Word: tuned
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Connecticut bandmaster who'd fought in the Civil War, and who taught his son to rely on his own ears and himself. Charles Ives went to Yale, took some music courses but didn't like his teachers' insistence on doing things in traditional ways, continued to prefer out-of-tune psalms sung at camp meetings to romantic orchestrations played in concert halls, went out and became an insurance agent and then a partner in his own insurance agency. During the day Ives sold insurance, managed the firm, worked on a manual explaining how to induce potential customers to sit back...
...Ives all that was most progressive, most substantial, most radical--the "last sublime echoes of the greatest socialist symphonies" and "the relentlessness of fate knocking at the door." But in the third movement of the sonata, "The Alcotts," Ives made the four notes over, into an old hymn tune, as peaceful and completed as the camp-meeting songs his grandmother had sung. The tune recurs throughout the sonata, and always, after you've heard the whole piece once, with the same double resonance--which Ives said was single, "transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the cynic, respectively...
...another part of the sonata's power is the ineffable sadness of its last movement, when the four-note theme comes in for the last time on a flute--Thoreau's flute, Ives explained. The flute's been silent for the first three movements, and the tune comes in slowly and quietly, without preparation or roots, out of the blue. The sonata ends without a resolution. It is as though the old hymns couldn't stand against the bombast of fate knocking on the door. It is as though Ives had admitted that his father's world was gone...
...drive to build a kind of historical mythology out of the music of the recent American past. He sings of grifters and gamblers, outlaws and farmers, offers reflections on taxes, infidelity, the lot of the poor man, and occasionally includes moral injunctions like the following, from an early 1930s tune called Denomination Blues by a singing preacher named Washington Phillips...
Cooder is not bound to reproduce old music intact. He sometimes uses orchestration and can find new emphasis in a tune by changing the usual arrangement. Thus a World War II song called Comin' In on a Wing and a Prayer, which he sings low and slow, loses its Tin Pan Alley patriotism and becomes plaintive, full of battle fear. An old calypso tune, F.D.R. in Trinidad, is delivered with careful ingenuousness, and Cooder brightly, as if inadvertently, stresses the irony that time has worked on the lyrics: "Mr. Cordell Hull in attendance/ They took part in a peace...