You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.
Charles Ives
Lily boys, head for the safety of the conservatory library! Brian's at it again.
What, you may ask, is a “lily boy"? It is not, as you might expect, a florist's apprentice, nor yet an undertaker's assistant...although the lily boys do tend to cultivate a grave aspect perfectly in keeping with the mortuary trade. "Lily boy" is a term coined by the often-irascible Charles Ives (1874-1954): one of the greatest 20th-century American composers. (SMiLE owes a major debt to his brilliant, challenging, idiosyncratic work.) Ives invented the term to describe – unflatteringly – the conservative, dogmatic music critics who often found fault with his compositions.
Ives's music was charged with original, audacious ideas, thematic, harmonic and structural. If Gershwin was a sort of musical stepfather to SMiLE, then Ives was surely its eccentric great-uncle. He was obsessed with the idea of creating a truly American classical idiom, rejecting what he saw as inherited European conservatism. One may detect a spiritual kinship with Van Dyke Parks, who said of SMiLE: “Voluntarily, spasmodically, we chose to confirm the American experience.” 1
Ives wrote one work that emulated the sound of competing marching bands playing different pieces simultaneously, and another that captured the uphill-downhill progress of a fire truck, its bell clanging at irregular intervals. (Sirens howl through "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow.") He quoted heavily from American vernacular songs and hymns, including, among many others, "Turkey in the Straw," "Camptown Races," "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," "Taps" and "Long, Long Ago" (that last song is also quoted in Movement III of SMiLE.) Ives's "Concord" Piano Sonata – sometimes regarded as the most technically demanding of all piano compositions – requires the soloist, at one critical point, to use a block of wood to play several keys at once in a "tone cluster." (This is surely akin, at least in terms of "performance art," to the musical hammers and saws of "Workshop.")
Ives thought the traditional string quartet "weak, trite and effeminate," and wrote a quartet of his own – the Second Quartet – subtitled "String Quartet for 4 men who converse, argue..., fight, shake hands, shut up – and then walk up the mountain-side to view the firmament." The second movement of the quartet, called "Arguments," features the four players engaging in a musical dispute. (Perhaps Brian was after something similar in the "George Fell" experiment; and he famously asked David Anderle and Michael Fosse to incite a bar fight, so he could record it.) The indicated tempi of the Second Quartet include "andante emasculata" and "largo sweetola." Like Brian and Van Dyke, Ives obviously saw no conflict between musical seriousness and humor. His compositions were long thought to be so difficult as to be unplayable. (Like SMiLE, many an Ives work waited decades for its official premiere.)
One work which so languished is the so-called “Holidays Symphony.” The four "tone poems" that comprise A Symphony: New England Holidays (the correct title) were composed at various times between 1903 and 1912. The piece that would become the final "movement" – "Thanksgiving and Forefathers' Day" – was the first to be composed. It was based on an earlier pair of organ pieces (now lost) dating from 1897. With the exception of private run-throughs, none of the pieces was publicly performed until 1931-2. During those years, three of the pieces were performed as stand-alone works; "Thanksgiving" did not have its premiere until 1954 (a month before Ives's death), when the four movements were finally performed together as a "symphony." In 1932 – some 22 years prior to that premiere – Ives wrote the following:
These four pieces, movements of a Holiday Symphony, take about an hour, and although they were first called together a symphony, at the same time they are separate pieces and can be thought of and played as such – and also, and as naturally, be thought of and played as a whole). These four pieces together were called a symphony, and later just a set of pieces, because I was getting somewhat tired of hearing the lily boys say, "This is a symphony! – Mercy! – Where is the first theme of 12 measures in C major? – Where are the next 48 measures of nice (right kind of) development leading nicely into the second theme in G?" (second donkey contrasting with Ass number 1) – the nice German recipe, etc. – give it a ride, Arthur! – to hell with it! – Symphony = "with sounds" = my Symphony! 2
Ives's entire musical career was a source of irritation to the lily boys; but as you may gather from this quotation, the specific transgression which aroused their ire in this case was a matter of nomenclature. Ives made the dreadful mistake of calling these four tone-poems, collectively, a "symphony." (Let the pearl clutching commence.) The piece did not, after all, conform to the predetermined requirements of symphonic structure. As if to enrage his detractors still further, Ives went on to pour the entire tempest out of the teapot, abandoning "symphony" in favor of the perfectly opaque "set of pieces" (the only thing more offensive than the misuse of terminology is the denial of its relevance altogether). But composers are an ornery, stubborn lot, and Ives was among the orneriest.
