New England Artists
New England Artists: Charles Ives and E.E. Cummings
Adrienne Brown
Introduction
It would be hard to find two centuries in greater contrast than the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries in American life in terms of mores, manners, dress, customs,
habits, philosophies, beliefs, and identities.
The cusp of these changes occured
towards the end of the nineteenth century; the post-civil war gilded age, with its mass
democracy and industrialisation.
Looking backwards, one saw freedom won on
revolutionary battlefields, the rise of self-governance, frontier expansion; looking
forwards one saw modernism, the jazz age, avant-garde, the golden age of Hollywood
and two world wars. Münsterberg wrote in 1905 that American national feeling had
stimulated literary and artistic life: ‘The American feels that [he] has entered the
exclusive circle of world powers and must like the best of them realise and express his
own nature’.1
This article will examine two of America’s foremost artists of that period,
composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) and poet E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), and it will
show how they gave expression to the changing artistic and cultural milieu of their
time. The manner in which they effected changes will be explored, following a
detailed analysis of a middle-phase work of each. A selection of works from both
artists will be commented upon, to show methods of syntactical play, use of
traditional forms to create works of increasing complexity, and ultimate control of
form by taking elements of the old and the new. In order to highlight its comparison
with written or spoken utterance, the music will be examined through a semiotic
analysis.. This period of pivotal change in America, will be seen to have been spoken
and sung into being.
Both men were born into and imbued with the traditions of New England,
including an Ivy League education. Each was influenced by their father, Ives’ father
having highly original ideas about music; Cummings being influenced by his father’s
religious and spiritual beliefs, against whom he rebelled. Transcendentalism was a
1
Hugo Münsterberg, The Americans (London: Williams & Norgate, 1905), p. 494.
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governing philosophy for each, Cummings through the Unitarian beliefs of his father,
Ives through his reading of Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne. Early influences from
popular culture found ways into their developing creative voices, from witty
sloganisms to band-master and hymn tunes, considered ‘low art’ but under these two
innovators were integrated into high art forms. New England Puritanism was evident
in the early training of each, and in their disciplined approach to the artist’s life. Ives,
although he became a recluse in later years, claiming to have given up music,
nevertheless composed avidly in isolation for thirty years. Cummings, who rebelled
against his father and believed a poet ‘should be fed by the ravens,’ maintained a
lifelong habit of writing for hours each day in silence.2 Their classical training gave
them a sense of history on which they would build. Respect for old forms generated
new ones.
Cummings travelled widely in Europe and Russia, and his interest in the
ancient classical world gave him a world-view that was European in outlook, despite
writing in an American accent. Ives, by contrast, stayed all his life in New England,
yet in total isolation from all other influences, his musical discoveries exceeded those
that were to follow in Europe. Language can be viewed as a paradigm for the
development of art culture in America. The first colonists of New England came
predominantly from south and south eastern counties of England. They determined
the speech of the settlers, later accretions were made gradually, and were easily
assimilated.3
Immigrants, who came to the new world, not only brought their
homeland legacies and tendencies with them; but also, crucially, left them behind.
While bringing traditions and practises in European art culture with them, they found
an environment susceptible to new practises, with greater freedoms of invention and
radicalisation. These freedoms allowed the American to seek new and novel ways of
doing things.
Although immigrants respected the traditions of the old country,
somehow the new world demanded that things would be done in a different way. In
fact, it was impossible to replicate modes of expression and behaviour of the old
world. Thus, the American was on a path of discovery and reinvention that was to
feed into all areas of life and notably the arts.
2
Richard S. Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E.Cummings (New York: Liveright
Publishing Corporation, 1980), p. 5.
3
Albert C. Baugh, ‘The American Dialects’, in Elizabeth Kerr and Ralph M. Aderman, eds, Aspects of
American English (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1963), pp.
108-109.
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The influence of New England on America as a whole has been well
documented, and in the case of culture, language and the arts, its dominant role can be
seen in the life of its major cities. During the nineteenth century, there was a dramatic
shift in the tone and rhetoric of popular social texts, merging the illustrative with the
burlesque sermon of the Evangelical Reform Movement, along with novels and
newspapers expounding sensational and metaphorical exposés of perversity and vice.4
Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of there being a new consciousness, one where the
nation was at the service of the individual.5 This was a declaration of the new
American Idea, the literary voice of which would not be found in parlours or
universities, but on the streets and frontiers.6 This influence was to give zest, fluidity
and toughness to the American vernacular, and would find its way into the public
voice, and ultimately to the nature of art expression.7 Emerson, Thoreau and the
transcendentalists were intent on discovering a distinctly American literary voice, one
that would give voice to the newly emerging identity of American selfhood. Yet, they
had no real living American tradition on which to draw, and it was only later, at the
end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, that innovative artists
like Ives and Cummings would articulate a mode of expression that gave voice to the
new American Idea.
Cummings, lower-case-i anti-hero
Cummings was born into a family that espoused New England values to which he
adhered in his childhood, but by the 1920s he was a leading public figure of the
literary revolt, heaping scorn on American culture.8 While at Harvard he began to
associate with lively free-thinking men of the new art movement of the twentieth
century,9 writing satiric verse on subjects that outraged him; capitalism, communism,
war, western technology, politics and authority.10
As was the case with Ives,
Cummings’ relationship with his father, Edward, was central to his creative life. As a
4
David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of
Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 7.
5
Francis Otto Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and
Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. 6-7.
6
David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the age of
Emerson and Melville, p. 484.
7
Ibid., p. 484.
8
Barry A. Marks, E. E. Cummings (New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1964), p. 6.
9
Marks, E. E. Cummings, p. 74.
10
Bethany K. Dumas, E.E. Cummings – A Remembrance of Miracles (London: Vision Press, 1974), p. 75.
