Provided Photo

Charles Ives.

Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington
Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Oral History, American Music; 4 p.m., Nov. 3. Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall, 128 Wall St. Free. library.yale.edu.

Oral music history is a different kind of music history. It’s proactive, you could say. It aims to establish what are called primary sources — information, thoughts, perceptions, points of view, values and ideologies straight from the horse’s mouth.

Oral music historians go to the people making history — composers, musicians, friends, collaborators, peers, and relations of composers or musicians — and record their voices. Regular history only studies primary sources. It doesn’t produce them. And it doesn’t have a real voice.

So it’s no small thing that Yale’s Oral History, American Music turns 40 this year. It’s the only institute in the country dedicated to collecting and preserving audio and video memoirs of American history-makers. And it’s no small thing Yale’s institute (OHAM) has been directed pretty much by one person the whole time: Vivian Perlis.

In 2005, with co-author Libby Van Cleve, Perlis published Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington, the first of four projected books to draw from OHAM’s deep well of knowledge going all the way back to 1969. On Nov. 3 at 4 p.m., Perlis and Van Cleve give a presentation at the Yale Library to commemorate the last four decades.

Twentieth-century American music starts with Connecticut’s own Charles Ives, but he died (in 1954) before Perlis had a chance to interview him. How do you establish an oral history of the dead? Simple. You interview anyone and everyone who came in contact with him.

“Ives was a quirky type,” Perlis says. “Everyone I talked to without exception found they couldn’t describe what was special about him but they were convinced he was special. And the range of people who knew him was amazing: Between the barber who didn’t know he was a musician to other composers like Elliot Carter and Henry Cowell to people he knew in the insurance business.”

Insurance?

Yes. Ives innovated estate planning in fact.

Composing came second.

Even so, he was always composing. The yen started with his father, George, a bandleader in Danbury who liked to point out to his precocious son the dissonant and (to his ears) exciting sound of two brass bands crossing paths. The lesson evidently stuck. Cowell recalls in the book when Ives explained that the idea of clashing sonorities came from his experience in the church.

“You know, Henry,” Cowell recalls in the book, “people singing in church don’t sing so much because they’re musical, they sing because they’re religious. … There are always a few people who sing the melody right in the middle …, but if people are overeager and terribly religious, they apt to be sharp. … If they’re backsliders, they’re flat, because they don’t take this with any very great degree of interest. The result is that you get a tone in the middle, and you get a few tones just a little higher and a few tones just a little lower, all going together in a kind of nebulous haze around the melody proper.”

Ives pretty much kept that nebulous haze to himself.

“His insurance colleagues were surprised when he won the Pulitzer Prize,” Perlis says. “Most didn’t know he was anything other than a successful insurance executive.

“His music was so far ahead of his time,” she adds. “For more than two decades, he didn’t hear his music played at all. [Aaron] Copland wrote that he must have had the courage of lion to live the way he did.”

Copland knew about courage.

He must have.

After dabbling in the avant-garde, and learning from the great Nadia Boulanger, this slight gay Jew of Russian parentage born in Brooklyn went on to become author of America’s soundtrack. Masterpieces like Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, Fanfare for the Common Man accompanied dreams of deserts, mountains, the Great Plains, cowboys, Shaker dancing and rolling verdant hills.

Yet to Copland, there was no disparity.

“Copland’s mother sang cowboy tunes to him,” Perlis says. “She spent the first 19 years of her life in Texas where her family sold dry goods out of back of the wagon and they only spoke Yiddish. It sounds like a Mel Brooks movie, but it didn’t occur to Copland that a Jewish boy from Brooklyn couldn’t write American music. It didn’t seem odd to him. Copland was not isolated like Ives was.” Another role of the oral historian is to evoke in the interviewee more than just facts. Oral historians are looking for impressions, feeling, and perceptions, the threads that make up the tapestry of a life. Perlis spent a lot of time asking subjects about early childhood experiences, influences, and particularly, about their process.

That might sound somewhat abstract, but someone like Virgil Thompson, a composer and acclaimed music critic, knew what she was talking about. To him, inspiration came from somewhere, he didn’t know where, but he did know that if it stopped, it was time for him to stop, too.

“It surprised me that someone as practical-minded as Thompson said that when the ideas stop coming, you put your pencil down and you get another job,” Perlis says.

“He’d say he wasn’t a mystic and he wasn’t calling forth any special gifts. He believed that if it doesn’t come, you have no choice. That was the case with Copland as well.”