Iveseenit!

Not just a paltry insurance salesman, Charles Ives spent most of his life chastising the American political system through his penetrating prose and extraordinary works of music. His leider—like most of his compositions— walk a fine line between traditional tonality and untamed dissonance, while curiously mixing and manipulating meter. Often featuring Ives’ own lyrics, these songs flaunt Ives’ knack for text. Vote For Names, a work written for Soprano and three pianos, encompasses all of Ives’ brilliantly unorthodox leider style in under a minute.

Ives’ was a politically minded, progressive individual, but had a distaste for politicians themselves and the political parties they represented. He found the candidates in the 1912 election to be particularly irksome. This election was at the height of the progressive movement; a movement far too tame for Ives’ taste. Vote for Names was Ives’ commentary on the campaigns of Woodrow Wilson, running under the democratic nomination, William Howard Taft, for the republican party and Theodore Roosevelt representing his own “progressive party.” Ives felt there was little difference between these candidates’ platforms; they were all simply gushing crowd-please political rhetoric.

While the original manuscript of Vote for Names is fairly ambiguous, and the few published versions of the song vary greatly , the manic dissonance and hasty harmonic rhythm prevail in all. The three pianos represent the three candidates—all spewing “the same hot air election slogan hit hard over and over,” as Charles noted as the dynamic marking on the score. In this case, the slogan is mainly one polytonal chord, present in the second piano part, an E minor chord in the left hand and a D augmented chord with a flat nine in the right, theoretically, a meaningless chord . According to Ives, this chord was sadly devoid of meaning, representing the way he felt listening to politicians speak and voting at the polling office. This melancholy chord is drummed out in a meter of nine-sixteen, repeated in a constant rhythmic sequence of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. The first piano part consists of a strange chain of minor ninths, and the third piano part consists of three chords of just minor ninths followed by one consisting of minor seconds. The vocal line is similarly unique. Written without a meter, the vocal line sails up and down from the top of a sopranos range to the bottom. This represents the individuality and independence of the voter, possibly Charles Ives himself. When the text is combined with the dissonance of the pianos and idiosyncratic vocal line, Ives’ message is clearly pounded home:
Vote for names, names, names!
All nice men!
Three nice Men!
Teddy, Woodrow, and Bill!
After trying hard, to think whats the best way to vote,
I say,
Just walk right in,
And grab a ballot,
With the eyes shut and walk right out again.