Thanksgiving According to Charles Ives

Jennie A. Brownscombe, The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth (1914)

—for Kyle Gann

Thanksgiving and Forefathers’ Day is the last of the four pieces included in Charles Ives’s A Symphony: New England Holidays. Ives provided no program note for the piece, but the score does bear a dedication to his brother-in-law, Edward Carrington Twichell (“Uncle Deac”):

The Fourth of July According to Charles Ives

Fourth of July Parade by Alfred Cornelius Howland, c. 1886

A doctor in the sanitarium looked at [the score] strangely, and assumed I was a patient.
—Charles Ives John Kirkpatrick, ed., Charles E. Ives, Memos 104]

Decoration Day According to Charles Ives

A Rainy Day in Camp (Winslow Homer, 1871)

Decoration Day is a masterpiece, with an ending that is the loneliest and one of the most touching I know of.
—attributed to Igor Stravinsky

Charles Ives wrote of his piece Decoration Day, the second of the four pieces included in his A Symphony: New England Holidays, that it “started as a brass band overture, but never got very far that way.” [John Kirkpatrick, ed., Charles E. Ives, Memos 101]

Washington’s Birthday According to Charles Ives

Washington and Lafayette at Valley Forge, John Ward Dunsmore (1907)

Charles Ives wrote of his piece Washington’s Birthday:

The first part of this piece is but to give the picture of the dismal, bleak, cold weather of a February night near New Fairfield [Connecticut] . . . . The middle part and the shorter last part are but kinds of refrains made up of some of the old barn-dance tunes and songs of the day . . . . As I remember some of these dances as a boy, and also from father’s description . . . there was more variety of tempo than in the present-day dances. In some parts of the hall a group would be dancing a polka, while in another a waltz, with perhaps a quadrille or lancers going on in the middle. . . . Sometimes the change in tempo and mixed rhythms would be caused by a fiddler who, after playing three or four hours steadily, was getting a little sleepy–or by another player who had been seated too near the hard cider barrel. [John Kirkpatrick, ed., Charles E. Ives Memos 96-97]