Charles Ives’s Use of Quartertones:

Are They Structural or Expressive?

By
Peter Thoegersen
 Charles Ives’s Use of Quartertones: Are They Structural or Expressive?

The topic statement just presented will be the entire subject of this discussion.

There will not be any lengthy meanderings into the life or biography of Ives or his family

(except for his father) except to a superficial extent, nor for that matter, is this a report of

a chronology of his works. In fact this paper is not even an analysis of any musical works

in particular, but rather, a survey of Ives’s usage of quartertone in the few pieces that he

did employ them: The Universe Symphony, Three Quartertone Pieces, and The 4th

Symphony (used only in the class presentation as an example of how Ives actually

notated quartertones in his scores). Therefore, this is a study of Ives’s attitude towards

quartertones and how they began to take a prominent place in his musical life as he grew

older.

Ives believed that future generations would sing in quartertones using a uniform

system (Block: 104). The reason for this is that Ives grew up with a very experimental

musician for a father thus yielding a very liberal household in which radical ideas were

fostered and enjoyed. George Ives, Charles Ives’s father, a Union Army bandmaster and

trumpeter, became fascinated with quartertones and made experiments with twenty-four

violin strings where each string was tuned a quartertone apart when Charles Ives was a

child. George Ives would pick out quartertone melodies and then teach them to his family

where young Charlie thought of this as punishment, at first, but began to appreciate it as

time marched on (Ives: 110). George Ives instilled in Charles Ives his lifelong search for

a quartertone harmonic system that almost came to an astonishing fruition in the latter’s

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works at their summit. Eventually Ives would come to the conclusion that quartertone

chords had to be developed before melodies would make any sense; these chords had to

contain four pitches: two from the old twelve-tone set and two from the new twenty-four

tone set. This would ensure that no system would take over and thus produce an “out of

tune” and imbalanced chord (Ives: 111).

Ives believed that the assimilation of quartertones into the common practice

harmonic paradigm would be along harmonic lines and opposite to the way the common

practice system had developed (Ives:109-110). The common practice harmonic plan

came to light by way of independent horizontal lines eventually lining up vertically and

then harmonizing in thirds, sixths, fifths and octaves, where the harmonic development

came as a byproduct. Ives believed that the opposite would be true for quartertones: that

the harmonic material would generate its own melodies. Ives came to discover that the

limited resources of having only twelve pitches and a handful of intervals restricted the

organic flow of music. Diatonic chords simply did, and do, not give many choices,

according to Ives (Ives: 115).

Ives had read Helmholtz, a German acoustician, and had come to believe that “the

system of scales does not rest solely upon unalterable natural laws but is at least partly

the result of aesthetic principles which are subject to eternal change with the progressive

growth of humanity.” (Ives:108) But Ives did not need Helmholtz in order to come to a

conclusion such as this; Ives was strong enough to endure the negative reaction of new

harsh dissonances. One must take into account that Ives was a Transcendentalist like

Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau, and that Ives was a very spiritual man-not religious, but

‘spiritual’-such that Ives equated the quartertones to a type of spiritual growth and

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enhancement. Ives was relating quartertones to the prospect of amplifying spiritual

consciousness (Ives: 109).

Ives always relied on the judgment of his finely tuned ear (Ives: 105). There is

also the very meticulous and mathematical Ives who planned every pitch relationship out

to the fullest detail. In Three Pieces for Quartertone Piano, Ives used quartertone lines

against syncopated accompaniment in the first piece entitled Largo. Although primarily

diatonic, Largo uses passing tones and suspensions in quartertones with some quartertone

chordal extensions in the middle section. The second piece, Allegro, is mainly a compare

and contrast them between two pianos tuned a quartertone apart. The last piece, Chorale,

is based on a more integrated quartertone harmonic plan. This piece makes use of Ives

concepts of Fundamental, or Primary quartertone chords, and Secondary quartertone

chords. The cantus firmus in Chorale is comprised of quartertone lines expanding to

semitones and eventually whole tones thus revealing a wedge shaped harmonic structural

design (Ives: 119). Ives collaborated with Hans Barth, a piano manufacturer, to construct

a single two layer quartertone keyboard that would alleviate the problem of detuning a

grand piano as well as avoid pushing around two pianos instead of one. A performance of

Three Pieces was arranged by Pro-Musica to be played at Town Hall in 1925 (Cowell:

101) and the reception was terrible as people laughed and rioted.

