Piano Trio

Though privately played in New York around 1920, Charles Ives’ Piano Trio received its first public performance at Baldwin-Wallace College on 24 May 1948. We are fortunate to have a firsthand guide, an insider’s perspective on how the piece works and what it may signify. In a letter dated 22 April 1948 Ives’ wife wrote to a performer involved in that public premiere:

The Trio was, in a general way, a kind of reflection or impression of his college days on the [Yale] Campus now 50 years ago. The first movement recalled a rather short but serious talk, to those on the Yale fence, by an old professor of Philosophy—the second, the games and antics by the Students on the Campus, on a Holiday afternoon, and some of the tunes and songs of those days were partly suggested in this movement, sometimes in a rough way. The last movement was partly a remembrance of a Sunday service on the campus…which ended near the ‘Rock of Ages.’ It was composed mostly in 1904 but fully completed in 1911.

The Trio is a complex and challenging work (one might expect nothing less from Ives), but buried in the density of harmonic action are echoes of familiar formal principles, such as the return of the opening theme to signal the imminent close of the first movement. Ives has often been called a “pastiche” composer, which pertains here to the juxtaposition of strikingly dissonant harmonies (particularly diminished 7ths, 9ths, and octaves) followed by a series of major triads. Ives was also noted for his interest in weaving ambient noise into his compositions. (This comes through clearly in the frat-song jumble of the second movement.) I think he would be pleased by how exactly the C-major resonance of the first movement’s final sonority matches, as I listen to it just now, the whistle of a train passing through Staunton station.
The second movement, a scherzo with the curious title “TSIAJ,” quotes snatches from over fifteen identifiable folksongs and college tunes, as well as a few that have not been positively identified. It makes for a whirling cacophony of frat songs, chromatic slithering in the cello, and drum-like thumping clusters in the piano. Here everyone—from performers to listeners—gets a direct introduction to Ives’ genius for making the comic dance alongside the surreal. Details such as classical ornamentation (turns, trills) are placed within vertical sonorities than border on complete atonality.
The haunting finale returns to the dissonant intervals that played a prominent role in the first movement, and Ives even goes so far as to indicate da capo (“to the beginning”) and repetition of large passages of the central section, as in many Baroque forms. Two challenges for the listener (in addition to trying to name and pick out all fifteen songs quoted in the Scherzo!): first, listen for Ives’ quotation from “Rock of Ages” in the finale’s coda—it’s in the cello; and second, take a guess what the second movement’s title, TSIAJ, might mean. If you want Ives’ own answer, look on the last page of this program.

(c) Jason Stell