Ives Sherwood Article

"Buds the Infant Mind": Charles Ives's "The Celestial Country" and American Protestant Choral
Traditions
Author(s): Gayle Sherwood
Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 163-189
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/746922
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"Buds
The
the
Infant
Celestial
Protestant
Charles
Mind":
Country
Choral
and
Ives's
American
Traditions
GAYLE SHERWOOD
Over the past two decades our view of the

American composer Charles Ives has changed
considerably. Although still seen as a rugged,
independent pioneer, Ives has emerged as a far
more complex figure. We now know that the
Ives described by Time in 1938 as the "most
individual, most authentically American of contemporary U.S. composers" drew heavily on
the European tradition well into his mature
compositions.' And the earlier image of the
19th-Century Music XXIII/2 (Fall 1999). ? by The Regents
of the University of California.
I am grateful to Naomi Andr6, Amy Beal, J. Peter
Burkholder, H. Wiley Hitchcock, and Jeffrey Magee for
their suggestions and encouragement during the writing of
this article. Earlier versions of this paper were read at the
1996 meeting of the Sonneck Society in Falls Church,
Virginia, and at the 1995 American Musicological Society
meeting in New York.
I"Music," Time 32/1 (4 July 1938), p. 20. Review of Charles
Ives: Six songs. Mordecai Bauman (baritone) and Albert
Hirsch (piano) in New Music Quarterly Recordings,

Bennington College, Bennington, Vt. For extensive studies
of Ives's use of the European tradition, see J. Peter
Burkholder,All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses

of Musical Borrowing (New Haven, Conn., 1995), idem,
Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music (New Haven,
Conn., 1985), and idem, The Evolution of Charles Ives's
Music:Aesthetics, Quotation, Technique (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1983). For the most recent overview of
Ives scholarship, see Burkholder, "Ives Today," in Ives
Studies, ed. Philip Lambert (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 263-90.
isolated and neglected artist described by critics in 1965 now coexists with that of the selfpromoting businessman who shrewdly advanced his own music by funding various concert series and publications.2The integration of
these seemingly incompatible traits has created a more nuanced profile of the man and his
music.
Ives's song On the Antipodes from the mid1920s dramatizes that conflict.3 In this work
Ives presents the world-"Nature"-as a series
of dualities. His own text describes the
unpredictability and contradictions of nature,
while the music underscores its inevitability
through overlapping, irregularcyclic patterns.4
In one passage (ex. 1), he juxtaposes a seemingly innocent description of nature with a sar2As recounted in Stuart Feder, Charles Ives: "My Father's
Song" (New Haven, Conn., 1992), pp. 320 and 325; Gayle
Sherwood, The Choral Works of Charles Ives: Chronol-
ogy, Style, and Reception (Ph.D. diss., Yale University,

1995), pp. 281-83; Maynard Solomon, "Charles Ives: Some
Questions of Veracity," Journal of the American Musicological Society 40 (1987), 463-64 and passim.
3Ives dated On the Antipodes "1915-23" in 18 Songs (published 1935): the song's exclusion from 114 Songs of 1921
supports the conclusion that Ives completed it between
1921 and 1935.
4For a discussion of cyclic structures in On the Antipodes,
see Philip Lambert, The Music of Charles Ives (New Haven, Conn., 1997), pp. 178-85.
163
19TH
14
CENTURY
music
Andante grazioso
I
-
Some
times
Na
ture's
as
and sweet.
nice
lit
pan
tle
sy
8--------------
_I
Andante grazioso
(between a shout and a drawl)
Presto or Allegro
18
fiff
times
Some
and.
S3
"it
ain't."
loco 8--------loco
(as fast as it will go)
L3
Presto or
Allegro3
(as fast as it will go)

.-
?--
,,
1.1, 0
Example 1: Charles Ives, On the Antipodes, mm. 14-19.

Examples 1, 6, and 10a are used by permission of the publisher. ? Merion Music, Inc.
donic disclaimer, accentuating their opposition

with an extreme musical contrast. The inversions of text and music provide a revealing
portrait of Ives as composer, and they dramatize the creative tensions that recent scholarship has reinforced.
Clearly, the second part of this passage is
vintage Charles Ives. Crashing dissonances collide with a snide parody of the sentimental
style popular at the turn of the century. Larry
Starr described the first line as "excessively
genteel, banal C-major music," and the second
line as "ferociously dissonant music" that creates "a violent and wildly humorous effect."5
Yet despite its modernist overtones, this passage contains a surprising quotation from one
of Ives's earlier, less rebellious compositions.
Measures 14-15 quote a moment from the third
movement of Ives's cantata The Celestial Country, "Seek the Things" for four-part solo quar-
sLarry Starr, A Union of Diversities (New York, 1992), p.

87.
164
GAYLE
SHERWOOD
Ives and
Choral
Tradition
[Tempo I]
81
rail.
For
For
ward
ward
when
when
in
in
child
child
hood
hood
For
ward
when
in
child
hood
For
ward
when
in
child
hood
For
ward
when
in
child
hood
rall.
84
f marc.
Buds
the
in
in
fant,
fant
mind:
All
youth
and
man
hood,
through
youth
and
man
hood,
Not
through
youth
and
man
hood,
Not
youth
and
man
hood,
Not
through
f marc.
A3-
Buds
the
in
fant,
in
fant
mind:
All
fmarc.
Buds
the
in
fant,
in
fant
mind:
All
f marc.
Buds
the
in
fant,
in
fant
mind:
All
through
Example 2: Charles Ives, The Celestial Country, "Seek the Things," mm. 81-87.
Examples2, 4, 7, and 11 usedby permission.
and
PeerInternationalCorporation.
Internationalcopyrightsecured.
1971
1973
by
?
tet (ex. 2).6 The original text for the full passage
in "Seek the Things" reads as follows (the passage used in On the Antipodes appearsin italics): "Forwardwhen in childhood / Buds the
infant mind / All through youth and manhood
/ Not a thought behind." The melody, pitch
level, and rhythmic accents are quoted almost
exactly, and the harmony is virtually identical
in both cases. Ives's allusion to this earlierwork
unites the secular modernist On the Antipodes
with its opposite: a conservative religious cantata that premiered in 1902.
6My identification of this quotation was first reported in

Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, p. 476n.56.
Ives's quotation from his own cantata suggests several interpretations.Perhapsthis is selfcriticism, a dismissal of his own earlier, conservative work. It could be an in-joke perpetrated
by the Ives of the 1920s, the increasingly venerated modernist winking at his unknown conservative efforts. Or, the key may lie in the cantata itself. This previously unrecognized quotation offers, in microcosm, clues regardingboth
Ives's relationship to American Protestant choral traditions at the turn of the century and his
later interaction with those traditions into the
1920s. Viewed from this perspective, On the
Antipodes emerges not as a self-parodybut as a
self-portrait,one groundedin a careful reconsideration of the source work, The Celestial Country, and its place within Ives's early career.
165
THE CELESTIALCOUNTRY
19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
The Celestial Country was first performed on

18 April 1902 at Central Presbyterian Church
in Manhattan, where Ives was choir director
and organist. It then disappearedfor seven decades-until 1972-when the GreggSmith Singers performed it at Columbia University. In
1974-the Ives centennial year-Peer published
John Kirkpatrick's piano-vocal edition of the
cantata, and the work was treated to two recordings: one in Columbia's five-disc box set;
and the other in Harold Farberman'srecording
for Composers Recordings.7The recordings received much critical attention, the majority of
it negative, including a highly unfavorable review by Victor Fell Yellin in Musical Quarterly and several lukewarm assessments in the
New YorkTimes and Records and Recordings.8
The context of these published evaluations are
significant because of their far-reachingimpact
on scholarship to the present.
The most significant objection to the cantata has perennially involved its relationship to
the style of Horatio Parker (1863-1919), Ives's
teacher at Yale between 1894 and 1898. Since
1974, critics have consistently and unfavorably
compared The Celestial Country with Parker's
1893 oratorio Hora Novissima. As John
Kirkpatrick and others have noted, the most
obvious influence of Hora Novissima occurs in
the second, third, and sixth movements of The
Celestial Country, where passages are modeled
on Parker'sbass solo, "Spe modo vivitur" (excerpted in ex. 3).9 Ives's cantata, for instance,
7Kirkpatrick's vocal and piano edition was re-released by

Peer in 1974 (it was originally copyrighted in 1972). The
cantata was revived in March 1972 by the Gregg Smith
Singers at Columbia University in New York (cited in
[unsigned], "Things You Should Know," Music Journal 30/
5 [May 1972], 50) and recorded on 13-14 March 1972 by
the same organization (Kirkpatrick, liner notes to "Charles
Ives: The 100th Anniversary" [unpaginated]). The Gregg
Smith Singers also performed the cantata in 1975 in Frankfurt. Cited recordings are "Charles Ives: The 100th Anniversary," various works and artists, Columbia (Col M4
32504); and Harold Farberman, London Symphony Orchestra and Schutz Choir, Composers Recordings (CRI SD314).
8Victor Fell Yellin, review of The Celestial Country by
Charles Ives, Musical Quarterly 60 (July 1974), 500-08.
9Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, pp. 36-37.
uses the same metrical alternations as Parker's

