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THE TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE


Despite the widespread usage of the term “transcendental” for describing the poetry of Emerson and Thoreau, its appropriateness for music has been more distant. Certainly, one may understand the term transcendental to mean mere ephemera, or a dapper delving into the soul. However the term is difficult to apply, except perhaps in the realm of opinion, or as a catalyst for an insight.

With this recording of the “Concord Sonata” the transcendentalism in sound is glaring, and the distinction between untempered and tempered is profoundly perceivable. Without doubt, Ives signaled his readers for sympathy in this regard, and suggested a century of patience to continue to invest in his beliefs long after his passing, akin to a time capsule: “In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones—when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now”(Ives, Franco-American Music Society Quarterly Bulletin, March 1925).

While there was once a great benefit through temperament, its necessity has finally receded into the past. Temperament is now more often used as a crutch than it is a benefit, based on the reception of our collective ears. There no long needs to be a reaction such as this great fan of the “Concord Sonata,” Kyle Gann, who wrote confidently of “the Concord’s well-deserved reputation for complex dissonances and general atonality” (Gann, Charles Ives’s Concord: Essays After A Sonata, 2017).

The intentional untempered version envisioned by Ives unequivocally renders transcendentalism transparent, rather than emphasize atonality. To the musicologists among us, I ask each of you to listen afresh to the music coming out of your stereo speakers. Listen to this recording without the constant comparisons to the thick dissonances of earlier 12-tone equal temperament performances.

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from "TRANSCENDENTAL" CONCORD SONATA by Charles Ives for two pianos in spiral of fifths tuning performed by pianists Gabriel Zucker and Erika Dohi: AMERICAN FESTIVAL OF MICROTONAL MUSIC, released December 21, 2022

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