press (Lehman Engel, letter to Kirkpatrick, June 5, 1970, MSS 39/13, Lehman Engel Papers); Anne McMaster was paid fifteen dollars per week during her time at Music Press (Richard Dana, letter to Virgil Thomson, May 2, 1956, MSS 29/69/8).

notes to pages 31–34

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5. See Vivian Perlis, “Aaron Copland and John Kirkpatrick.” 6. “Mercury Music Corp.,” Music Educators Journal 36, no. 4 (1950): 10. 7. Back matter, Musical Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1947). 8. “The Ten Best,” Notes, 2nd ser., 6, no. 2 (1949): 219. 9. Richard Dana, letter to Kirkpatrick, June 4, 1940, MSS 56/26/279. 10. In a letter to Virgil Thomson from years later, he wrote that “many things can be done quite calmly, far larger and more important than the things we became so hectic about” (Dana, letter to Virgil Thomson, May 2, 1956. MSS 29/69/8). 11. Thomson, “The Koussevitzky Case.” 295–98. 12. Dana, letter to Kirkpatrick, March 8, 1946, MSS 56/26/279; Dana, letter to Quincy Porter, December 13, 1941, Quincy Porter Papers, MSS 15/4/51. 13. “Nina Montgomery, Richard Dana Wed,” New York Times, November 21, 1948. 14. Dana, letter to Kirkpatrick, October 2, 1946, MSS 56/26/279. 15. Music Press Advertisement, Notes, 2nd ser., 4, no. 2 (March 1947), 255; Music Press Advertisement, Musical Quarterly 33, no. 2 (April 1947). The Lessard piece was only listed in the Musical Quarterly advertisement. The Foster publication was planned but never issued: see Dana, letter to Kirkpatrick, February 13, 1947, MSS 56/26/279. 16. Dana, letter to Kirkpatrick, March 23, 1948, MSS 56/26/279. 17. Dana, letter to Kirkpatrick, March 24, 1948, MSS 56/26/279. 18. Roy Harris, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 21, 1938, MSS 56/16/181; Hunter Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, June 5, 1944, MSS 56/19/218. Kirkpatrick’s relationship with Perkins bore a slight romantic tinge: she confessed to being somewhat “jealous” when Kirkpatrick married Hope Gardiner Miller in 1940 (Katherine Perkins, letter to Hope Kirkpatrick, March 23, 1940, MSS 56/2/11). 19 Kirkpatrick, letter to Katherine Perkins, November 24, 1941, MSS 56/2/11. 20. Elly Parker, letter to Kirkpatrick, February 11, 1978, MSS 56/2/12. 21. Kirkpatrick, letter to Elly Parker, December 19, 1977. MSS 56/2/12. 22. Dana, letter to Kirkpatrick, June 7, 1948, MSS 56/26/279. 23. Dana, letter to Kirkpatrick, April 20, 1949, MSS 56/26/279. 24. John de Keyser and Company were announced as “sole distributors for the eleven Western States for Music Press, Inc.” Notes, 2nd ser., 5, no. 2 (1948): 153. 25. The royalty statements in Kirkpatrick’s papers date from July 13, 1948 ($13.50), August 25, 1949 ($9.95), and November 28, 1949 ($11.50). MSS 56/26/279. 26. Verall, letter to Thomson, December 22, 1947, MSS 29/39/31. Verall had hoped that Thomson would write a piece about Valley Music Press in the New York Herald Tribune. Thomson was amenable to the idea, but apparently never wrote the essay. (Thomson, letter to Verall, December 31, 1947, MSS 29/39/31). 27. “Department of Music Records, 1918–2001: Historical Note,” Five College Archives and Manuscript Collections, Smith College Archives, Northampton, MA, accessed December 2, 2009, http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/smitharchives/manosca84_bioghist.html. The New Valley Music Press continued publication until 1996. 28. Valley Music Press Catalogue, 1961, MSS 15/4/56, Quincy Porter Papers. 29. “Smith College Music Archives, Announcing Volume IV,” Musical Quarterly 27, no. 3 (1941), back matter. 30. “Department of Music Records, 1918–2001.”

164

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notes to pages 34–38

31. Verall, letter to Robert Palmer, May 17, 1943, MSS 56/27/299. 32. Palmer, letter to Kirkpatrick, July 22, 1942, MSS 56/27/299. 33. Finney, letter to Kirkpatrick, July 27, 1946, MSS 56/13/141. 34. Dana, letter to Kirkpatrick, September 17, 1948, MSS 56/26/279. Palmer was not the only composer whose work was moved from press to press on Kirkpatrick’s account; the same thing happened while Arthur Farwell was attempting to get his Navajo War Dance published. Finney wrote to Kirkpatrick: “We hoped to publish the Farwell, but my feeling is that if a commercial publisher will bring it out we better not stand in the way. Therefore let Dana have it” (Finney, letter to Kirkpatrick, November 1, 1946, MSS 56/13/141). 35. Dana, letter to Kirkpatrick, November 8, 1948, MSS 56/26/279. There was an unsuccessful attempt to get Mercury Music to publish the sonata later. Palmer, letter to Kirkpatrick, February 17, 1956, MSS 56/27/300. 36. Kirkpatrick’s finding aid lists Finney’s Third Piano Sonata as undergoing a revision in 1958. However, I have found nothing in Finney’s memoirs, his papers at NYPL-PA, Susan Hayes Hitchens’s bio-bibliography of Finney, nor in the Kirkpatrick papers to show that such a revision occurred. 37. Kirkpatrick, letter to Hunter Johnson, May 13, 1946, MSS 56/19/218; Finney, Profile of a Lifetime, 146–56. 38. Arthur Farwell, letter to Kirkpatrick, September 17, 1941, MSS 56/13/136. 39. Arthur Farwell, letter to Kirkpatrick, January 31, 1947, MSS 56/13/136. 40. Farwell, letter to Kirkpatrick, September 23, 1951, MSS 56/13/136. 41. Kirkpatrick, listing of performances, MSS 56/46/484. 42. Kirkpatrick, letter to Dana, August 26, 1947, MSS 56/26/279. A similar encounter occurred in 1949, as the press was closing. See Kirkpatrick, letter to Dana, June 27, 1949, MSS 56/26/279. 43. Kirkpatrick, letter to Dana, August 26, 1947, MSS 56/26/279. 44. John Rockwell, “Jeanne Behrend, 76, a Pianist,” 45. Harris, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 21, 1938, MSS 56/16/181. 46. “Harris Work to Go on Air,” New York Times, February 26, 1943. 47. Kirkpatrick, letter to Roy Harris, February 27, 1943, Roy Harris Papers, California State University of Los Angeles. 48. Harris, letter to Kirkpatrick, March 3, 1943, MSS 56/16/181. 49. Kirkpatrick railed against communism in an essay entitled “Ives, Transcendentalist in Music,” dated October 26, 1961, MSS 56/61/568. Thanks to David Paul for bringing this paper to my attention. 50. Kirkpatrick, summary of performances, MSS 56/46/484. 51. Richard Monaco, “Johnson, Hunter,” Grove Music Online. 52. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, November 6, 1939, MSS 56/19/218. 53. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, November 6, 1939, MSS 56/19/218; Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 12, 1939, MSS 56/19/218. 54. Kirkpatrick, letter to Henry Moe, February 25, 1941, MSS 56/19/218; Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, April 9, 1948, MSS 56/19/219. Johnson resigned from Cornell in 1953, citing “growing creative frustration” as the primary reason (Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, June 24, 1953, MSS 56/19/219). 55. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, March 10, 1944, MSS 56/19/218. 56. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, March 10, 1944, MSS 56/19/218. Sprague Smith, a colleague of Dana at Music Press, may possibly have had the press in mind

notes to pages 39–45

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when he requested the piece. However, I have found nothing to indicate that Music Press ever considered Johnson’s flute piece. 57. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, March 12, 1944, MSS 56/19/218. 58. Johnson, letters to Kirkpatrick, March 12, 1944, June 19, 1944, and June 27, 1944, MSS 56/19/218. 59. Kirkpatrick, draft letter to Hunter Johnson, May 29, 1944, MSS 56/19/218. 60. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, November 6, 1939, MSS 56/19/218. 61. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 2, 1939, MSS 56/19/218. 62. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, January 16, 1940, MSS 56/19/218. 63. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, March 17, 1941, MSS 56/19/218. 64. Johnson, quoted in Kirkpatrick, draft program note to Johnson’s Piano Sonata, MSS 56/19/219. 65. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, October 18, 1939, MSS 56/19/218. 66. Ibid; Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, November 6, 1939, MSS 56/19/218. 67. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, August 15, 1947, MSS 56/19/219. 68. Kirkpatrick, program note to Johnson’s Piano Sonata, MSS 56/19/219. 69. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, August 15, 1947, MSS 56/19/219. 70. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, August 15, 1947, MSS 56/19/219. 71. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, October 2, 1947, MSS 56/19/219. 72. For an exploration of how Harris cultivated his “Western” identity, see Beth Levy, “The White Hope of American Music,” 73. Steve Swindell, “Composer Hunter Johnson, 92, dies.” 74. Kirkpatrick, program note to Johnson’s Piano Sonata, MSS 56/19/219. 75. Ross Lee Finney, letter to Kirkpatrick, September 27, 1940, MSS 56/13/141. Kirkpatrick performed Palmer’s piano sonata at a series of four concerts of contemporary music that took place on September 7–8, 1940. See Yaddo Music Group, Recital Program, September 7–8, 1940, MSS 56/46/488. 76. Finney, Profile of a Lifetime, 106. 77. The men listed in Finney’s dedicated were Stanley Rubint, Bernie Aronson, Ralph Carruthers, Fred Kilgour, and a lieutenant identified only as “Jack” in Finney’s memoir. 78. Finney, Profile of a Lifetime, 114. 79. Ibid., 130. 80. Ibid., 124–25. 81. Kirkpatrick, program note to Finney’s Fourth Piano Sonata, October 1946, MSS 56/13/141. 82. Finney, letter to “Mrs. Vosburg,” June 20, 1944, Valley Music Press Papers, Smith College Archives. 83. Finney, letter to Kirkpatrick, November 1, 1946, MSS 56/13/141. 84. Finney, letter to Richard Dana, July 14, 1947, MSS 56/13/141. 85. Kirkpatrick also worked intensively with Elliott Carter on finding an appropriate tone for the program note for Carter’s song Voyage, published in 1945 by Valley Music Press. See Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler, eds., Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait, 56–59. 86. Much of the correspondence between Finney and Kirkpatrick is one-sided. As Finney wrote to Kirkpatrick in 1962, “I am completely impossible when it comes to saving letters. I haven’t the vaguest notion where my letters are, whether I have saved them or not.” Finney, letter to Kirkpatrick, February 15, 1962, Ross Lee Finney Papers, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

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notes to pages 45–51

87. Finney, Portrait of a Lifetime, 109. 88. Kirkpatrick, letter to Palmer, January 7, 1953, MSS 56/27/300. 89. As George Chauncey has explored, the 1930s and 1940s were a pivotal time in middle-class attitudes toward gender and sexuality. With the rise of an increasingly white-collar middle class, traditional markers of masculinity became increasingly difficult to project. Chauncey explained that “being called a fairy became a serious threat to middle-class men precisely because the boundaries between the she-man and the middle-class man seemed so permeable” (Chauncey, Gay New York, 115). 90. Hubbs, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound, 225n25. 91. Palmer, letter to Kirkpatrick, May 9, 1939, MSS 56/27/299. 92. Schwarz, “A Lost Generation of Americans.” 93. Palmer, letter to Kirkpatrick, March 7, 1939, MSS 56/27/299. 94. For a detailed account of the history of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the United States, see Rember, The End of Obscenity. 95. Lawrence’s novel, which revolves around a woman’s sexual dissatisfaction with her husband who has become disabled due to the injuries he sustained in the First World War, could easily be read as an allegory by queer readers: the man, unable to satisfy his wife, leaves her incomplete—a “demi-vierge,” to use Lawrence’s term—and becomes complicit in her moral unraveling and his own emasculation. Alternately, a queer subject could identify with Lady Chatterley herself, unfulfilled and constrained by the sexual roles that are expected of her. 96. Palmer, letter to Kirkpatrick, August 18, 1939, MSS 56/27/299. Emphasis in original. 97. Palmer, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 20, 1939, MSS 56/27/299. 98. Palmer, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 20, 1939, MSS 56/27/299. For a discussion of theories of sexuality and “maturity,” see Hubbs, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound, 72–73. 99. Palmer, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 19, 1944, MSS 56/27/299. 100. Kirkpatrick, draft of letter to Rosalyn Tureck, February 18, 1953, MSS 56/60/558. Emphasis added. 101. Kirkpatrick, letter to Rosalyn Tureck, February 18, 1953, MSS 56/36/395. 102. Kirkpatrick, letter to Dean O’Leary, October 23, 1956, MSS 56/27/300. 103. William Austin, “The Music of Robert Palmer,” Musical Quarterly 42, no. 1 (January 1956), 35.

