A Civil War Requiem/ SATB/speakers/piano

Program Notes: A Civil War Requiem (World Premiere) SATB/one male, one female speaker/piano Duration c. 20 minutes (appropriate for college/professional/ambitious community choirs)

 

Charles Ives’ Second Piano Concerto (“Concord”) is a forty-five minute monument of American music. Most American music before Ives was simply a regurgitation of European styles- Ives was our first truly original and very American composer. In his large-scale works he layering American folk tunes, hymns, marching band music, and popular songs in a way wholly his own. The Piano Sonata is no exception to this layering and use of musical parody – the fate theme from Beethoven Fifth Symphony (as well as Stephen Foster songs, and much more) figures prominently in the sonata’s musical portrayal of the Transcendentalist American poets (Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, the Alcotts) from an oasis of literary culture spanning the years 1840-1860. The Civil War came and destroyed much of that American literary beauty and hope. Gradually I began thinking that there might be some way to recompose Ives’ very American piano sonata as a choral/piano work (and thus, in a sense parodying a bit of Ives’ own parodies) by weaving high quality Civil War texts into it. Working in this, to me, new way of composing/recomposing was a challenge- but I believe fitting the puzzle together succeeded, and the sonata, newly welded with compelling poetry, portrays an epically tragic world, which nonetheless also contains some elements of a strange beauty.

 

 

The poem by Melville was written in 1859, just after the John Brown uprising in the beautiful small town of Shenandoah, which was quelled by none other than Robert E. Lee. John Brown’s ideas and actions embodied much that was right and much that was wrong about America in 1859. The piano introduction opens with the quote which appears throughout the entire Ives Concord Sonata, the well-known four note “Fate” theme from the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The piano introduction proceeds to paint an oddly beautiful world- but one whose slightly dissonant tone suggests turmoil ahead.

 

 

Melville’s miniature masterpiece of realism, Shiloh: A Requiem, was created from first-hand reports of the first large-scale battle of the war. We arrive after the battle to survey the swallows skimming over the wounded, dying, and dead. Broken bodies and souls from both sides of the conflict are all mixed together at the little wooden church of Shiloh. Most of the Ives music used for this movement (quite Debussy-like) is strangely placid, as if the post-battle scene were being viewed from above by the swallows or by a floating out-of-body soul.

 

 

When I came across this rather maniacal poem I though it was just the product of the imagination of a fervently partisan Southern poet. After some research I learned that in1862 General Beauregard actually pleaded with people in the south to provide any metal they could to help the war effort, the South being short on important raw resources. Beauregard’s request, turned into poetry by F.T. Rockett, was not ignored. Many a church bell was melted down and turned into artillery. The music here is angular, strident, and unrelenting.

 

 

Freed black men fighting for the Union turned the tide at many later moments of the war. Captain Thomas Wentworth Higginson was the commander of the first such regiment, the First South Carolina Volunteers. Higginson recorded much of the black soldiers’ daily camp life, including the songs the former slaves sang. I Wanna Go Home was one such song, and its opening notes happen to virtually fit the Beethoven Fate Theme.

 

 

The piano interlude starts at roughly the midpoint of Ives’ lyrical portrait of the Alcott family. In fact, Ives scholars call this simple melody the “family” motif, an idea about as quaintly “American” as one could be, I suppose. However, I chose to use the violation of this melody, as poetic recitations of violent images (fragments of Whit man’s “The Wound Dresser” and Emily Dickinson’s “The Name of it- is Autumn”) are layered over it, to actually represent the loss of life and loss of family caused by the war. The two poems clash and compete with each other, as well as combining to overwhelm the simple piano melody. The piano careens into dissonance, but then fairly quickly rights itself and enters into the final chorally-set poetry; Walt Whitman’s “Look Down, Fair Moon”. This poetry, while still holding disturbing images, is Whitman’s plea to the universe for mercy and peace. The majestic Ives music here is the grand apotheosis of the Concord sonata. The variation here of the fate theme is in a wholly major key and often turns upward instead of downward- a musical signification of hope. The enormous block-chords quickly fade away into a final simple, yet truly sublime, cadence.

 

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