Brian Wilson first provoked the lily boys back in 1966, when he publicly announced that his upcoming album SMiLE would be a "teenage symphony to God." 3 If the offhand use of the term "symphony" was irksome in Ives's case, it was totally insupportable in Wilson's case. Ives, at least, was a classically-trained musician. Wilson was...well, he was a pop musician. A writer of surf music! Car music! What could be worse?
Well, this could be worse: following the concert premiere and album release of the completed SMiLE in 2004, Brian decided to double down – no, quadruple down – on his earlier “symphony” description, as follows:
"It's a rock opera with three movements, is what it really is. It's the long promised answer to a rock opera, that people wanted to hear." 4
And then again: "It's a three-movement rock opera...." 5
Adding insult to injury: "People call it a rock symphony, but it's more a cantata, a rock cantata." 6
And finally, the worst indignity of all: "It's a three-piece rock opera about America, and a happy teenage symphony to God." 7
Opera? Cantata? Oh, the effrontery! As if the casual misuse of the word "symphony" weren't enough. Was there no form, no term that was sacrosanct? And that last, nonchalant phrase: "a happy teenage symphony to God." The original quotation revived, refurbished, and sporting the decidedly unclassical adjective "happy." Why, if one didn't know better, one might think that Wilson, like Ives, was telling the world that the terminology…(gulp!)...didn't even matter. One might think (angels and ministers of grace defend us!) it was all about the music.
Whatever you call it – opera, cantata or symphony – recrimination and doubt did not, ultimately, keep SMiLE from seeing the light of day. The lily boys had no better luck keeping Ives's music out of the concert hall. Luckily – for the folks who care more deeply about the music than the terminology – it often seems to work out that way.
By way of illustration, consider the case of another gentleman, a German organist-composer, who ran afoul of an earlier generation of lily boys. They regarded him as an average musician; he had no university education, and published only a handful of pieces during his lifetime. He had the composer's streak of orneriness as well: he once likened a certain bassoonist's playing to the bleating of a goat, and was obliged to defend himself with a ceremonial sword when the bassoonist and his friends attempted to exact physical retribution for the remark. In 1722 the Town Council of Leipzig set out to fill the post of town Choir Master, and was distressed when the leading candidates turned down the position. At length, in desperation, they turned to the sword-wielding organist; the surviving council minutes read as follows: "Since the best men cannot be obtained, we must make do with the mediocre." 8 After his death, this "mediocre" composer's manuscripts were divided among his children; some were sold, and some were lost. Four sons, composers all, were trained at the best universities; and their musical reputations, in the 18th century, easily eclipsed that of their father. The lily boys of the era adored them.
The passage of time has given us the opportunity to reconsider some of these judgments. Today, relatively little is heard of the four sons. They are regarded as technically proficient, perfectly correct, utterly uninspired composers, and their works are rarely played. As for their "mediocre" father: history has come to take a more favorable view of Johann Sebastian Bach. It is surely no coincidence that Brian himself, speaking of his "happy symphony," has said: "My favorite was Bach, because he used simple chords and simple forms, but got such complex results. That’s what I was trying to do.” 9
No fair, lily boys. Now they're ganging up on you.
Footnotes
1 Quoted in “How Brian Wilson Found his Smile,” James Cullingham, Globe & Mail, Saturday, October 2, 2004
2 https://www.briancoffill.com/single-post/2016/04/02/charles-ives-decoration-day
3 https://magazine.atavist.com/goodbye-surfing-hello-god/
4 Quoted in Express Magazine, 2004
5 Larry Rodgers in the Arizona Republic, 2004
6 http://www.pastemagazine.com/action/article?article_id=949
7 Quoted in “How Brian Wilson found his Smile,” James Cullingham, Globe & Mail, Saturday, October 2, 2004
8 https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/travel/1985/03/24/leipzig/c01a0976-7153-4266-8bb9-4218ea9c1041/
9 http://www.pastemagazine.com/action/article?article_id=949
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