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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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TG 1792: Zelensky Presents Plan To "Save" Moldova And Transnistria

George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss the Ukraine-provoked energy crisis in Moldova and Transnistria, and President Zelensky's selfless plan to solve it by donating coal and expertise to the people of Transnistria.

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TG 1791: Belarus's Lukashenko Wins Seventh Presidential Term

George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss Alexander Lukashenko's sixth successful presidential re-election victory in Belarus, and wonder about the curiously lackluster response to it from the West's usual suspects.

00:29:40
TG 1790: Trump Advocates Ethnic Cleansing Of Gaza

George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss President Trump's impromptu news conference on Air Force One, during which he revealed that his ideas as to the future of Gaza are very close to those of the most extreme members of the current Israeli government.

00:42:21
January 16, 2025
Monday Night At The Movies

Please choose which one of the following 8 movies you would like to have screened next Monday, Jan. 27. The theme is "wrongful accusation of sex crimes."

Please continue to vote after Jan. 20, so that we can determine the runner-up. The runner-up will be screened on Feb. 3.

Monday Night At The Movies: "A Passage To India" (1984)

Dear Gagglers:

Monday is, and has always been, a profoundly depressing day. That's why we have decided to add a little bit of fun to it.

On Monday, Jan. 27, we are holding another film screening. Gagglers can watch a movie and, as they do so, offer comments, random thoughts, aesthetic observations and critical insights in the Live Chat.

We will be screening the winner of The Gaggle's "cinema and false sexual accusations" movie poll: David Lean's 1984 Oscar-winning masterpiece "A Passage to India," based on the novel by E.M. Forster, and starring Judy Davis, James Fox, Peggy Ashcroft and Alec Guinness.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087892/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_a%2520passage%2520to%2520india
The film will starts at 3 p.m. ET sharp.

Please continue to vote in the poll. We will be screening the runner-up on Feb. 3.

See you at the movies.

Tom Luongo going off the Deep End again. Making derogatory comments about something he knows almost NOTHING about & has made NO EFFORT to understand. I am expecting more of this Q-Anon-style rhetoric from Trump-Delusion-Syndrome victims like Luongo going forward. His type will fade into irrelevance in terms of influence eventually if he continues on this path of utter fantasy which is in no way grounded in reality.

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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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