Jeremy Denk plays Charles Ives and Blind Tom Wiggins - a pleasing conjunction of Wuthering Expectations stuff

More Massachusetts semi-literay adventures.

Last weekend I was at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, enjoying Jeremy Denk’s performance of insurance executive Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata (c. 1913).  It was a pleasing congruence of Wuthering Expectations themes.  I have nothing to say about it in particular, but I will, I guess, register that I was there.

I wrote about the Concord Sonata a decade ago, one of a number of posts of Little Women.  The piano sonata’s third movement, among the most beautiful in the piano repertoire, is “The Alcotts,” where Ives imagines the sisters, in particular Beth, the real Beth, but in this exercise what distinction is there from the fictional one, at the piano, wandering through Beethoven’s fifth symphony, hymns, Scottish songs, and whatever enters her head.  I included a link, still working, to Denk’s performance of the movement.

The earlier movements are “Emerson” and “Hawthorne,” the last the contemplative “Thoreau,” all with programs of some kind.  “Thoreau” is a day at Walden Pond; “Emerson” is, well “Emerson” Is a thorny one but let’s say an imitation of his thought, and “Hawthorne” is a collage of his stories, including “The Celestial Railroad,” which I wrote about fifteen years ago.

I’ll interrupt myself to note that it was a pleasure to me, certainly, to hear the “Hawthorne” movement in a performance space literally named after a Nathaniel Hawthorne book.  Did I ever write about Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys (1853)?  I sure did. 

Denk’s performance of the “Hawthorne” movement was astounding.  I believe it has evolved over time.  At one point in the piece, Denk reached for a wooden plank, which allowed, or forced, him to play an entire section of the keyboard.  All the notes, all the dissonance, that is what Ives wanted.  This is all in the score.

Denk opened the concert with the once massively popular “Battle of Manassas” by “Blind Tom” Wiggins.  I wrote about Wiggins long ago because an avatar of him appears in My Ántonia.  Cather readers should try to hear what Wiggins played.  His music is full of surprises.  “Manassas” is a tone poem made up a collage of popular songs and massive chord clusters that sounds avant garde for now but was somehow a crowd pleaser at the time.  I wondered if someone would have to tune the piano after Denk was done pounding on it.  Someone did.

Wiggins is also the central character of Jeffrey Renard Allen’s 2014 novel The Song of the Shank, almost objectively the fifth best book, at least, of the last twenty-five years.  The trombonist, composer, and musicologist George Lewis has written, with Allen, a “monodrama” of Song of the Shank, described here, which I would love to hear someday.  Lewis was sitting almost directly in front of me.  Based on his enthusiastic movement he also particularly enjoyed the “Hawthorne” movement.  After the show I thanked him for his own music, decades of it.  He did not seem to mind the compliment.  This week I have been enjoying his 1979 Homage to Charles Parker (on Youtube here and here), and if you just want to hear him play the hard stuff go straight to Anthony Braxton’s Creative Orchestra Music 1976.

If you happen to be in New York City on December 12th and enjoy noisy, dissonant, beautiful music, do not miss Jeremey Denk’s next performance of the Concord Sonata.