Joel Sachs Pre-Concert Talk

Joel Sachs will talk informally about his life with Charles Ives’s music, beginning when almost no one knew the name Ives – even though Joel grew up near Yale University, Ives’s alma mater. Music history courses in college would mention him but only as a curiosity. Finally, with the foundation of Continuum in 1966 by his visionary friend Cheryl Seltzer, who, coming from the West Coast, was much better informed about Ives, Joel began a lifetime of astonishing audiences and awakening great music students in America, Europe, Latin America, Central Asia -- even having the joy of conducting the Chinese premiere of his Third Symphony. Interludes include a dinner with Pierre Boulez at which he found himself trying to convince the great French musician that Ives was an amateur only in the sense that he made his living otherwise! Yet Ives had not been entirely alone, as Joel saw in writing the biography of the amazing California radical composer Henry Cowell, arguably the most unselfish composer in history. Introduced by chance to Ives, Cowell, who was busily promoting his American colleagues became not just a friend but a tireless spokesman for Ives’s music and his first publisher. They were just beginning to break through European resistance to American composers when World War II put a stop to everything. Since then, Ives has gotten a proper place in the world of music, though still only with a few of his easier pieces. Joel’s recent concerts in England, Holland, Germany, and the US have shown how audiences are astonished and deeply affected when they finally hear Ives at his most amazing.

This event is free and open to the public.

In the evening, Joel Sachs will performs masterworks by Ives. His rarely heard Piano Sonata No. 1 will be preceded by “The Alcotts” and “Thoreau,” the third and fourth movements of his more famous second Sonata, “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860.” You can reserve tickets for the concert here.