Yesterday, two bombs packed with ball bearings tore through crowds near the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon.
Three people were killed. Many, many more were injured.
The perpetrator(s) are still at large.
As all of America mourns for Boston--demanding, too, that this act of terror not go unpunished--Classicalite wanted to share something in memoriam...
Three Places in New England (Orchestral Set No. 1) is a work by the iconic American composer Charles Ives. While sketches for the work come as early as 1903, scholars believe it was mostly composed between the years 1911 and 1914.
Ives, always rewriting, dates his revisions as late 1929--when Nicolas Slonimsky asked Ives for a work that his Boston Chamber Orchestra might play.
Three Places unfolds in three movements. Ives, always inverting, intended them as a slow-fast-slow whole:
- I. The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment)
- II. Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut
- III. The Housatonic at Stockbridge
One of the often difficult composer's most played pieces, Three Pieces features pretty much every Ivesian trope we've come to know him for: bitonality, tone clusters, sudden textural contrasts, quotations of Protestant hymn and marching band tunes, etc.
Whereas the last movement, The Housatonic at Stockbridge, is probably the movement that best represents Ives' unique style and voice, it is the first movement, The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common, that's perhaps the most apropos at a time like this.
The official name of the monument on the corner of Beacon and Park Streets in Boston (across from the State House) is The Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial, so named for the first all-Black regiment to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War.
Robert G. Shaw was the name of the white colonel who led his 600 desegregated men during the siege of Fort Wagner in Charleston, South Carolina. Of those 600 who stormed the fort, 227 (including Col. Shaw) were killed in battle.
Throughout his own life, Charles Ives would always refer to this movement, The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment), as his "black march." May we hear it now as a tribute to those dead and injured in the events of Monday, April 15, 2013.
Godspeed you, Boston!
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