bass solo in the second movement baritone
solo, "Naught that country needeth," in the
third movement quartet, "Seek the Things,"
and briefly in the sixth movement tenor solo
"Forwardflock of Jesus" (ex. 4a-c). Assessing
its relationship to Hora Novissima, Victor
Yellin concluded that Ives's cantata was "an
essay in conformity to late-nineteenth-century
taste in Protestant church music in unabashed
imitation of his teacher. Even by those standards The Celestial Country seems insipid."'1
Some of the anti-Parkerfervor in 1974 was
surely due to the recently published collection
of the Memos, which presented Ives's bitter
memories of his battles with the conservative
Parker. These anecdotes served as a nucleus
around which scholars began to paraphrase,
embellish, and distort Ives's representation of
Parker,always to the effect of vindicating Ives
the American experimentalist against his tradition-bound, European-trainedprofessor. For
example, in his recollections of the First Symphony, Ives stated that "Parkermade me write
another first movement. ... (And also he didn't
like the original slow movement.
. [so] I
wrote a nice formal one-but the first is better!)."" Throughout 1974 writers parlayedthis
memory into a detailed vignette that scorned
Parker's conservativism and exonerated Ives.
Thus Adrian Jack criticized Parkerfor not recognizing Ives's brilliance, stating that the First
Symphony "is a well brought-upwork (yet not
well enough to satisfy Ives's teacher, Horatio
Parker).""More general reproachesin 1974 included Robert Crunden's condemnation of
Parkerfor "snorting"at hymn tunes, Harold C.
Schonberg's statement that Ives's experiments
10Yellin, review of The Celestial Country, p. 506. Yellin

noted other general similarities, including thematic relationships between the movements, and symmetrical arrangements of the movements. Feder also noted that both
texts deal with similar themes and images of heavenly
redemption (Feder, Charles Ives, p. 171). All of these factors, however, are also present in many other religious
cantatas of this period: see below for a discussion of one
such work by Dudley Buck.
"Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (New York, 1972), p.
51.
12Adrian Jack, review of Ives, First Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond., CBS 77424,
Records and Recording 18/1 (October 1974), 47.
166
GAYLE
SHERWOOD
Ives and
Choral
Tradition
31
A
tri - a
Pa
splen - di-da,
ra - que
Ter
flo - rida,
cresc. be - ra,
poco
poco
i cresc.
pizz.
.,-
I.elli1
PP
37
W
.,. + _ ,
, W..
14-
spi
flow
10k?J
trinis, Pa
users,
I:
t,
'
.
ra
splbe less rious,
spi
flow
Love
Linis
ers
hath pre
Thorn
.I
Pa
da,
O for
thy
pared
'4'4
1Z
Example 3: Horatio Parker, Hora Novissima, "Spe modo vivitur," mm. 31-40.
167
19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
a. "Naught that country needeth."

13
the
Where
God - head
dwell
where
eth,
the
God
- head
dwell
Temrn
eth,
there is
pie
-44
b. "Seek the Things."

I A
des
for
ert,
ward
toil
and
fight,
33-
-3 -3--
the
through
33-
--3-3
c. "Forward flock of Jesus."

rall.
a tempo
f
-P
-
lov
ray.
___
Sick,
they
ask
for
heal
collavoce
f
:,
Vn
ing
__
Vla.
Example 4: Ives, The Celestial Country: Modelings on Parker, Hora Novissima.
"disturbed the academician," and Herbert

Kupferberg's description of Parker as "horrified" by Ives's experiments.13 Variations on
'3Robert Crunden, "Charles Ives: The Man and His Music," Choral Journal 15 (December 1974), 7. Harold
Schonberg, "Natural American, Natural Rebel, Natural
Avant-gardist," New York Times Magazine, 21 April 1974,
p. 12. Herbert Kupferberg, "Ives Centennial Hits Crescendo," National Observer, 26 October 1974, [n.p.]. Horatio
Parker is almost entirely excluded from Neely Bruce's discussion of Ives and the American music tradition. An Ives
these well-worn themes are still common, as

in Alan Rich's mythological recent account of
the First Symphony:
Not surprisingly, Horatio Parkerwas aghast at the
first draft.... Parkerwaxed even more furious at the
"reprehensible"ending of the work (in-horror!-a
Celebration: Papers and Panels of the Charles Ives Centennial Festival-Conference, ed. H: Wiley Hitchcock and
Vivian Perlis (Urbana, Ill., 1977), pp. 38 and 41.
168
key otherthanthe one at the start),andorderedIves

to rewrite it. This time Ives refused. . . . On his own,
removedfromthe disapproving
glareof Yale'smusic
faculty,the collegianIves composedprolifically.14
Compounding its problematic links to
Parker, The Celestial Country resurfaced at a
most inauspicious time, when the "Ives legend" was at its height. As promulgated by Ives
and codified by the American modernist circle
and subsequent writers, the legend claimed that
Ives was an exclusively experimental composer;
that he was alreadycomposing modernist works
at the turn of the century; and that he was
uninfluenced by other European or Europeantrained composers.'1 These themes had dominated Ives reception for the half century leading up to the composer's centennial, and they
influenced not only scholarship but also published editions, premieres, and recordings. The
most frequently performed,recorded,and studied works-the so-called Ives canon-used modernist techniques and relied on identifiably
American quotations for their musical material. In this way, Ives's modernist works were
linked to his identity as a specifically American modernist composer: an identity manifest
in the numerous concert series, published articles (both academic and popular),and recordings during the centennial year.16The Celestial
Country-a large conservative cantata that
sounded neither modernist nor obviously
American-served only to contradict the legend. It could thus not be admitted to the canon.
14Alan Rich, American Pioneers: Ives to Cage and Beyond

(London, 1995), pp. 37-38.
'5For an overview of the legend, see my "Questions and
Veracities: Reassessing the Chronology of Ives's Choral
Works," Musical Quarterly 78 (1994), 429-30.
16Ives the nationalist remains an important icon for contemporary American composers to this day. Duckworth,
Five Generations of
Talking Music: Conversations ...
American Experimental Composers (New York, 1995) contains transcripts of interviews with Pauline Oliveros, Steve
Reich, Philip Glass, and John Zorn, all of whom all recognize Ives as an influence. Reich states, "I believe that it
helps the classical music and the popular music of a period to have some kind of a discourse. Charles Ives, George
Gershwin, and Aaron Copland, everything we consider
great American music has had either a great or small
amount of that in it, because that's a particularly American truth" (p. 317, emphasis added). Zorn states, "There's
a very deep element of quotation in my music, which is
something that relates to Ives very directly" (p. 470).
In sum, The Celestial Country re-emerged

within a climate overtly hostile to Parkerand
intolerant of the conservative tradition in general. The unfavorable review from 1974 in the
New York Times revealed these two biases and
even suggested that the piece had been written
under duress: "[The Celestial Country was] designed to please Ives's conservative composition teacher, Horatio Parker,and subsequently
of less interest to us. Ives seems to be making
one of his rarebows to 'the nice old ladies' here
and the sanctimonious tone tends to get a bit
irritating."17All reviews agreed that the piece
was not significant enough to warrant inclusion in the Ives canon, describing it as "banal,"
"no great discovery," or "surprisingly conventional."18 Many reviews emphasized that Ives
had alreadywritten mature experimental works

such as Psalm 67, excusing the cantata as the
publicly conservative effort of a privately modernist composer.19The ongoing discourse of
modernism relegated The Celestial Country to
the status of a mere "novelty" or an anomaly
("not a typical piece") within the output of the
great American experimenter.20Because The
Celestial Country offered evidence of Ives's independent, willing participation in the conservative tradition as late as 1902, that is, well
'7Peter Davis, "The Ives Boom on Disk: Every Sketch,
Scrap and Masterpiece," New York Times, 20 October 1974,
sec. D, p. 26.
'8sack described the work as "breezily banal, cosily sentimental and sometimes perversely abrupt. . . . No great
discovery here, perhaps, but fun as a novelty," while Donal
Henahan found the cantata "surprisingly conventional."
Jack, review of Ives, The Celestial Country, recorded by
the London Symphony Orchestra, London Schutz Choir,
Harold Farberman cond., CRI SD 314, Records and Recording 18/6 (March 1975), p. 62; Henahan, "On Listening
to Mahler, Ravel and Ives Play Their Own Music," New
York Times, 14 July 1974, sec. 2, 13.
'9Feder maintains that Ives was composing larger and more
progressive works alongside The Celestial Country, including The Yale-Princeton Football Game and the Second Symphony. More recently, Kyle Gann continues the
tradition of dismissing the cantata as "a work patterned
after Parker's highly esteemed Hora Novissima, and one
far more conservative than other pieces Ives had already
written" (Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century [New York, 1997], p. 9).
20This point is underscored in a review of a performance of
the cantata in Frankfurt on 19 February 1975, where it is
noted that for a revolutionary composer like Ives the cantata "really is not a typical piece" (Gerhard R. Koch, "Das
Paradies liegt hinter Danbury," Frankfurter allgemeine
Zeitung, 19 February 1975, p. 23).
169
GAYLE
SHERWOOD
Ives and
Choral
Tradition
19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
after his graduation from Yale and his escape

from Parker's immediate influence, it was
abruptly dismissed.21
A quarter century after the Ives centennial,
the views from the 1970s of The Celestial Country persist: that its originality suffers as an imitation of Parker'sHora Novissima, and that its
conservative style is anomalous in Ives's predominantly modernist output. Feder's 1992
study of Ives discussed the textual and psychological relationships between The Celestial
Country and Hora Novissima at length, but
included only scant references to the music of
the cantata. Feder concluded that Ives's music
was "uncharacteristicallyderivative"of Parker's
and emphasized that the cantata "represents
only one facet of [Ives's]creative work" at this
time.22
But these evaluations contain several fundamental oversights, all relating to Ives's musical
environment at the turn of the century. Although a central figure in Ives's biography and
a significant composer, Parkerwas by no means
the dominant composer of American choral
music at the end of the nineteenth century. In
fact, Parker'sacademic, European-inspiredchoral writing constituted only a small part of the
mainstream of American choral music at the
time. Moreover, The Celestial Country had a
wealth of predecessors in Ives's own service
21These harsh criticisms of the cantata are also significant
given the warmer reception of Ives's other early conservative work, the First Symphony. Critics saw the symphony
as a symbol of rebellion in Parker's class and valued the
work as part of Ives's ongoing vindication. For example, in
1966 Theodore Strongin portrayed Ives outclassing his
teacher in the First Symphony: "Ives's originality was only
temporarily dimmed by the gentlemanly teaching of
Horatio Parker.
Ives is superamiable throughout the
....
symphony's four movements; perhaps, out of deference to
academic standing, he hid most of his muscle. . . . The
climax [of the second movement] is almost trite-could
Ives have been teasing his teacher set?" (Theodore Strongin,
"When Charles Ives Was at Yale," review of Ives, First
Symphony, recorded by the Chicago Symphony, Morton
Gould cond., RCA Victor LM2893/LSC 2893, New York
Times, 5 June 1966, sec. 2, 19). Part of the difference may
lie in the symphony's conformity to the Ives canon in its
nineteenth-century
genre and use of quotation in its
themes. Furthermore, Ives's active defense of the symphony in Memos, in his extensive recollections of battling
Parker over the work, placed it in a much more sympathetic light than the cantata that was composed independent of course requirements.
22Feder, Charles Ives, pp. 171 and 173.
music and anthems: a body of work almost