Chapter Three 1. Cowell, introduction to Harrison, About Ruggles, 3. 2. A fifth Evocation, dedicated to Carl’s son Micah, was planned but never completed. 3. Several people have commented on the affinities Ruggles shares with the Second Viennese School, often focusing on his semiserial approach to composition. One particularly clear example is found in Gilbert, “The ‘Twelve-Tone System’ of Carl Ruggles,” 68–91; See also Herlin, “Carl Ruggles and the Viennese Tradition.” 4. Burkholder, “Museum Pieces,” 115–34. Burkholder explains that “The mainstream of the past one hundred years consists of music written for an audience

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familiar with the art music of the 18th and 19th centuries, by composers who were or are themselves highly informed members of that audience, who wrote or write music with a concern both for continuing the tradition of European art music, particularly its aesthetic assumptions and its understanding of the relationship between artist and audience, and for distinguishing their own work stylistically from other composers, both predecessors and contemporaries (116).” See also Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. 5. Solomon, Late Beethoven, 129. Other comparisons between Solomon’s reading and the one I offer here could be made. For example, just as Beethoven left no record of his own interpretation of the Seventh Symphony, Ruggles left none of his on Evocations; each composer left a breach into which contemporary commentators stepped. 6. Kirkpatrick, letter to Ruggles, November 23, 1941, MSS 56/30/334. 7. Slonimsky, quoted in Ziffrin, Carl Ruggles, 124. 8. Marilyn Ziffrin, for example, noted the important criticism and guidance that Ruggles received from Charles Seeger while he was writing Men and Angels. Ziffrin, Carl Ruggles, 71–72. 9. Kirkpatrick, letter to Ruggles, July 19, 1947, MSS 56/30/335. 10. Robert McMahan, review of Marilyn Ziffrin, Carl Ruggles, 494–97. 11. Rudhyar, “Carl Ruggles, Pioneer” 3, 20. See discussion in Oja, Making Music Modern, 111–26. 12. Machen, quoted in Rudhyar, “Carl Ruggles, Pioneer” 3. 13. Rudhyar, “Carl Ruggles, Pioneer” 3. 14. Seeger, “Carl Ruggles,” 578–92. 15. Ibid., 580. 16. At certain points Seeger’s essay reads more as a tirade against the American cultural establishment than as a defense of Ruggles. “In America there are only a few composers of any kind, yet even with this minimum of competition, with the possibilities clear in sight, and with the money here to pay for the realization of the possibilities, still the hide-bound conventionality of professional life and patronage alike withholds even a cent for the building of the new, while millions of dollars go into the rebuilding of the old” (Seeger, “Carl Ruggles,” 583). 17. Seeger, “Carl Ruggles,” 580. 18. Ibid., 591. 19. Slottow, “Carl Ruggles and Charles Seeger,” 283–303. 20. Harrison, About Carl Ruggles, 8. As Daniel Albright has noted, invoking the distant past to praise a given work was something largely confined to nonmusical art forms: “The culture of the Renaissance, like that of the eighteenth century, tended to revere the classical, the ancient; something that was modern . . . was merely fashionable, transitory, perhaps gaudy.” In music, he notes that the state of the art “evolved so rapidly, and with such a strong presupposition that the new was better than the older, that the reverence for the classical, so common in other artistic media, was as much a matter of lip service as a matter of actual practice.” Albright, Modernism and Music, 1. 21. Harrison, About Carl Ruggles, 10. 22. Ibid. 23. Thomson, “Carl Ruggles,” 470. 24. Ibid., 471. 25. Ibid., 472.

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26. Ibid., 473. 27. Although Ruggles was highly self-regarding, he published relatively little about his compositional method. For example, when Ruggles wrote to Charles Seeger about new techniques for pitch nonrepetition in Sun Treader, his biographer Marilyn Ziffrin took special note, writing that “this is Carl’s first statement of his composition method, and one of the few he ever put into writing” (Ziffrin, Carl Ruggles, 104). 28. Girard, “Music Theory in the American Academy,” 168. 29. There have also been efforts to place Ruggles in different contexts. Some have focused, for example, on Ruggles’s career as a painter as well. See Archabal, “Carl Ruggles: Ultra-Modern Composer.” Deniz Ertan’s recent essay takes a broad look at Ruggles’s creative output in relationship to American national identity in general and Walt Whitman in particular. See Ertan, “When Men and Mountains Meet,” 227–53. 30. Tenney, “The Chronological Development of Carl Ruggles’s Melodic Style,” 36–69; Slottow, A Vast Simplicity. 31. Ziffrin, Carl Ruggles, 141–71. 32. Ibid., 149. 33. Ibid., 145. 34. Kirkpatrick, list of Kirkpatrick-Ruggles correspondence, MSS 56/31/339; Ziffrin, 145. 35. Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, October 10, 1940, MSS 56/30/334. Emphasis in original. 36. Seeger, “Carl Ruggles,” 586. 37. Ibid. Emphasis in original. 38. Ibid., 587. 39. For a detailed account of the retrograde canon in this Evocation, see Slottow, “Carl Ruggles and Charles Seeger,” 298–302. 40. Harrison, About Ruggles, 14–15. 41. Kirkpatrick, Making a Piano Sing, unpublished typescript, MSS 56/60/558. 42. This fugue’s remarkable subject includes all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. “That is one of the great phrases in all music,” Ruggles wrote to Kirkpatrick. “How magnificently modern it is; and the glorious way he has worked it out” (Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, June 23, 1944, MSS 56/30/335). Yet, despite his enthusiasm for the fugue, and his suggestion that Kirkpatrick include it on a recital program alongside Evocations, Kirkpatrick was cool to the idea. Although Kirkpatrick’s letter back to Ruggles is missing, in Ruggles’s next letter he gives a hint of what Kirkpatrick thought, writing “I think you are right about the Bach. It can’t be sustained on the piano” (Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, July 3, 1944, MSS 56/30/335. Emphasis added. Kirkpatrick lists his own letter between these two by Ruggles as “missing” in the “Tentative List of Ruggles Kirkpatrick Correspondance [sic],” MSS 56/31/339). 43. Kirkpatrick, “The Evolution of Carl Ruggles,” 164. 44. Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, October 20, 1952, quoted in Kirkpatrick, “The Evolution of Carl Ruggles,” 164. 45. The dualistic nature of this phrase has been noted by other scholars. See Slottow, A Vast Simplicity, 128–29; Brown, “Dual Interval Space,” 37–38. 46. Kirkpatrick, letter to Ruggles, September 26, 1951, MSS 56/30/336. 47. Kirkpatrick, letter to Ruggles, October 5, 1952, MSS 56/30/336.

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48. William Brooks has suggested that the pedaling in the first measure of the 1956 version is actually a mistake, and should follow the example of clearing the pedal on the third beat that occurs in the second bar in order for the pattern of held notes to be duplicated (conversation with the author, March 20, 2009). Neither Kirkpatrick nor Ruggles appears to have been concerned by the measurelong pedal that opens the piece, though, since it is present in three of the four versions considered here. Perhaps coincidentally, James Tenney, who prepared his own edition of Evocations, left out all of the pedaling indications in his copy (Tenney, letter to Ruggles, January 30, 1960, MSS 26/5/110). 49. Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, November 3, 1940, MSS 56/30/334. 50. Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, October 28, 1940, MSS 56/30/334. See the boxed text in ex. 3.3. 51. Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, August 21, 1954, MSS 56/30/336. 52. Kirkpatrick, letter to Ruggles, August 24, 1954, MSS 56/30/336. 53. Kirkpatrick, letter to Ruggles, December 31, 1954, MSS 56/30/336. 54. Elliott Carter, quoted in Kirkpatrick, letter to Ruggles, June 26, 1952, MSS 56/30/336. 55. Cowell, New Musical Resources, 138–39. For a more thorough contextualization of this passage in Cowell’s musical thought, see Oja, Making Music Modern, 143. 56. Rudhyar, “The Relativity of Our Musical Conceptions,” 108–18. See discussion in Oja, Making Music Modern, 131. 57. Rudhyar, “Carl Ruggles, Pioneer.” 58. Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise, 138.

Chapter Four 1. The Concord had been played in individual movements at several points before. See Block, Ives: Concord Sonata, 9–11. 2. Kirkpatrick, table of “relearnings,” MSS 56/75/720. 3. J. Peter Burkholder, interview by the author, May 21, 2007. Kirkpatrick’s comment to Burkholder was made in the context of preparing the final edition, which was made during the 1980s after Kirkpatrick’s stroke. The phrase “playing at,” though, captures the essence of much of Kirkpatrick’s work with the Concord throughout his life. It is also possible that he borrowed it, consciously or not, from Ives’s language in Essays Before a Sonata, where Ives described “the little old spinet piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony” (Ives, Essays Before a Sonata, 47). 4. Some of the most important participants in this debate are Block, “Remembrance of Dissonances Past”; Clark, “The Element of Choice in Ives’s Concord Sonata”; Bruhn, “The Transitive Multiverse of Charles Ives’s ‘Concord’ Sonata,” 166–94. 5. Kirkpatrick performed “The Alcotts” for the first time in New York on February 25, 1933, and “Emerson” for the first time at Princeton on November 13, 1935. By July 1937, Kirkpatrick happily reported to Ives that he could almost play the entire sonata. Kirkpatrick, listing of performances 1917–40, MSS 56/46/484; Kirkpatrick, letter to Ives, July 25, 1937, MSS 14/30/13, reproduced in Owens, Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives, 256–57.

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6. A complete register of the Ives-Kirkpatrick correspondence and meetings, from 1927 until after Harmony’s death on April 4, 1969, may be found in MSS 56/18/203. 7. Kirkpatrick, register of Ives-Kirkpatrick correspondence, MSS 56/18/203; Owens, 256. 8. Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor, for example, was a reference point for early encounters with the Concord. On at least two occasions before 1939, the two works were programmed together: Kirkpatrick played them as part of his 1937 series of “Eleven Informal Musical Evenings,” designed to survey the whole of Western music, and the early Ives champion Oscar Ziegler performed the Liszt B-Minor Sonata and “The Alcotts” in a recital on July 31, 1928. Program announcement, “Eleven Informal Musical Evenings,” MSS 56/46/487; Oscar Ziegler, Recital Program, MSS 14/50/2. See also Deaville, “Liszt and the Twentieth Century,” 28–56. 9. Bellamann, review of Concord, 166–69. 10. Unsigned review of the Concord, Musical Courier 82, no. 17 (April 28, 1921), 22. A number of reviews of the Concord are available in Burkholder, ed., Charles Ives and His World, 278–88; see also selected reviews of the 1939 premier in Charles Ives and His World, 313–37. 11. Ives, quoted in Bellamann, review of Concord. 12. Ives, Essays Before a Sonata, 84. 13. Carter, “The Case of Mr. Ives,” 173. 14. Burkholder, “The Organist in Ives,” 269. 15. Ives, Memos, 186–87. 16. Kirkpatrick, letter to Charles Ives, November 1935, MSS 14/30/13, reproduced in Owens, 239. 17. Kirkpatrick gave a few hints about the features of this 1930s copy, especially the addition of barlines, in Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered, 215. 18. Kirkpatrick, letter to Charles Ives, December 11, 1933, MSS 14/30/13, reproduced in Owens, 209–10. Kirkpatrick continued to copy Emerson into 1934. See Kirkpatrick, letter to Charles Ives, January 5, 1934, MSS 14/30/13, reproduced in Owens, 214; Kirkpatrick, letter to Charles Ives, July 12, 1934, MSS 14/30/13, reproduced in Owens, 223. “The Indians” is a song that appeared in 114 Songs (1920) and Fifty Songs (1923), but Kirkpatrick here is referring to the version that appeared in Seven Songs (1932) and was issued by the Cos Cob Press. 19. James Sinclair, who processed Kirkpatrick’s papers at Yale and assembled a thematic catalogue of Ives’s music, has no recollection of ever seeing this copy. Sinclair, e-mail to the author, January 31, 2008. 20. Peter Burkholder, in an interview some fifty years later, reiterated this as a default stance in editing Ives. In discussing his impression of Thomas Brodhead’s edition of The Celestial Railroad, Burkholder commented: “Brodhead’s work, I remember seeing that in ’90 and ’91, and not thinking twice about his insertion of barlines and time signatures. It just was so natural, so much the way that Kirkpatrick had worked, that I don’t remember even questioning it. So at the same time, there was this sense of scrupulous adherence to what the notes actually said, and a real concern that we get that part right. There was simultaneously a sense that Ives had given Kirkpatrick, and therefore Kirkpatrick had given us the leave, or the permission, to change aspects like the barring. In other words, silent aspects of the notation” (Burkholder, interview by the author, May 21, 2007).

