Old Home Days

Old Home Days: Suite for Band (1976), by Charles Ives and arranged by Jonathan Elkus. Performed by the Rhode Island Wind Ensemble on May 17, 2026, at Moses Brown School in Providence, RI. Video and audio recording by Ryan Vemmer. Old Home Days is drawn from Ives’s Second Orchestral Set (1911–1915), a work rooted in memory, nostalgia, and the layered soundscape of small-town New England life. The songs and sketches assembled in this suite reflect Ives’s lifelong love of familiar tunes and homegrown music-making, inspired by his upbringing in Danbury, Connecticut. The music evokes the tradition of hometown reunions, where parades, church services, and community gatherings blend into a vivid and often overlapping musical experience. Each section contributes a distinct vignette. Waltz opens and closes with Michael Nolan’s “Little Annie Rooney,” reimagined by Ives as a festive wedding scene at “the old dance ground.” The Opera House captures a child’s breathless anticipation as the pit orchestra begins, leading directly into Old Home Day, where a drum roll sends the listener outdoors to follow a village band down Main Street, complete with fragments of tunes such as “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” “Garryowen,” and “Auld Lang Syne.” The Collection portrays a church offering, introducing “The Organist,” “The Soprano,” and a “Response by Village Choir” based on George Kingsley’s hymn tune Tappan. In Slow March, one of Ives’s earliest surviving works, a touching tribute to a family pet unfolds, framed by quotations from Handel’s Saul. The set concludes with London Bridge is Fallen Down!, a playful and rhythmically adventurous reimagining of the familiar tune, suggesting the youthful exuberance of Ives’s improvisations. In this arrangement, the collage-like nature of Ives’s writing is preserved, with overlapping melodies and shifting perspectives that evoke both the energy of communal music-making and the hazy, layered quality of memory itself. Old Home Days becomes not just a portrait of a place, but a deeply personal reflection on the sounds and experiences that define “home.”