completely unknown in performances and recordings and little represented in Ives scholarship. By reawakening the multilayered reality
of American choral music during the 1890s, we
can hear The Celestial Country as a more complex and daring composition than previous
evaluations have shown. And the redating of
several of Ives's earlier anthems suggests that
The Celestial Country, far from being a compositional anomaly, stands as the culmination of
years of work within an alternate and currently
misjudged choral style.
IVES'S CONSERVATIVE CHORAL PERIOD
My revised chronology of Ives's early,

nonmodernist choral works sheds light on his
cantata by placing it alongside its immediate
predecessors. The revised chronology follows
the methods for music paper dating and handwriting analysis outlined in my dissertation
and earlierpublications.23Redatedchoralworks
through to 1903 are presented in Table 1.24
Following the revised datings, the conservative
works fall into clear chronological groupings,
demonstrating a strong relationship between
Ives's church positions and his choral output to
1902.
In sum, Ives functioned as a pragmaticchurch
composer through the 1890s, composing for
the unique circumstances of each congregation,
choir, and denomination. As outlined in Table
1, works intended for each church are consistent in their text sources, performing forces,
and liturgical function. Most sources redated
to 1893-94 are service music, including the
Benedictus, the Communion service, and the
Nine Experimental Canticle phrases. This period correspondsexactly to Ives's appointment
23See my Choral Works of Ives, "Questions and Veracities," and my "Redating Ives's Choral Sources," in Ives
Studies.
24Kirkpatrick's dates are taken from the 1960 catalog unless followed by "REVCAT" (from Kirkpatrick's revisions
to the catalog) or "AMGROVE" (from the Ives article in
American Grove). Ives's dates are taken primarily from
the lists as published in Memos, pp. 147-66. Dates preceded by a question mark indicate problematic or contradictory dates from Ives, either in the lists or manuscript
memos.
170
at St. Thomas's Episcopal Church in New Haven, where he worked from 7 May 1893 until
29 April 1894.25 The formal services of that
Episcopalianchurch probablyencouragedthese
liturgical settings, which could not have been
used at Ives's previous or later churches.
After leaving St. Thomas's, Ives held a prestigious position as organist at Center Church on
the Green, New Haven, between 1894 and 1898,
where he composed several sacred anthems including Easter Carol, Crossingthe Bar,and Turn
Ye, Turn Ye.26At this time he received encouraging support from the choir director, Dr. John
Cornelius Griggs. Griggs's choir offered Ives an
accessible group of performers in the church
choir. Ives's anthems set hymn texts and sentimental religious poetry not only common to
the period but also specific to the choir's format, more of which will be discussed shortly.
Surviving choral sources from 1898-1902 are
againrelated to Ives's changingchurchpositions
as well as to his graduation from Yale in 1898.
Between 1898 and 1900 Ives held a position at
the Bloomfield Presbyterian Church in
Bloomfield, New Jersey,and from 1900 to 1902
he worked at Central Presbyterian Church in
New York.27It was only during these four years
that Ives held positions as both organist and
choir director.28This was a significant change
from his previous experiences. Working under
other choir directors, Ives had had little or no
choice of choral repertoireand only limited access to the performingensemble itself. Both the
New Jersey and New York positions presented
significant advantages because Ives could now
try out his own compositions as he wrote them.
This factor may well have proved crucial to the
development of Ives's progressive choral style,
since the choral sources from this period include the most experimentalwriting to that time.
2"Ives, Memos, p. 326.
26Ives's predecessor at Center Church was Harry B. Jepson,
organ teacher at Yale (Memos, p. 183), while his successor,
David Stanley Smith, followed Parker as head of the Yale
School of Music. Elizabeth Goode, David Stanley Smith
and His Music (Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1978),
p. 29.
27Although little is known about the choir at Bloomfield,
it is intriguing to note that two of Ives's surviving compositions from this period, Psalm 67 and Psalm 150, use
boys' choirs as well as mixed chorus.
28Ives, Memos, pp. 57, 68, 237, 262, and 327-28.
Ives's traditional choral works (service music and anthems), then, do not significantly
overlap with such sources for substantial experimental compositions as Psalm 67. The practical division between conservative and modernist sources is approximately 1898-the year
Ives graduatedfrom Yale and the earliest date
of compositional work on The Celestial Country. What this suggests, of course, is that Ives's
cantata is most obviously connected to a clearly
delineatedgroupof earlier,nonmodernistworks.
The Celestial Country is best viewed as the
last and largest composition in this conventional style, which Ives had been pursuing for
over a decade.
Rather than being an anomaly, the cantata is
fully consistent with Ives's efforts of the preceding years and yet was written at about the
time that Ives began serious experimentation
in the choral genre. Because they formed the
immediate backdrop to Ives's cantata and provided a context for Ives's own sacred anthems
and those of his contemporaries, the 1894-98
Center Church anthems merit closer attention.
IvEs's QUARTET-CHOIRANTHEMS, 1894-98
Ives's descriptionof the Center Church anthems

placed them within a specific historical tradition. His 1929 list included the entry, "about
20-25 anthems, responses and hymn-anthems
(alla [sic] HarryRowe Shelley and Dudley Buck)
during four years at Center Church." Turn Ye,
Turn Ye, Crossing the Bar, I Come to Thee,
All-Forgiving, and The Light that Is Felt are all
within this group following the revised chronology.
The list is significant for its explicit
acknowledgement of Buck (1838-1909), and his
lesser-known student Shelley (1858-1947).
Trained in Germany, Buck enjoyed a successful career in Boston and New York. His Centennial
Cantata was commissioned
by the
United States government for the 1876 celebrations and received its premiere at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia amid great publicity and media coverage. Buck's organ works
were also widely performed and published in
the United States. Around 1894, Ives studied
briefly with Buck and Shelley and played many
of Buck's organ works over the first decade of
171
GAYLE
SHERWOOD
Ives and
Choral
Tradition
Table 1
19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
Selected Revised Datings of Ives's Choral Works, 1891-1901

REVISED CHRONOLOGY
KIRKPATRICK/IVES
IVES'S CHURCH POSITIONS
1891 5C16 Be Thou (1891-92)

5C17 Oh God My (1891-92)
5C7
5C12
5C13
5C14
Crossing
Communion
Benedictus
Bread (AMGR)
Danbury Baptist
1889-93
5D2
5D3
Seranade
Partsong
5C6 Nine Exper. (1891-92)

5C15 Search Me (1891-92)
1892 5C3
5D1
5C4
5C13
Ps. 42
5C16 Be Thou
The Year's
5C17 On God My
Gloria (1892-93)
Benedictus (1892-93)
5C18 I Come to Thee

5C19 ?Easter Carol
5C15 Search Me
1893 5C9 Benedictus (1893-94)
5C12 Communion (1893-94)
5C14 Bread (1893-94)
1894 5C6 Nine Exper.
5C7 Crossing
1895 5C10 I Think (1895-96)

5D2 Serenade
1896 5C11 Turn Ye
5C19 Easter Carol

5C20 Life of
5C18
5D5
5D6
5D10
1897 5D3
5D8
5D9
1898 5A1
5C24
5C25
5C26
5C31
5D11
1899 5D12
5C13
5C20 Life of
5C21 Lord God (1893-94)
St. Thomas's Episcopalian

1893-94
5C24 ?Ps. 67
5C26 Ps. 150 (REVCAT)
Center Church on the

5D4 Love (1894-95)
Green Congregational
1894-98
5C25 Light That
5D5
5D6
The Boys
Partsong
5C7
5D8
For You (1895-96)

Age of Gold
5D9
Partsong
5D10 Song of
I Come to (1896-97)
The Boys (1896-97)
Partsong (1896-97)
Song of (1896-97)
Partsong (1897-98)
Age of Gold (1897-98)
Partsong (1897-98)
Celestial (1898-99, sketches)
Ps. 67
Light That
Ps. 150
All-Forgiving
5C28
5C34
5D11
5D12
5C31
5D13
5C33
5C34
All-Forgiving
My Sweet
Ps. 100 (1898-99)
Ps. 23 (1898-99)
5C35
5C29
5C36
5C37
Ps.
Ps.
Ps.
Ps.
Kyrie
?Ps. 23
Bells of (1897-98) (AMGR)
O Maiden (1897-98)
Bloomfield Presbyterian
1898-1900
Bells of
O Maiden (1899-1900)
My Sweet (1899-1900)
14 (AMGR)
25 (1899-1900) (REVCAT)
135 (1899-1900)
90 (1899-1900)
172
Table 1 (cont.)
GAYLE
SHERWOOD
Ives and
Choral
Tradition
Selected Revised Datings of Ives's Choral Works, 1891-1901

REVISED CHRONOLOGY
KIRKPATRICK/IVES
1900 5C29 Ps. 25

5C30 Ps. 24
5C21 Lord God (1900-01)
5C28 Kyrie (1900-01)
1901
5C36 Ps. 135 (AMGR)
1902 5A1 Celestial County (parts)

