Jeremy Denk, one of America’s foremost pianists and an alumnus of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, returns to IU Bloomington to provide a piano master class at 8:30 p.m. Oct. 1 in Ford-Crawford Hall during “Charles Ives at 150: Music, Imagination and American Culture.” The festival celebrates Ives as the leading American concert composer of the early 20th century.
Proclaimed by The New York Times as “a pianist you want to hear no matter what he performs,” Denk is also a New York Times bestselling author, the recipient of both the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ahead of the festival, which takes place Sept. 30 to Oct. 8, Denk tells us what Ives’ musical legacy means to him. He also shares memories of his time as an IU student, including anecdotes about the professors and places that made an indelible mark on his life and career.
Question: Can you tell us about the impact that Charles Ives had on American music and what you admire about his work?
Answer: How many pages do you have? Ives was a fascinating radical, way ahead of his time, hiding in plain sight as a successful insurance executive. During the years 1900 to 1920, he composed this unprecedented body of musical work that attempted to grapple with the messy, wild world of American experience.
At first, the conservative American classical music world did not receive him very well, to say the least. He was regarded as a lunatic (and still is, by many people) — to the extent he was noticed at all. But by the late ’30s and ’40s, the music’s special qualities, its incredible imagination — these things got noticed. Leonard Bernstein, especially, helped to bring Ives into the mainstream; but there were many others.
Ives became a crucial forefather for a mavericky strain of American composition. He also foreshadowed so many of the compositional processes of the 20th century, especially postmodernism, for instance, and the obsession with layering different musics together, the merging of popular and classical styles.
For me, Ives’ appeal is not his historical significance. It is fairly simple: He writes amazing chords, and traces out compelling stories, where all these conventional tunes (hymns, marches, ragtimes, ballads) are lost in a world of improvisation, and are only gradually found through epiphany, through the difficult work of searching and reworking and recreating. I find the music incredibly moving, funny, surprising and gratifying to play; you really live an Ives piece when you perform it. Beneath all the naughty, cranky dissonance, he’s a softie; there’s a tenderness at his core.
Q: It’s wonderful to have you return to campus! What was your experience like as a student at IU Bloomington? Did you have any professors or fellow students who were important to you?
A: Not that I’m pushing my book, but I wrote at length about my Bloomington years in my memoir (“Every Good Boy Does Fine”). OK, maybe I am pushing my book.
Bloomington changed everything about my concept of music. I had so many inspiring professors, but the most important was the Hungarian pianist György Sebök, a man and artist of refinement and deep cultural understanding who forced me to always ask about purpose and meaning, different languages of different styles, etc. He was obsessed with finding a “truthful” way of playing a piece, that let the music speak without becoming just a “performance.”
But the faculty had so many legends when I went to IU: the great cellist Janos Starker, the elegant Italian violinist Franco Gulli, Miriam Fried, Atar Arad, many of the wind players of the legendary Cleveland Orchestra, singers from the Met, including Margaret Harshaw, Virginia Zeani … on and on. It was a ridiculous profusion of musical knowledge, all these mentors with different personalities and value systems.
The professor Evelyne Brancart gave me some of my best piano lessons, outside of school, showing me the things that Sebök wouldn’t explain.
Q: How did your IU experience help you achieve great things throughout your career?
A: I think if it weren’t for Starker and Sebök, I wouldn’t have found an individual musical voice, and that’s such an important thing for your life going forward — to know what it is you have to say.
Q: Do you have any favorite haunts or establishments in Bloomington from your days as a student?
A: I heard that the Irish Lion closed! Terrible tragedy. I used to eat so many Blarney puffballs. And, of course, the Uptown Cafe was always the place you went for a “fancy” meal. Fancy was relative for me, as a grad student, who specialized in Kraft macaroni and cheese. The farmers market was always nice on Saturdays. I ate more Mother Bear’s pizza than anyone ever should.
Q: What wisdom would you share with today’s students who are pursuing degrees in the arts?
A: Be creative with your creativity. Always ask why. Try to think of music-making as a fundamentally joyous act, something that has to be reinvented every single day. Don’t be too impatient with your teachers; they were you, once.
