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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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The Gaggle Music Club: Sibelius’s Symphony No. 1

This week's selection for The Gaggle is Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 1 in E minor, Op. 39.

Composed between 1898 and 1899, Sibelius’s First Symphony was written in the political and cultural context of growing Finnish nationalism. Sibelius had already garnered fame with works like Kullervo (1892) and the Lemminkäinen Suite (1895), both based on Finnish mythology.

Kullervo, composed in 1892, was a massive choral symphony based on the Kalevala (Finland’s national epic). It consists of five movements, featuring baritone and soprano soloists, male chorus and large orchestra. Though labeled a "symphony," it is closer in spirit to Wagnerian music drama than to a traditional symphony.

Lemminkäinen Suite, composed in 1895, consisted of a cycle of four symphonic tone poems, including the famous The Swan of Tuonela. Like Kullervo, it was based on the Kalevala legends, centered on the roguish figure of Lemminkäinen. The work is rich in exotic orchestration and mood-painting, but episodic in structure. ...

00:40:46
TG 1872: Trump & Houthis Reach Ceasefire Deal: Now What?

George Szamuely discusses the ceasefire agreement, announced by President Trump, between the United States and the Houthis of Yemen, and wonders what it might portend for peace prospects in the Middle East as a whole.

00:31:48
Live Chat
Monday Night At The Movies: "Go Tell The Spartans" (1978)

Join Gagglers for "Go Tell The Spartans"!
The screening starts at 3 p.m. ET sharp.
Share all of your thoughts, comments and criticisms on the Live Chat.

01:52:05
Monday Night At The Movies

Please choose which one of the following 8 movies you would like to have screened next Monday, May 12.

The theme is "British films of the 1970s."

Please continue to vote after May 12, so that we can determine the runner-up. The runner-up will be screened on May 19.

World War Now:
🇷🇺🇺🇦⚡- BREAKING: Ukrainian forces have landed on the left-bank of Dnieper river - Russian front-line sources confirm to Rerum Novarum.

🇷🇺🇺🇦⚡- Russian military journalists are confirming the Ukrainian crossing of the Dnieper too.

Meanwhile, idiot zanon grifters bask in their glory of wins that Vucic went to Moscow and Putin supports Venezuela's entry into the meaningless Brics :))))

11 hours ago

World War Now:
🇺🇸🇷🇺🇺🇦⚡- BREAKING: "Russia can’t expect to be given territory they haven’t even conquered yet," - JD Vance US Vice President, declares the US will not support an agreement for the entirety of Zaporozhye, Kherson, Donetsk and Lugansk, which Russia has yet to capture fully.

🇺🇸🇷🇺🇺🇦⚡- "Our attitude is we don’t want Ukraine to collapse. We obviously want Ukraine to remain a sovereign country," - JD Vance, US Vice President.

🇺🇸🇷🇺🇺🇦⚡- "What would bother me is if we conclude that the Russians are not engaging in good faith, and if that happens, yeah, we're going to walk away," - JD Vance, US Vice President.

🇺🇸📞🇮🇳🇵🇰❗️ — US Vice President JD Vance says India-Pakistan conflict is 'fundamentally none of our [American] business and has nothing to do with America’s ability to control it'.

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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