5B2 Harvest I
IVES'S CHURCH POSITIONS
Central Presbyterian
1900-02
5B2
5B2
5C38
5B2
5B2
Harvest II (before 1902)

Harvest III (before 1902)
?Procession
Harvest I
Harvest II
5C27 Ps. 54 (1902-03)

5C33 Ps. 100 (1902-03)
5C35 Ps. 14 (1902-03)
5C36 Ps. 135 (1902-03)

5C38 Processional (1902-03)
his career. Buck's Variations on "Home Sweet

Home" for organserved as a prototype for Ives's
own Variations on "America"of 1892.29In fact,
many of Buck's works including the Star
Spangled Banner Overture blended Germanic
Romantic orchestral traditions with American
sources and sentiments, and they may have
influenced Ives's later efforts in the same vein.
Although forgotten today, Buck was widely
known as a choral composer, and his anthems
and cantatas were popular with church choirs
well into the twentieth century.30Buck wrote
engaging, approachable music for the most
widely used choir format of the time, the quartet choir. The quartet choir consisted of a paid,
trained solo quartet (SATB),around which was
built an unpaid, untrained chorus.31The solo
quartet never blended with the chorus, and instead sang solos, duos, trios, or quartet sections
within largeranthems, or on their own.
29Laurence David Wallach, The New England Education
of Charles Ives (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1973),
pp. 147-48 and 152.
30JohnTasker Howard, Our American Music (3rd edn. New
York, 1946), p. 592.
31Summarized from Leonard Ellinwood, The History of
American Church Music (New York, 1953), pp. 72-75.
Solo quartets became so popular that some

congregations relied almost entirely on them.
Although many critics disparagedthe solo quartet as a descendent of secular glee singing popular in America in the early nineteenth century,
congregations enjoyed the polished sound and
"personal touch" of the soloists in a mixed
quartet.32Meanwhile, the chorus offered amateur singers in the congregation an opportunity
to participate in sacred music making. By the
last decade of the century the quartet choir was
the most common ensemble in American Protestant churches, and the solo quartet was given
significant attention in church advertisements.
A survey of the Easter service listings in the
New York Times from 1889-98 verifies that
the large majority of churches in Manhattan
32It is listed in the United States as early as 1861, in The

American Musical Directory, 1861. Also discussed in William Kearns, Horatio Parker 1863-1919: His Life, Music
and Ideas (Metuchen, N.J., 1990), pp. 193-94.
173
and Brooklyn listed the individual quartet singCEMUSICRY ers in their advertisements.33
Dudley Buck's anthems were the most successful compositions for quartet choir and represented the choral mainstream. If the Easter
listings provide a reliable gauge, Buck and
Shelley were the only American composers
whose works were heardregularlyin New York
churches. Buck's preeminence as a composer of
music for quartet choir remained strong decades after his death. As late as 1946, John
Tasker Howard wrote, "As a choir director and
composer [Buck]helped to develop our literature for the church, and since he was fond of
the mixed quartet which has been a feature of
American worship, and sometimes its curse,
he had a profound influence on our choir mu19TH
sic. "34
In keeping with the American Protestant

musical mainstream, Ives's choir at Center
Church was a quartet choir. One member of
the choir, Lewis Bronson, later described the
division of labor between the professional solo
quartet and amateur chorus, both directed by
John Cornelius Griggs:
Center Church ... at that time [1896] had the best
church quartet that I knew about .... At first, they
simply had the quartetat the morningserviceand

the four o'clock service on Sundays.Then Griggs
made up his mind that he wanted to do a little
broaderwork,andhe decidedto get in a small chorus which he was able to pull togetherby offering
vocal lessons .... The chorus sang only at the four
o'clockservice,butwe hadchoirrehearsalsandgave
some fairlysubstantialpieceswith Mr.Ivesplaying
the organandthe quartetandchorusdirectedby Dr.
33Listings vary in detail, with the most extensive entries

for 1889-90, and 1894-98: general prose descriptions are
found in 1888 and 1899-1900, while the remaining years
have no music listings. For example, of the twenty churches
in Manhattan that identify their musical ensembles in
1895, sixteen list the members of their mixed SATB quartet by name and voice,.and many of these specify the
number of voices in the accompanying chorus. "Glad Music for Easter," New York Times, 14 April 1895, pp. 17, 19.
In addition to the sixteen churches with mixed quartet,
one church lists a quintet without names (Trinity Episcopal Church), another identifies a male quartet (Madison
Avenue Presbyterian), and two list male choirs. Five other
churches include insufficient information.
34Howard, Our American Music, p. 592.
Griggs.Wehada rehearsaleveryweek,andthe membersof the chorusreceivedlessonsin return.Wehad

a good quartet,so that we could really do some
prettyelaboratepieces.35
Griggs, whom Ives seems to have regardedas a
surrogate father (his own father, of course, had
died in 1894), endorsed this peculiarly American ensemble in his doctoral dissertation, in
which he asserted that it "representsthe people
and in no manner represents the priesthood or
any other specially ordained class."36 On 25
October 1895, Griggs even delivered a lecture
to the Yale Divinity School that included musical examples performedby the Center Church
Choir with Ives on the organ. In this lecture,
Griggs discussed both the "Limitations and Advantages" of the quartet choir and apparently
offered some further endorsement of the ensemble in general. Surviving calendars demonstrate that the Center Church choir regularly
performedBuck's anthems for quartet choir.37
Given Center Church's choir format and
Griggs's approvalof the quartet choir, it is not
surprisingthat virtually all of Ives's sacredcompositions from 1894 to 98 feature quartet soloists backed by an amateur chorus. Moreover,
Ives's compositions for this ensemble clearly
resemble the most popularcontemporaryworks
for quartet choir: those by Dudley Buck. One
feature of the quartet-choir anthem, for instance, was its awareness of the limitations of
the amateurchoir;instead, these anthems showcased the solo singers. Larger anthems typically begin and end with homophonic sections
for full choir and include more complex music,
written for some combination of quartet soloists, in the middle sections.38Alternatively, the
entire work could be sung by the quartet singers alone, without the chorus. Accompaniment
35Interview with Lewis Bronson, 28 July 1969, transcribed

in Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History (New
Haven, Conn., 1974), pp. 20-21.
36Ives, Memos, p. 254.
37Ives Papers, box 51, folder 1.
38Kearns, Horatio Parker 1863-1919: A Study of His Life
and Music (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1965), p.
585. In fact, some of Ives's early experimental psalms adapt
this form as well. Psalm 67, despite its bitonality, adapts a
hornophonic texture in the outer sections with a fugato in
the middle.
174
is limited to piano or organ, which doubles the

chorus sections as an aid to the amateur singer.
In his choral works from the Yale period,
Ives uses a harmonic language similar to that
of Buck, as shown in ex. 5. Both composers
feature the close, chromatic harmonies that
showcase the solo quartet (and that may have
been associated with contemporarybarbershop
singing). Most notable are the constant chromatic motion and use of diminished sevenths,
often used in conjunction (ex. 5a, where chromatic motion in the bass creates a diminished
seventh on C#;and ex. 5b, where a suspension
and a chromatic appoggiaturacreate a momentary diminished seventh in 2 position over F),
and parallel chromatic motion in sixths and
thirds (ex. 5c and 5d). All of these features are
evident in a passage from Turn Ye, Turn Ye of
1896 (ex. 6), where Ives accentuates the dramatic character of the text through constant
slippery chromaticism (including in m. 16 the
double chromatic motion to a diminished seventh on B), echoes, and pauses as the voices
twist and turn, finally returning "home" to
rest in m. 15.
In his anthems Ives demonstrated the same
pragmatic attitude evident in his earlier service
music. The anthems accommodated the performing ensemble at his disposal and the denominational demands of his position. More
than thirty years after leaving Center Church,
Ives acknowledged the influence of Buck on
these works in the 1929 list mentioned above.
It is striking that after a decade of promoting
himself as an exclusively modernist composer,
Ives clearly allied himself with a forgotten nineteenth-century composer for quartet choir. But
perhaps this open admission is more understandable when we recall Ives's declaration at
the top of the list: "for my own information,
not for publication."39
IVES, PARKER, AND BUCK: A COMPARISON
The quartet-choir heritage is crucial for understanding The Celestial Country, a work that
Ives began composing at the end of his Center
Church period. Thus the quartet-choir legacy
39Ives, Memos, p. 147.
constitutes a second stylistic influence in that

cantata, albeit one that has been eclipsed by
excessive emphasis on its borrowingsfrom Hora
Novissima. The interrelationships between the
musical styles of Ives, Parker, and Buck are
best illustrated through a comparison of a contemporaryquartet-choircantataby Buck, Christ
the Victor of 1896, alongside The Celestial
Country and its acknowledged model, Hora
Novissima.
Table 2 (p. 179) summarizes many of the primary features of these works, including overall
structure, language, accompaniment, chorus
size, and duration. These factors, considered
along with the level of difficulty of the choral
writing, indicate that The Celestial Country
more clearly resembles Buck's quartet-choir
cantata style than it does Parker'sgrand oratorio Hora Novissima. Such a conclusion is reinforced by a study of the initial impetus, premieres, and early performances of the works.
The cantatasby Ives and Buckwere written with
the limitations of congregationalchoirs in mind
and accommodated the unique features of the
quartet choir. According to William Gallo, five
of Buck's cantatas published during the 1890s
(including Christ the Victor) were written "at
the request of Rudolph Schirmer to fill the current need for works of about an hour's duration
and of moderate difficulty to be performed at
evening musical services." JohnTasker Howard
described the same Buck cantatas as "not difficult to perform, and any one of them may be
performed in connection with a Christmas or
Easterservice.'"40Both Gallo's and Howard'sdescriptions fit The Celestial Country closely.
Ives's cantata received its premiereby the small
amateur chorus of seventeen that he directed at
Central Presbyterianchurch, plus the standard
solo quartet.41The work lasts under an hour and
40William K. Gallo, The Life and Church Music of Dudley

Buck (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1968),
p. 101. The cantatas included Christ the Victor (1896),
Coming of the King (1895), The Story of the Cross (1892),
and The Triumph of David (1892). Howard, Our American
Music, p. 594.
41Ives's choir at Central Presbyterian Church in New York
included seventeen voices altogether in the chorus, plus a
solo SATB quartet. The chorus was certainly amateur,
since Ives's nonmusical roommates were recruited to sing
in the choir on occasion.
175
GAYLE
SHERWOOD
Ives and
Choral
Tradition
19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
a. Ives, Crossing the Bar (5C7, 1894).
one
clear
call
for
me!
one
clear
call
for
me!
No
one
clear
call
for
me!
No
And
no
there be
may
moan
ing
moan-ing
of
the bar,
When
of
the bar,
When
of
the bar,
When
of
the bar,
When
----- -- --- -- -moan
ing..
one
clear
call
for
me!
Glo
B.
No
ry,
glo
moan
ry
be
ing ......
to
the
Fa - ther,
-L
Example 5: Comparison of quartet-choir writing by Ives and Buck.