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child he felt dwarfed by his father’s height and prowess, but later he made a virtue out
of his smaller stature in an anti-heroic, lower-case-i persona.11
Over the years,
Cummings defied and rebuked his father for interfering in his life, trying to solve the
many personal and professional problems that he encountered. For his part, Edward
manifested a tone of constant love, support and forgiveness towards his son. It was
only ten years after his father’s death that Cummings gradually moved towards
reconciliation with all that he had earlier rejected.12 He wrote:
I finished a poem to my father: a poem of which one line … doomed me to a moral life – the
line being ‘No liar looked him in the head’ but this feeling of doom was vastly more than
counterbalanced by a sense of freedom & exhilaration – a feeling that I was developing a
deeper dimension.13
Analysis
Parsing and analysing this poem my father moved through dooms of love14 (1940)
reveals Cummings’ middle-period syntactical play.15
The poem marked a
psychological breakthrough for Cummings. Meditating on his father he reminisced:
‘feeling that out of him came generosities like mountains and forgiveness like
morning’.16 He removed a restriction from his deepest self and felt that he had
entered a new poetic period, speaking with a more concerned and responsible voice.17
Dumas comments: ‘[i]t reflects the understanding and gratitude he felt towards his
father for being the man he was.’18
The poem consists of seventeen stanzas, each a quatrain. It is written in epic
form, which implies an extended narrative of praise or commentary on a serious
subject, upon the death of someone; or of some event that marks the right of passage
or rebirth of the speaker, nation, or some other persona. The rhyme scheme follows
an almost universal pattern: lines 1 and 2 rhyme, 3 and 4 also. Some rhyme is based
on consonant sounds, for example ‘willed/sold’ in stanza 14; and ‘sea/joy’ in stanza
11
Dumas, E.E. Cummings – A Remembrance of Miracles, pp. 100-101.
Ibid., pp. 356-7.
13
Ibid., p. 385.
14
George J. Firmage, Complete Poems, 1904-1962 E.E. Cummings, (New York: W.W. Norton, c1991), p.
520.
15
See appendix I.
16
Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E.Cummings, p. 385.
17
Ibid., p. 385.
18
Dumas, E.E. Cummings – A Remembrance of Miracles, p. 35.
12
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New England Artists
five (with emphasis on the ‘y’ sound of both words). Rhyming of vowel sounds
occurs in stanza 10 with ‘wise/is’ and assonance occurs in stanza 1 with ‘love/give’.19
The tone of the poem alternates between exalted, childlike wonder juxtaposed
against bitter, angry ripostes. It is achieved and maintained throughout, by a careful
use of syntactical alteration, switching adjectives, pronouns and nouns; sometimes in
the interests of metrical patterning, sometimes in the interests of allowing a clash of
vocabulary: juxtaposition creating conflict and tension.
Such grammatical and
syntactical play is equivalent to disruption of tonality in music, in the case where
composers ignored conventions of harmony governing resolution of dissonances, or
cadential closure of phrases. Such convention breaking devolved into the new music
practises of the twentieth century.
The metric conformity of this poem is clearly enunciated throughout. It relies
heavily on lines of equal length, though there are some exceptions. Equanimity of
line length is due to the rigorous application of metric organisation, which uses iambic
tetrameter, dactylic and trochaic meter, here indicated by ‘/’ representing a stressed
syllable, and x an unstressed syllable:
Iambic meter:
x/x/x/x/
Dactylic meter:
/xx/xx
Trochaic meter:
/x/x/x/x
Cummings frequently uses both dactylic and trochaic meter in a line, as in stanza 2,
line 2:
/
x
x
/
x
/ x
/
Turned at his glance to shining here;20
Some lines are altered to maintain Cummings’ metric sensitivity, for example, stanza
6, line 2 would make sense if written:
x
x
/
x
/
x x
/
he could steer the heart of a star
19
Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, eds, ‘Versification’, in The Norton Anthology of
Poetry, 4th edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), pp. xix-xxi.
20
Ibid., pp. xii-xix.
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This arrangement would result in metric alteration from the given iambic tetrameter,
to anapaestic meter: two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one. Cummings
never uses anapaestic meter in this poem, instead the line reads:
x
/
x
/
x
/
x
/
a heart of star by him could steer
Cummings uses a strong structure to shape this poem. Its naïve tone derives
from the use of underlying poetic technique, which discloses a crafted syntactical
puzzle. His poetic craft reveals infrequent use of capital letters, the personal pronoun
designated to the father, except in the penultimate line, and frequent alteration of verb,
pronoun and adjective to nouns, exhibiting modernist tendencies towards disruption.
Stanza 1
The first line sets the theme, which is stated as an affirmation that Cummings’ father’s
life was animated by a love that had within its constitution an aspect of doom. The
word ‘doom’ was one that Cummings associated with transcendence and mysticism,
yet, its association with hopelessness and pain must also be taken into consideration.
This is the first theme to be developed throughout the poem, one that has equivalence
in music, where the first theme is generally heard at or near the beginning of the piece
of music. Two other themes have their exposition in stanzas 10 and 14 respectively,
immediately forming an association with the common tripartite division of musical
works.
Stanza 1 presents an example of syntactical play in line 2, which may be
paraphrased in prosody thus: ‘through being the same, by having and giving,’ but
Cummings writes it as follows: ‘through sames of am through haves of give’. This
serves to contain end-of-line rhyme, but also shortening the active verbs to ‘haves’
and ‘gives’ to one stressed syllable instead of two, lending a crisper sound quality.
Clashes of imagery and vocabulary are set up with the dichotomies between
‘doom/love’, ‘have/give’ and ‘depth/height’. These dichotomies dictate an active type
of reading, one that demands scrutiny and interrogation, not a passive or accepting
approach. Indeed, such active participation in art experience is one of the factors that
emerged in the new art movement in many disciplines, expressing the changing tides
from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. Line 3 is in triple meter, echoing song
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and dance, as most dance music was traditionally set in triple meter. The momentary
lull on the second and third beat allows for the swing and sway of physical movement.
Stanza 2
The most striking element here is the use of ‘this/where/here’ as nouns. Cummings
uses these indirect objects as personal pronouns, throughout the rest of the poem as
designators of Cummings the persona. Father is accorded ‘his’, ‘him’ or ‘my father’
to describe his persona. In Cummings’ case, altered verbs, adjectives, pronouns and
the like, render him a construct of opposites and grammatically altered devices;
reminiscent of the many angles and planes of cubism, another exemplar of the
modernist palette.
