The last movement of Charles Ives’s Fourth Violin Sonata extensively used the theme of Robert Lowry’s Shall We Gather at the River, but in his unique manner. It is very interesting to see how Ives uses the borrowed tune from fragments to the whole gradually in this two-minute music. This paper will examine this progress, as well as how he combined tonal and atonal material together to create his own musical languages. The piece can be divided into three main sections. The first section which is from the beginning to m. 18, opens with a 4-bar introduction on the piano which used fragment of the hymn, and the same fragment is followed soon by the violin in m. 5. Another fragment appears in m. 9 in the violin, and the following three measures …show more content…
19 to m. 36, contains two different characters. The first half, from m. 19 to m. 28, the music acts like a “development” of the preceding material. There is almost no fragment of the hymn in this section. And it sounds like being modulated to another key although the piece is atonal as a whole. The mood is also very different from the first section. The register of both the violin and the piano keeps climbing up as well as the dynamic until it gets to the climax in m. 26. The piano here also helps building up by playing consecutive block chords in ff. In m. 27, we can see that Ives tried to set the mood back gradually. The fragment is back but firstly in an altered way. In original tune, the corresponding phrase uses A flat and F natural. Whereas here, Ives set A natural and F sharp instead. In this way, he highlighted the use of chromaticism and make the original tune more suitable to the vernacular contemporary music. In the second half of the second section, m. 29 to 36, Ives repeated same material from m. 13 to m.17, just slightly …show more content…
37 to the end. Instead of using fragments like before, Ives set the hymn tune straightforward here. The melody in the violin is mostly tonal, except for m. 43 and m. 52 where he used the same phrase as in m. 28. As if Ives is reminding us this is not the exact hymn tune. The piano uses the piano motif from the second section. What’s interesting is the fusion of tonal and atonal here. In the third section, violin melody is tonal in itself. And when we just listen to the piano part, we will find it more atonal. It is not very usual to see such a combination in a piece. It again looks like in this way Ives wants people to think it is not the exact one. There is a slight pause in m. 45, this measure acts like a little trick to the listeners. We were expecting it to proceed more while Ives stops it suddenly and continues the second half of the hymn in a strong manner. The second half starting at m. 46 is more tonal and the violin and the piano sound more unified. Again, the hymn tune is very straightforward except for the slight change in m. 52. In m. 56, Ives repeated again the first phrase from the beginning of the hymn, where the corresponding lyric is “Shall we gather at the river?” to end the whole piece, as if he is posing the question again at the