Simone Dinnerstein feels a connection to Charles Ives’ temporal tension and panoramic vision
Simone Dinnerstein. // photo credit Lisa Marie Mazzucco
Composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) was a modernist maverick, a musical revolutionary whose radical ideas and techniques were ignored by the public and the academy until near the end of his life. The son of a Civil War bandleader, he grappled with America’s musical and intellectual past in his work, writing a symphony inspired by U.S. holidays and orchestral pieces dwelling on specific Northeastern rivers and landmarks. His densely layered approach — full of harmonic dissonance, clashing rhythms and collagelike quotes of old hymns, minstrel songs and scraps of the classical canon–may have captured the galvanic energy of his native country at the beginning of the 20th century, but it had more in common with the emerging European avant-garde and its bid to dismantle old forms. But Ives was no cold theorist–all his music shows a deeply personal drive to communicate, to express something about his own life and past as well as the turbulent American scene.
Pianist Simone Dinnerstein, brought to Kansas City by the Harriman Jewell Series, has put her own stamp on Ives’ work, performing the notoriously difficult “‘Concord’ Sonata” as part of a multimedia presentation, “The Eye Is the First Circle.” The sonata, a long four-movement piece based on the thought and works of Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalist-adjacent writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott, is strange, thorny and impassioned. It reaches back to Beethoven, dabbles in the present (ragtime, which was sweeping the nation in the early 1900s, when the piece was being written) and gazes ahead to the polytonalities and postmodernism of the Atomic Age. At one point, the elusive main theme is played simultaneously in different keys; during the second movement, Ives’ program notes suggest that the piano’s keys be depressed with a wooden block or a clenched fist (Dinnerstein, under the advice of Ives champion Donald Berman, is using a velvet-covered piece of wood fashioned by her husband). It’s an immersion in the past and a prophecy of the future– it anticipates musicians as diverse as John Cage, Sun Ra, Keith Jarrett and Henry Flynt.
Dinnerstein feels a connection to Ives’ temporal tension and panoramic vision. “The more that I studied the music, it was clear to me how so many great composers of the past as well as popular music of his present had left their mark on Ives, and yet he had created a completely new language for himself,” Dinnerstein writes in response to a set of questions emailed by The Pitch. But her presentation goes beyond Ives’ influences and the subjects of the sonatas — her own family and artistic histories come into play as well. Dinnerstein’s father, Simon Dinnerstein, is a painter whose work mixes the dreamy and the real with an unnerving clarity. His most famous painting, the 14-foot-wide “Fulbright Triptych,” from 1971-1974, shows the artist, his family and his workspace–dotted with works in progress and household ephemera–presented in a flat, stylized manner reminiscent of folk art but given a sense of import on par with medieval religious iconography.
Her father’s painting “tells the story of my parents at that period of their lives,” Dinnerstein says. “Postcards of works of art, quotes from books, photographs of family, and children’s art from my Mom’s teaching are all tacked on the walls of the studio. I’d been looking for a piece of music that would relate [its] the collage-like composition.” Ives’ knotty sonata, with its intricate threads of personal, musical and national history, as well as it’s thick palimpsest of themes, motifs and melodies, fit the bill.
An image of the painting will be projected behind Dinnerstein as she plays and will be digitally “manipulated in various ways,” according to Dinnerstein, interwoven with footage of her in the garden depicted in the painting (as the subject of a work of art), along with scenes captured by small cameras inside her piano and various animations and close-ups. Working with multidisciplinary artist Laurie Olinder and designers Davison Scandrett and Simon Harding, Dinnerstein created an elaborate visual presentation that will add another, entirely fresh, layer of artistic perspective and depth to Ives’ already teeming composition. Putting the visuals together was as intensive and demanding a process as mastering the challenges of Ives’ difficult piece. “We experimented with different ways of translating the ideas into a realized vision. A member of the stage crew sat at the piano as a stand-in for me as the four of us sat in the theater and shaped the work,” Dinnerstein says.
The result promises to be not just about Ives or 19th-century New England philosophers but about Dinnerstein and her family, and, more generally, the artistic impulse and the shape of life as a whole. “This project was a way in which I could ponder the process we’ve all been through — the accretion of experiences and influences that brought me to the place I was when I made the piece,” Dinnerstein says. “My father’s triptych has something of the same spirit, with his creation of a personal work of art using the art that awed him,” she adds. With the creation of “The Eye Is the First Circle,” Dinnerstein has done something similar. Ives, always backward-looking, forward-thinking and boundary-breaking, would surely have approved.
Simone Dinnerstein performs “The Eye Is the First Circle” at the Folly Theater on Saturday, February 3. Details on that show here.