Stanza 3
Lines 1 and 2 read: ‘newly as from unburied which/ floats the first who’ containing a
double possible reading of the word ‘which’. On the one hand, if it is tied to ‘who’ in
the next line it can refer to an unburied and newly awakened Cummings.
Alternatively, it can be read as a conjunction between ‘unburied’ and ‘floats’, where
the emphasis is on floats as an action related to the sleeping and dreaming self in lines
3 and 4, out of which Cummings awakes.
Stanzas 4, 5, 6, 7
The mountains, sea and sky are invoked, with father as godlike and heroic. Stanza 4,
line 5: ‘singing desire into begin’ shows Cummings’ device of word alteration again.
‘Singing’ is active and continuous, in motion at the present time, ‘begin(ning)’ is
proximate, immanent and not in motion at the present time. This conflict is somewhat
resolved by the insertion of ‘desire’ as a word that can draw immanence into being.
‘Grief’ and ‘joy’ are further clashing images which strengthen the love and joy
dynamic in the poem, by placing them alongside their opposite designate. The ‘griefs
of joy’ motto is carried on and developed in the next stanza. Father’s grief and joy
becomes ‘joy’, ‘joy so pure’, ‘pure so now’ and ‘now so yes’. ‘Pure’ becomes
indicative of his state of activity in the ever-present now. ‘Now’ becomes affirmative:
his being is always affirmative in each moment. Somehow father is transcending the
pull of oppositional force that was set up at the beginning: doom, depth and grief.
This transformation is all the more remarkable since in stanza 7, it is revealed that
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Cummings’ father’s dream was strict: not free, or liberating. He won his freedom
through adherence to some form of stricture, and this adherence is manifested in the
potency of a word like ‘desire’, a word not associated with servitude, humility or the
religious life. As his father was a Unitarian minister, and a public pacifist in the face
of U.S. involvement in World War I, it is clear that the ongoing struggle to break free
from his father, as earlier described, is being rebalanced here. Father’s greatness,
which Cummings expresses as having a mind keener than the sun, came perhaps from
adhering ‘strict(ly)’ to his principles of loving and forgiving, even when rebuked by
his erstwhile recalcitrant son.
Stanzas 10, 11, 12
A new theme enters here; one that exposes the idea of father’s approaching death.
September and October are invoked as metaphors in stanzas 10 and 11, and snow
appears in stanza 12. This move from early autumn through to winter is an obvious
metaphor for the dying year, and death itself. The tone deepens to show mortality and
sorrow.
Stanza 10 opens with the first three lines commencing on unstressed
syllables, following iambic tetrameter or dactylic and trochaic meter, having eight or
nine stressed syllables per line. This contrasts with the down-beat and heavy tread of
line four: ‘offered immeasurable is’.
This dactylic metered line has only seven
stressed syllables, its effect being to halt the running meter of the previous three lines.
‘If’ denotes finality, especially the fact that the line ends on the adverb ‘is’, a
statement of finite existence.
The second theme develops in stanza 11, with
beckoning flame and naked immortal inserted to invoke images of the soul’s shedding
of the body. ‘Downward climb’ and ‘against the dark’ of lines 2 and 4 are metaphors
for the grave and burial. Only in stanza 12 is ‘his sorrow’ presented as an unqualified
statement: a negative without clashing positive counterpoint, indicating perhaps
Cummings’ desire to highlight this point within the narrative. Yet, in line 4 the word
‘laugh’ changes the darker imagery of ‘liar’ and ‘foe’. This stanza reveals father’s
humanity, his struggle with life’s everyday woes, he is now presented in more human
and less godlike terms than at the outset in the first theme. This contrast is similar to
the play of musical themes in sonata form, where the first theme is contrasted against
a second, the purpose being to generate fresh material out of the interplay of both
themes. Such new material tends to be reiterated in some way within a third theme.
Stanza 13 is a reprise of earlier material, reverting back to the tone of childlike
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New England Artists
wonder and admiration that was evident in stanzas 1 to 6. This functions in the
manner of a musical chorus, serving to remind the listener of the narrative thread, and
its development.
Stanzas 14, 15
The third theme appears here, and this one is in Cummings’ own adult voice; it is a
statement about war, and betrays bitterness and anger at his country’s actions. The
effect of direct speech here is achieved by the use of ‘let’ in lines 1 and 2, as a
statement of fact, not ambiguity. Lines 3 and 4 link the idea of imagination with
scheming, and passion with will, implying an attack on human freedom that is
elucidated in line 4. Cummings uses contrapuntal tension in stanza 15 with several
dichotomous states being indicated: ‘give/steal’ and ‘cruel/kind’ the implication of
which is revealed in ‘fear’, ‘doubt’ and ‘disease’ in lines 2 and 3, and further
developed in ‘same’, ‘conform’, ‘pinnacle’ and ‘am’. These contrapuntal oppositions
mimic practises of musical composition as stated above. Here, the third theme
contains elements of the first (father as pacifist), and the second (death), while
engendering a new component: Cummings’ own voice, which is worked in with the
first two themes. This can be seen to mimic the model of sonata form referred to
earlier, indicating commonalities between these modes of expression.
Stanza 16
The tone strengthens in this stanza, with bitterness and irony emanating in word use
such as ‘dull’, ‘bitter’, ‘maggoty’, ‘minus’, ‘dumb’ and ‘death’. Line 2 shows how
Cummings’ word alteration preserves his metrical intentions. If it read for example:
/ x
/
x
/x x
/
bitter all things utterly sweet
the rhythm would be as above. However, Cummings wants two dactylic clauses
followed by two successively stressed syllables for emphasis at the line end thus:
/ x x /x x
/
/
bitter all utterly things sweet
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This rhythm is repeated in the following line in the same manner emphasising ‘dumb
death’, which is the central point in this section:
/ xx
/ x
x
/
/
maggoty minus and dumb death21
Stanza 17
Line 2 is treated differently to the rest of the poem beginning and ending with a dash.
The personal pronoun ‘i’ is now Cummings’ own voice which he emphasises with ‘i
say’ even ‘though men may breathe to hate’, a turn occurs here into the last two lines,
which are a reprise of the opening theme, the triumphant victory of love. The words
‘soul’, ‘love’, ‘whole’ and ‘all’ provide the necessary balm to overthrow the bitter
irony of the previous three stanzas.
