Light reflects off a bronze statue at the edge of Boston Common and into Charles Ives’ first movement from Three Places in New England. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was a Union officer who marched a unit of Black volunteer soldiers into a massacre at Fort Wagner near Charleston, SC. The colonel’s parents commissioned sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to commemorate their son, and he responded with an image of heroism embossed onto a slab of sad fate. Ives spent many childhood days in the Common near the relief, and his “St. Gaudens” movement conjures his impression of Shaw and his men walking into death. The composer’s penchant for interweaving familiar melodies is used here to evoke the dissipating echoes of two Civil War songs, “The Battle Cry of Freedom” and “Marching Through Georgia,” which he surrounds with cannon smoke and confusion. A soldierly horn occasionally pierces through the din, and there is a brief brass attempt at a rally, but all notes of courage are felled. 

In the second movement, “Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut,” Ives visits another place of meaning to him—a few miles from where he was born—and the site of another American war. Partly in response to the death of his uncle Lyman Brewster, who wanted Ives to compose an opera based on his play about Major John André (a traitorous British spy in the Revolutionary War), the composer wrote a chamber piece, 1776 Overture and March—a wild, modernist mash-up of the revolutionary songs “Hail, Columbia,” “The Red White and Blue,” and “The British Grenadiers.” (The effect recalls his boyhood experience hearing marching bands in the town square, playing different tunes in surround sound.) He wrote “Country Band March” around the same time and fused the two pieces to form the Putnam movement, creating a fictional story about a boy who falls asleep during a Fourth of July picnic and dreams about a battle waged at the camp. 

There is no bloodshed in Ives’ third place, only bliss. “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” is a river where the composer shared a honeymoon walk with his new wife, Harmony, on a Sunday morning in the summer of 1908. “We walked in the meadows along the river, and heard the distant singing from the church across the river,” Ives recounted in his Memos. “The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and elm trees were something that one would always remember.” He set the memory to music, and it nicely bookends this three-part ode to his beloved New England with something of the same dreamy, gauzy quality as the Shaw remembrance...only of a much happier time.

- Tim Greiving