This is an exceptionally important recording. Charles Ives intended his Universe Symphony to be the pinnacle of his pioneering compositional efforts, and all the original elements of the arch-maverick composer’s imagination are here: dense multi-layered textures, radical tuning structures, and transcendental artistic intentions. Missing are the trademark elements of melody–no quotations of pre-existing material–and rhythms: no marches, ragtime, waltzes, or barn dances. Ives leaves New England far behind and takes on the entire earth and its place in the cosmos.
By the early 1920s overwork and diabetes had wrecked Ives’ health (insulin treatment came along just in time to keep him alive three more decades), and thus he never was able to put his myriad sketches for the work in order. Larry Austin wrote a “realization” (available on Centaur), but it is essentially a 40-minute Austin composition using Ives’ ideas. This very different version is “edited” by Johnny Reinhard, who says it contains only Ives’ own notes, after these were transcribed and put into order by Yale University archivists.
Reinhard concluded that Ives intended a Pythagorean-based 21-tone “octave”. Since overtones in such a system tend to coincide with and affirm scale notes, Ives’ complex dissonances are cleaner, more transparent, and easier on the ear than they would be in a 12-note equal-tempered system. The vast dimensions of the universe in time and space is Ives’ topic. Built from so many strands of temporally unrelated music, and without melodic or rhythmic patterns to hook the ear, the very sound of the symphony is a metaphor for a universe beyond human understanding. Ives himself likened it to a “painting of Creation” and said it was “not music as such.”
And yet the interplay of percussion does guide the ear into the dense textures, which are the work’s foundation. Seeking maximum accuracy, Reinhard and his recordists James Rosenthal and Mike Thorne used a pop-music multi-track technique: 19 musicians made a total of 120 tracks that were blended into a stereo recording. This is probably the only approach that could ensure clean, accurate playing and balancing of all the parts. The resulting unresonant sound would not be welcome in a standard orchestral recording, but in this case it actually aids in picking out individual strands of music. The result is a noble and successful effort. Universe is far too specialized and difficult a composition to appeal to the average mainstream classical listener. But for connoisseurs of the most inventive and avant-garde music this is a recording well worth investigating.
