the eye is the first circle

CHARLES iVES CONCORD SONATA

Artist: Simone Dinnerstein
Release Date: October 18, 2024
Label: Supertrain Records
Producer: Adam Abeshouse

Ralph Waldo Emerson, on whom the first movement of the Concord Sonata is based, wrote in his essay, Circles, “The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end.”

Charles Ives wrote his large-scale Concord Sonata in a similar manner, in rushes. Some elements of it he began in 1904, he ‘finished’ it twice in 1919 and 1947 and added and subtracted for much of his life. There is a sense in which he barely stopped writing it. We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact, identity is always a never-completed process of becoming - a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being. Ives’ music teems with invention, with the music that was all around him - art music and popular music - from which he, in turn, created his own distinctive and changing voice.

This recording of Ives’s sonata is taken from a live performance of a larger audio-visual work, The Eye is the First Circle, in which I coupled a performance of the sonata with manipulated images from The Fulbright Triptych, a painting by my father, Simon Dinnerstein, which formed one of the first rings of my own creative personality. This artistic project was a way in which I could ponder the process we’ve all been through - the accretion of experiences and influences that brought me to the place I was. It was an attempt to do what Emerson argued that we all want to do: to draw a new circle.

-Simone Dinnerstein