Examples 5a and c reprintedby permission.
and
1974
1983 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. (BMI).
?
constituted only half of the evening's program
at its premiere, which took place in a church.
More importantly, The Celestial Country and
Christ the Victor reveal their intended performers-the amateur chorus and professional quartet standard in American churches-through
the choral writing, which is "of moderate difficulty" for the amateur chorus. Both works use
the chorus sparingly, and then only in simpler
textures: most choral writing is homophonic,
doubled by the organ, and even in unison and
octaves, as in the final movement of The Celestial Country (ex. 7) and in the ninth movement
of Christ the Victor (ex. 8). In The Celestial
Country, the chorus sings only in the outer
movements (one and seven), while Buck's work
is distributed among unison or two-part cho-
ruses (divided between men and women), the

quartet soloists, and, in a truly inclusive gesture, the congregation. In Buck's work, the full
chorus usually leads the congregation in a familiar hymn, thus underlining the religious context of the work while accommodating the amateur choristers as well as the entire church
population.42 Both cantatas feature soloists extensively, in smaller ensembles and against the
amateur chorus.
Hora Novissima stands apart from the two
other works in both style and function. Parker's
oratorio was first performed on 3 May 1893 by
420nly movements III, V, VI, and XI use full chorus, and

then only sparingly.
176
c. Ives, I Come to Thee (5C18, 1896-97).

rt.
poco
rock,
rpt.
In - to
my shield,
poco
Thy hands
rit.
Srit.
In
hands
Thy
soul
my
I yield,
poco
t.
shield,
my
life,
a tempo
my
In - to
hands
Thy
soul
my
a tempo
my
fa teIpo
shield,
I yield,
soul
my
GAYLE
SHERWOOD
Ives and
Choral
Tradition
yield,
my
life,
my
a tempo
life,
my
d. Buck, Festival Te Deum in E6,op. 63, no. 1.
Thou
T.
...
,0'6
- ver
hadst__
ver
B.
When
Thou
hadst
Pfr
6.
"L
Example 5 (continued)
the Church Choral Society of New York at the

Church of the Holy Trinity: it was the only
work on the program. According to Parker's
biographerWilliam Kearns,this was "the most
important performancein [Parker's]career"due
to the high profile of the performing ensemble,
the growing reputation of the composer, and
the expectations of New York critics that Hora
Novissima would be "the major effort in the
field of American oratorio up to that time."43
The Church Choral Society was a formally
43Kearns, Horatio Parker: Life, Music and Ideas, pp. 18, 19.
trained ensemble that met the nineteenth-century demand for religious content and cultivated context, and that counted among its patrons the wealthiest and most visible
Manhattanites, such as J. Pierpont Morgan and
the Vanderbilts.44Foundedin 1888, the society
was organized "for the purpose of holding musical services in the larger churches where the
sacred compositions of the great musicians
44Reviews and announcements of Church Choral Society
concerts are from the New York Times on the following
dates: 4 May 1893; 20 December 1893; 19 January 1894; 19
December 1894; 21 December 1894; 22 February 1895.
177
19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
Slow
S.
pp
ALf
=
.PP
(IIIV
Je- sus
in - vites
you, the
Spir- it
says, "Come."
An
gels
are
wait
-ing,
wait - ing
to
Je - sus
in - vites
you, the
Spir - it
says, "Come."
An
gels
are
wait
ing,
wait - ing
to
you, the
Spir - it
says, Come."
An
gels
are
wait
ing,
wait - ing
to
the
Spir- it
says, "Come."
An Slow
gels
are
wait
ing,
wait - ing
to
A.
T.I
ke)
Je -
sus
in - vites_
B.
sus
Je
: F)
12
S.
'
~p
I
'
wel
wel
come
you
come
you
11 "
home,
to
wel
come
you home.
So
home,
to
wel
come
you
So
L"
'
home.
i
"
why_
p
will ye die?
why
will
ye die?
2pp
T.
wel
come
you
home....
to
.II
welc
come
you home.
So
why
will ye die?
wel
come
you
home,
to
wel
come
you
So
why
will
IWW
T.
nR
I1
home.
ye die?
7
do",,
Example 6: Ives, Turn Ye, Turn Ye, mm. 7-16.
could be properly rendered."45 To this end, its

programs included works by Dvohik, Mozart,
Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Wagner.
According to Parker, Hora Novissima was
written for this socially and musically signifi-
cant ensemble that presented concerts "of a

very high order."46But despite its excellent credentials, the Church Choral Society did not
adequatelyperformHora Novissima. Critic William J.Henderson lamented the "inadequacyof
45New York Times, 20 December 1893, p. 12.
46Ibid.
178
Table 2
GAYLE
SHERWOOD
Ives and
Choral
Tradition
Comparative Summary of Parker's Hora Novissima (1893),

Ives's The Celestial Country (1898-99) and Buck's Christ the Victor (1896)
PARKER, HORA NOVISSIMA IVES, THE CELESTIALCOUNTRY BUCK, CHRIST THE VICTOR
Movements:
1. Introduction and Chorus

2. Quartet
3. Aria (Bass)
4. Chorus
5. Aria (Soprano)
1. Chorus
2. Aria (Baritone)
3. Quartet
4. String Quartet Intermezzo
5. Double Quartet a cappella
6. Quartet and Chorus

7. Solo (Tenor)
6. Aria (Tenor)
7. Chorus
8. Double Chorus
9. Solo (Alto)
10. Chorus a cappella
Text Language
and Source:
Latin, 12th-century poem

by Bernardof Cluny
English, 19th-century
hymn by Alford
1. Solo (Baritone)
2. Chorus (Women)
3. Chorus (Men)
5. Chorus, Solo (Tenor),
Hymn (Congregation)
6. Chorus (Men)
7. Chorus (Women),Trio,
Hymn (Congregation)
8. Duet (Alto and Baritone)
9. Chorus
10. Hymn (Congregation)
English, 19th-century
hymns (var.)and Bible
passages
Accompaniment: Full Orchestraplus organ Organ, String Quartet, 2 horns Organ

Chorus Size:
Choral Society, unknown Central Presbyterian
No premiere on record
Handel and Haydn Society: Church Choir: 17 voices
383 voices
Approximate
Duration:
84 minutes
50 minutes
the chorus" and stated that "the work ought to

be given by a chorus of 300 or 400 voices to get
full justice."47 This obstacle was overcome with
the 4 February 1894 performance by the Handel
and Haydn Society in Boston Symphony Hall.48
In this much-anticipated concert by an even
more venerated ensemble, the choir consisted
of 383 voices accompanied by an orchestra of
fifty-seven. The size and quality of this performance removes Parker's work from the modest
amateur context in which Ives's cantata first
appeared.49
Furthermore, the musical style of Hora

Novissima-the
choral writing-was obviously
47NewYorkTimes, 4 May 1893, p. 5.
48Kearns,Horatio Parker:Life, Music and Ideas, p. 22.
49Historyof the Handel and Haydn Society, 2 vols. (Boston, 1883-1913; rpt. New York, 1977-79), II,37.
45 minutes
suited to a trained ensemble such as the Church

Choral Society or the Boston Handel and Haydn
Society. As H. Wiley Hitchcock noted, the choral movements "are the pillars of the work":
indeed, the full chorus is used in six of the
eleven movements including a double chorus
("Stant Syon atria," movement 8) and the a
cappella penultimate movement "Urbs Syon
Unica" (ex. 9). The difficulty of the part writing
in "Urbs Syon Unica" was acknowledged at
the time by critic Louis Elson, who wrote, "That
an American can write such music is something that we should be proud of; that the
Handel and Haydn Chorus could sing it (unaccompanied) is something to congratulate them
upon."50Parker's demanding score incorporates
p. 38.
SOIbid,
179
19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
114
---hon
or
done
In
hon
or
done,
In
to ..
---
to.......
,-Ifhon
or
done,
In
to .
hon
or
done,
In
to
116
tri
umph,
In
to ...
tri
umph,
In
to
6L
14
dl
1:% a
tri
umph,
In
to
tri
umph,
In
to
......
Tpt.
Example 7: Ives, The Celestial Country, "To the Eternal Father,"mm. 114-17.
a wide variety of polyphonic techniques, most

often extended fugues or fugatos. Here again,
Parker'swork demonstrates a level of writing
appropriateto his intended performersand concert-hall audience but inappropriateto the quartet choir and church congregation for which
Buck and Ives composed.
The texts invite yet another point of com-
parison. Christ the Victor sets a nineteenthcentury hymn text in English, supplemented
by biblical quotations. Ives, like Buck, set a
nineteenth-century hymn text in English that
would have been familiar to both his audience
and choir. Fourverses of Alford's text appearin
numerous hymnals from the period, under the
title "Forward!be our watchword": although
180
GAYLE
SHERWOOD
Ives and
Choral
Tradition
Allegro molto maestoso