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21. Kirkpatrick, letter to Ives, September 28, 1935, MSS 14/30/13, reproduced in Ives, Memos, 198. 22. Ives, letter to Kirkpatrick, October 11, 1935, MSS 56/18/203, reproduced in Ives, Memos, 200. 23. Ives, letter to Kirkpatrick, October 11, 1935. Emphasis in original. This advice was not unique to Kirkpatrick—Ives also assured the singer Radiana Pazmor to do “whatever you think best in the matter” of performing certain songs, and that “if you sing it in your own way it will be quite alright—and well sung” (Edith Ives, letter to Radiana Pazmor, November 13, 1934, MSS 14/31/3; Edith Ives, letter to Radiana Pazmor, December 3, 1934, MSS 14/31/3. Edith’s later letter is dated 1933, but based on the context and content of the letter, this appears to be a mistake (Tom Owens, email to the author, February 11, 2009). Both reproduced in Owens, 225–26. 24. Replying to Ives’s letter, Kirkpatrick wrote: “I’m sorry I’m not the sort of person who can exemplify the spontaneously improvisatory element that is so important in your music. I have to decide what notes I’m going to play and play just those, short of the kind of relearning that takes some time. I suppose all that is in a way the very antithesis of creative action, bringing in the element of the well rehearsed circus act, which always goes off like clockwork and always exactly the same. One simply does one’s best to keep the muscular habits from getting out of hand away from the spiritual causation, and keep them one” (Kirkpatrick, letter to Ives, October 25, 1935, MSS 14/30/13, reproduced in Owens, 238). 25. Elsewhere in Memos, Ives reiterated this point, writing of the Concord: Play it before breakfast like –––– ! “ “ after “ “ –––– ! “ “ “ digging potatoes ” –––– ! (Ives, Memos, 191) 26. Ives, letter to Kirkpatrick, October 10, 1927, MSS 14/30/13, reproduced in Owens, 150. Kirkpatrick, letter to Ives, January 5, 1934, MSS 14/30/13, reproduced in Owens, 214–15. 27. Kirkpatrick, letter to Ives, January 18, 1934, MSS 14/30/13, reproduced in Owens, 215–16. Kirkpatrick’s curiosity about the complicated web of Ives’s works led him, as early as 1936, to suggest compiling a works list, apparently unaware that Ives had already begun to compile such lists. (See Ives, Memos, 147–66.) Kirkpatrick, letter to Ives, July 22, 1936, MSS 14/30/13, reproduced in Owens 245–46. The following year, ripples of Kirkpatrick’s preservationist attitudes surfaced even more directly, when he wrote to Harmony Ives: “Every least scrap of documentation is invaluably precious. . . . Composers are notoriously kaleidoscopic and see things they have written years before in quite a different light— hence the value of the manuscripts dating from the time of actual composition” (Kirkpatrick, letter to Harmony Ives, April 4, 1937, MSS 14/30/13, reproduced in Owens, 253–54). 28. James Sinclair, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives. 29. See Oja, “Cos Cob Press and the American Composer.” 30. Ives, letter to Lehman Engel, August 27, 1938, MSS 14/29/3, reproduced, with sketches, in Owens, 264–66. 31. Lehman Engel, quoted in Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered, 196.

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32. Kirkpatrick, letter to Ives, February 4, 1939, MSS 14/30/14, reproduced in Owens, 271. 33. Kirkpatrick, register of Ives-Kirkpatrick correspondence, MSS 56/18/203. 34. Writing to Kirkpatrick about his delays, Harmony told him, “It is really rather vexatious, you know.” Swafford placed this comment in context, writing that it is “as furious as one ever finds Harmony” (Swafford, Charles Ives, 505; Kirkpatrick, register of Ives-Kirkpatrick correspondence, MSS 56/18/203). 35. Kirkpatrick, quoted in Swafford, Charles Ives, 415. 36. Roberts, quoted in Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered, 186. 37. Roberts, letter to Kirkpatrick, June 18, 1958, MSS 56/30/328. The formal tone of the correspondence suggests that Robert and Kirkpatrick had not met before. 38. Ives, draft letter to Roberts, November 21, 1940, MSS 14/31/8, reproduced in Owens, 284–85. 39. Kirkpatrick, register of Ives-Kirkpatrick correspondence, MSS 56/18/203. 40. Kirkpatrick, letter to Ives, July 28, 1950, MSS 56/18/203. See also Bruhn, “Ives’s Multiverse,” 193. 41. See Swafford, Charles Ives, 505n90. 42. Kirkpatrick, “The Player’s Apology,” MSS 56/75/718. Strike-outs in original. Bruhn references a different copy of this same document in his dissertation, folding it in to a discussion of the 1987 edition (Bruhn, “Ives’s Multiverse,” 197). 43. Kirkpatrick, letter to Ives, January 18, 1934, MSS 14/30/13, reproduced in Owens, 215–16. 44. Kirkpatrick, liner notes to Columbia MS 7192. 45. Burkholder, interview by the author, May 21, 2007. 46. Hitchcock, interview by the author, February 24, 2007. 47. To cite just one example, Bruhn writes that Kirkpatrick experienced an “inability to overcome his preference for the first edition,” and “never seems to have warmed up” to the second edition (Bruhn, “Ives’s Multiverse,” 193). 48. Block, “Remembrance of Dissonances Past,” 35. 49. Ibid. 50. Later in life, it seems that Kirkpatrick thought that Ives’s original spellings might have actually contained some grain of performance information in them, even for a pianist: “Ives said, very justly, that often it’s a little futile to try to think of these pitch subtleties when you’re operating on a keyboard, but he also said that it’s surprising how by subtleties in volume it’s possible to suggest subtleties in pitch, and that’s perfectly true” (Kirkpatrick, quoted in “On Conducting and Performing Ives,” in Hitchcock and Perlis, eds., An Ives Celebration, 139–40). Despite acknowledging this, Kirkpatrick continued to respell the Concord heavily in his final edition. 51. Kirkpatrick, letter to Ives, November 20, 1935, MSS 14/30/13. Reproduced in Memos, 202–3; also reproduced in Owens, 239. 52. Ives’s full reply was as follows: “In the two places you speak of 1st line p. 6 & the bottom of p. 15 [sic]—The first—these measures may have been in the overture, but are not in the pages that I can find—but it probably was—as in the copy from which the sonata was engraved, there was a lower set of notes in LH. which were crossed out of the engraver’s copy—I can’t make them out exactly, but probably cut out as some other things were—probably or perhaps, because they didn’t seem quite essential enough to pay for the difficulty in playing & listening that they might cause. (am enclosing this & other pages from the copies of engraver’s copy—

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Do whatever you think best[.)]” (Ives, sketch of letter to Kirkpatrick, [Ca.] November 1935, MSS 14/30/13, reproduced in Owens, 240–41). 53. The 1953 edition, which is incomplete, does not include the passage Kirkpatrick asked about on p. 17. 54. The only apparent change is a courtesy E♮ on the fourth eighth note of the page in the right hand. 55. Kirkpatrick, “Editors’ Experiences,” 71. 56. Kirkpatrick, liner notes to Columbia MS 7192. 57. Kirkpatrick’s 1981 footnoted reprint of Ives’s 1920 edition is oddly silent on this passage, only noting a few accidentals in its source comparison. As an annotated facsimile, Kirkpatrick’s reprint seems much more restrained than Kirkpatrick’s other editions of Concord. 58. This is similar to Kirkpatrick’s approach in Memos, where he notes the sources of Ives’s prose in the margin of the book, and sometimes weaves together several different versions of a passage by Ives over the course of a page. 59. For a complete listing of the sources that Kirkpatrick consulted, see Bruhn, “Ives’s Multiverse,” 198. 60. Bruhn’s dissertation includes a source comparison between Kirkpatrick’s 1987 edition and the 1947 version of “Emerson.” See Bruhn, “Ives’s Multiverse,” 239–47.

Chapter Five 1. Kirkpatrick, preface to Mood edition, MSS 56/81/768. Also, a few notes on citation formats in this chapter are in order. Robert Y. McMahan, in his dissertation, prepared a census of Ruggles’s manuscript materials for The Sunken Bell. I follow his bibliographic format, “RYM” numbers, wherever possible and note when there is an ambiguity. Measure numbers for Mood are relative to Kirkpatrick’s final copy. Following Kirkpatrick and McMahan, citations to texted elements of The Sunken Bell are by page and line number of Meltzer’s play. Boxed text in a musical example is in Ruggles’s hand; unboxed text is my own. I use Kirkpatrick’s sigla for the sketch material surrounding Mood, which is described in table 5.1. 2. Kirkpatrick, preface to Mood edition, MSS 56/81/768. Ruggles’s Op. 1, a set of three songs, and “Thy Presence Ever Near Me” for voice and piano had been published around 1900 but were later withdrawn by the composer. 3. Kirkpatrick, letter to Micah Ruggles, May 8, 1981, MSS 56/31/341. 4. Meredith, The Works of George Meredith, vol. 26, 257. 5. Ziffrin, Carl Ruggles, 43. 6. Kirkpatrick, letter to Ellis Freedman, November 17, 1976, MSS 56/31/341. 7. Ibid. 8. Kirkpatrick, letter to Micah Ruggles, September 14, 1976, MSS 56/31/341. By 1976, he still claimed not to have a finished copy of the piece (Kirkpatrick, letter to Micah Ruggles, May 15, 1976, MSS 56/31/341). 9. See, for example, Kirkpatrick’s work on Ruggles’s Parvum Organum, MSS 56/81/769. 10. Kirkpatrick, draft of critical commentary to Mood, MSS 56/81/768, 4. 11. Kirkpatrick, preface to Mood, MSS 56/81/768.

