UDC 78.071.1
DOI: 10.36871/hon.202403053
Authors
Daria A. Barabanova,
Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Moscow, 125009, Russian Federation
Abstract
The article is devoted to studying the music of one of the founders of American national music, Charles Ives (1874–1954). Charles Ives was an outstanding American composer, organist and Pulitzer Prize winner. In the context of traditional music, Ives’s piano style gains freshness and innovation through the use of modern writing techniques. On the example of Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for piano (1925), the article traces exactly how traditional and innovative compositional features are reflected in Ives’s work. In these pieces, the composer imposes a new technique of quarter-tone writing based on microtonal and microchromatic intervals. In addition to innovative compositional techniques, Ives employs traditional techniques such as symmetrical episodes, palindromes, whole-tone scales, quotations from American and French national anthems and patriotic songs. The theoretical material used for the publication is the composer’s article “Some Quarter-Tone Impressions”, an important document in which Ives gives a theoretical justification for his innovative quarter-tone system. The article was first published in March 1925 in the Franco-American Musical Society Bulletin. Ives’s article has never before been published in Russian.
Keywords
Charles Ives, American music, modern compositional technique, twentieth century music, innovation, performance, microchromatics, quarter-tone writing
