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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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TG 1988: Nobel Committee, Trump Join Forces To Oust Maduro

George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss the well-developed plans to overthrow the government of Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro--plans that include the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Corina Machado--and wonder whether anything can save Venezuela from the U.S.-instigated coup.

00:54:24
TG 1987: Trump Prepares To Address Knesset, Chair Peace Conference In Egypt

George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss President Trump's upcoming speech in the Knesset as well as his co-chairmanship of a Middle East peace conference in Egypt, and wonder as to how well-founded the hopes for lasting peace are.

00:51:48
October 10, 2025
TG 1986: Polish PM Donald Tusk Endorses Terrorism

George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk's announcement that Poland has no intention of extraditing to Germany a Ukrainian suspected of blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines on the ground that what the man did was wholly commendable.

00:32:31
October 11, 2025
The Gaggle Book Club: "Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History Of The Second World War And Its Aftermath."

Each week, The Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is "Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath." Published posthumously in 2011, and edited by historian George H. Nash, the work encapsulates the former president's critique of U.S. foreign policy from the 1930s through the early years of the Cold War.

Often referred to as Hoover’s magnum opus, the book offers extensive historical, ideological and personal reflections. The book is informed by a distinct antipathy toward foreign interventionism and what today would be called “globalism.”

Hoover began what eventually became "Freedom ...

HOOVER_-_Freedom_Betrayed_(2011)_(1).pdf
Monday Night At The Movies: "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972)

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, Oct. 13, 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 runner-up in The Gaggle's "time, memory and discontinuity" poll: Luis Buñuel's comedic masterpiece from 1972, "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie," starring Stephane Audran, Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig and Bulle Ogier.

The film will starts at 3 p.m. ET sharp. Please join us.

See you at the movies.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068361/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_the%2520discreet

October 02, 2025
Monday Night At The Movies

Please choose which one of the following 8 movies you would like to have screened next Monday, Oct. 6.

The theme is "memory, time and discontinuity."

Please continue to vote after Oct. 6, so that we can determine the runner-up. The runner-up will be screened on Oct.13.

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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