Shoptalk:

Charles Ives in his explorations had discovered that there were two types of

chords that quartertone harmonies could use: Primary and Secondary. Primary chords had

to be more settled and less restless while secondary chords had to be restless and less

settled. Ives therefore found that a primary chord containing the notes C-G-D quarter #-A

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quarter # would work quite well since it contains two fifths from each of the two differing

scales (Ives: 112). Another example of a primary chord is C-G-E quarter #-B quarter #

(Ives: 113). If there was only one representative from a scale without its perfect fifth

partner, the tonality would go in favor of the scale featuring the fifths making the “triad”

sound out of tune, so that is why there are two sets fifths comprising at least four notes to

a primary quartertone chord. Secondary chords, according to Ives, should be comprised

of five notes with smaller intervals where the intervals are equal and are five quarter-

steps apart. The second pitch should be an octave higher (Ives: 114) and is not considered

an inversion. Ives also makes note of tertiary chords which would consist of 9, 5, and

then 5 again, quarter-step intervals which would lead further away from the secondary

chords.

Ives adored equal interval chords, which predates Bartok’s preoccupation with

them. Equal intervallic music in its transformations looks to the eye as a wedge shaped

pattern-a feature in the music of Bartok. Ives also loved the whole tone scale, which

contains the augmented triad, and he used the augmented triad as a vehicle for

quartertone harmony. The way Ives did this was to play successive augmented triads on

each piano scaling up three or four octaves beginning on C, then C#, D, and D#

(Lambert: 81). Quartertone clusters (Helena: 1) were also a staple of the Ivesian harmonic

repertoire, which predates Henry Cowell’s notion of clusters, for which he became

famous.

In terms of motivic development, Ives needed a resource that would disallow

literal repetition (Ives: 115). Quartertones with their greatly expanded intervallic potential

offered Ives a valuable solution. In addition to motivic problems with diatonic harmony,

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Ives further found that all parallel motion was just as valid as contrary motion in

quartertone harmony-in direct contrast to diatonic harmony (Ives: 118).

Ives was a cyclic composer. Interval cycles played a very large part in his

harmonic language. The unfinished Universe Symphony featured combination cycles to

their limits. An Ives cycle could begin with open fifths, and then alternate with the next

chromatic interval before settling on that interval. Then the new interval, say a tritone,

would then intermingle with a perfect fourth before settling on the perfect fourth, and so

on. This is called cyclic writing, but it can be done only with select intervals: fifths,

fourths, minor seconds, and major sevenths. All other intervals, in the modular twelve

system, will map onto themselves, which defeats the purpose (Lambert: 160). Ives

completely broke the mold when he began planning his Universe Symphony. The U Sym,

as Ives called it, contained twenty-four chordal structures from which twenty-four

divisions of the orchestra would play simultaneously. Ives laid out his chords on an

incrementally rising quartertone scale, from C to c, where the first chord consisted of

perfect fifths and gradually diminishing in intervals through perfect fourths, thirds,

semitones, and ultimately a quartertone cluster (Lambert: 200).

Not only are the quartertones in Ives’s oeuvre structural, they are also very

expressive. Ives showed that with quartertones, the meaning of expression could be

multiplied in an almost geometrical sense thus adding to the breadth of expression this

gave to his music (Perlis: 74).

The basis for all music is a mixture of intervals over time. The common practice

period has short-circuited the growth of music. Even in the renaissance, Huygens, a

Dutch composer, had been experimenting with 31 tones to the octave. Bach offered a way

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out of modes, but the narrow-mindedness of the classical tradition locked us squarely in

its maw and has not let go for over two hundred years. Ives is actually Bach’s true

successor: where Bach had proceeded to give the world key changes via cycles of fifths,

Ives tried to expand it further with quartertones.

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 Bibliography

Block, Geoffrey, ed. Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition, Yale University Press

New Haven, Connecticut, 1996

Cowell, Henry Charles Ives and his Music, Oxford University Press, New York

NY, 1955

Ives, Charles Essays Before a Sonata, the Majority, and other Writings,

WW Norton & Company, Inc. New York, NY 1962

Ives, Charles Symphony #4, Associated Music Publishers, Inc., New York, NY

1965

Lambert, Philip The Music of Charles Ives, Yale University Press, New Haven,

CT, 1997

Perlis, Vivian Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History, Yale University Press

New Haven, CT, 1974