Ragtime and Sonata Forms: Appendix 2: Ragtime and cumulative setting or cumulative form

Appendix 2: Ragtime and cumulative setting or cumulative form

All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing

J. Peter Bukholder

Yale University Press

Copyright © 1995 by J. Peter Burkholder

ISBN 0-300-05642-7 (hc)

In chapter 5 of his monograph on Charles Ives and musical borrowing, J. Peter Burkholder described Ives’ use of cumulative setting, a variation of cumulative form.  This approach to form can be thought of as a kind of reverse variations/development form in which Ives took a well-known and popular tune; created a variant of that theme with a polyphonic complement and proceeded to reverse-engineer a development that culminated in a presentation of these themes.  

In Burkholder’s description cumulative setting can be thought of as a development that leads to a kind of recapitulation without any preliminary exposition (Burkholder, page 146). Burkholder emphasized on page 138 of All Made of Tunes that once you understand this is how Ives often composed many of the mysteries about what on earth he’s doing musically and why he’s doing it disappears. Burkholder also stressed that Ives developed the themes he derived from the borrowed tune rather than the borrowed tune itself (page 215).

Of course a risk in this approach to composing a large-scale form is that if your auditor doesn’t already recognize the borrowed melody throughout the earliest stages of an Ives work then the listener may conclude Ives had no idea what he was doing and couldn’t competently compose a sonata or a rondo or whatever European classical forms are given in the pedagogical literature that present the theme first.  This doesn’t make Ives a musical incompetent, he could clearly compose conventional sonatas and fugues and rondos when it suited him.  So why did he resort to cumulative setting?  Burkholder’s proposal was that Ives wanted to find a way to create new music that continued Romantic era ideas of organic development and invention without being overtly beholden to what Douglas Shadle would later describe as “the Beethoven problem”:

Orchestrating the Nation: the Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise

Douglas W. Shadle   

Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2016 by Oxford University Press

ISBN 978-0-19-935864-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-19-935865-6 (ebook)

Ultimately, then, the Beethoven problem and the Wagner problem coalesced into a “German music problem” that would have permanent ramifications for American composers.  Navigating the marketplace was not as simple as convincing audiences to buy tickets. Style mattered (page 10)

Shadle’s book expounded at length the double bind in the reception history of American symphonic essays: any American symphonist who did not imitate Beethoven or Wagner was not a “serious” composer yet anyone who did imitate the German composers could be accused of being derivative.  After roughly a century of that double bind it is hardly surprising that American composers ranging from Henry Cowell to John Cage to Harry Partsch all came up with different ways of giving a unidigital salute.

Ives, however, took Beethoven seriously.  Cumulative setting, In Burkholder’s account of Ives’ work, was a way to emulate the European tradition without being too overtly beholden to it.  Ives was, in other words, an American composer who pioneered a consistently workable solution (or work-around) to what Douglas Shadle called “the Beethoven problem”. 

Ives also made a point of suggesting that, well, maybe ragtime was one of the uniquely American styles and that it had value. 

Without lingering too long on Ives scholarship I hope to provide a possibly perfunctory but useful illustration of what a cumulative setting approach to composing a ragtime could look like.  The basic idea is to take some existing tune that is well-known and well-loved and then create themes that are derived from it and develop these themes.  In a ragtime, modular as it is, developmental at the scale of a Charles Ives work isn’t really necessary, although we could choose to go that path.  Moreover, cumulative setting doesn’t require that we omit an exposition simply because Ives did.  This work is called Ragtime and Sonata Forms, after all.  So, at this point I think it may be easier to show than merely tell.

Seeing as Ives loved to use a good hymn tune we can use a hymn tune.  I nominate the venerable melody from the Captain Kidd family of tunes that’s generally known as “Wondrous Love” from the American shape note tradition of hymnody.

Now what I’m about to do is something that might seem perfunctory but there are important elements to ragtime as a musical style that I’m relying on for this decision.  Ragtime rhythmic phrasing tends to be heavily syncopated but many of the key rhythmic tropes involve symmetrical phrases, the antithesis of Messiaen’s non-retrogradeable rhythms for those musicians who appreciate Messiaen’s work. You can take any number of riffs in ragtime and play them upside, backwards, or upside down and backwards.  Throw in the frequency of blue notes and I trust you see where I’m going by now, you can create a matrix of the tune you want to use that presents the tune in prime, retrograde, inversion and retrograde inversion.  In other words, for folks who had to study twelve-tone technique, this is where you can use devices from twelve-tone procedures to write ragtime. 

So the tune I’ve picked is “Wondrous Love”. What would the prime, retrograde, inversion and retrograde inversion of this tune look and sound like?

For the sake of simplicity I am going with B minor because as a guitarist the B natural in the treble clef can be a kind of middle C.  It’s very easy to set up inversions, retrogrades and the like if you start on B in a guitar score. 

Notice that “Wondrous Love” has no third.  It is traditionally harmonized in a minor mode in many an arrangement but it’s harmonic implications can clearly be dorian.  They don’t have to be.  We can mutate the contour of the melody into whatever mode or scale we want and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.  I dashed all of this off in literally a 24-hour period so I’m not trying to write anything anyone might consider “inspired”.  This is to demonstrate how an Ivesian cumulative setting approach using “Wondrous Love” gets us a simple two-page ragtime for solo guitar.

Because of the dorian inflection of the tune the retrograde inversion is only sort of interesting to me so I favor using the retrograde and inversion.  You’ll see I didn’t really do much with the retrograde inversion.

So those are the four basic forms of “Wondrous Love” and dashed off ragtime strain ideas that I’ve made from them.  Notice that the strains are in B minor, F major and A flat major.  Because ragtime is traditionally recursive and modular these lets me use the F major and A flat major strains as the A and B strains that flow across readily for the first page.  For the second page I return to the A strain and use retrograde inversion materials as a modulating transition that gets to the B minor strain that ends the work.  In cumulative setting terms this is finally revealing the tune I’ve used as the basis for the rag.  So “Wondrous Love Rag” hides the originating material that it’s based on behind retrograde and inversion derived themes until the closing strain appears, in which strain we finally get to see why it’s called “Wondrous Love Rag”.

Again, the idea isn’t to write something amazing or “inspired”.  This is a short “how to” for drawing on the example of Charles Ives’s cumulative setting approach to composition as described by J. Peter Burkholder as a way to write a new rag on an old tune from the shape note tradition.  I did say in part 1 I would get to this, it’s just turned out to be in an appendix rather than the body of the overall argument.   

Cumulative setting is a fun, flexible way to generate ragtime strains from some public domain melody that can become the basis for a ragtime sonata form.  I haven’t presented a larger-scale ragtime sonata form because that’s not really the goal of this little treatise although … I know of someone who has a few ragtime sonatas composed.  The idea here is to give you an example of how I’ve approached a cumulative setting ragtime so that you can come up with your own variants if you want.  The main thing is to have fun.  As this has been a work of musical advocacy rather than a compositional guidebook there is a lot I could say about what I was doing in this rag that I leave to readers to work out, if they want, on their own.