The special qualities of this language use is the clash of vocabularies, achieved
by the transformation of parts of speech into nouns, often paired to show conceptual
opposites or contrasts.22 His techniques of typography, punctuation and capitalisation
were used as patterns of linguistic signalling, the major significance of which is a kind
of code labelling, where codes have a function other than carrying a message.23
Indeed, the message can be compared to musical counterpoint, which allows two
musical devices to operate closely with each other, often in combative ways. The
resulting texture is tight but multilayered, and in this poem, it can be seen that
Cummings had overall control of form, while finding ways to reinterpret syntax. It is
an example of Cummings’ mature voice, showing adherence to metric stability, yet
encompassing a linguistic adaptability that marked him out as a true modernist.
Visual Poetry
America in the early-twentieth century saw an influx of new art from Europe: cubism,
fauvism and futurism; as well as new tonal and rhythmic freedoms in music,
encouraging a revolt against the idealised art forms of the nineteenth century, and
encouraging a new way of looking at reality.24 Just as Picasso sought a way to
21
Ferguson, Salter and Stallworthy, ‘Versification’, pp. xiii-xiv.
Norman Friedman, E.E. Cumming: The Art of His Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1960), pp.
64-66.
23
Dumas, E.E. Cummings – A Remembrance of Miracles, p. 144.
24
Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E.Cummings, p. 4.
22
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New England Artists
represent what he actually saw, from all angles and at one time, Cummings sought to
fracture and recombine linguistic elements. This was evident in his experimentation
in typographical layout of word placement, division and attachment, which led to
poems that were visually arresting and seeming to flout the normal intelligibility of
written language.
In doing this, he investigated the full plastic possibilities of
language itself.25 His talent for linguistic play in creating a new style of poetry26 with
parentheses, commas, spaced-out or bunched-up words, used almost like stage
directions, involved the simple device of displacement or disjunction.27 An element
or word appearing parenthetically within another word, was a way of showing
simultaneity of action or expression; ordinarily inexpressible by conventional
syntax.28 An example of this can be seen in his poem, ‘loneliness (a leaf falls)’29
(1958), one of Cummings’ ‘eye poems’, it rises from a base of five letters upwards
through a column of single and double letters to the top.30 It contains two related
thoughts, one placed in parentheses.
The use of parentheses normally adds
explanatory comment to a sentence, which the writer wants to be held in mind while
he completes his main idea. Dividing the word ‘loneliness’ produces an insistent
emphasis on the idea of oneness, shown in the letter ‘l’ which mimics the number ‘1’
on the typewriter, and also the three letters ‘one’ as part of ‘l[one]liness’ which
appears in the third last line.31 This poem could be spoken (or sung) by two voices,
the second voice retarding the beginning but
accelerating the end of
‘l…………oneliness.’ Musically it could be notated as:
Soprano
Alto
a leaf falls
l....…….…..oneliness
Similarly, ‘under fog’ (1938) a four stanza poem,32 is structured with each stanza
containing a clause or part of a phrase.33 In between these clauses and removed to the
left, the word ‘slowliest’ is placed, to indicate a secondary idea to the main thought of
25
Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E.Cummings, p. 117.
Ibid., p. 4.
27
Dumas, E.E. Cummings – A Remembrance of Miracles, pp. 72-73.
28
Ibid., p. 73.
29
Firmage, Complete Poems, 1904-1962 E.E. Cummings, p. 673.
30
See appendix II.
31
Firmage, Complete Poems, 1904-1962 E.E. Cummings, p. 26.
32
Ibid., p. 463.
33
See appendix III.
26
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the poem. It is as though the word ‘slowliest’ is parenthetical, although it is not
placed in parentheses. The presence of the word ‘slowliest’ at one remove from the
body of the text, and its placement between each stanza, indicates that it is spoken at a
separate tempo. There are two speeds here, and the first voice ‘under fog…’ moves
more rapidly that the second ‘s..l..o..w..l..i..e..s..t’, but voice two complements the
idea of voice one: the fog moves slowly to envelop the people beneath it. This device
is analogous to a duet in music, or two notes played simultaneously, or indeed a
sustained chord played under a melody.
It allows the function of simultaneity,
normally unachievable in language, owing to its sequential ordering. Rather than an
example of clashing vocabulary, it takes on a contrapuntal texture, holding two
separate but related ideas and tempi in play.
Cummings’ poetic style incorporated lyric, mythic, satiric and later
‘modernist’ poems.34 He said: ‘The day of the spoken lyric is past. The poem which
has taken its place does not sing itself; it builds itself, three dimensionally, gradually,
subtly in the consciousness of the experiencer.’35 The important part here is not the
absence of ‘singing’ quality, but Cummings’ stress on the building components in
poetry. In fact, the principle of intelligibility, appropriateness or decorum, denoted a
set of vocabulary used in certain circumstances to produce a ‘tone of voice’.36
Cummings incorporated a mixture of old and new methods in his writing.
Some influences from the old school were metric control and precision, stanzaic form
that served to hold complex ideas in play, and adherence to a thematic exposition of
ideas. New innovations were noun displacement, re-ordering of syntax, and extremity
in line reduction. The effect of these innovations was to create poetry that had
equivalence in painting as well as music.
The fracturing and recombination of
elements, which skilfully rendered poetic meaning and experience in direct,
sometimes confrontational ways, places Cummings at the centre of modernist practise
in early twentieth-century America.
34
Firmage, Complete Poems, 1904-1962 E.E. Cummings, pp. 125-6.
Ibid., p. 128.
36
Friedman, E.E. Cummings: The Art of his Poetry, p. 62.
35
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Ives and Transcendent Americanism
Ives’ contributions to modernism were fully developed between 1900 – 1906 a time so early that
no European composer, not even Arnold Schönberg had done anything so radical … not until the
1920s did Schönberg, Stravinsky and Hindemith shock European audiences with comparable
innovative techniques.37
While both Ives and Cummings straddled the period of change from the end of the
nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century, Cummings was more at home
with the new artistic milieu, partaking in it publicly and more fully. Ives, the shy
New Englander who spent thirty years composing in exile, nonetheless showed in his
music a complete understanding of the art milieu of the time. Only in retrospect was
it fully understood.
