Piano Sonata No. 2 (Ives)

According to Henry and Sidney Cowell, "she gave performances of it, usually one movement at a time, in conjunction with Bellamann's lectures, across the southern states from New Orleans to Spartanburg, South Carolina.

"[5] During the late 1920s, a number of pianists including Katherine Heyman, Clifton Furness, E. Robert Schmitz, Oscar Ziegler, Anton Rovinsky, and Arthur Hardcastle performed various movements of the sonata.

[4] (In a letter to Ives dated June 22, 1938, Kirkpatrick wrote: "Last night, in our little series here, we got to the American impressionists, and I trotted out the whole Concord Sonata — not yet from memory — but it was nice to feel its unity.

In the introduction to his Essays Before a Sonata[13][14] (published immediately before the Concord Sonata, and serving as what Henry and Sidney Cowell called "an elaborate kind of program note (124 pages long)"[15]), Ives said the work was his "impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Massachusetts of over a half century ago.

This is undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne.

"[1] The four movements are: The piece demonstrates Ives' experimental tendencies: much of it is written without barlines, the harmonies are advanced, and in the second movement, there are cluster chords created by depressing the piano's keys with a 14+3⁄4-inch (37 cm) piece of wood, as well as clusters marked "Better played by using the palm of the hand or the clenched fist."

The piece also amply demonstrates Ives' fondness for musical quotation: the opening bars of Beethoven's Symphony No.

"[18] In a letter to John Kirkpatrick, Harmony Ives wrote the following on behalf of her husband: "it depends sometimes, on the time of day it is played heard — at sunrise that wide chord — and at sunset maybe with an overtone, towards a star.

"[19] Commenting on the sections without barlines, Henry and Sidney Cowell wrote: This is a prose concept of rhythm; it is also related to the idea that different stresses may be given by different performers, all of them right... [U]sually one feels that Ives hopes to induce the performer not to be too bound by any one way of organizing strong and weak beats, playing the passages now one way, now another.

Ives's whole approach to his complex rhythms should be understood as an attempt to persuade players away from the strait-jacket of regular beats, with which complete exactness is impossible anyhow, and to induce them to play with rubato in the involved places, with a freedom that creates the impression of a sidewalk crowded with individuals who move forward with a variety of rhythmic tensions and muscular stresses that make constant slight changes of pace.

[23]) Other exponents of the work include Nina Deutsch, Gilbert Kalish, Easley Blackwood, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Stephen Drury, Marc-André Hamelin, Heather O'Donnell, Herbert Henck, Alan Feinberg, Richard Aaker Trythall, Phillip Bush, Roberto Szidon and most recently Jeremy Denk, Alan Mandel, James Drury, and Melinda Smashey Jones.

In 1986, Bruce Hornsby borrowed the opening phrase of "The Alcotts" movement as the introduction to his hit "Every Little Kiss" (as heard on the album The Way It Is).