Fresh from being blown away by the Detroit Symphony and their romp through the four number symphonies by Charles Ives, I remembered slogging through an Ives choral work in college, the Psalm 90. The slogging speaks to our abilities, not Ives’.
Unisons give way to carefully assembled tone clusters, which heighten certain meaningful words – ‘to another,’ ‘destruction,’ ‘flood,’ ‘evil.’ The unison returns as a shock or a comfort. When performed correctly, as in this recording, the harmonies are so close that you can feel yourself reverberating in sympathy. I’ve pasted the text below to follow along. It is a passage that will be read at no wedding.
Who else but Ives could give us a Psalm transfigured, starting with unconventional plainchant to an ecstatic recitative to the closing transcendental hymn?