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12. Kirkpatrick, typewritten critical commentary for Mood, MSS 56/31/341, 5. 13. Ruggles, signed documents, March 6, 1965, and January 26, 1966, MSS 56/31/338. 14. Micah Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 7, 1976, MSS 56/31/341. Enclosed with this letter is a copy of Ruggles’s will, dated March 27, 1961. 15. Micah Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 7, 1976, MSS 56/31/341. Micah wrote to Kirkpatrick: “There was never a codicil attached to the will and John Whalen [the estate’s lawyer] never mentioned to me about one and I am not being naïve about it.” The original document noted that copies of it were deposited with both Micah and Whalen. 16. Green, letter to Kirkpatrick, March 26, 1948. MSS 56/15/169. 17. Micah Ruggles, letter to John Kirkpatrick, July 16, 1974, MSS 56/31/341. 18. Micah Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, July 7, 1976, MSS 56/31/341; Micah Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, March 20, 1977, MSS 56/31/341. The other works Micah contracted to Green in 1976 were Exaltation, Ich Fuhle Deinem Odem, How Can I Be Blythe and Glad, Organum, and Prayer. Micah also wrote Kirkpatrick that he “had never heard of” Mood (Micah Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, July 5, 1976, MSS 56/31/341). 19. Kirkpatrick, letter to Micah Ruggles, May 15, 1976, MSS 56/31/341. 20. Green, letter to Kirkpatrick, July 6, 1976, MSS 56/15/169. 21. Kirkpatrick, letter to Micah Ruggles, September 14, 1976, MSS 56/31/341. 22. Micah Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, October 2, 1976, MSS 56/31/341. 23. Ellis Freedman, letter to Kirkpatrick, November 22, 1976, MSS 56/31/341. 24. Micah Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 7, 1976, MSS 56/31/341. 25. Kirkpatrick, letter to Green, February 17, 1977, MSS 56/15/169. 26. Kirkpatrick, letters to Micah Ruggles, January 8, 1980, and May 8, 1981, MSS 56/31/341. 27. Kirkpatrick, letter to Micah Ruggles, May 8, 1981, MSS 56/31/341. 28. Micah Ruggles, letter to Kirkpatrick, August 5, 1981, MSS 56/31/341. Kirkpatrick and Green do not appear to have been in direct contact after 1977. 29. See Ziffrin, Carl Ruggles, 38–58; Robert McMahan has written an exhaustive dissertation on The Sunken Bell. 30. Ibid., 46. 31. Ibid., 47. 32. McMahan, “The Sunken Bell,” 99; McMahan, “A Brief History of The Sunken Bell,” 146; McMahan, “The Sunken Bell,” 107. 33. Ruggles’s papers also contain part of another copy of Meltzer’s published play, but that copy does not contain musical annotations (see McMahan, “The Sunken Bell,” 265). 34. McMahan gives a description of this annotated play and other sources for the text in McMahan, “The Sunken Bell,” 617–85. By way of comparison, the earliest date marked anywhere in The Sunken Bell source material is 1916 (McMahan, “The Sunken Bell,” 265). 35. McMahan, “The Sunken Bell,” 264–65. Ruggles had a few different copies of the play, but the one in question is the only one with significant musical notation. 36. Pages 76, 86, and 87 have 37, 37, and 40 pages of corresponding sketch material. McMahan, “The Sunken Bell,” 579–80. 37. Kirkpatrick, quoted in Donald Berman, liner notes to The Uncovered Ruggles, 4.

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38. Some scholars of early music, for example, have argued that transcription itself distorts the underlying intention. See Bent, “Editing Early Music,” 373–92. Other scholars have sought to restore fragmented texts to their original state. See Berenbeim and Röder, “Milanese Chant in the Monastery?” 39. The first proposal follows the “best text” approach to music editing. The second was suggested by Jim Sinclair’s edition of Ives’s Ragtime Dances, which attempts to triangulate between sources to determine which of the earliest sources of Ragtime Dances should be disregarded as work toward the related First Piano Sonata. See chapter 7 of this book.

Chapter Six 1. To provide one example of this trend, Kirkpatrick took issue with J. Peter Burkholder’s dissertation on the grounds that “you intrude yourself too often.” Kirkpatrick, letter to J. Peter Burkholder, July 6, 1983, MSS 56/5/53. 2. William Lichtenwanger, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 14, 1960, MSS 56/19/214. 3. Kirkpatrick, draft letter to Richard MacCarteney [Chief, Reference Division, Library of Congress], after December 14, 1960, MSS 56/19/214. 4. Ibid. 5. Kirkpatrick, index to Kirkpatrick-Ives Correspondence, MSS 56/18/203; the Kirkpatrick-Ives correspondence is also substantially represented in Owens, ed., Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives. 6. John Kirkpatrick, letter to Sarah Hanks, February 28, 1963, MSS 56/18/210. 7. In terms of prose publications, Kirkpatrick’s Cornell years were the most productive. Apart from his youthful essay “On Copland’s Music,” and two short essays for Modern Music in the early 1940s, he had all but stopped writing until 1946. While at Cornell, he published sixteen articles on a range of subjects, mostly either these reviews for Notes or essays for the Cornell University Music Review. 8. Kirkpatrick, review of Charles Ives’s Three-Page Sonata, 486–87. 9. Kirkpatrick, “A Player’s Apology,” MSS 56/75/718. 10. Kirkpatrick, “Envoi,” p. 3, MSS 56/18/203. 11. Kirkpatrick, “Envoi,” May 22, 1954, MSS 56/18/203. 12. For a discussion of Cowell’s changing attitude toward Ives, see Paul, “From American Ethnographer to Cold War Icon.” Kirkpatrick published his Ruggles editions through Cowell’s New Music Quarterly in 1943 and 1944, but he coordinated with Lou Harrison, another member of the New Music Quarterly, instead of Cowell himself. See Mead Henry Cowell’s New Music, 369–70. 13. Harmony Ives, letter to John Kirkpatrick, September 13, 1954, MSS 56/18/204; Harmony Ives, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 3, 1954, MSS 56/18/204. 14. Paul notes that following Charles Ives and His Music, Henry wrote publicly about Ives only in two short essays. Paul, “From American Ethnographer to Cold War Icon,” 450. 15. Sidney Cowell, letter to John Kirkpatrick, March 22, 1966, MSS 56/10/107. Reproduced with permission of the David and Sylvia Teitelbaum Fund, Inc. 16. Harmony Ives, quoted in Collins and Miller, “The Cowell-Ives Relationship,” 474.

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17. Kirkpatrick gives a detailed chronology of the entire process of assembling the Temporary Catalogue in its introduction. 18. Kirkpatrick, letter to Lou Harrison, December 5, 1957, MSS 56/16/183. 19. Kirkpatrick, letter to Harmony Ives, January 12, 1959, MSS 56/18/204. 20. Kirkpatrick, preface to Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, xi. 21. Johnson, letter to Kirkpatrick, January 21, 1961, MSS 56/29/214. 22. Chase, letter to Kirkpatrick, April 18, 1961, MSS 56/29/214. 23. James Sykes, letter to Kirkpatrick, January 16, 1961, MSS 56/29/214. 24. Edmunds, letter to Kirkpatrick, November 28, 1960, MSS 56/29/214. 25. Mendel, letter to Kirkpatrick, November 21, 1960, MSS 56/29/214. 26. Finney, letter to Kirkpatrick, December 8, 1960, MSS 56/29/214. 27. Coover, letter to Kirkpatrick, April 28, 1961, MSS 56/29/214. 28. See Crawford, The American Musical Landscape, 26–27. 29. Kerman, “A Profile for American Musicology”; Lowinsky, “Character and Purposes of American Musicology,” 222–34; Kerman, “Communications,” 426–27; McCorkle, “Finding a Place for American Studies,” 73–84; and Hitchcock, “A Monumenta Americana?” 5–11. 30. Kerman, “A Profile for American Musicology,” 62. 31. Sinclair, A Descriptive Catalogue. 32. Chase, letter to Kirkpatrick, April 4, 1961, MSS 56/29/214. 33. See Kirkpatrick, “Ives as Revealed in His Marginalia,” 14–19; Kirkpatrick, “The Evolution of Carl Ruggles,” 146–66. 34. Kirkpatrick, introduction to Memos, 19–20. 35. George Tyler, letter to Robert Farlow, June 12, 1968, MSS 56/37/419. 36. David Hamilton, reader’s report for Memos, April 16, 1968, MSS 56/37/419. 37. Kirkpatrick, letter to Robert Farlow, November 21, 1970, MSS 56/37/419. 38. Peter Dickinson, “Ivesiana,” 947–48. 39. Alan Mandel, review of Memos, 716–19. 40. Laurence Wallach, review of Memos, 284–90. 41. Wallach, review of Memos, 289. 42. Ibid. 43. David Hamilton, reader’s report for Memos, April 16, 1968, MSS 56/37/419. 44. Lakond, letter to Kirkpatrick, MSS 56/29/214. 45. Paul, Charles Ives in the Mirror, 197. The pagination here refers to a typescript draft of the book, kindly provided by Paul. 46. See for example Kirkpatrick, “Religion and Music,” 13–17.

Chapter Seven 1. Bernstein, quoted in Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America, 309. 2. Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America, 249. 3. Ibid. 4. Solomon, “Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity,” 443–70. 5. Ibid., 447. 6. Ibid., 463. 7. Lambert, Communications, 204–9; Maynard Solomon, Communications, 209–18; Henahan, “Did Ives Fiddle with the Truth?” In the scholarly world, more

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sustained responses to Solomon included Magee, “The Choral Works of Charles Ives”; Baron, “Dating Charles Ives’s Music,” 20–56. 8. Burkholder, “Charles Ives and His Fathers,” 11. 9. The Charles Ives Society was founded in 1967, but was essentially dormant until 1973. 10. Gilman, “Music.” 11. Ibid. 12. For a concise overview of the reception history of the Concord, see Block, Ives: Concord Sonata, 7–19; A discussion of Ives’s overall reception from 1921 to 1939 is given in Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America, 191–287. 13. Carter, “The Case of Mr. Ives,” 176. 14. Ibid., 175. 15. Ibid., 174. 16. Carter, interview by Vivian Perlis, in Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered, 139. Carter edited this transcript heavily prior to publication. Perlis has noted that “this resulted in substantial differentiation between the published material and the original interview” (Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered, xvii). 17. “Anyhow the question is not important. Ives himself has said that he prefers people to judge his music not for when it was written but for what it is.” Carter, “The Case of Mr. Ives,” 174. 18. Carter, “Shop Talk by an American Composer,” reprinted in Bernard, ed., Elliott Carter, 222. 19. Carter, “Documents of a Friendship with Ives,” reprinted in Bernard, ed., Elliott Carter, 111. 20. Ibid. He also elaborated on his ultimately unsuccessful effort to put Ives’s manuscripts in order during the 1940s in Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered, 142. See also Carter, “Ives Today: His Vision and Challenge.” 21. “The Charles Ives Society,” undated and anonymous document, Charles Ives Society Papers, Bloomington, Indiana. 22. Carter’s more generous assessments of Ives’s music include his aforementioned essay “Ives Today: His Vision and Challenge,” as well as “Charles Ives: An American Destiny.” 23. Carter, interview by Perlis in South Salem, New York, June 20, 1969, reproduced in Charles Ives Remembered, 138. 24. Carter commented briefly on Ives in a later interview by Vivian Perlis, reiterating his position. Perlis and Van Cleve, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington, 34. 25. Kirkpatrick, “The Current State of Ives Scholarship” (paper read at annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, November 13, 1971), MSS 56/61/561. 26. Perlis, e-mail to the author, May 24, 2007. 27. Kirkpatrick, letter to Carter, May/June 1973, MSS 56/6/67. 28. Kirkpatrick, letter to Carter, 1. Page references in this chapter refer to the original pagination of the letters. 29. Ibid., 4. 30. Ibid., 2. 31. Ibid.; Ives, Thirty-Four Songs. 32. Carter, letter to Kirkpatrick, 1973, 1. MSS 56/6/67. 33. Ibid.

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34. The question of exactly how dissonant Neusidler’s piece was has been challenged. See Stevens, Musicology: A Practical Guide, 175. See also Scott, “Orientalism and Musical Style,” 309–35. 35. Carter, letter to Kirkpatrick, 2. 36. John McClure, letter to Kirkpatrick, June 6, 1967, MSS 56/7/74. This chapter focuses on the work of the Ives Society from 1973 onward. For a discussion of earlier efforts on behalf of Ives by Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, see Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America, 249–99; and Miller and Lieberman, Lou Harrison, 31–38. 37. H. Wiley Hitchcock, letter to Ellis Freedman, May 26, 1973, Ives Society Papers. 38. The Society was careful to preserve the balance of intellectual property already established among the various publishers of Ives’s music. The main publishers of Ives—Associated Music Publishers, Peer International, and Merion Music— have retained their copyrights even for editions prepared by the Ives Society. The Society specifically avoided any attempt to consolidate Ives’s music with a single publisher. 39. H. Wiley Hitchcock, letter to Mario di Bonaventura, July 31, 1974, MSS 56/7/74. 40. Kirkpatrick, letter to Harmony Ives, September 16, 1954, MSS 56/18/204. 41. Despite the detailed instructions for achieving a consistent editorial style within the Society, one of the most visually striking aspects of the Ives Society edition is that it comes in many different shapes and sizes, as the performing forces dictate—it does not have the standardized appearance of a library “shelf” edition. This stemmed from an emphasis on issuing editions that were easy to perform from—and no doubt also reflected Kirkpatrick’s own background as a concert pianist. As Peter Burkholder commented, “The reason that he [Kirkpatrick] wasn’t questioned [about the editorial guidelines] is because the focus was so much on getting the music out. The initial decision . . . was that instead of putting out a shelf edition, they would put out these octavos, or other single prints, that would then get in to the hands of performers” (J. Peter Burkholder, interview by the author, May 21, 2007). 42. Echols and Kirkpatrick, “Guidelines for Editors,” May 1977, MSS 56/7/76. 43. A few editions listed in the table, in particular Kirkpatrick’s Psalm settings that he coedited with Gregg Smith, lack the official Ives Society mark of approval which appears in their editions. However, these editions are included here not only because Kirkpatrick was involved in them, but also because they feature an editorial process that is in line with the Ives Society’s official editions. 44. This chapter follows James Grier’s use of ‘eclectic’ and ‘best-text’ to denote editions that use a variety of sources, and ones that designate a primary one, respectively. See Grier, The Critical Editing of Music, 129–30. 45. For the realizations, emendations vary in degree, ranging from writing out the orchestration indicated by Ives in Evening to transcription of three piano improvisations by Ives that have no written source. 46. In the eclectic editions surveyed, the editor was generally guided by his or her musical instincts in making, to quote the 1977 policy again, “the piece cohere most strongly and fulfill its expressive purpose most eloquently and naturally.”