S.
if5
to
the heav'n
of
dfeav
ens
did
He
as - cend,
with
to
the heav'n
of
heav
ens
did
He
as - cend,
with
So_
to
the heav'n
of
heav
ens
did
as
with
So ---
to
the heav'n
of
heav
ens
did
So
A.
So
..............
he
he
as
- cend,
- cend,
with
F
Allegro molto maestoso
Organ
8" ---------------------------------------------------------------
Example 8: Buck, Christ the Victor, "So to the heav'n."
Ives changed the order of the verses in his cantata, he did not alter the text itself.51Although
Ives incorrectly believed that the text of The
Celestial Country was written by the author of
Hora Novissima, as clearly identified in the
program of the concert,52 his choice of the
widely published English version of this text is
telling.
While Ives and Buck chose hymn texts in
English that were readily accessible to American listeners and choristers of all denominations and classes, Parker's text is a twelfthcentury poem written in Latin by a French
monk. While the Eurocentricity inherent in
Parker's choice is obvious, the class connotations of his text are more subtle. In his study of
Parker,William Kearnsreported that the original poem, De Contemptu Mundi, "was then
51Two such examples are The Church Hymnal, ed. Charles
L. Hutchins (Boston, 1900), pp. 622-25 (hymn no. 523);
and Hymns for Church and Home, ed. Arthur Foote (Boston, 1896), p. 158 (hymn no. 308).
52Facsimile of the program of the cantata's premiere is
reproduced in Perlis, Ives Remembered, p. 32.
enjoying popularitylargely as a result of a translation by the nineteenth-centuryEnglishscholar

and theologian, J. M. Neale."13In fact, Neale's
translationof Hora Novissima was readilyavailable in hymn books of the time, much like
Alford's hymn that Ives used in The Celestial
Country. But instead of setting Neale's
hymnized version, Parkerset the original Latin,
thereby seeking to address a smaller, better
educated, elite audience.
A final consideration involves the accompaniment of all three works. Christ the Victor
and The Celestial Country are similar in instrumentation: both depend heavily on organ
accompaniment. Buck's cantata relies solely
on organaccompaniment that doublesboth chorus parts and the soloists' lines. Ives's cantata
uses organ accompaniment in all movements
except the fourth (forstring quartet)and fifth (a
cappella double quartet). The only other instrumentation is the addition of two optional
53Kearns, Horatio Parker: Life, Music and Ideas, p. 106.
181
19TH
dim.
CENTURY
OP
MUSIC
-
si-o
mys
of the saints
ti
ca,
con -di-
a - lone. Built in
o. Nunc
ta
coe
the
hea - ven. Now
ti-
will
bi gau-de
dim.
Sy
Ci
on,
ty,
high
ni -ca,
ca,
nunc__
high re - kown.
dim.
u
high
ni -ca,
con re-nown, Built
di - ta
in the
Sy
Ci
coe - lo,
hea - ven,
mi
hi
dore
the
lu - ge - o,
- o,
lu -ge
match- less grace,
nunc
A
mi
dore
hi
lu -ge - o,
the match-less grace,
ni - ca,
re - nown,
ni - ca,
re - nown,
u
high
lu - ge - o,
match-less grace,
mi
A - dore
Nunc
hi
the
PA
f/ dim.
trist- tor
an - he
To mor - tals
match-less grace,
less grace,
u
high
on__
ty,
ge - o,
hi - lu
dim.
urbs
Blest
mi
A - dore the match
u-ni-
re - nown,
nunc
o,
I sing thy praise,
giv
tris- tor
lo,
en,
he
an
to mor - tals
lo,
en,
giv
f dim.
lu - ge - o,
tris - tor
an - he
To mor - tals
match-less grace,
giv
lo,
tris
to
en,
tor
an - he
mor - tals
o,
en,
giv
-
Adim.
tris - tor an - he
To mor - tals
giv
tris - tor,
giv - en,
lu - ge - o, .
match-less grace,
f/ dim. ,-7
lu
match
ge
less
o,
grace,
trist
giv
tris
to
lo
en,
tor an - he
mor - tals
giv
lo,
en,
__._..
tor,
en,
trist
To
tor
mor
san
tals
he
giv
lo,
en,
Example 9: Parker,Hora Novissima, "Urbs Syon Unica."
horns in the final movement. In the outer movements, the organ usually doubles the choral
parts. While Ives does use a scattering of other
solo instruments here and there, both cantatas
are organ-based,reflecting the small scope and
limited resourcesof the performingensembles.54
In contrast, Hora Novissima is written for full
orchestra plus organ. The orchestral accompa-
54Even in his use of solo instruments Ives imitates Buck's
technique. According to Howard, Buck's 1881 male chorus King Olaf's Christmas was accompanied by "piano
obbligato, reed organ, and string quartet ad lib. The composer knew what was practical in the way of accompaniment in his day" (Howard, Our American Music, p. 594).
niment, elaborate and largely independent of

the choral parts, introduces and develops thematic material in the interludes and codas. The
organ is rarely used on its own: each movement incorporates orchestral instruments except for the a cappella choral movement.
All of these factors underscore substantial
differences between the populist anthem style
of The Celestial Country and Christ the Victor
and the elite, cosmopolitan style of Parker's
Hora Novissima. Ives and Buck wrote for the
quartet choirs still common in the American
churches where they worked. Their cantatas
were intended to be performedby an untrained
chorus, a professionalsolo quartet,and a church
182
organist accompanist (possibly with added

instrumentals as available) within a religious
setting. In contrast, Hora Novissima exemplifies the European-Americanacademic tradition
that Parker taught at Yale. Although receiving
its premiere in a church and written on a religious theme, Hora Novissima partook in the
bigger, granderoratorio tradition and, with its
Boston performance, found a home in the concert hall. This large orchestral work was particularly well suited for English choral festivals-where the work proved popular-and for
large skilled choral societies in American cities
such as New York and Boston. As Hitchcock
notes, Hora Novissima combines the "highminded" English Victorian choral style with a
"German-Americanhymnic grandeur,solidity,
and dignity."55
Notwithstanding these matters of genre and
intention, Parker's specific influence on The
Celestial Country remains undeniable in such
aspects as Ives's deliberate metrical borrowings
from Hora Novissima, mentioned above. Even
in this regard,however, The Celestial Country
is not anomalous, but remarkably consistent
with Ives's contemporary output.56The Center
Church anthems of 1894-98 consistently feature brief insertions of 3 measures into 4 passages or vice versa: the resultant brief metrical
alternations are probably modeled on precedents in Hora Novissima.57 Example 10 presents four such interpolations in the Center
Church anthems including Turn Ye, Turn Ye
,5Horatio Parker, introduction to Hora Novissima, ed.

Hitchcock (New York, 1972), [1].
16Even the main distinction of Ives's work is found in two
of Buck's cantatas. The 4-4 alternation of Parker's Spe
modo vivitur is used in two movements of Christ the
Victor and in The Coming of the King of 1895. Buck's use
of metrical shifts may have been another imitation of
Parker's bass solo. Buck had acknowledged his admiration
of Hora Novissima in a letter to Parker of 30 January
1893, indicating that he knew the work. Parker Papers,
box 26, folder 10.
57This is another confirmation of the revised dates of these
works. Parker's cantata was written and published in 1893,
and Ives probably did not encounter the work before his
early years at Yale in the fall of 1894 or possibly during
1895 (Solomon, "Ives: Some Questions of Veracity," p.
461). Therefore any direct imitations of Hora Novissima
must postdate 1893 at the earliest, and probably 1894 or
1895.
(1896), I Come to Thee (1896-97), All-Forgiving, and The Light that Is Felt (both 1898).58
These anthems testify to Ives's adaptation of
features of his teacher's most famous composition well before The Celestial Country. Once
again, in this respect Ives's cantata emerges as
the last in a series of works that incorporate
modelings on Hora Novissima, and not as an
isolated imitation.59Through its amalgamation
of the mainstream quartet-choir style with the
metrically sophisticated structures of EuroAmerican art music, The Celestial Country is
both a typical composition from and the culmination of Ives's Center Church choral period.
The Celestial Country navigates between
Parker's religious concertizing and Buck's sacred pragmatism,bringingtogether the two prevailing styles in the contemporary musical environment to create a true hybrid. In this light,
The Celestial Country was no "insipid" imitation of Parker's musical values: rather, Ives
was rejecting many of those values in favor of
ones more congenial to the prevailing amateur
style that constituted the contemporary mainstream.
Moreover, the more fundamental issue at
stake here exceeded those of mere personal preference and musical style. Ives's stylistic synthesis in the mid- and late-1890s may be understood, more broadly, as a daring and original
solution to the challenges confronting American music as a whole during this period. In
other words, the very heterogeneity of The Celestial Country embodied a largercultural conflict of this time-and it is to that conflict that
I now turn.
"XCrossing the Bar of 1894 also includes brief metrical

combination (mm. 27-29), and a
disruptions such as a
succession (mm. _44-8-4
59-61). Wendell Clarke Kumlien,
The Sacred Choral Music of Charles Ives: A Study in
Style Devlopment (D.M.A. thesis, University of Illinois,
1969), p. 142. The most extensive exploitation of this technique occurs in Lord God, Thy Sea Is Mighty (1900-01),
where the unsteady sea in the phrase, "Batten down the
hatches" is illustrated through irregular shifts of 4, 3, and 2
measures. See my Choral Works of Charles Ives, p. 149.
"5The borrowings in the anthems illustrate Parker's influence in works written outside of the classroom.
183
GAYLE
SHERWOOD
Ives and
Choral
Tradition
19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
a. Turn Ye, Turn Ye (1896).

