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January 26, 2025
The Gaggle Music Club: Charles Ives's "Three Places In New England"

This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Charles Ives's "Three Places in New England."

Ives composed the piece between 1911 and 1914, and revised the work multiple times until its final orchestration in 1929. The composition reflects Ives’s fascination with memory, place and the emotional resonance of the American landscape, blending his experimental approach to harmony, rhythm and musical structure with deeply personal and historical inspirations.

Each movement of Three Places in New England is tied to a specific location and narrative:

1. The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment)

Inspired by Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Boston Common memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first African-American regiment to fight for the Union during the Civil War. Ives portrays the solemn heroism of these soldiers, emphasizing themes of dignity and tragedy.

2. Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut

A nostalgic reflection on childhood and patriotism, this movement recalls a Revolutionary War camp in Connecticut. It is filled with humor and chaos as it depicts a child's vision of patriotic parades, military exercises and imagined historical events.

3. The Housatonic at Stockbridge

Based on Ives’s honeymoon experience walking along the Housatonic River in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The serene setting is interwoven with reflections on nature, spirituality and the passage of time, creating a highly impressionistic soundscape.

"Three Places in New England" demonstrates Ives's innovative use of polytonality, polyrhythm and collage techniques. Each movement showcases different stylistic features that highlight Ives’s synthesis of American folk traditions, hymn tunes and experimentalism.

The composition was an important stage in Ives’s exploration of "American-ness" in music. The piece exemplifies many of Ives's characteristic traits. For example, Ives incorporates hymn tunes, patriotic songs, and folk material into the orchestral texture, blending high art and vernacular traditions in a way that was unprecedented at the time.

In addition, the work exemplifies Ives's groundbreaking techniques in polytonality complex layering, and rhythmic innovation. They placed the composition at the forefront of modernism. Despite this complexity, the piece retains a deeply personal and emotional core, grounded in Ives's love of America and his memories of New England.

Critical responses to "Three Places in New England" evolved significantly over time, reflecting broader changes in the reception of Charles Ives's music. Initially, Ives's music struggled to gain widespread recognition due to its unconventional techniques, dense textures and radical approach to form and tonality. Early performances of "Three Places in New England" were rare, but when the work was introduced to audiences in the 1930s and 1940s, reactions were mixed.

Some critics and musicians dismissed Ives's music as unpolished or overly chaotic. They viewed his use of quotation and layering as amateurish or a failure to adhere to traditional compositional norms. Others, however, began to recognize the originality and emotional depth of the work, praising its adventurous spirit and the uniquely American character it conveyed.

As Ives's stature as a pioneering American composer grew in the mid-20th century, "Three Places in New England" came to be seen as a major contribution to modernist music. By the 1960s and 1970s, conductors such as Leonard Bernstein and Leopold Stokowski regularly performed Ives's orchestral works, thereby ensuring that pieces such as "Three Places" gained critical and academic attention.

"Three Places in New England" stands as one of Ives's seminal works, bridging his experimental chamber music, such as"The Concord Sonata," and his later orchestral masterpieces, such as "The Unanswered Question" and Symphony No. 4. The work encapsulates his belief in music as a vehicle for memory, transcendence and reflection on the American experience, making it a cornerstone of early 20th-century American music.

The work here was performed in May 18, 2017, by Ensemble intercontemporain, under the direction of Matthias Pintscher

00:21:54
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Monday Night At The Movies: "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold" (1965)

"The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" starts at 3 p.m. ET sharp.
Share all of your thoughts, comments and criticisms on the Live Chat.

01:52:25
The Gaggle Music Club: Mahler's Symphony No. 6 in A minor

This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 6 in A minor. Composed between 1903 and 1904, the Sixth Symphony is one of Mahler’s darkest and most tragic works. He called it his "Tragic Symphony", and its tone contrasts starkly with the love and stability he seemed to have found in his personal life at the time.

Mahler was at the peak of his career as a conductor, serving as the director of the Vienna Court Opera. He had recently married Alma Schindler and, in 1903, their first daughter, Maria, was born. Alma later wrote that the symphony foreshadowed the tragedies that would strike their lives. Maria, died in 1907; in that same year, Mahler was diagnosed with a heart condition, and was forced out from the from the Vienna Court Opera. (Later that year, he and his family left Vienna for America, where he became the conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.)

