Charles Ives - Scherzo (Over the Pavements) for Octet (1906/1913) | Текст песни

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Charles Ives - Scherzo (Over the Pavements) for Octet (1906/1913)

Ives at the time worked for Mutual Insurance Company and was, in his spare time, making some of the most remarkable stylistic advances in music history. This work would, for all its brevity, turn out to be one of his most important pieces for its treatment of rhythm and tempo.
Ives later wrote that it began when he made an observation from the front basement window where he shared a bedroom with another young businessman in an apartment on Central Park West that its denizens called \"Poverty Flat.\" He saw and heard the people going past, mostly in \"all different steps.\" Horses, with their distinctive rhythm, also passed, and sometimes a trolley car drowned them all out. \"I was struck with how many different and changing kinds of beats, times, rhythms, etc., went on together -- but quite naturally.\"
Ives wrote down some of these rhythms in a piece he called Take-Off #3: Rube Trying to Walk 2 to 3!. In a period of a few years, Ives polished the idea into a somewhat longer piece, which he eventually titled Over the Pavements. (A scrap of Rube Walking was also used in the short song 1, 2, 3.) Over the Pavements is Ives' first wholly realized and successful essay in continuously separate streams of music in different rhythms, the concept that would occupy him in the future more than any other.
Ives described Over the Pavements as \"also a kind of take-off of street dancing.\" It begins with a perky 3/8 meter clarinet tune over a bassoon in 2/8. Polyrhythms then pile up to six streams in different beats and in many cases in different keys, and a ragtime rhythmic undercurrent is established. The piece is more than just a takeoff, and more than just a technical exercise. It neatly tickles the ear with its experimental rhythmic tricks while the descriptive impulse of the piece provides a lift. It has great forward momentum and maintains a sense of fun throughout. Just when it seems that there is no real way to end this cascade of busy forward rhythms Ives does so: there is a sudden shift to a 2/8 oom-pah rhythm and a textbook cadence on a C major chord, its hilarity compounded by the fact that the stream of preceding music is so polytonal as to be, in effect, atonal.

Description by Joseph Stevenson

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