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47. John Kirkpatrick, letter to Arnold Broido, Bruce McCombie, and Paul Echols, January 31, 1984, MSS 56/34/382. 48. H. Wiley Hitchcock, letter to James Sinclair, June 1, 1988, Ives Society Papers. 49. Kirkpatrick gives a few specific examples of “more valid” settings in his introduction to Forty Earlier Songs: “The surprise harmonies ending The Sea of Sleep serve no purpose in Those Evening Bells, nor do the watery images of Her Eyes and Grace in Mirage and Where the Eagle.” 50. Ibid. 51. The piece was not actually premiered until January 10, 1931. 52. Datings are by Sinclair in his preface to the edition; he gives a more detailed account of his reasoning in his Descriptive Catalogue. 53. Sinclair, ed., Ragtime Dances, iv–v. 54. Singleton includes a listing of these on p. 41 of his edition. 55. Ives, Memos, 55. Cited in Singleton, ed., Third Symphony, iv. 56. The letter dates from July 1945, and the draft letter from March 1946. Singleton, ed., Third Symphony, iv. 57. Hamm, review of “Forty Earlier Songs,” 1125. 58. Ibid. 59. A listing of published reviews of editions through 2010 is given in Magee, Charles Ives: A Research and Information Guide, 157–61. 60. H. Wiley Hitchcock, letter to Gunther Schuller, May 14, 1987, Ives Society Papers. It isn’t clear precisely why Schuller was upset; Hitchcock was merely quoting an earlier letter from Schuller to him that has not been located. 61. To this day, the Ives Society edition of Tone Roads remains unpublished. 62. James Sinclair, letter to H. Wiley Hitchcock, June 27, 1986, Ives Society Papers. 63. H. Wiley Hitchcock, letter to Carol Baron, December 15, 1987, Ives Society Papers. 64. Gregory Fulkerson, letter to H. Wiley Hitchcock, February 14, 1992, Ives Society Papers. 65. Rathert, “The Unanswered Questions of the Ives Edition,” 575–84. 66. Baron, review of Ives’s Third Symphony, 1436–38. 67. H. Wiley Hitchcock, conversation with the author, March 16, 2006. Other members of the Committee were Daniel Dorff, William Holab, Wayne Shirley, James Sinclair, and Todd Vunderink. 68. Ives Society Editorial Guidelines Committee, “Guidelines for Editors of critical Editions of the Works of Charles Ives,” January 1996, Ives Society Papers. The use of “best text” in these guidelines obviously departs from the way I have been using the term in this chapter. 69. Burkholder, interview by the author, May 21, 2007. 70. Sinclair, e-mail message to the author, May 29, 2007. 71. Kirkpatrick, letter to Solomon, April 11–13, 1987, MSS 56/33/368. Along with his one-page response, Kirkpatrick also sent Solomon a marked-up copy of the draft (discussed below) of “Questions of Veracity.” 72. Ibid. 73. See also Kirkpatrick, “Report on a work-in-progress,” and chapter 2 of this study. 74. Kirkpatrick, Preface to Set of Five Take-Offs for Piano, v. 75. Kirkpatrick, letter to Solomon.

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76. Solomon, “Questions of Veracity,” 450. 77. The draft Kirkpatrick read can be found in MSS 56/33/368. 78. Solomon, “Questions of Veracity,” 464. 79. Kirkpatrick, marginal comment in draft of Solomon, “Questions of Veracity,” 32, MSS 56/33/368. 80. Kirkpatrick’s protectionist impulse notoriously took the form of guarding Charles’s and Harmony’s courtship letters. See Swafford, Charles Ives, xii, 460n32. 81. See, for example, Solomon, Beethoven; Solomon, Mozart: A Life; Solomon, “Schubert: Some Consequences of Nostalgia,” 34–46. 82. Maynard Solomon, letter to John Kirkpatrick, June 12, 1987, MSS 56/33/368. 83. Only one Ives Society Edition has been published since Kirkpatrick’s death— Charles Krigbaum’s 1994 reconstruction of Ives’s Postlude in F for Organ—that prefers an earlier version. 84. Maynard Solomon, Late Beethoven, 32. 85. Paul, “From American Ethnographer to Cold War Icon,” and his forthcoming book, cited in the previous chapter. McGinness, “Essay: Has Modernist Criticism Failed Charles Ives?” 99–109. 86. See, for example, Paul’s summary of the scholarship surrounding Ives’s absorption of transcendental philosophy (p. 401n3). After reviewing the main scholarly contributions to the debate, he pushes it to the side of his argument, writing, “Regardless of when the historical Ives discovered transcendentalism and made it a central part of his life, its position in his reception history does begin with Cowells’ 1955 book.”

Conclusion 1. For an example of comparative methods, see Hammond, Editing Music in Early Modern Germany. James Grier’s previously mentioned The Critical Editing of Music is one of the more recent examples of a guide to a general approach to editing. 2. Von Bülow, introduction to Sechs Sonaten für Klavier allein, 3. Translated in Agawu, Music as Discourse, 26. 3. Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments, 100. 4. For a discussion of some of these parallel tracks of mediation, see Moorefield, The Producer as Composer; Jeffrey Magee, “Revisiting Fletcher Henderson’s ‘Copenhagen,’” 42–66; Holzaepfel, “David Tudor and the Performance of American Experimental Music.” 5. Stone, letter to Elliott Carter, July 20, 1964, Kurt Stone Papers, Yale University Music Library. 6. H. Wiley Hitchcock, letter to Directors of the Ives Society, December 3, 1991, Ives Society Papers.

Works of John Kirkpatrick Except where otherwise noted, these citations have been drawn from the register of Kirkpatrick’s papers (assembled by James Sinclair), and from “John Kirkpatrick, A Friend of American Composers: Catalogue of the Exhibition at the Yale Music Library March 30–May 3, 1985, with A Selective Bibliography in Honor of His Eightieth Birthday,” MSS 56/20/228, John Kirkpatrick Papers, Yale University.

Musical Editions Beeson, Jack. Fifth Piano Sonata. Bryn Mawr, PA: Theodore Presser, 1973. Carter, Elliott. Voyage. South Hadley, MA: Valley Music Press, 1945. Chanler, Theodore. A Child in the House. New York: Mercury Music, 1956. ———. Toccata for Piano. New York: Music Press, 1947. Copland, Aaron. Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, two-piano (four-hand) arrangement. New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 1956; Cos Cob Press, 1929. Farwell, Arthur. Navajo War Dance No. 2 for Piano, op. 29. New York: Music Press, 1947. Finney, Ross Lee. Fantasy. New York: Arrow Music Press, 1942. ———. Nostalgic Waltzes. New York: Mercury Music, 1953. ———. Piano Sonata No. 3 in E. South Hadley, MA: Valley Music Press, 1945 (rev. 1958). ———. Piano Sonata No. 4 in E Major (“Christmastime 1945”). New York: Music Press, 1947. ———. Variations on a Theme by Alban Berg. New York: C. F. Peters, 1972. Foster, Stephen. Anadolia, Old Folks’ Quadrilles, Old Folks at Home Variations. (Announced for publication as a set by Music Press but never published.) Gottschalk, Louis Moreau. Souvenir de Porto Rico. New York: Music Press, 1947. Johnston, Hunter. For an Unknown Soldier, for Flute and String Orchestra. South Hadley, MA: Valley Music Press, 1944. ———. Piano Sonata. New York: Music Press, 1948. ———. Serenade for Flute and Clarinet in B-flat [includes arrangement for piano by Kirkpatrick]. South Hadley, MA: Valley Music Press, 1945. ———. Trio for Flute, Oboe and Piano. New York: Galaxy Music, 1972.

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Ives, Charles. The Celestial Country. Vocal score. New York: Peer International, 1973. ———. Crossing the Bar: Anthem for Solo Quartet or Mixed Choir and Organ. New York: Associated Music Press, 1974. ———. Easter Carol, for solo quartet, SATB and organ. New York: Associated Music Press, 1973. ———. Eleven Songs and Two Harmonizations. New York: Associated Music, 1968. ———. Fugue in Four Keys on The Shining Shore, for B-flat trumpet (cornet), flute, and strings. Bryn Mawr, PA: Merion Music, 1975. ———. I Come to Thee, for SATB with organ. New York: Associated Music Press, 1983. ———. Johnny Poe, for male chorus and orchestra. Realized and edited by Kirkpatrick. New York: Peer International, 1978. ———. Lord God, Thy Sea Is Mighty, for SATB with organ. New York: Associated Music Press, 1983. ———. Psalm 25, for SATB with organ. [edited with Gregg Smith]. Bryn Mawr, PA: Merion Music, 1979. ———. Psalm 54, for mixed chorus (SATB), a cappella. [edited with Gregg Smith]. Bryn Mawr, PA: Merion Music, 1973. ———. Psalm 90, for mixed chorus (SATB), organ and bells. [edited with Gregg Smith]. Bryn Mawr, PA: Merion Music, 1975. ———. Psalm 100, for choirs (SA, SATB) and bells, with optional organ. [edited with Gregg Smith]. Bryn Mawr, PA: Merion Music, 1975. ———. Psalm 135: Anthem-Processional, for SSAATTBB, trumpet, trombone, organ, tympani, tenor drum, and bass drum. Bryn Mawr, PA: Merion Music, 1981. ———. Psalm 150, for Four-part treble (or boys) SATB and optional organ. [edited with Gregg Smith]. Bryn Mawr, PA: Merion Music, 1972. ———. Set of Five Take-Offs for Piano. New York: Peer International, 1978. ———. Study No. 20 for Piano. Bryn Mawr, PA: Merion Music, 1981. ———. Study No. 21 (Some Southpaw Pitching!) for Piano. Bryn Mawr, PA: Mercury Music, 1975. ———. Study No. 22 for Piano. Bryn Mawr, PA: Merion Music, 1973. ———. Sunrise, for voice, violin, and piano. New York: C. F. Peters, 1977. ———. Three-Page Sonata, for piano. Bryn Mawr, PA: Mercury Music, 1975. ———. Trio for Violin, Violoncello, and Piano. New York: Peer International, 1985. ———. Turn Ye, Turn Ye, for SATB and organ. Bryn Mawr, PA: Mercury Music, 1973. ———. Varied Air and Variations: Study No. 2 for Ears or Aural and Mental Exercise!!! [edited with Gerry Clarke]. Bryn Mawr, PA: Merion Music, 1971. ———. Waltz-Rondo for Piano. [edited with Jerrold Cox]. New York: Associated Music Press, 1978. Lessard, John. Mask. New York: Music Press, 1947. Maganini, Quinto. A Californian Rhapsody for Orchestra with Trumpet Obbligato. Transcription for trumpet and piano. New York: Edition Musicus, 1936.

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183

———. The Cathedral at Sens: Concerto da Chiesa for Solo Violoncello, Mixed Choir and Orchestra, op. 18. Transcription for violoncello, mixed choir, and piano. New York: Edition Musicus, 1936. Palmer, Robert. Piano Quartet. New York: G. Schirmer, 1950. ———. Sonata for 2 Pianos, 4 Hands. New York: Peer International, 1959. ———. Three Epigrams for Piano. New York: Peer International, 1960. ———. Three Preludes for Piano. [facsimile of Kirkpatrick’s ms.] South Hadley, MA: Valley Music Press, 1943. ———. Three Preludes for Piano. [corrected edition]. New York: Peer International, 1968. Persichetti, Vincent. Variations for an Album. New York: Music Press, 1947. Ruggles, Carl. Evocation No. 4: Chant for Piano. New Music Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1945). ———. Evocations: Four Chants for Piano (Revision of 1954). New York: American Music Edition, 1956. ———. Evocations: Three Chants for Piano. New Music Quarterly 16, no. 3 (April 1943). ———. Organum, for orchestra. arranged for piano. New Music Quarterly 21, no. 1 (October 1947). Thomson, Virgil. Capital, Capitals for Four Men and a Piano. New Music Quarterly 20, no. 3 (April 1947).

