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If you’ve never experienced Charles Ives’ music before, you might want to hang on to your hat.

Ives liked to create musical portraits of life, of the way things happened. He evokes the ethos of these old-time barn dances, by weaving a tapestry of fragments from the old tunes of the time.

If our expanded Consort sounds here like an old country band, then I think we’ve done right by Charlie.

David’s gorgeous cello voice emerges after the first couple minutes, playing this beautiful, yearning, “going home,” finale melody that Ives composed in the old-time style. I can’t imagine any cellist on the planet playing it more soulfully.

Here is Ives’ description of this piece (from the program of our Charles Ives Show):

Barn Dance from Washington’s Birthday
[1909: “Recollections of a Boy’s Holiday in a Connecticut Country Town.”]
These...holiday movements...are but attempts to make pictures in music of common events in the lives of common people (that is, of fine people), mostly of the rural communities. That’s all there is to it.

Sometimes the change in tempo and mixed rhythms would be caused by a fiddler who, after playing three or four hours steadily, was getting a little sleepy -- or by another player who had been seated too near the hard cider barrel. Whatever the reason for these changing and sometimes simultaneous playing of different things, I remember distinctly catching a kind of music that was natural and interesting, and which was decidedly missed when everybody came down “blimp” on the same beat again. The allegro part of this “Washington’s Birthday” aims to reflect this, as well as to depict some of the old breakdown tunes and backwoods fun and comedy and conviviality that are gradually being forgotten.

….in this piece, from a half a dozen to a hundred Jew’s harps are necessary -- one would hardly be heard. In the old barn dances, about all the men would carry Jew’s harps in their vest pockets or in the calf of their boots, and several would stand around on the side of the floor and play the harp more as a drum than as an instrument of tone.

- Charles Ives

credits

from Consorting with David, released February 26, 2021
Written by Charles Ives
(Associated Music Publishers, Inc, BMI)

Paul Winter / alto sax
Paul McCandless / English horn
David Darling / cello
Robert Chappell / regal
Tigger Benford / percussion
Ken Singleton / tuba
Sam Singleton / flute
Ben Aldridge / trumpet
Ted Toupin / trombone
Anthony Newman / organ
West Redding Jews-Harp Sextet

Conducted by James Sinclair
Arranged by Ken Singleton and Paul Winter
Recorded live, West Redding, Connecticut
August 17, 1974

From the forthcoming album The Charles Ives Show
Paul Winter Consort & Friends

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Paul Winter Litchfield

Paul Winter is a seven-time Grammy-winning saxophonist, whose sextet was the first jazz group to perform at the White House in 1962. His second group, the Paul Winter Consort, interweaves sounds from the natural world with classical and ethnic traditions, and the spontaneous spirit of jazz. Their annual Winter Solstice Celebrations and Earth Mass are among the most popular events in New York. ... more

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