IVES: Three Quarter-Tone Pieces / Five Take-Offs / Hallowe'en / Sunrise

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IVES: Three Quarter-Tone Pieces / Five Take-Offs / Hallowe'en / Sunrise album cover
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EDITOR'S PICK

Total Tracks: 17   Total Length: 48:55

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Gavin Borchert

eMusic Contributor

Gavin Borchert is a composer and music critic living in Seattle.

04.22.11
Continuum takes on one of America’s most inventive composers.
Label: Naxos

This atmospheric song, sensitively performed by members of the new-music group Continuum, is Ives'wistful remembrance of a Massachusetts stream he and his wife Harmony loved to stroll along. (It was later reworked as one of the movements in his orchestral Three Places in New England.) In this song we hear lapping waves and gently dissonant glints of light on the water's surface; Ives's experiments in unprecedented harmonic and rhythmic complexity are here used in the service of delicate landscape painting — in a style not far removed from the overtly avant-garde works also on this disc, like the exuberant chaos of his In Re Con Moto et al or the strange, tart new flavor of his Three Quarter-Tone Pieces.

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spinal thrills

kip-w

Thanks to emusic, I was finally able to hear Ives's quarter-tone pieces, for two pianos tuned one half of a half-step apart. They're just as odd as I could have hoped for. To my 20th century ears, something seems a bit off, and I have a hard time detecting where a given note is, but that's what I signed on for -- to be mystified. I hope to listen to these three pieces over and over until I can actually follow what's going on. Then I can decide if I really like them or not!

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