Recordings Cowell, Henry. Toccanta. Columbia ML 4986, 1955. With Helen Boatwright, soprano; Aldo Parisot, violincello; Carleton Sprague Smith, flute. Gottschalk, Louis Moreau. Piano music. Selections. Turnabout TV S-34426, 1970. Ives, Charles. Five Violin Sonatas. Musical Heritage Society MHS-824501 (1981) and Musicmasters MM20056–20057 (1982). With Daniel Stepner, violin. ———. “In the Inn” from Piano Sonata No. 1. Columbia 72535-D in set MM-749 (78 rpm), 1948. Recorded 1945. ———. Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord, Mass., 1840–60). Columbia MM-749 (78 rpm), 1948; Columbia ML-4250 (LP), 1950. Recorded 1945. ———. Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord, Mass., 1840–60). Columbia MS-7192 (stereo), 1968. ———. “The Things Our Fathers Loved.” Record 3 in Charles Ives: The 100th Anniversary. Columbia M4–32504, 1974. With Helen Boatwright, soprano. ———. 24 Songs. Overtone 7, 1954. With Helen Boatwright, soprano. Johnson, Hunter. Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra. Concert Hall CHD-1189, 1954. With the Rochester Chamber Orchestra, Robert Hull conducting. ———. Letter to the World: A Suite from the Ballet for Martha Graham. Concert Hall CHS-1151, [195-]. With the Concert Hall Chamber Orchestra, Robert Hull conducting.

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MacDowell, Edward. Piano Music of Edward MacDowell. Columbia ML-54372, 1951. Palmer, Robert. Piano Sonata No. 1. Yaddo III-6, 1940. ———. Quartet for Piano and Strings. Columbia ML-4842, [195-]. Recorded 1947. With the Walden Trio (Bernard M. Goodman, violin; John C. Garvey, viola; R. H. Swenson, violoncello). Ruggles, Carl. Evocations: Four Chants for Piano, 1937–43, Revision of 1954. Columbia ML-4986 (1955), CML-4986 (1968), AML-4986 (1974). ———. Evocations: Original Piano Version. In The Complete Music of Carl Ruggles. CBS Masterworks M2–34591, 1980.

Published Writings “Aaron Copland’s Piano Sonata.” Modern Music 19, no. 4 (1942): 246–50. “Bennington’s Festival of the Arts.” Modern Music 18, no. 1 (1940): 52–54. “Editors’ Experiences.” In An Ives Celebration. [Panel with Kirkpatrick, Lou Harrison, and James Sinclair, chaired by Alan Mandel]: 67–85. “The Evolution of Carl Ruggles: A Chronicle Largely in His Own Words.” Perspectives of New Music 6, no. 2 (1968): 146–68. “Is ‘House-Music’ a Lost Art Today?” Musical Courier, 129, no. 9 (5, 1944). “Ives as Revealed in His Marginalia.” Cornell University Music Review 4 (1961): 14–19. “Ives, Charles.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie. Vol. 9. London: Macmillan, 1980: 414–29. “A Lewis Pupil, Richard Selig, American Poet, 1929–57.” Bulletin of the C. S. Lewis Society 15, no. 12 (1984): 1–7. Memos [editor]. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. “Meter and Rhythm in Performance.” Cornell University Music Review 9 (1966): 14–17. “Mozart’s D Minor Fantasy.” Cornell University Music Review 11 (1968): 15–17. “The New Ives Biography: A Disagreement.” High Fidelity and Musical America 24, no. 12 (1974): 18–20. “On Copland’s Music.” Fontainebleau Alumni Bulletin 1 (1928): 1–6. “Performance as an Avenue to Educational Realities in Music.” College Music Symposium 4, no. 4 (1964): 39–46. “Piano Music [review].” Notes, 2nd ser., 4, no. 3 (June 1947): 370–71. Preface to Charles Ives, Fourth of July. New York: Associated Music Publishers, 1974. Preface to Charles Ives, Symphony No. 4. New York: Associated Music Publishers, 1965. Preface to Charles Ives, Washington’s Birthday. New York: Associated Music Publishers, 1974. “Religion and Music.” Cornell University Music Review 3 (1960): 13–17. Review of Charles Ives’s Three-Page Sonata, South Paw Pitching, and The AntiAbolitionist Riots. Notes, 2nd ser., 6, no. 3 (1949): 486–87.

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Review of Dominique-René de Lerma Bibliography of Ives. Notes, 2nd ser., 27, no. 2 (1970): 260. Review of Elliott Carter’s Piano Sonata. Notes, 2nd ser., 6, no. 1 (1948): 179. Review of “From the Steeples and Mountains, A Study of Charles Ives, by David Wooldridge.” High Fidelity and Musical America 24, no. 9 (1974): 33–36. Review of Gail Kubik’s Piano Sonata and Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata. Notes, 2nd ser., 7, no. 3 (1950): 448–49. Review of L. Kirchner’s Piano Sonata and Howard Swanson’s Sonata for Piano Solo. Notes, 2nd ser., 8, no. 3 (1951): 575–76. Review of Robert Palmer’s Toccata Ostinato. Notes, 2nd ser., 3, no. 4 (1946): 382. Review of Robert Ward’s Lamentation.” Notes, 2nd ser., 6, no. 1 (1948): 179. Review of Vincent Persichetti’s Concertino for Piano and Orchestra. Notes, 2nd ser., 6, no. 1 (1948): 179. Review of Vincent Persichetti’s Third Piano Sonata. Notes, 2nd ser., 3, no. 4 (1946): 381–82. Review of Virgil Thomson’s Album One and Synthetic Waltzes. Notes, 2nd ser., 6, no. 1 (1948): 179. A Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue of the Music Manuscripts and Related Materials of Charles Edward Ives. Self-published edition of 114 copies, 1960. “Thoughts on the Ives Year.” Student Musicologists at Minnesota 6 (1975): 218–23. “Three Realizations of Chromatimelodtune.” In An Ives Celebration: Papers and Panels of the Charles Ives Centennial Festival-Conference, edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Vivan Perlis, 87–109. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. “What Music Meant to Charles Ives.” Cornell University Music Review 6 (1963): 13–18.

Bibliography Archives Charles Ives Society Papers, Bloomington, Indiana. Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut: Helen and Howard Boatwright Papers, MSS 93. Lehman Engel Papers, MSS 39. Charles Ives Papers, MSS 14. John Kirkpatrick Papers, MSS 56. Quincy Porter Papers, MSS 15. Carl Ruggles Papers, MSS 26. Kurt Stone Papers, MSS 71. Virgil Thomson Papers, MSS 29/29A. New York Public Library: Henry Cowell Papers. Ross Lee Finney Papers. Roy Harris Papers, California State University, Los Angeles. Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. Valley Music Press Papers, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Oral History of American Music, Yale University.

Interviews Conducted by the Author Berman, Donald. November 17, 2007. Boatwright, Helen. October 8, 2005. Burkholder, J. Peter. May 21, 2007. Hitchcock, H. Wiley. February 24, 2007. Stepner, Daniel. November 19, 2007.

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Index Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations, musical examples, and tables. Locators with fig. indicate unpaginated figures. aftertones, 51, 59–60, 61, 63, 70 Albright, Daniel, 167n20 Alexander, Joseph: Little Suite, 36 American bicentennial, 129 American music: conservativism in, 30, 54; nationalism in, 28–29, 35–36, 42, 43; sublime and, 54, 55 Aronson, Bernie, 165n77 Arrow Music Press, 31, 34, 81–83, 162n4 “art world” concept, 4 Associated Music Publishers, 75, 155, 178n38 Austin, William, 49 Bach, C. P. E.: piano sonatas, 154 Bach, Johann Sebastian: B Minor Fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier, 60, 168n42 Bales, Richard, 124 Baron, Carol, 147 Basham, Leonard, 36 Becker, Howard: Art Worlds, 4, 157n6 Beethoven, Ludwig van: Piano Sonata Op. 26, 16; Symphony No. 7, 51; Waldstein Sonata, 25–26, 162n107 Behrend, Jeanne: Sonatine, 36 Bellamann, Henry, 77, 78, 131 Bergeron, Katherine, 154 Berlinski, Herman, 48 Bernstein, Leonard, 129 Blitzstein, Marc, 29 Block, Geoffrey, 85

Boatwright, Helen, 20 Boatwright, Howard, 126, 127 Bonaventura, Mario di, 136 Boston Chamber Orchestra, 144–45 Boulanger, Nadia, 13, 16, 17–18 Bret, Gustave, 23 Brett, Philip, 157n4 Brodhead, Thomas, 170n20 Brooks, William, 169n48 Bruhn, Christopher Edwin, 172n42 Bülow, Hans von, 154 Burkholder, J. Peter, 51, 73, 78, 84, 129, 148, 151, 166–67n4, 169n3, 170n20, 178n41 Cage, John, 14 Cammeyer, Henrietta, 10 Carruthers, Ralph, 165n77 Carter, Elliott: Boulanger viewed by, 17–18; “Documents of a Friendship with Charles Ives,” 132; Ives’s dissonance approach viewed by, 130, 132–33, 135–36, 144, 177n16; Ives’s notation viewed by, 78; on Kirkpatrick’s religious views, 20; open letter exchange with Kirkpatrick, 133– 36, 137; Piano Sonata, 31, 33; Pocahontas, 132; review of Kirkpatrick’s premiere of Ives’s Concord Sonata, 130–32; on Ruggles’s Evocations sonorities, 70–71; Stone and, 155; “Voyage,” 35, 165n85 Chanler, Theodore, 31; Toccata, 32

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Charles Ives Society: abortive attempt to found, 1944, 132; best-text editions, 137, 140–41, 178n44; complete critical edition, 130, 134, 136–48, 178n41; Cowell’s editions for, 141; Cox’s editions for, 140; Dapogny’s editions for, 140; earlypreference editions, 138, 142, 144– 48; Echols’s editions for, 138, 145; Echols’s guidelines for, 137; eclectic editions, 137, 138–39, 146– 47, 178n44; editorial policies, 3, 121, 130, 136–48, 154; editorial policy changes, 148, 151, 156; Elkus’s editions for, 141; Harrison’s editions for, 141; incorporation of, 1967, 136; Kirkpatrick as executive editor, 1, 3, 128, 129–52; Kirkpatrick’s own editions for, 138– 41, 142–43; Mandel’s editions for, 141; Masselos’s editions for, 141; Monod’s editions for, 138, 139; reactivation of, 1973, 130, 136; realization editions, 137, 139–40; reorganization of, 155–56; reprint editions, 137, 141, 142; reviews of editions from, 137; Sinclair’s editions for, 138, 139, 140, 144–45; Singleton’s editions for, 138, 139, 140, 146; Smith’s editions for, 138, 140, 142, 178n43; speculative editions, 140, 142; Stout’s editions for, 140; variety of editorial approaches, 137, 138–41, 142; work with various publishers, 178n38; Zahler’s editions for, 138, 145 Chase, Gilbert, 124, 125–26 Chauncey, George, 166n89 Christian Science, 19 Concord Sonata (Ives): 1941 edition, fig. 4.6; “Alcotts” movement, 169n5, 170n8; “Beethoven” motive, 85–86; “Emerson” movement, figs. 4.2–4.4, 25, 77, 79–80, 85–86, 87, 88, 169n5; first