The symphony premiered in Essen, Germany, in 1906, conducted by Mahler himself. It was not well ...

01:29:16
TG 1849: In The Land Of "Values," Arrest Warrants Are Issued Against Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik

George Szamuely discusses the arrest warrants that have been issued against Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, and reflects on the profoundly anti-democratic ethos that now prevails in the continent that prides itself on its "values."

01:07:15
10 hours ago

I can still hear that piece of shit grifter 'former' CIA Larry 'bin Laden did 9/11 from a cave in Afghanistan' Johnson grifting how the US has not one working ammunition factory left and the Russians will do this and that...
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/defense-industry-winners-and-losers-amid-trump-tariffs/ According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the U.S. has only extended its lead in weapons exports over the past four years. Between 2015 and 2019, it accounted for 35 percent of global weapons exports; from 2020 to 2024, that figure rose to 43 percent. And for the first time since the 1990s, Europe was the number one regional destination for U.S. exports. (The Middle East ranked second.)

World War Now:
🇺🇸⚡️- US Senate is poised to strip President Trump of the power to implement tariffs without Congressional approval. This will be the first major limiting of executive power in decades.

🇧🇦 🇷🇸- Interpol rejects Bosnian ...

April 01, 2025

The United States can’t export anything because we are ripped off by everyone”.

We are the 2nd largest exporter on earth, and in terms of profitability of our exports we are by far the largest exporter on earth.

Nobody does this better than us.

No one.

Now go back to Breitbart and doomscroll away. https://x.com/SpencerHakimian/status/1906854292079653022

Trump was installed into office because he can sell to the American public what others can't: the digital control grid & war.

In fact, if it comes from Trump (and Elon), many otherwise conservative Americans will actively cheer their own destruction or enslavement. https://x.com/BradMiller1010/status/1906717173638217728

10 hours ago

What happened to peace on day one? :)))) what a fucking scumbag grifter and how many idiots fell for it again :))
World War Now:
🇶🇦🇵🇸🇮🇱⚡- "Israeli billionaire Shlomi Fogel, who is considered to be close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, helped coordinate cash transfers from the government of Qatar to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which were carried out with Israel's approval.

This policy strengthened Hamas, and maintained the split between Gaza the Palestinian Authority run West Bank, thereby undermining the possibility of a unified Palestinian entity, plus a two-state solution," - Haaretz.

🇺🇸🇮🇷⚡- "Trump administration is seriously considering Iran’s offer for indirect nuclear talks while boosting military forces in the region to maintain both diplomatic and deterrent pressure. Trump does not want a war with Iran, but has given the Middle East nation a vague two-month deadline to strike a deal," - Axios.

🇺🇸🇷🇺🇺🇦⚡- "Senior Trump ...

January 21, 2023
More Leftie Than Thou
"Jacobin" Magazine Celebrates A Strike Against Ol' Blue Eyes

Here at "The Gaggle" we have very little time for the "more Leftie than thou" school of thought--that's the approach to life according to which the only thing that matters is whether you take the right position on every issue under the sun from Abortion to Zelensky. No one in the world meets the exacting standards of this school of thought; any Leftie leader anywhere is always selling out to the bankers and the capitalists. The perfect exemplar of this is the unreadable Jacobin magazine. 

The other day I came across this article from 2021. It's a celebration of trade union power. And not simply trade union power, but the use of trade union power to secure political goals. Of course (and this is always the case with the "more Leftie than thou" crowd), this glorious, never-to-be-forgotten moment on the history of organized labor took place many years ago--in the summer of 1974 to be exact. Yes, almost half a century has gone by since that thrilling moment when the working-class movement of Australia mobilized and prepared to seize the means of production, distribution and exchange. 

Well, not quite. Organized labor went into action against...Ol' Blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, the Voice; yes, Frank Sinatra. Why? What had Sinatra done? Sinatra was certainly very rich, and he owned a variety of properties and businesses. But if the Australian trade union movement were, understandably, searching for the bright, incandescent spark that would finally awaken the working class from its slumber there were surely richer, greedier, more dishonest, more decadent, above all more Australian individuals it could have discovered. Australia was never short of them. Rupert Murdoch immediately springs to mind. Why Sinatra?

 

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