It’s official: Harvard’s Fourth of July parade and celebrations will be filmed for a PBS documentary about early 20th-century American composer Charles Ives. Fourth of July Committee Chairwoman Kathy Farrell confirmed this week that Michael Tilson Thomas, musical director of the San Francisco Symphony, has selected Harvard as one of the sites for the project.
According to a publicity piece from the California-based production company Independent Communications Associates, Inc. (InCA), Thomas will host and narrate the program about Ives, who is “considered by many to be not only the most revolutionary, but also the greatest American composer.” InCA Productions has been working with Thomas since 2003 to create documentaries about classical music as part of a series called Keeping Score, a “project of the San Francisco Symphony designed to make classical music more accessible to people of all ages and musical backgrounds,” according to the project’s website.
The Ives documentary is one of three in the works for Keeping Score: Second Series, and it focuses on Ives’s “Holidays Symphony.” Described by InCA as a “sound painting,” the symphony consists of four movements that “distill Ives’s powerful memories of four perfect childhood days, one from each season.” According to Farrell, the four days are Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving; each day will be set in a different New England town.
Although representatives of InCA fell in love with Harvard’s timeless town center, said Farrell this week, the choice of Harvard was as much about the old-fashioned parade and field events.“The production company was looking for towns that had a traditional celebration that wasn’t commercialized,” Farrell said. “They were particularly interested in things like the pie-eating contest and the field events.”
Julie Mirocha, local representative for InCA, said in a telephone interview Tuesday, “We were looking for nostalgia in small-town New England.” She described the overall theme as “the perfect summer day in a boy’s life.” They sought a setting that evokes timelessness because “Ives was nostalgic for his youth in the 1890s,” a time of “swimming holes, fireflies, and walking down the country lane with a fishing pole,” she said.
A huge factor in the decision, according to Mirocha, was the level of cooperation from the community. “They are on the ball, they answer calls, and they are very organized,” she said, referring to Fourth of July Committee members and local officials. She added, “This is a town of overachievers!” Another factor was Harvard’s proximity to Boston and to Concord, where they are also filming at Walden Pond. Mirocha explained that Ives is considered to be an heir to Concord transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau—a musical heir, because they have no literary heirs. Wikipedia.com describes Ives’s “tendency to experiment and his increasing use of dissonance” and states that he was “almost certainly influenced by the New England transcendentalist writers.”
Farrell expects a small production crew of five to six people to be on site for the fireworks June 30 and for the parade and field events July 4. She hopes to locate a golf cart she can borrow to help the crew get around easily with their equipment. When asked if there would be any adjustments made or special features added in recognition of the documentary, she said Thomas has requested that a fife and drum band be included in the parade, and that InCA is trying to locate a local group.
In addition to celebrating the nation’s Independence Day, the parade will celebrate Harvard’s 275th birthday, and the committee is hoping to use this birthday theme as incentive for more local groups to get involved, in particular to boost the number of floats, which has dwindled in recent years. The plans for the fireworks event include performances by three local bands: a bluegrass group yet to be named; the Last Chord, a folk group; and the rock band Sometimes Charlie.
According to InCA’s website, the one-hour documentary is expected to be presented by PBS in early 2009.