edition, fig. 4.2, 76–77, 83, 85, 86, 88, 149; “Hawthorne” movement, 89–90; Kirkpatrick’s 1947 edition, fig. 4.2b, fig. 4.7, 88–89; Kirkpatrick’s 1953 edition, fig. 4.3, 85–86, 90; Kirkpatrick’s 1987 edition, fig. 4.4, 1–2, 4, 86, 89, 90–91, 149; Kirkpatrick’s performances of, 38, 162n107; Kirkpatrick’s “Player’s Apology” edition, 84; Kirkpatrick’s premiere of, 6, 9, 19, 25–26, 73, 81, 130–32; Kirkpatrick’s request for, 19; Kirkpatrick’s sources and editions for, 73, 74–75, 75, 84–91, 121, 126; Kirkpatrick’s special relationship with, 6, 73, 76, 79–81; Kirkpatrick’s striving for universal in, 4; Musical Courier review of, 77; musical portraits in, 73; second edition, fig. 4.2, fig. 4.5, 81–85, 86, 88 Conservatoire Americain (Fontainebleau, France), 13, 19 Coover, James, 124 Copland, Aaron: accessible musical style, 29–30; Kirkpatrick and, 20, 24; Piano Concerto in two-piano reduction by Kirkpatrick, 20, 31; Piano Variations, 24, 25; Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, 22; work for Cos Cob and Arrow Music Press, 31 Copley, Richard, 25 Cornell University, 119–20, 162n1 Cornell University Music Review, 118, 128 Cortot, Alfred, 23 Cos Cob Press, 20, 31, 81 Cowell, Henry, 24, 131; Charles Ives and His Music, 122, 180n86; copy of Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, 124; Ives editions by, 120, 141; Ives estate and, 122; Ives viewed by, 152; as music editor, 155; New Music and, 32; as New Music Quarterly publisher, 175n12;

index

New Musical Resources, 71; Ruggles viewed by, 50, 51 Cowell, Sidney, 122, 124, 152 Cox, Jerrold: Ives editions by, 140 Crumb, George, 43 Dana, Richard, 31–33, 35, 36, 45 Dapogny, James and Gail: Ives editions by, 140 Decreus, Camille, 16 Diamond, David, 47 Dickinson, Peter, 126–27 Donovan, Richard: Two Choral Preludes, 31 Echols, Paul C.: Ives editions by, 137, 138, 145; work on Ives catalogue, 125 École Normale de Musique (Paris), 17 editorial practices: assessing, 5, 157n4; of Charles Ives Society, 3, 121, 130, 136–48, 178n41; Kirkpatrick’s hybrid, 3, 4–5, 6, 90–91, 99–100, 126, 146–47, 153– 56, 173n58; scholarship on, 153– 56, 175nn38–39 Edmunds, John, 124 Elkus, Jonathan: Ives editions by, 141 Engel, Lehman, 81–82, 155 Ertan, Deniz, 168n27 Evocations (Ruggles), 50–72; aftertones in, 51, 59–60, 61, 63, 70; “Charlotte Ruggles” movement, 50, 70; editing and analysis, 70–72; as fluid text, 52; “Ives” movement, 50, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64–66, 67, 68–69, 69, 71; “Kirkpatrick” movement, 50; Kirkpatrick’s 1943 edition, 50, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64–66, 67, 68–69; Kirkpatrick’s 1956 edition, 50, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64–66, 67, 68–69; “Miller” movement, 50, 58, 70; piano acoustics and, 51, 67, 70–72; planned fifth movement, 166n2;

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199

Ruggles–Kirkpatrick collaboration, 2, 57–70, 76, 96, 154; tempering in, 51, 60–61, 63, 67, 70 Farwell, Arthur: Kirkpatrick’s shaping of career, 3, 153, 164n34; Navajo War Dance No. 2, 32, 35–36, 164n34; Pawnee Horses, 36; Plantation Melody, 36 Feist, Leonard, 124, 155 Ferris, Jeffrey, 10 Finney, Ross Lee: accessible musical style, 30, 43; Fantasy, 43; Kirkpatrick’s shaping of career, 28, 30–31, 44–45, 165n86; Piano Sonata No. 3, 35, 43, 43, 164n36; Piano Sonata No. 4, 43–45, 165n77; serial music, 45; Sonata No. 4, 32; works published by Valley Music Press, 34 Finney, Theodore, 124 Fletcher, Lucille, 150 Foster, Stephen: “Anadolia,” 32; Old Folks Quadrilles, 32 Freedman, Ellis, 101–2, 103, 136 Fulkerson, Gregory, 147 Garden, Mary, 104 Gatti-Casazza, Giulio, 104 Gilbert, Giles, 8, 11, 18 Gilbert, Stephen, 56 Gilman, Lawrence: Kirkpatrick viewed by, 5; review of Kirkpatrick’s premiere of Ives’s Concord Sonata, 9, 81, 131 Girard, Aaron, 56 Goehr, Lydia, 51 Gottschalk, Louis Moreau, 25; Souvenir de Porto Rico, 32 Graham, Martha, 37–38 Green, Ray, 101, 102, 116 Gregorian chant, 154 Greslé, Magdeleine, 18 Grier, James, 178n44 Griffes, Charles Tomlinson: Piano Sonata, 25

200

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Grosser, Maurice, 15 Guide du Concert et des Théâtres Lyriques, Le, fig. 1.3, 18 Hamilton, David, 127 Hamm, Charles, 146 Hanks, Sarah, 120 Hanson, Howard, 46–47 Harris, Roy, 15; accessible musical style, 29–30; American Portrait, 22; Johnson influenced by, 40, 41, 42; Kirkpatrick’s relationship with, 37; Palmer and, 28; Perkins’s patronage of, 33; Piano Sonata, 22–23, 25, 40; “La Primavera,” 37; Symphony No. 5, 37 Harrison, Lou: correspondence with Kirkpatrick, 123; Ives editions by, 141; monograph on Ruggles, 50, 54–55; as music editor, 155; New Music Quarterly and, 175n12 Harvey, Vivien, 36 Hauptmann, Gerhart: Die versunkene Glocke, 103 Henderson, Clayton Wilson, 127 Herrmann, Bernard, 146, 147 Heyman, Katherine Ruth, 14, 23; copy of Ives’s Concord Sonata, 19, 76; Kirkpatrick influenced by, 19–20; The Relationship of Ultramodern to Archaic Music, 19–20; Scriabin viewed by, 160n64 Hitchcock, H. Wiley, 1, 8–9, 85, 125, 136, 146, 151 Hofmann, Josef, 25 homosexuality, 15, 46–49, 159n31, 166n89 Ives, Charles: centennial, 118, 127– 28; college studies, 12; compositional impasse, 2; dating, 119; death, 120; dissonance approach viewed by Carter, 130, 132–33; dissonance approach viewed by Kirkpatrick, 133–34; financial help to music publishers,

81–82; innovator image questioned, 3, 129–36, 148–52; Kirkpatrick as musical executor for, 119–22, 130, 136; Kirkpatrick’s correspondence with, 19, 76–77, 83–84, 86, 120; “maverick” trope, 127, 134–36, 151–52; as organist, 78; as patron, 162n103; posthumous promotion of, 119– 22, 126–27, 129; revisions by, 3, 130–36, 137, 144–45, 153; Ruggles compared with, 2, 72; Ruggles’s “evocation” of, 50, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64–66, 67, 68–69, 69, 71; Solomon’s criticisms, 129–30, 131, 148–52; transcendental philosophy and, 180n86; virtuosic difficulty viewed by, 77–78; West Redding home, 8–9, 24, 120 Ives, Charles, works of: 114 Songs, 8; The Anti-Abolitionist Riots, 120; The Celestial Railroad, 81, 170n20; Central Park in the Dark, 82; Country Band March, 142; Eleven Songs and Two Harmonizations, 143; Emerson Overture, 80, 81, 85; Emerson Transcriptions, 80–81; Essays Before a Sonata, 78, 126, 127, 169n3; Forty Earlier Songs, 142–43, 146; Hallowe’en, 134; On the Antipodes, 82; Psalm 54, 142, 143–44, 178n43; Ragtime Dances, 142, 145, 175n39; Set of Five Takeoffs for Piano, 142; Some South-Paw Pitching!, 120; “Song for Harvest Season,” 134; Symphony No. 3, 142, 146, 147; Three Places in New England, 133, 142, 144–45; ThreePage Sonata, 120, 147; Trio, 82, 147; The Unanswered Question, 38, 145; “The World’s Highway,” 26–27. See also Concord Sonata; Memos; Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, A (Kirkpatrick) Ives, George, 150

index

Ives, Harmony Twichell, 82, 83–84, 89, 122, 136, 171n27, 172n34 James, Philip, 32 Johnson, Hunter, fig. 2.1, 38; accessible musical style, 30, 45; For an Unknown Soldier, 33, 35, 38–39, 39; career of, 37–38, 163n54; copy of Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, 124; Kirkpatrick’s shaping of career, 3, 28, 30–31, 33, 37–42, 153; Piano Sonata, 33, 35–36, 37–38, 40–41, 40–42 Jones, Charles, 36 Journal of the American Musicological Society, 129–30, 148–52 Kalamus, Godwin, 20 Kerman, Joseph, 125 Kerr, Harrison, 162n4 Kilgour, Fred, 165n77 Kirkpatrick, John, fig. 2.1; academic appointments, 162n1; career path, 6; compositions, 11; at Cornell University, 119–20; crisis of confidence, 14; early years, 9–13; eightieth birthday celebration, 1–2, 4; family difficulties, 14, 20–21, 22; family genealogy, 10, 158n4; finances, 14–15, 20, 21, 23; in Greenwich, Connecticut, 21–27; indirect agency of, 118–19; as Ives’s musical executor, 119–22, 130, 136; at Lawrenceville School, 8, 10, 11; legacy, 155–56; letter to Ives requesting Concord Sonata copy, 19; meetings with Ives, 77; as music copyist, 17–18, 22–23; musical opinions, 16; personality, 8–9, 11, 16, 17; preservationist attitudes, 171n27; at Princeton, fig. 1.2, 11–13, 15–16, 158n17, 158–59n20; religious and spiritual beliefs, 13–14, 19–20, 121; Ruggles estate and, 100–101, 116, 174n15; Ruggles’s relationship with, 50,

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201

52–53, 57–58; senior class photo, fig. 1.1, 8; sexuality, 14, 15, 46–49, 159n31; stroke, 102. See also categories below Kirkpatrick, John, as author/text editor, 118–28; account of Ives funeral, 121–22; editorial approach, 126; Ives’s Memos, 6, 99, 118, 126–28, 173n58; Making a Piano Sing, 59–60; music journalism, 20, 118, 120, 128, 175n7; “On Copland’s Music,” 20, 175n7; open letter exchange with Carter, 133–36, 137; program notes for Princeton Symphony Orchestra, 12–13; Ruggles essay for Perspectives of New Music, 100; Sinclair’s descriptive catalogue, 123; Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, 6, 83, 118–19, 122–26, 135 Kirkpatrick, John, as Charles Ives Society executive editor, 3, 128, 129–52; radical policy toward revisions, 3, 121, 130, 133, 137, 142–43, 153; retirement, 1 Kirkpatrick, John, as editor of music, 2, 6, 22–23, 91; arrangement of Copland’s Piano Concerto for two pianos, 20, 31; arrangement of Thomson’s Symphony on a Hymn Tune for two pianos, 22; editions of Ives’s Concord Sonata, 1–2, 73, 74–75, 75–76, 84–91; editorial priorities of, 5, 92–93, 116–17, 121, 126, 130, 136–48; hybrid editorial practices of, 3, 4–5, 6, 90–91, 99–100, 146–47, 153–56, 173n58; Ives editions by, 138–41, 142–43; Music Press editions, 28, 29, 31–33, 40–42, 43–44, 49; reconstruction of Ruggles’s Mood, 6, 92–117, 126; Ruggles’s Evocations, 50–72; selection criteria, 35–37; Valley Music Press editions, 28, 29, 33–35, 38–39, 46, 49; work in music publishing, 28–49

