My Native Land (I), song for voice & piano, S. 303 (K. 6B21f)

• Date: 1895
• Composer: Charles Ives
• Period: Modern (1910-1949)

Review

Charles Ives dated this song to 1897 in his self-published collection of 114 Songs, but there is evidence that it was written as early as 1895, that is, in Ives' freshman or sophomore year at Yale.

Although the system at Yale at that point did not permit the study of additional subjects outside the basic classical curriculum until the junior year, Yale's first music composition professor, Horatio Parker, did have informal private classes with students he expected to enroll with him officially when they became upperclassmen. Since this song was written to a text of Heinrich Heine this is surely a song written as an assignment for Parker.

Ives' relationship to Parker was complex. Ives had only one teacher, his father, who died just after Charles entered college. Ives seems to have sought a mentor/parent substitute, a role Parker, only 31 years old, could not fill. Moreover, to George Ives rules (once learned thoroughly) could be questioned and broken as needed. ("Tell Parker," responded George Ives in one of his last letters to his son, "that every dissonance doesn't have to resolve if it doesn't happen to feel like it....")

One wonders, then, what Parker had to say when Ives handed in this setting of a Heinrich Heine poem wherein a dyad of G/D flat "resolves into E flat/F, and where, in a piece in E flat major a simple A flat chord is suddenly followed by c# minor chord with a C natural on top."

These strange chords and a few other unexpected chromatic effects give a dreamy, distant feeling to the song that somehow fits the mood of the text, which, as published in 114 Songs is an English paraphrase from Heine's German. ~ Joseph Stevenson, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
American Songs	1997
Charles Ives: Songs	2007
Charles Ives: Songs, Vol. 4	2008
Charles Ives: Songs, Vol. 4	2008
My Native Land: A Collection of American Songs	1997
Romanzo di Central Park	2008

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