He composed in several metric configurations, played simultaneously, using
polymetric figures. His interest in physical space was evident in some of his writings,
where he spoke of ‘a melody heard at a distance over the woods’ or a ‘horn heard
across a lake’.38 He seemed concerned with the specific type of space that fills this
distance. He wrote in his memos that in climbing a mountain, one’s eyes constantly
have to shift focus, one moment on the sky, the next on the grass, with the sky
receding, thus indicating how this ‘multi-focused’ vision was part of the whole
experience. This overall shifting focus can be heard in his music, where the ear is
drawn to many places all at once, while differentiating between them at the same
time.39
As with Cummings, Ives often fragmented his material, cutting off a musical
idea before it is presented as a fleeting insert. He frequently crossed from one musical
idea to another. His phrase structures could be abruptly broken off; this fracturing
mimicked the broken poetic lines and phrases of Cummings, and is of course, a
further reflection of the ideas that governed cubist paintings, placing Ives in dialogue
with the visual arts. For Ives, the intention of fragmentation was disruption and
layering many musical fragments in a manner that produced a multidirectional
37
H. Wiley Hitchcock and Vivian Perlis, eds, An Ives Celebration: Papers & Panels of the Charles Ives
Centennial Festival Conference (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 4.
38
H. Wiley Hitchcock, Ives: Oxford Studies of Composers (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), Vol.
14, pp. 47-56.
39
Ibid., p. 56.
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framework. All points of direction seem to be presented at once.40 An example of
this is his Second Piano Sonata Concord, Mass., 1840 – 1860 (1911 – 1912). Each
movement is written for ensembles of different size and composition.
This
eclecticism allowed for the primacy of sound as a governing philosophy, where
overarching unity of form, that contains diversity and polarity within it, is both
modernist, and also transcendentalist; both of which played their part in Ives’ style of
writing.
Symphonic Writing
Münsterberg contended that by 1905, music composition had not yet reached a high
point in the United States, the nineteenth century bringing forth little more than bandmaster music.41 He also claimed that America had ‘no actual folk songs … the Star
Spangled Banner (1814) was written to an old, probably English melody, is the only
true American folk-song’.42 Yet, Dulles asserts that the isolated life of the cowboy
allowed their songs to grow from sorrowful dirges and plaintive love-songs into a
distinctive balladry of the plains: in time to become recognisable American folk-song,
which Ives inserted into his works as tropes of Americana.43 His Fourth Symphony
(1909 – 1916) draws heavily on recollections of childhood Memorial Day, with
marching bands and revivalist camp meetings. The symphony features innovative
aural effects achieved by separate orchestral sections placed at different distances
from the audience.44 This feature can be compared to Cummings’ parenthetical ‘eye
poems’, but on a much larger scale: aural effects contained in separate sound blocks,
comprising the work’s totality. The Fourth Symphony has a densely layered texture,
with three atonal movements and one tonal.
Even within the dissonant atonal
movements (one, two and four), Ives’ melodic ease is present, a reflection of his well
remembered classicism. Musical cadences are disguised by overlapping phrases and
unexpected entrances, here a match for Cummings’ abandonment of strict punctuation
and infrequent use of capitals, they serve to weaken the impulse at the beginning of a
40
Hitchcock and Perlis, An Ives Celebration, p. 150.
Münsterberg, The Americans, pp. 478-9.
42
Ibid., p. 479.
43
Foster Rhea Dulles, A History of Recreation: America Learns to Play (New York: Meredith Publishing
Company, 1965), p. 175.
44
Frank Rossiter, Charles Ives and his America (London: Gollancz, 1975), p. 107.
41
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new musical statement. The work as a whole is a combination of vernacular religion
and transcendental philosophy, remembering pre-civil war New England.45
Analysis
Ives’ The Unanswered Question (1906) shows him to be a composer belonging to the
early modernist period. Originally titled A Contemplation of a Serious Matter or the
Unanswered Perennial Question, it was constructed on the idea that groups of
instruments were playing as if unaware of each other, following two separate
unsynchronised conductors. The background music is tonal, the foreground atonal.46
Isham refers to it as ‘a polyphony of meaning-impregnated sounds, or sound
blocks’.47 Created for trumpet, string quartet, and four flutes, Ives’ own programme
notes contain the thesis of the piece: the strings play softly throughout with no change
in tempo representing ‘The Silences of the Druids – who Know, See and Hear
Nothing’, the trumpet intones the ‘Perennial Question of Existence’ in the same tone
of voice each time. A search for the ‘Invisible Answer’ is undertaken by the flutes
which become gradually faster and louder, eventually coming to mock the Question
‘until at the end the “Silences” remain in “Undisturbed Solitude”’.48 In a sense, the
intended meaning of this piece is spelled out in these programmatic instructions, but
the real question to ask is how this is achieved. Ives believed that music was beyond
analogy to word language, but he was fascinated by the raw materials of music.49 His
musical idiom was based on the refusal to accept any authority other than the sounds
of nature, both heard and unheard.50
The question of what music is supposed to mean, or at least have as its effect,
raises the assumption that any musical communication is an instance of what we
recognise as musical communication. Thus, there must be some means by which we
are able to decipher musical messages and to identify their codes. The following
analysis will be based on the structure of the work, that is to say, the score. As has
been said, Ives constructed this piece in a tripartite manner: the strings representing
45
Dulles, A History of Recreation: America Learns to Play, p. 108.
John Kirkpatrick, ‘Ives Charles E(dward),’ in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music &
Musicians, Vol. 9 (London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980), p. 417.
47
Howard Isham, ‘The Musical Thinking of Charles Ives’ in The Journal of Ives, Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, Vol. 31/iii, Spring (1973), pp. 395 – 404: 401.
48
Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question: for Trumpet, Flute Quartet & Strings, critical edition
(1906), Paul C. Echols and Noel Zahler, eds (New York: Peer International Corporation, 1985), p. 10.
49
Isham, ‘The Musical Thinking of Charles Ives’, p. 398.