202

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Kirkpatrick, John, as pianist, 6, 13–27; Concord Sonata studies, fig. 4.1, 76–81, 169n5; first reviewed concert, Paris, 1927, 18; Ives’s pitch spellings viewed by, 172n50; Johnson’s Piano Sonata performed by, 38; musical study in Europe, 9, 12, 13–24; performance of MacDowell’s Piano Concerto No. 1, 13; piano recital in Paris, 1931, 23; practice methods, 78–79; recordings of Concord Sonata, 83–84, 85; Ruggles’s Mood premiered by, 94; symbiotic relationship with editing, 80–81; Town Hall debut recital, 1936, 19, 24, 25; Town Hall recital, 1939, 6, 9, 19, 25–26, 73, 130–32, 162n103 Kirkpatrick, John, Sr. (father), 9, 10, 14, 21, 22 Kirkpatrick, Marguerite Haviland (mother), 10, 18, 21, 24 Kirkpatrick, Thomas (brother), 10, 21, 22, 25 Kirkpatrick, Thomas (grandfather), 10 Koussevitzky, Serge, 32, 37 Lakond, Wladimir, 127 Lambert, Philip, 129 Lawrence, D. H.: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 47, 166n95 Lawrenceville School, fig. 1.1, 8, 10, 11 Lessard, John: Mask, 32 Liszt, Franz: Sonata in B Minor, 170n8 Lowens, Irving, 124–25 Lowinsky, Edward, 125 Luckey, Ann, 24–25 MacDowell, Edward: Piano Concerto No. 1, 13 Machen, Arthur, 53

Maganini, Quinto, 16–17; “La Rhumba,” 16 Mandel, Alan, 127; Ives editions by, 141 Mason, Daniel Gregory, 19 Masselos, William: Ives editions by, 141 McClure, John, 136 McCorkle, Donald, 125 McGinness, John, 152 McMahan, Robert, 53, 106, 108 McMaster, Anne, 162n4 Meltzer, Charles H., 103, 106 Memos (Ives, edited and compiled by Kirkpatrick), 6, 118, 126–28; as definitive volume for researchers, 126–27; Ives letters in, 79–80; Ives on Concord Sonata performance, 171n25; Ives on Symphony No. 3, 146; on relationship between difficulty and transcendence, 78; work method, 99 Mendel, Arthur, 124, 155 Mercury Music, 31, 33 Meredith, George: “Fragments,” 93–94, 105 Merion Music, 178n38 Miller, Harriette, 50, 58, 70 Miller, Hope Gardiner, 20, 163n18 Modern Music, 118, 131–32, 175n7 Monaco, Richard, 38 Monod, Jacques-Louis: Ives editions by, 138, 139, 140 Monteux, Pierre, 23 Monticello College, 162n1 Mood (Ruggles): authenticity questions as Ruggles’s own work, 115–17; epigram, 93–94, 105; form of, 93; Kirkpatrick transcription, fig. 5.2, fig. 5.3b; Kirkpatrick’s critical commentary, 99; Kirkpatrick’s discovery of sketches for, 92; Kirkpatrick’s premiere, 94; Kirkpatrick’s reconstruction of, 6, 92–117, 126; Kirkpatrick’s relationship to, 103–17;

index

Kirkpatrick’s sources for, 93–100, 95–96, 98–99, 105, 105–10, 109– 13; material shared with The Sunken Bell, 94, 96, 103–4, 109–10, 112, 115–16; publication attempts, 92–93, 100–103, 116; Ruggles sketches, fig. 5.3a, figs. 5.1–5.2; sound world of, 112, 114; as speculative edition, 142 Mount Holyoke College, 33–34, 162n1 Music Press, 28, 29, 31–33, 162n4, 164–65n56; “American Piano Music edited by John Kirkpatrick” series, 32–33, 35–36, 40–42, 43–44, 49; financial problems, 33 music publishing and publishers: of American music, 28–49; Arrow Music Press, 31, 34, 81–83, 162n4; Associated Music Publishers, 75, 178n38; Cos Cob Press, 20, 31, 81; editor’s role in, 155; Mercury Music, 31, 33; Music Press, 28, 29, 31–33, 40–42, 43–44, 49, 162n4, 164–65n56; New Music, 31, 32, 82; New Valley Music Press, 34; shift toward tonally oriented and accessible works, 28–29; Society for Publication of American Music, 31; Theodore Presser, 33; Valley Music Press, 28, 29, 31, 33–35, 38–39, 46, 49, 165n85; women composers discouraged by, 36 music theory as academic discipline, 56–57, 152 Musical Courier, 118 musicology: debate on priorities of, 125; dominance of source studies in, 119, 124–25; German critical editions, 136; Ives studies and, 127–28; reception and intellectual history studies, 152, 180n86 Neusidler, Hans: Der Juden Tanz, 135, 178n34

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New Music, 31, 32, 82, 175n12 New Valley Music Press, 34 Newcomb, Anthony, 148, 149 Nordoff, Paul: Lachrimae Christi, 31 Notes, 118, 120 Nouneberg, Louta, 22 Oja, Carol, 53, 162n103 Palmer, Robert: accessible musical style, 30, 45; Kirkpatrick’s relationship with, 15; Kirkpatrick’s shaping of career, 2–3, 28, 30–31, 33, 34–35, 45–49, 163n34; Piano Sonata No. 2, 34–35, 165n75; Sonata for 2 Pianos, 4 Hands, 48; Three Preludes, 34, 35, 46, 46 Paris, 1920s, 14–24 Parsons, Geoffrey, 58 Paul, David, 127–28, 152, 180n86 Pazmor, Radiana, 171n23 Peer International, 178n38 Perkins, James H., 33 Perkins, Katherine: Kirkpatrick’s relationship with, 15, 163n18; patronage of, 33, 37 Perlis, Vivian, 1, 8–9, 10, 20, 82, 123, 158–59n20; Carter’s interview with, 132–33; Charles Ives Remembered, 127, 133, 177n16 Perry, Martin, 158n9 Persichetti, Vincent, 33 Philipp, Isidor, 16, 17, 21 Piston, Walter, 29–30 Porter, Quincy, 31; works published by Valley Music Press, 34 Pound, Ezra, 19 Princeton University, fig. 1.2, 11–13, 15–16, 158n17, 158–59n20 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 58 Rathert, Wolfgang, 147 Ravel, Maurice: Kirkpatrick’s performance with, 20; Tombeau de Couperin, 16 Read, Gardner, 36

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Reynolds, Roger, 43 Roberts, George F., 82–83 Rorem, Ned: “The Lordly Hudson,” 31 Ross, Alex, 72 Rossiter, Frank, 129, 151, 152 Rubint, Stanley, 165n77 Rudhyar, Dane, 50, 53, 71–72 Ruggles, Carl: aftertones technique, 51, 59–60, 61, 63, 70; compositional impasse, 2; dissonant counterpoint concept, 51, 52, 55; estate, 100– 101, 116, 174n15; feedback needed by, 52; Ives compared with, 2, 72; Kirkpatrick’s account of Ives’s funeral to, 121; Kirkpatrick’s championship of, 100; Kirkpatrick’s editions of incomplete works by, 92, 153, 175n12; melodic style, 105; Men and Mountains, 58; Organum, 51; Parvum Organum, 51; pitch nonrepetition concept, 51; pitchclass set theory applied to works of, 56–57; Portals, 59; space and timelessness tropes describing, 50, 51, 52, 53–57, 72; spelling theory, 58–59; sublime as applied to, 53, 55; Sun Treader, 168n27; tempering concept, 51, 60–61, 63, 67, 70; texts used by, 94; Toys, 92; twelve-tone music and, 166n3; as Winona Symphony conductor, 103–4; writings on his music, 168n27. See also Evocations; Mood; Sunken Bell, The Ruggles, Charlotte, 50, 70, 121 Ruggles, Micah, 94, 101–3, 116, 166n2 Schmitz, E. Robert, 131 Schuller, Gunther, 136, 146 Schuman, William, 29–30 Scriabin, Aleksandr, 135, 160n64 Seeger, Charles, 50; article on Ruggles, 53–54, 55, 167n16; Ruggles’s correspondence with,

168n27; on Ruggles’s theory of spelling, 58–59 Seeger, Ruth Crawford, 29 Shepard, Brooks, 119 Siegmeister, Elie, 29 Simon, Robert A., 25–26 Sinclair, James B., 125; A Descriptive Catalogue of Charles Ives’s Music, 123; as Ives edition editor-in-chief, 151; Ives edition policy changes viewed by, 148; Ives editions by, 138, 139, 140, 144–45, 175n39; on Kirkpatrick’s “working copy” of Concord Sonata, 170n19 Singleton, Kenneth: Ives editions by, 138, 139, 140, 146 Slonimsky, Nicolas, 51, 144–45 Slottow, Stephen, 54, 56–57 Smith, Carleton Sprague, 32, 38, 164–65n56 Smith College, 33–34 Smith, Gregg: Ives editions by, 138, 140, 142, 178n43 Smith, Moses, 32 Society for Publication of American Music, 31 Solesmes editions of Gregorian chant, 154 Solomon, Maynard: on Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, 51, 167n5; “Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity,” 129–30, 131, 148–52 Sonneck, Oscar, 124 Spry, Walter, 36 Stein, Gertrude, 29, 31 Stepner, Daniel, 92 Stillinger, Jack, 5 Stokowski, Leopold, 124 Stone, Kurt, 155 Stopes, Marie: Married Love, 47 Stout, Alan: Ives editions by, 140 Strauss, Richard, 135 Stravinsky, Igor: Le Baiser de la Fée, 15; Kirkpatrick and, 23; Piano Concerto, 23; Piano Sonata, 16; Symphony of Psalms, 23

index

Stringham, Edwin J., 32 Strunk, Oliver, 5–6 sublime, concept of, 54, 55–56 Sunken Bell, The (Ruggles): genesis of, 103–4; leitmotif usage, 108–9; plot of, 104; Ruggles’s destruction of fair copies of, 104; sketches and materials for, figs. 5.4–5.5, 92, 94, 96, 100, 106–7, 107–8, 113–14, 114, 115–16; songs from, 104; sound world of, 112, 114 Swafford, Jan, 14–15, 82, 172n34 Sykes, James, 124 tempering, 51, 60–61, 63, 67, 70 Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, A (Kirkpatrick), 6, 83, 118–19, 122– 26, 135; copy distribution list, 123–24; Kirkpatrick’s attempt to copyright, 119; significance and reception of, 124, 125–26 Tenney, James, 56, 169n48 Theodore Presser, 33 Theosophical Society, 19 Thomson, Virgil, 15, 33–34; accessible musical style, 29–30; Four Saints in Three Acts, 31; The Mother of Us All, 31; as music journalist, 163n26; Ruggles viewed by, 50, 55; Symphony on a Hymn

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Tune, 22; works published by Cos Cob and Music Press, 31 Town Hall (New York), 6, 19, 24, 25–26, 73, 81, 162n103 Treitler, Leo, 5–6 Tureck, Rosalyn, 15, 48 University of Michigan, 35 Valley Music Press, 28, 29, 31, 33–35, 38–39, 43, 46, 49, 165n85 Verall, John, 33–34, 35, 36, 163n26 Wallach, Laurence, 127 Waterman, Anne, 21 Wertheim, Alma, 31 Whalen, John, 174n15 Yaddo Festival (Saratoga Springs), 24 Yale University, 120, 162n1; Ives papers at, 122; support for Kirkpatrick’s Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, 123. See also Charles Ives Society Zahler, Noel: Ives editions by, 138, 145 Ziegler, Oscar, 170n8 Ziffrin, Marilyn, 57–58, 94, 103–4, 168n27

“A substantial and provocative contribution to our understanding of Kirkpatrick as a man, performer, editor, and scholar. This book’s implications reach beyond the particular composers and works involved and will interest readers concerned with American music generally, as well as those interested in the history and practice of editing in the twentieth century.”

John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page

or over sixty years, the scholar and pianist John Kirkpatrick tirelessly promoted and championed the music of American composers. In this book, Drew Massey explores how Kirkpatrick’s career as an editor of music shaped the music and legacies of some of the great American modernists, including Aaron Copland, Ross Lee Finney, Roy Harris, Hunter Johnson, Charles Ives, Robert Palmer, and Carl Ruggles. Drawing on oral histories, interviews, and Kirkpatrick’s own extensive archives, Massey carefully reconstructs Kirkpatrick’s collaborations with such luminaries, displaying his editorial practice and inviting reconsideration of many of the most important debates in American modernism— for example, the self-fashioning of young composers during the 1940s, the cherished myth of Ruggles as a composer in communion with the “timeless,” and Ives’s status as a pioneer of modernist techniques.

John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page

—Tom C. Owens, editor of Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives

Binghamton University. Cover photo: Kirkpatrick seated at clavichord, ca. 1925. MSS 56, the John Kirkpatrick Papers in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. Photographer unknown. Cover design: Frank Gutbrod

Massey

Drew Massey is assistant professor of music at

Drew Massey EBSCOhost - printed on 10/9/2019 9:20 PM via BROWN UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use