The choir worked weeks to count the irregular measures and to tune the dissonant chords, especially a twelve - tone pile - up on the verse about God's wrath. After the service, I asked my roommate Ned Rodriguez what he'd thought of all that. "I'm sorry, but we don't listen; we just pass the plate and read the program."
Well, that's what the psalm is about: all that sound and fury, come and gone, for nothing. But that's not the whole story. Forty-plus years later, I appreciate what Ives does to bring out the context of that somber message.
[Photo: Duke University Chapel, view of the nave from the choir. The Flentrop Organ was new when I sang there.]The 90th Psalm begins, Lord, You have been our refuge from one generation to another (v.1), to which composer Charles Ives, aged 24 in 1894, added, "to another... to another...." As each phrase slowly mounts a melodic step, it falls with a musical sigh, until the third iteration cuts off sharply.
Consciously or not, Ives echoes Macbeth's "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," our days crawling in "this petty pace" towards "dusty death," (for, as the psalm says, we are children of earth who turn back to the dust), the journey "signifying nothing." Perhaps Ives's final "another," abruptly ended, echoes Macbeth's clipped "nothing."
[Photo: Charles Ives (left), pitcher for a school team, around the time he composed Psalm 90. See Wikiwand.]
A young man singing a young man's composition, I sensed that, like me, Ives sometimes foresaw the decades ahead of him as a hard climb. My greatest fear was to plateau, never having attained the pinnacle, simply to drop off, unremembered. Psalm 90 tells us, Sorry, that's the way it's going to be:
You sweep us away like a dream;
we fade away suddenly like the grass.
In the morning it is green and flourishes;
in the evening it is dried up and withered. (v.5, 6)
Ives, using the King James version, does some word - painting with these lines. The chorus attenuates each word of the phrase "In the evening it is cut down," but the words "and withereth," crumple suddenly in a little row of half - tones.
The span of our life is seventy years,
perhaps in strength even eighty;
yet the sum of them is but labor and sorrow, for they pass away quickly and we are gone. (v.10)
In Ives, the chorus chants the King James version of these lines: "the years of our lives are three score years and ten," perhaps, "by reason of strength, we have four score years." Ives makes those last words a trudging succession of sighing two - syllable words: "FO-ur SCO-re YE-ars." Long life, it seems, is a hard slog that an individual must endure with resignation.
But Psalm 90 isn't just about the ephemeral lives of individuals; it's also about creation and community. This is, after all, a song for many voices, plus percussion, plus organist. The opening lines situate our lives within God's memory, from before time "when the mountains were brought forth" to "everlasting." The community, i.e., Israel, pleads that God bless them the same number of years that they've suffered for their sins.
I remember how the final section of the piece felt like warm comfort after the dryness, the strain, and the destruction of that middle section: "Prosper Thou our handiwork upon us,/ Prosper Thou our handiwork."
There's an assurance in this Psalm, highlighted by Ives's music, that our short lives have meaning as we, creators ourselves in our "handiwork," are part of the ongoing creation, perhaps forgotten by men in time, but remembered by God.
And that Ives piece, which I've heard just a couple times since I sang it, is remembered by me.