50
Ibid., p. 396.
46
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Undisturbed Solitude; the trumpet representing the Question and the flutes
representing the search for an answer. It is immediately obvious upon looking at the
score that these three fields of action operate disjunctly, and indeed Ives’ first choice
was to have the strings offstage.51 Separation of the three musical operatives and
illustration of the spatial distance between them, are evident in the score, which shows
large empty spaces between the staves. This might be analogous to what Craig Ayrey
refers to as the play of the structure: a centre, or fixed origin, serving to balance or
contain the entire structure.52 The centre in this piece is perhaps an invisible point
which is indicated by modes of opposition: between parts and the whole; continuity
and discontinuity; similarity and dissimilarity.53 Separating planes of activity is a
modernist convention, used also by Cummings in his typographical poems, as well as
leading painters in early twentieth-century America.
My analysis is based on Jean-Jacques Nattiez’ method of semiology54 in order
to illustrate some meaning indicators.55 The first sound that is heard is the sustained,
slowly descending scale in G major, played by the strings. This is taken as paradigm
I. Along with the trumpet motive, it is the most extensively used motive in the piece.
The pattern of this original paradigm, (which I have labelled motive Ia)56 shows the
following degrees of the scale, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, with a further extension of 5 and 4 at the
end. Its ending on degree four of the scale gives the motive a sense of incompletion,
passing the dominant but failing to come to rest on the mediant or tonic. Although the
effect is peaceful and serene, it is nevertheless incomplete for that reason. Variant Ib
in the musical examples shows the pattern extending further to encompass G – A, the
scale now coming to rest on the supertonic. This increases the expectation of moving
to completion on the tonic, but again this resolution is denied. Variant Ic with its
descent A – C omitting the F sharp could be seen as an extension to Ib, a continuation
of the scale descent from G major and modulating to C major.
This C major
implication is continued in variant Id with a G to C descending scale. These scalar
51
Ives, The Unanswered Question, p. 10.
Craig Ayrey, ‘Debussy’s Significant Connection: Metaphor and Metonymy in Analytical Method’, in
Anthony Pople, ed., Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), p. 131.
53
Ibid., p. 129.
54
Robert Samuels, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: A Study in Musical Semiotics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), pp. 8-9.
55
See appendix IV.
56
For the purposes of this article I will address only a representative proportion of the motives in this
work.
52
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patterns can be read as a background canvas, on which the contrapuntal flute and
trumpet dialogue are superimposed.
Motive IIa with its tied semibreves and minims forms the pattern G – D – E –
D, with the ascending interval of a fifth (G – D) establishing the G major tonic and
dominant. This seems to evoke a response to Motive Ia: 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, – 8, 5, 6, 5,
establishing the sought for tonic and stressing the dominant, thus, bringing to a
conclusion the open-ended scale descent earlier described. Variant IIb with its 8, 4, 6,
4, pattern likewise refers back to IIa: 1, 5, 6, 5, – 8, 4, 6, 4, alternating a strong
tonic/dominant phrase with a phrase based on imperfect consonances, which in
themselves demand resolution under the scheme of tonal music; and furthermore it
refers also to Ia: 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, – 8, 4, 6, 4; hereby reinforcing the imperfect
consonances which underlie the suspended incompletion of the opening motive. All
of these motives circumscribe Ives’ contention that the strings illustrate silent,
contemplative ‘unseeing’ and ‘unhearing’ forces. Both serenity and suspension is
achieved through these tonal structures, a fitting interplay of signifiers that point
towards a sense of the ‘unknown’: which contains resolution, rest, incompletion and
dissolution; in other words, a balance of opposites.
Motive IIIa establishes degree eight of the scale as a centre of a pinnacle
formed by a row of crochets flanked by minims, and variant IIIb establishes degree
three of the scale in a similar fashion. Both degrees form part of the stable tonic triad,
the basis of tonal music. These variants serve the tonal nature of the music sections
they occupy, and add weight to Motives I and II as part of a background tonal canvas.
This canvas is subverted in true Ivesian fashion by layering subtle dissonances in the
flute and trumpet parts, as an example of an Ives idiolect; a manner in which he uses
his preferred compositional method of upsetting harmonic balance to destabilise a
norm.
The trumpet call is the subject of Motive Va. Claiming that Ives revisited and
revised previous musical choices, Alex Ross comments: ‘[i]n Paul Echols and Noel
Zahler’s distressing edition of The Unanswered Question the trumpet tone row that
forms the work’s motto no longer drifts untethered but instead returns to its starting B
flat.’57 Ives was well known for his interest in the exploration of quarter tones, echoes
and their distortion, and the juxtaposition of tonality with atonality. That he chose to
57
Frank R. Rossiter, Charles Ives and his America (London: Gollancz, 1976), p. 33.
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place the trumpet call as always beginning on B flat, may be owing to the complex
tonal layering of the flutes over strings, and the emphatically dissonant nature of the
trumpet tone row itself.
Added to this is the narrative insistence achieved by
reiterating over and over, the same ‘perennial’ question, in the same voice.
The trumpet call can be seen in the score as a middle layer, running stratumlike through the blocks of music allocated to flute and strings. In this manner, the
repeated insistence of its interrogation can be seen as a feature of the early modernist
condition of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artistic palette. It affirms the
value of pure opposition to the neighbouring blocks of music, yet shows the momentto-moment continuity of the music, via a stable motive running through an
increasingly complex contrapuntal score.
Such visual signification had its
counterpoint in Cummings’ poetry, of course.
Music theory recognises that
opposition is a relation, a mode of connection between disparate units.58 The tone
row, Motive Va, is constructed on juxtaposing dissonant and consonant intervals:
diminished seventh; minor third; diminished octave and perfect fourth. B flat and E
flat in the row, may suggest the key of B flat major, with C sharp creating an
augmented second. It is well known that Ives’ father George used to make the young
Charles sing a tune in E flat major while accompanying himself in C major, which
would sound ‘off key’ (being a minor third lower). This was in order to train young
Ives’ ear in holding and maintaining dissonance, and arguably Ives’ great contribution
to music was his ability to create dissonant and atonal music that sounded as
intentional and complete as any tonal masterpiece. If in The Unanswered Question
this trumpet row is set in B flat major against a predominantly C major/G major tonal
background (strings), it could be a reference to his early training. Alternatively, C
sharp and E flat in the phrase may suggest the key of D major (as both neighbour D
by a semi-tone), the dominant of G major as exemplified in the opening Motive Ia.
