Breaking Time's Arrow by McDonald Matthew

Author:McDonald, Matthew
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253012760
Publisher: Indiana University Press

Example 3.6. “Grantchester,” p. 37/3–p. 38/2, connections with Debussy’s Prélude and Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan und Isolde.

In sum, Ives recasts the opening of the Prélude as a tonally warped version of the original. Ives’s manipulation of his source is perhaps most striking when it involves the full harmonies of mm. 4–5. The harmonic progression from a half-diminished seventh chord to a dominant seventh that characterizes this portion of the Prélude takes on a very different flavor as a result of the semitonal shift in Ives’s song. In the Prélude, these two chords share the same bass (A;/B), which strips the progression of any clear functionality and thereby lends it a mystical aura. In “Grantchester,” where the bass descends a semitone from one chord to the next, there is likewise no firm tonal context in which the progression can be heard. But on a local level, it suggests a predominant-to-dominant motion supported by a bass line. More specifically, the half-diminished seventh chord functions like an augmented-sixth chord resolving to the dominant.

The locus classicus of this progression was also likely an important musical reference point for Ives when he was composing “Grantchester”: the opening of Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan und Isolde. Ives’s progression, a D; half-diminished seventh chord resolving to a D dominant seventh, both chords in root position, transposes the famous first two chords from Wagner’s Prelude, the Tristan chord and its resolution, down a whole step from A minor (the implied key at the opening of the Prelude) to G minor (see Example 3.6). Clearly, Ives wished to undermine the fluidity of the music borrowed from Debussy’s Prélude using a series of tonal shifts, but the last of these may have been motivated primarily by a desire to refer more literally to the composer whose presence is already felt so strongly in the Prélude. Enhancing the reference, Ives’s vocal line incorporates the ascending chromatic melody that accompanies the opening pair of chords in Wagner’s Prelude, also transposed down a whole step (see the vocal setting of “Naiad’s reedy,” highlighted on the example). Although the melodic figure is displaced rhythmically in relation to the chords, the basic metrical pattern remains the same—most significantly the treatment of the third note, G;, as an accented passing tone.

Ives seems to have made veiled references to the opening of the Tristan Prelude in other pieces, probably more extensively than has been acknowledged. The musical entwining of Wagner and Debussy in “Grantchester” reflects Ives’s commentary on the composers in the Essays. His negative assessments of the composers share basic characteristics: their music is effeminate, lacks substance, and evidences moral deficiencies. In describing his own disillusionment with Wagner’s music in the “Epilogue,” he likens Wagner’s “sensual” harmonic vocabulary to Debussy’s: “Those once transcendent progressions, luxuriant suggestions of Debussy chords of the ninth, eleventh, etc., were becoming slimy” (73). It is perhaps no coincidence that Ives added an eleventh, G;, above Debussy’s/Wagner’s half-diminished seventh chord in “Grantchester” (p. 38/2) and continued to emphasize this pitch class above the following dominant seventh.

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