Cacophony in Town

A Story about the Danbury Fair, Charles Ives, Leonard Bernstein and Contemporary Discourse

Location is memory. Danbury CT, my hometown, was known for 3 things: its role in the Revolutionary War, hat manufacturing and the Great Danbury Fair. We read about 1777, the Mad Hatter became an advertising trope, but I lived and learned from the Danbury Fair.

Rides, sideshows, games of chance, cotton candy, oxen draws, sheep shearing contests, music and dancing, puppet shows, acrobats, petting zoos, livestock and fancy quilts. The Budweiser horses, all the way from St. Louis, pulled their beer wagon around the large oval racetrack where stock cars zoomed in another season. John Leahy, the owner of the Fair (as well as the local fuel oil company) arranged free admission and a day off from school for all Danbury students. October saw hundreds of thousands of tourists flocking to our 142 acre fairgrounds—we were on the map. We were known.

The great composer Charles Ives, a native of Danbury, surely attended the first Danbury Fair in 1869 when members of the Farmers and Manufacturers Society borrowed a tent from the Barnum & Bailey Circus to exhibit and celebrate the agricultural acumen of locals. Charles’s father,  George Ives, at that time was Danbury’s Bandmaster and undoubtedly played at the Fair. George was from a prominent family -- deacons, entrepreneurs, lawyers and civic leaders—but George fell in love with music, music education and musical experimentation. His two favorite composers were Bach and Stephen Foster.

Charles, though deeply influenced by his father, opted for a more lucrative profession. His most productive period as a composer occurred while he worked as an insurance executive. Years later, once his compositions were recognized for their genius and originality, and he had both time and resources, Charles Ives found himself unable to compose.

To celebrate the centennial of Charles Ives’ birth, a music professor at Western Connecticut State College, came up with what seemed like a crazy idea. He contacted Leonard Bernstein, a huge fan of Ives’ music, and to everyone’s amazement Bernstein agreed to perform a concert at the Fairgrounds. Michael Tilson Thomas added his name to the program and the fundraising effort began, spearheaded by the energetic arts devotee (and family friend) June Goodman, Contralto Marian Anderson and jazz great Dave Brubeck. The maestros were coming to town.

July 4, 1974. I was there with my parents and virtually everyone else we knew. Record-breaking heat, a full-moon. Orchestra under a bandshell at the racetrack and every seat in the grandstand filled. A small town came of age that night. A feat no one thought possible actually occurred. Layers of history turned to momentum. I look at the photos of Bernstein and focus on the crowd behind him. Independence at its best.

I added my own layer to that year’s celebration of freedom. That was the summer I turned down a full scholarship for NYU grad school, quit my job at Grand Street Settlement, and left the guy my mother viewed as perfection. I packed up my blue ’64 Plymouth Sports Fury convertible— minimal clothes and a record player and moved to a 170 acre farm in the poorest County in southwestern Wisconsin, 17 miles from a new town. I had purchased the farm two years earlier with my teacher’s salary. I breathed in the freedom of the Midwest and the beauty of land the glaciers had passed by.

In 1975 John Leahy, Fair’s owner, died.  With no obvious heirs, the property was sold and the huge Danbury Fair Mall now occupies the old fairgrounds. The original carousel offers a bit of nostalgia to shoppers.

As I listen to current arguments about historical preservation in the small hamlet where I now live, I can’t help but think about change—changes in space and function as well as changes in personal circumstance. Simply by living we move and change—individually from a baby to an adolescent to an adult—and if we are indeed lucky, to an old age. A town moves, too. Anchors become archives. Stories about our pasts make us who we are today. Charles Ives and his brother apparently sat on the green near the Congregational Church on the street where I grew up, listening to competing marching bands playing different tunes in different tempos, reveling—as did his father—in the cacophony.

I am trying to make sense of arguments in the here and now by thinking of them as music. Might the sometimes uncivil discourse in our town be heard as a radical experiment in the sounds of democracy and freedom?

I sold my farm in Wisconsin to buy our place here in the Hudson Valley. That movement somehow feels like harmony.