Perhaps he is implying two tonal centres and not one, in a similar way to Cummings’
parenthetical simultaneity of language clauses, discussed already. The phrase moves
with a triplet-feel rhythm, the dissonant intervals interrupting the smooth C major/G
major tonalities of the background canvas, and the flutes as they enter with increasing
frequency. The dissonant and plaintive tones of the trumpet call, is a fitting signifier
for a question designed to disrupt and interrogate.
58
Ayrey, ‘Debussy’s Significant Connection: Metaphor and Metonymy in Analytical Method’, p. 129.
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The many variants of this row appear both with the trumpet, and also the
flutes, as indicated in the programme notes.59 Variants based on the diminished
seventh and diminished octave intervals feature in the flute quartet, played
increasingly faster (bars 52 to 54). Allied to this, the frequent insertion of trumpet
row tones of E flat, B flat and C sharp prior to that in bars 34 – 36; 40 – 41; and 45 –
46; as well as in the final 52 to 54 crescendo of the quartet, illustrates Ives’ ‘planting’
of these tones in the flute parts, to indicate perhaps an idea of grappling with these
elements prior to imitating them fully. This feature could signify the flutes toying
with responses to the question before reiterating it fully, albeit in ‘mocking’ tones.60
Ives uses further musical signifiers to amplify the accelerating crescendo of
‘mocking’ tones in the flute quartet. Motive Xa illustrates a high upward-reaching
motive. It begins with a minor seventh, then a major seventh, followed by step-up
and down semi-tonal vibrato-like figures played in triplet rhythm. This is followed
and ended by a glissando slide down first by a perfect fifth then and major third.
Juxtaposition of elements implied by intervals of a seventh, which Deryk Cooke
describes as one of the ‘flaws’ in nature’s harmony, sounding at times ‘lost’ or
‘melancholy’ unless able to resolve onto the tonic; along with stable intervals such as
the fifth and third, is one example of how musical signifiers can operate within a
system that governs meaning.61 Variant Xb shows an augmented intervallic variation.
The motive is played out on a lower register by the second flute, juxtaposing Es
against the Fs of variant Xa, thus accenting dissonance between these neighbouring
semitones and signifying disturbance and discomfort. This is perhaps equivalent to
the verbal clash that created oppositional tension in Cummings’ my father moved.
Variant Xb ends with an augmented octave leap upward, and then a compound major
third leap down, this cadence pushing against the glissando of variant Xa, which are
sounded simultaneously. The vibrato-like figures suggest agitation and irritation,
signifiers perhaps of the narrative content of the flutes at this point: attempting to
search for an answer; but later in bars 52 – 53 this vibrato-like figure appears a third
higher and in unison between flutes one and two. This is played over a G major triad
in the strings, suggesting perhaps the desire to escape or defy the quiet insistence of a
tonic triadic stability; or in a narrative sense, a desire to escape the quiet insistence of
59
Ives, The Unanswered Question, p. 10.
Ibid., p. 10.
61
Deryk Cooke, The Language of Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 72-75.
60
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the ‘unseeing’ and ‘unhearing’ signifiers, which after all end as they began:
undisturbed and unchanged by the cacophony around them.
These features exemplify Ives’ confident use of oppositional tensions to
generate movement. As Ayrey suggests, if two statements or musical events are
stated as equivalent or opposed, similar or different, it is left to the receiver to decide
which is more important: ‘[a]s the two things put together are more remote, the
tension created is, of course, greater’.62
These oppositional tensions generate
movement between the disparate elements. As aforementioned, there are three fields
of action at play: a sonorous background; a recurrent middle ground; and, an
accelerating foreground, each having its own musical style, intervallic and tonal
home-ground, rhythmic pattern and sound dynamic. The interplay between these sites
operates on a three-fold pattern: a theme (background) is established to which a
second theme (middleground) interposes. A third element (foreground) takes on
aspects of the second theme and engages with it in a way that transmutes some of the
second theme’s form. The resulting altered third element holds within it, parts of the
second theme, and rests on the unchanged first element. This tripartite operational
matrix in some way represents the archetype behind sonata form: where idea meets
opposition, causing interaction, and resulting in transmutation or change, and
indicated earlier as a possible governing scheme for ‘my father moved’. Ives uses this
dramaturgic three-fold enactment of compositional procedure to evoke quite simply:
call and response; chaos and repose. Theodor Adorno believed there were three
characteristic devices in music: breakthrough, suspension and fulfilment, which is
another way of viewing this tripartite structure. Breakthrough happens where material
is introduced from outside in a utopian image of integration. Suspension is achieved
when passages of ‘musical prose’ abandon metre to give the illusion of arrested
progress in time, and fulfilment is a culmination which does not give in to the false
representation of wholeness not justified by the course of the music.63
Ives can clearly be seen to have operated fully within the changing practises of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fully in dialogue with the other
expressive art forms, albeit unconsciously. Reminiscences of the old school were: the
use of scalar patterns, tripartite structural forms and programmatic theme exposition.
His innovative techniques, realised by the control he exerted over any possible
62
63
Ayrey, ‘Debussy’s Significant Connection: Metaphor and Metonymy in Analytical Method’, p. 135.
Samuels, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, p. 16.
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excesses, included: dissonant notes layered over tonal harmony, rhythmic flexibility
and the splitting of the orchestra into sound blocks. Like Cummings, he was using the
old to create the new.
Conclusion
The changes between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America wrought
social, cultural and artistic fracture, resulting in radicalisation of forms and structures
in the expressive arts. The founding Puritan ethic read that ‘[n]o work of culture has
any value in itself; it becomes ethically significant only in relation to the individual
will … to serve the highest development of the individual’.64 This statement seems to
indict art culture as a deterrent in following God’s law, according to the precepts of
Puritanism; yet its proposition that culture is significant if it serves the development
of the individual’s self-determining will, underlines the nature of the American Idea
which grew in prominence from the middle of the nineteenth century through to the
twentieth century. It would seem then, that to be truly American, both in the Puritan
and the modernist sense, meant that art-culture would have to exalt the individual.