Slow
s.
-.-
An
AS.
A.
gels
are
wait
ing
wait - ing
.
PpE
-I
to
.I)
wel
come
Ji
you
come
you
II
An
gels
are
wait
ing,
wait- ing
to
wel
An
gels
are
wait
ing,
wait -ing
to
wel
come
you
An
gels
are
wait
ing,
wait - ing
to
wel
come
you
c. All-Forgiving(1898).
b. I Come to Thee (1896-97).

,
fa
tempo
As
be - hold
Thee
be
hold
Thee
S.
A.-"of
soul
yield,
A
"L*f
soul
yield,
my
life,
fa
tempo
my
life,
f-.
my
my
B.
a tempo
S"
soul
yield,
su
ied
my
soul
yield,
my
my
fa
As
K-fird.
life,
my
be
hold
The Light that Is Felt (1898).

-
S.
tempo
ne
li.
OmA.ors
life,
my
.
ness
ye
T.yl
B.
nev
- er -
more.
Reach
"
Example 10: Metrical alternations in Ives's quartet-choiranthems.

Example10cpublishedby PeerInternationalCorp.Usedby permission.
BUCK, PARKER, AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY

AMERICAN
CHORAL MUSIC
Buck and his proponents (including, for a time,

his friend and supporter Theodore Thomas)
sought to "make good music popular" by accommodating the broaderpublic taste.60In 1875,
for example, Thomas and Buck collaborated in
60Thomas quoted in Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow:
The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 115.
the Central Park GardenConcerts. The express

purpose of this series was to educate and elevate the public at large by introducing European classical music alongside "lighter"music
(waltzes, polkas) in an outdoor, informal atmosphere.61In fact, just such a concept of mediating between popular taste and artistic values
was fundamental to Buck's own compositions.
As Howard put it, "Buckwrote for his market,
61Ibid., pp. 114-15.
184
and his work as a whole represents a comprothe public taste and the
mise between
composer's own ideals. Yet he constantly
worked to raise standards, and he succeeded."62
In fact, Buck's concern for educating the public extended to a rejection of the values of musical academia, which during the 1870s and 80s
had become a symbol of elitist, highbrow culture.63 In 1884 Buck was offered an honorary
Doctor of Music (Mus. Doc.) from Yale University.64 Instead of quietly declining it, he publicly rejected it and even condemned the whole
idea of awarding honorary degrees in music. "I
must say candidly," he stated in 1884, "that I
have a distaste, amounting to an unconquerable repugnance, for all titles of this kind in my
profession." He went on to declare the Mus.
Doc. "a joke ... sought for or desired only by
the greater or lesser frauds who would fain
climb by means of it."65
In contrast, Horatio Parker regularly conferred honorary doctorates at Yale after his 1894
62Howard, Our American Music, p. 595.

63The establishment of schools of music at Harvard and
later Yale is typical of the new movement to institutionalize European and European-American
music. See
Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, 1988), p. 141.
64Gallo, Life and Music of Dudley Buck, p. 67; Frances
Hall Johnson, Musical Memories of Hartford (Hartford,
1931), pp. 13-16. Although Ives was nominated for the
same degree in 1953 and 1954, it could not be awarded
either year due to technicalities. See Frank Rossiter, Charles
Ives and His America (New York, 1975), p. 301; and the
Ives Papers, box 29, folder 1 and box 36, folder 7.
65Johnson, Musical Memories of Hartford, pp. 14, 16. Buck's
disparagement of the "Mus. Doc." is echoed by Ives's own
words, in which he indirectly criticizes Parker as a German-trained Doctor of Music. When discussing structuring a fugue in successive fifths, Ives segues immediately
from an assessment of Parker as "governed too much by
the German rule," to the objections of "Professors, Doctors of Music, and some Germans" to polytonality. He
states, "So, if the first statement of a theme is in a certain
key, and the second statement is in a key a 5th higher,
why can't (musically speaking) the third entrance sometimes go another 5th higher, and the fourth statement
another 5th higher? ... One Mus. Doc. says, 'Because it
destroys tonality.' Having four nice different men playing
tennis together doesn't always destroy personality-tonality is more of a man-made thing than personality. Then
the Musdock says, 'It violates the true, fundamental, natural laws of tone.' Does it? What are the true, fundamental,
natural laws of tone? The people who talk and tell you
exactly what they are, who teach them explicitly . . .
know less about them than the deaf man who wonders!"
(Memos, pp. 49-50).
appointment, and he graciously accepted an

honorary doctorate himself from Cambridge in
1902. In Parker's opinion, the quartet choir was
the scourge of American choral music. In a
lecture entitled "Church Music" that was delivered in 1897-while Ives was attending his
class-Parker's comments are clearly directed
against Buck's amateur style:66
It seems strange . . . that the only characteristic
American Institution in Church Music should be
that abomination of desolation-the quartet choir. .
.. There is only one other American musical product which approaches it in possibilities of horror,
and that is the Moody and Sankey tune. . . . The
Quartet Choir is a labor-savingdevice I admit. They
do not require much training; in fact some of them
are not susceptible to training, but I do not feel at
liberty to commend them for that .... I loathe and
abhor[quartetsingers],and trust the time may never
come when I shall be at their mercy. Hunger alone
shall drive me to it, after a fair trial of begging.67
Parker's severe criticisms of quartet choirs and
Moody and Sankey tunes were harsh, extending to the following biting comparison: "People
ask for bread and we give them sponge cake; for
fish, and they are lucky if they get eels-sometimes real snakes, loathsome, wriggling, slimy
with the
moody and snakey snakes-vulgar
vulgarity of the streets and the music hall."68
One of Parker's favorite targets was In the
Sweet Bye and Bye, a hymn beloved by Ives
throughout his childhood and recalled in many
of his later works. In discussing Mendelssohn's
Elijah, Parker stated: "The thematic material
is often dull and sometimes vulgar. [For instance,] 'Be not afraid.' This is, as Music, but
little less vulgar thematically than the 'Sweet
Bye and Bye,' although the intense offensiveness of the words in Moody and Sankey's production gives it a flavour stronger than anything so commonplace as the combination of
66Lecture notes also survive from 1904 and 1915 and are
extensions of the Columbia talk. The "Church Music"
lectures are found in the Parker Papers, box 35, folders 5-7.
67Parker, "Church Music" (1897), 12-13, box 35, folder 5
(emphasis added).
68Parker, "Address before Guild of Organists," in "Addresses, Essays, Lectures," No. 2: quoted in Kearns, Parker:
A Study (1965), p. 601 (emphasis added).
185
GAYLE
SHERWOOD
Ives and
Choral
Tradition
19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
Mendelssohn and the Bible could produce."69

In the surviving 1904 lecture notes, Parkerexpanded his scathing criticism of In the Sweet
Bye and Bye (written by Sanford Fillmore
Bennett and Joseph Philbrick Webster, not by
Moody and Sankey) in a passage that reflects
what Ives later described as Parker's "hardboiled" approachto both gospel tunes and quartet choirs:
The two contributionswhich Americahas madeto
the churchmusicof the worldarethe QuartetChoir
and the Moodyand Sankeyhymn tunes. Can you
imagineourgreatgrandchildren
boastingof the good
old dayswhen ourchurches,throughthe mediumof
a committeecomposedof a merchant,a banker,a
lawyer,anda mechanicengagedquartetsingers,or
can you picturetheirreviving"TheSweet Bye and
Bye" for other than humorous purposes?... I believe
no lowerlevel canbe foundthanthat of the quartet

choirandsickly sentimentalhymntune.70
In his lectures and no doubt in his contemporary classes, Parker ridiculed the two most
potent influences in Ives's choral music to that
point: the camp-meeting hymns of his father,
and the quartet choir of Dudley Buck. Both
were examples of "popular"music, considered
lowbrow by academic musicians like Parker,
who preferredtrained boy choirs over quartet
choirs and traditional Episcopalianhymns over
gospel tunes.
The solidly entrenched, oppositional convictions of Parkerand Buck reveal essential musical and philosophical conflicts of American cultural life at that time. Each composer endorsed
musical values specific to their profession and
education and to their intended performersand
audiences. Buck made a living as a professional
composer outside of academia. His pragmatic
choral works were widely popular with amateur Protestant churches in major metropolitan centers and in smaller cities-like New
Haven. Parkerspent his career as music direc-
tor in the wealthiest and most prominent

churches of Boston and Manhattan where he
directed a trained male choir, in addition to
overseeing the music school at Yale. His devotion to the European-Americanacademic tradition intrinsically devalued the quartet choir of
Buck.
Parkerand Buck were the leading choral composers of the late nineteenth century: their professional positions and musical styles reflect
divergent layers of contemporaryAmerican society. Buck reached the height of his fame in
the 1880s and continued to compose popular
choral pieces through the 1890s. Parker made
his reputation with Hora Novissima in 1893
and received the Yale appointment in 1894.
Through the mid-1890s, Ives was studying with
each of them, performingtheir works, and composing his own sacred choral compositions.
Quite literally, Ives was caught between the
populist style of Buck with which he had grown
up and the elitist views of Parker that were
gaining support throughout educated American society.
Such considerations make Ives's blending of
these two opposing styles in The Celestial
Country all the more remarkable. Indeed, the
cantata's stylistic heterogeneity may represent
a prototype of the later large-scale mergings
that characterize Ives's mature works.71In effect, The Celestial Country may be heard as a
nineteenth-century potpourri that juxtaposes
the populist and elitist styles of Ives's contemporarysound world.
The confluence of Buck's amateur style and
Parker's academic tradition in The Celestial
Country would not be evident without the revised chronology and an awareness of Ives's
earlier conservative anthems in the Buck style.
These works providea new perspective on Ives's
early development, and they provide clear illustrations of a compositional style that faithfully and inventively mirroredits own time.
ON THE ANTIPODES
69Parker, "Church Music" (1897), 11-12, box 35, folder 5.

