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A version of this essay was presented at the 2003 Conference on Music and Gesture in Norwich, England. I would like to thank Larry Starr, Philip Lambert, and two anonymous readers for reading and commenting upon an earlier draft of this article.
Charles Ives's song 'The Cage', presented as Example 1, provides students of twentieth-century music with concise examples of whole-tone collections and quartal harmonies, neatly isolated in the vocal part and the piano part respectively.1 Since these two dissimilar parts occur simultaneously, the song also illustrates Ives's well-documented penchant for juxtaposing contrasting ideas. Many interpretations of this song understandably embrace and encourage this segregation, either by emphasizing the differences between the two parts, or by channelling analytical energies to each part separately. In contrast, Larry Starr's reading of the song suggests an analytical benefit from listening to the interaction between these two parts. 2 However, he provides no specific analytical method for examining this interaction, or at least no method that approaches the sophistication of the methods that have been previously applied to each individual part. This study offers one such method for 'The Cage', revealing a path within a virtual, bounded space that correlates with some of the syntactic and semantic aspects of the song's text. These syntactic correlations also hold true in a similar passage in Ives's song 'Majority'. Example 1
Charles E. Ives, 'The Cage'. © 1955, Peer International Corporation. International Copyright Secured. Reproduced by permission of Faber Music Limited, London. Numerical labelling of chords and brackets above vocal line follow Lambert, 'Ives and Berg', 116, and The Music of Charles Ives, 152. Encircled vocal notes are not doubled in the piano chord that accompanies them. Accidentals apply only to notes that they immediately precede.
Daniel Kingman's one-sentence summary of 'The Cage' is a concise example of how the two parts of the song are customarily disconnected from one another: 'The voice intones Ives's short prose text, again using mostly the noncommittal whole-tone scale, while the piano, in a rhythmically independent part, uses severe sonorities based on the interval of the perfect fourth, to depict the restless pacing of the leopard in the cage.' 3 Cassandra Carr's reading, as part of a...