Thus, the works of art of both Ives and Cummings, though far removed from
Puritanism, succeeded in advancing the Puritan ethic of serving God, by strengthening
the individual will through its expression. As such, they can be seen as artists that
truly exemplified the spirit of New England, Transcendentalism and later Modernism.
This marks them both as exemplars of the idea of the American Self.
The study of music has led to questions being asked about its inherent
meaning, and whether it can be compared to written or spoken language. This article
has sought to show meaning indicators that exist quite naturally in each discipline,
and to find some way of speaking about both. Indeed, Dunsby and Whittall argue:
‘Faced with an unknown language, we have to discover the meaning of messages in
that language by analysing them in a language we know’.65 Samuels asserts that
pieces of music are texts as is literature. Both have authors and audiences, both are
transmitted in printed media, but a musical text is no more a sequence of sounds, as a
literary text is not a sequence of words.66 Every text has, in principle, a beginning,
64
Münsterberg, The Americans, p. 354.
Jonathan Dunsby and Arnold Whittall, Music Analysis in Theory & Practise (London: Faber Music Ltd.,
1988), p. 213.
66
Samuels, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, pp. 152-4.
65
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middle and an end. Musical texts however, have a more continuous sonic reality than
those of written texts, with the exception of poetry of course.67
‘A poem does not need to be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new
relation is a word,’ Emerson wrote in ‘The Poet’.68 For Saussure, vocal sounds and
perceived phenomena were undifferentiated before the advent of language. It is this
perceived lack of differentiation that leads to the theory of universality of expression
in the arts. The linguistic sign simultaneously entered planes of sound and perceived
phenomena to create meaning, creating oppositions and relations in each.69 With this
in mind, it is possible to say of the previous study, that there is evidence to state that
the plastic arts of poetry and music govern the initial impulse towards expression,
marking the individual and the society from which it originates. In that context, it
serves both music and poetry to be analysed in an article such as this, as each can be
better understood as idiolects of the age in which they were generated, when placed
alongside the other.
The changing social and cultural milieu of America in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, produced documents of expression from the pen of two men
of New England origin, whose ancestors could be traced back to the early Puritans.
From that vantage point, of respect for tradition and aspiration to the highest moral
good, came manipulation of tonal and linguistic edifices that had been in place for
centuries. The art that resulted was of worldwide significance, opening up pathways
that others would follow.
Its confident and assertive richness came from the
conviction of these two lifelong creatives, to remain true to their craft, even when
there was little obvious return. Assiduous, disciplined and grafting, they were true
New England men.
67
Kofi Agawu, ‘The Challenge of Semiotics’ in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, eds, Rethinking Music
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 142-3.
68
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poet,’ (1844), in John Carlos Rowe, ed., Selected Works by Ralph Waldo
Emerson & Margaret Fuller (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), pp. 194-5.
69
Samuels, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, pp. 2-3.
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Appendix I
my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height
this motionless forgetful where
turned at his glance to shining here;
the if(so timid air is firm)
under his eyes would stir and squirm
newly as from unburied which
floats the first who, his april touch
drove sleeping selves to swarm their fates
woke dreamers to their ghostly roots
and should some why completely weep
my father’s fingers brought her sleep:
vainly no smallest voice might cry
for he could feel the mountains grow.
Lifting the valleys of the sea
my father moved through griefs of joy;
praising a forehead called the moon
singing desire into begin
joy was his song and joy so pure
a heart of star by him could steer
and pure so now and now so yes
the wrists of twilight would rejoice
keen as midsummer’s keen beyond
conceiving mind of sun will stand,
so strictly(over utmost him
so hugely)stood my father’s dream
his flesh was flesh his blood was blood:
no hungry man but wished him food;
no cripple wouldn’t creep one mile
uphill to only see him smile.
Scorning the pomp of must and shall
my father moved through dooms of feel;
his anger was as right as rain
his pity was as green as grain
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septembering arms of year extend
less humbly wealth to foe and friend
than he to foolish and to wise
offered immeasurable is
proudly and(by octobering flame
beckoned)as earth will downward climb,
so naked for immortal work
his shoulders marched against the dark
his sorrow was as true as bread not;
no liar looked him in the head;
if every friend became his foe
he’d laugh and build a world with snow.
My father moved through theys of we,
singing each new leaf out of each tree
(and every child was sure that spring
danced when she heard my father sing)
then let men kill which cannot share,
let blood and flesh be mud and mire,
scheming imagine, passion willed,
freedom a drug that’s bough and sold
giving to steal and cruel kind,
a heart to fear, to doubt a mind,
to differ a disease of same,
conform the pinnacle of am
though dull were all we taste as bright,
bitter all utterly things sweet,
maggoty minus and dumb death
all we inherit, all bequeath
and nothing quite so least as truth
-i say though hate were why men breathebecause my father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all
E.E. Cummings
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Appendix II
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
Appendix III
un
der fog
’s
touch
slo
ings
fin
gering
s
wli
whichs
turn
in
to whos
est
people
be
come
un
E.E. Cummings
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Appendix IV
Charles Ives: The Unanswered Question
Motive I
(a) Violin 1; Bar: 1-12
(b) Violin 1; Bar: 26-42
(c) Cello; Bar: 45-48
(d) Viola; Bar: 48-52
Motive II
(a) Violin 2; Bar: 5-18
(b) Violin 2; Bar: 33-45
Motive III
(a) Cello; Bar: 7-16
(b) Viola; Bar: 11-18
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Motive V
(a) Trumpet or Oboe; Bar: 16-17
(b)Flutes 1 and 2; Bar: 52
(c) Flutes 1 and 2; Bar: 52
(d) Flutes 1 and 2; Bar: 52
(e) Flutes 1 and 2; Bar: 53-54
(f) Flute 1; Bar: 54
(g) Flute 2; Bar: 54
Motive X
(a) Flute 1; Bar: 45-46
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(b) Flute 2; Bar: 45-46
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