On today’s date in 1946, at the Yaddo Music Festival in Saratoga Springs, New York, the Walden Quartet gave the first professional performance of the String Quartet No. 2 by the American composer Charles Ives.

Ives’ String Quartet No. 1 was his first major work – its manuscript is dated 1896, back when Ives was a 21-year old student at Yale. While Ives’ First Quartet was written under the watchful eye and conservatively tonal ear of the Yale music professor Horatio Parker, Ives’ Second, composed between 1907 and 1913, is more often than not a wildly atonal work that would have given poor Professor Parker a heart attack.

On the first page of its score, Ives provided a kind of program. It reads: “String Quartet for four men who converse, discuss, argue politics, fight, shake hands, shut up, and then walk up the mountainside to view the firmament.”

Judging from some musical quotations in the first movement of Ives’ Quartet, it seems the American Civil War was one of the political topics fought over by the four men mentioned by Ives, and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” is quoted, along with Ives’ perennial favorite, “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.”

Charles Ives (1874 – 1954) String Quartet No. 2 (Emerson Quartet) DG 435 864