An excerpt from "Elijah" had been performed as an example of appropriate solo quartet music in Griggs's lecture
of 25 October 1895, again illustrating differences of opinion between the two. Program, Ives Papers, box 51, folder 1.
70Parker, "Church Music" (1904), pp. 14-15, box 35,
folder 6.
REVISITED
Two decades after the premiere of The Celestial Country, Ives re-created the quartet choir
71Starr,A Union of Diversities, pp. 9-14 and passim.
186
in On the Antipodes by quoting from the third

movement of the cantata, "Seek the Things"
(see exs. 1 and 2). The newly written text for
the quotation-"Sometimes music's nice and
sweet [as a little pansy]"-and the original and
reconstructed musical context of this particular passage reveal an ongoing dialogue with his
early works and the legacy of Parkerand Buck
in one of his last major vocal compositions.72
As Judith Tick has noted, Ives used terms
like "nice," "sweet," and "pansy" as a means
of empowerment through the "emasculation of
the cultural patriarchy,"encompassing critics,
composers, and patrons.73Ives's gendered discourse is particularly evident in his attacks on
William Henderson and Philip Hale, the two
majorAmerican critics who championedParker
and praised Hora Novissima as a masterpiece.
Ives states that Henderson's ears "have been
massaged over and over and over again so nice
by the same sweet, consonant, evenly repeated
sequences and rhythms, and all the soft processes in an art 85 percent emasculated,"7"
while
Hale is dismissed as "a nice and dear old lady
in Boston (with pants on, often) who sells his
nice opinions about music and things to the
newspaper."75 In these and other instances,
72Ives's other final choral work, Psalm 90, incorporates
some of these early influences. The alternation of chorus
(sometimes in unison or octaves) and soloists in the work
suggests the form of Ives's early quartet anthems (such as
Easter Carol), while the concluding section combines the
simplicity of hymnody with the accessible choral writing
typical of The Celestial Country and his other conservative period works.
73Judith Tick, "Charles Ives and Gender Ideology," in Musicology and Difference, ed. Ruth Solie (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1993), pp. 104-05. See also Solomon, "Charles
Ives: Sorne Questions of Veracity," pp. 466-67; and Rossiter,
Ives and His America, pp. 42 and 162 for discussions of
Ives's gendered discourse.
74Ives, Memos, p. 31 (emphasis added).
75Ives,Memos, p. 28 (emphasis added). Although Ives never
directly critiques Parker using this terminology, several
passages in the Memos obliquely deride him as a "nice"
composer or professor. In one instance, Ives connects Parker
to the above engendered comments about Hale: "As one
routine-minded professor told me, 'In music [hymn tunes]
should have no place. Imagine, in a symphony, hearing
suggestions of street tunes like Marching through Georgia
or a Moody and Sankey hymn!-etc.'
Well, I'll say two
things here: (1) That nice professor of music is a musical
lily-pad (and also use the same remarks as about Aunt
Hale)" (Memos, p. 132, emphasis added).
Ives's comments are an obvious depiction of Parker's
dismissive attitudes toward American choral music that
Ives's gendered labels-including the terms

"nice" and "sweet" used in On the Antipodes-attack the musical establishment that endorsed and included Parker.76
The passage's links to Parkerare reinforced
through the discarded cantata text. In On the
Antipodes, Ives quoted the phrasethat was originally texted, in its entirety, "Forwardwhen in
childhood, Buds the infant mind, All through
youth and manhood, Not a thought behind."
This background image may reveal the aging
composer's retrospective glance-his "thought
behind"-to his own youth by quoting a product of his own "infant mind," a mind overly
influenced by Parker, as seen in the cantata's
modelings from Hora Novissima, and now thoroughly rebelling against him.
While both the originaland replacementtexts
invoke Parker,the musical style cleverly references Parker'santithesis, Dudley Buck. Of the
cantata's seven movements, only "Seek the
Things" is written for solo quartet and includes
explicit harmonic and melodic stylings associated with Buck's anthems, as mentioned above.
The close, chromatic harmonies that slide into
diminished sevenths (as at the end of m. 84),
and the parallel chromatic motion in thirds
prevail in passages such as "Buds the infant
mind" and are carefully preserved in the piano
accompaniment of the quotation in On the
Antipodes. Simultaneously, however, this
movement also contains the most extensive
modelings on Parker'sHora Novissima. In fact,
immediately preceding the quoted phrase is an
elaborate expansion of the signature feature of
Parker's oratorio, the - alternations, that
builds to a dynamic, harmonic, and registral (in
the accompaniment) climax (ex. 11) only to be
mentions one of his favorite targets, Moody and Sankey

tunes: as shown above, Parker's other favorite target, the
quartet choir, was often mentioned in conjunction with
gospel hymns.
76Naturally, Ives rarely describes his own music as "nice":
an exception is his dismissive discussion of the period
1908-10, where he associates being "nice" with "weakminded" and "retrogressive" compositions. "I'd have periods of being good and nice, and getting back to the usual
ways of writing, sometimes for several months, until I got
so tired of it that I decided I'd either have to stop music or
stop this. Some of the results of these weak-minded, retrogressive moments I can spot every time I look at the first
measure" (Memos, p. 126, emphasis added).
187
GAYLE
SHERWOOD
Ives and
Choral
Tradition
19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
72
A
for
ward
through
for
fight,
ward-...
for
ward
through
fight, _
for
for -
ward
through
ward
through
fight,_
34-
I3
ward
I[
for
fight,
for
_
..
ward
for
3-x
ward-
---
75
through
toil,
for
ward,
for
ward
S through
toil,
for
ward,
for
ward
through
toil,
for
ward,
for
ward
through
toil,
for
ward,
for
ward
_Z-
Example 11: Ives, The Celestial Country, "Seek the Things," mm. 72-83.
evaded by the unexpected appearance of the

quartet in close harmony: exactly the type of
startling stylistic juxtaposition that occurs between the traditional and modernist styles in
On the Antipodes, and that became a hallmark
of Ives's mature style.
In his recomposition of this passage in On

the Antipodes Ives conflates the two opposites
from the original cantata, the quartet choir of
Buck with its contemporary opposite, the academic Euro-Americanchoraltraditionof Parker.
Ives then compounded this stylistic multiplic-
188
78
poco rit. e cresc.
[f]
W.
the
through..
fight!
[ff1
[f]
the
through
through .-------
GAYLE
SHERWOOD
Ives and
Choral
Tradition
[ff]
fight!
[f]
[iff]
the
fight!
[f
the
through -----
[ff]1
fight!
poco rit. e cresc.
81
[Tempo I]
9 Ip
rall.
For
For
ward
when
in
ward
when
in
child
hood
hood
child
rall.
For
ward
when
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For
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[Tempo I]
Org.
444
q
Example 11 (continued)
ity by placing it within the modernist composition On the Antipodes, creating a synthesis of
contradictory characteristics: pragmatic, conservative, and progressive; amateur, academic,
and avant-garde;infancy, youth, and maturity.
These interactive layers, however, are lost with-
out a recognition of both the trajectoryof Ives's

own conservative period, and the diversity of
nineteenth-century American choral traditions.
For these reasons, Ives's The Celestial Country
should be of more interest to us than
has been previously realized.
,0%
L')
189

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"Buds the Infant Mind": Charles Ives's "The Celestial Country" and American Protestant Choral

Over the past two decades our view of the

Hirsch (piano) in New Music Quarterly Recordings,

Burkholder,All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses

Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music (New Haven,

Conn., 1985), and idem, The Evolution of Charles Ives's

Sherwood, The Choral Works of Charles Ives: Chronol-

ogy, Style, and Reception (Ph.D. diss., Yale University,

(between a shout and a drawl)

(as fast as it will go)

(as fast as it will go)

Example 1: Charles Ives, On the Antipodes, mm. 14-19.

donic disclaimer, accentuating their opposition

sLarry Starr, A Union of Diversities (New York, 1992), p.

6My identification of this quotation was first reported in

The Celestial Country was first performed on

7Kirkpatrick's vocal and piano edition was re-released by

uses the same metrical alternations as Parker's

10Yellin, review of The Celestial Country, p. 506. Yellin

a. "Naught that country needeth."

b. "Seek the Things."

c. "Forward flock of Jesus."

Example 4: Ives, The Celestial Country: Modelings on Parker, Hora Novissima.

"disturbed the academician," and Herbert

these well-worn themes are still common, as

key otherthanthe one at the start),andorderedIves

14Alan Rich, American Pioneers: Ives to Cage and Beyond

In sum, The Celestial Country re-emerged

had alreadywritten mature experimental works

after his graduation from Yale and his escape

music and anthems: a body of work almost

My revised chronology of Ives's early,

Ives's descriptionof the Center Church anthems

Cantata was commissioned

Selected Revised Datings of Ives's Choral Works, 1891-1901

IVES'S CHURCH POSITIONS

1891 5C16 Be Thou (1891-92)

5C6 Nine Exper. (1891-92)

5C18 I Come to Thee

1895 5C10 I Think (1895-96)

1896 5C11 Turn Ye

5C19 Easter Carol

St. Thomas's Episcopalian

Center Church on the

5C30 Ps. 24 (REVCAT)

5C25 Light That

For You (1895-96)

Selected Revised Datings of Ives's Choral Works, 1891-1901

1900 5C29 Ps. 25

5C36 Ps. 135 (AMGR)

1902 5A1 Celestial County (parts)

IVES'S CHURCH POSITIONS

Harvest II (before 1902)

5C27 Ps. 54 (1902-03)

5C36 Ps. 135 (1902-03)

his career. Buck's Variations on "Home Sweet

Solo quartets became so popular that some

the large majority of churches in Manhattan

32It is listed in the United States as early as 1861, in The

In keeping with the American Protestant

simply had the quartetat the morningserviceand

33Listings vary in detail, with the most extensive entries

Griggs.Wehada rehearsaleveryweek,andthe membersof the chorusreceivedlessonsin return.Wehad

35Interview with Lewis Bronson, 28 July 1969, transcribed