String Quartet No. 1 (Ives)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
String Quartet No. 1 is a musical composition by Charles Ives. Music historian and theorist Robert P. Morgan wrote that the quartet "was Ives's first mature composition of extended length, and its extraordinary fluency gives ample evidence of his solid control of traditional musical techniques. Moreover, the work is considerably more than a facile exercise based on classical models; there are already indications of the Ives to come, in the extensive quotations and, above all, in the composer's ability to bend the form to suit the idiosyncrasies of his own musical inclinations."[1]
The quartet, subtitled "From the Salvation Army" and "A Revival Service,"[2] was written in 1896, while Ives was a sophomore at Yale, and was composed under the supervision of Ives's teacher Horatio Parker.[1] Three of the movements have their origins in pieces for organ and strings originally played at a revival service, and were based on gospel hymns.[3] After arranging these for string quartet, Ives prepended a fugue written for Parker's counterpoint class to create a four-movement work.[4]
In 1909, Ives removed the first movement and began orchestrating it for inclusion in what would become his Fourth Symphony. He also renumbered the remaining movements, originally II, III, and IV, as I, II, and III. Ives's work list dated 1937–50 lists the quartet in its three-movement form: "Prelude, Offertory, and Postlude."[5]
After Ives's death, John Kirkpatrick discovered the original opening movement in the collection of manuscripts bequeathed to Yale, and reattached it to the quartet.[1] This alteration has not been met with universal approval: composer Bernard Hermann, who worked with Ives and conducted a number of his pieces, disagreed with Kirkpatrick's decision, stating: "I still don't know where Kirkpatrick got that fugue which he tacked on, but that's his business. It belongs to the Fourth Symphony. I don't think it fits the First Quartet at all."[6] Ives biographer Jan Swafford wrote: "Ives was probably right to remove the fugue - except in the general sense of being based on a revival hymn, it has no stylistic or thematic connection with the other movements, and it throws off the overall key scheme... And Kirkpatrick was wrong to put it back - as if Ives had no right to revise, and improve, his own music. Performances of the quartet the way Ives intended it will reveal a tighter, more effective piece. The fugue, too spacious and sonorous for a string quartet anyway, belongs in the Fourth Symphony..."[7]
The first documented complete performance of the quartet took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City on April 24, 1957. It was played, in its three-movement form, by the Kohon String Quartet, who also issued the first recording of the work in 1963 (Vox STDL-501120).[8] The quartet was first published in 1961 by Peer International, in a score which includes all four movements.[9]
