The Unanswered Question
Charles Ives
About the Composer
About the Music
Originally written around the same time that Ives began to conceive Three Places in New England, The Unanswered Question was later revised between 1930-35 before It received its premiere in New York on May 11, 1946 (nearly forty years later the original version would be premiered in New York on March 17, 1984). Like Three Places, The Unanswered Question is another product of the period of musical creativity and experimentation that followed his marriage to Harmony Twitchell in 1908. It is arguably the most frequently performed instrumental work from that period.
In his Memos Ives wrote “Around this time, running from say 1906 . . . up to about 1912-14 or so, thinks like All the Way Around and Back, The Gong on the hook and Ladder . . . The Unanswered Question, etc. were made. Some of them were played— or better tried out— usually ending in a fight or hiss . . . I must say that many of those things were started as kinds [of] studies, or rather trying out sounds, beats, etc., usually by what is called politely “improvisations on the keyboard”— what classmates in the flat called “resident disturbances.”
In The Unanswered Question Ives weaves together three unique and independent sonic levels. Each of them has its own instrumentation, melodic style and rhythmic footprint. The three layers overlap in a loosely controlled manner and effectively create an experimentation with polytonality and atonality, meaning the music lacks a single tonal center or a tonal center at all. Throughout the short work, the strings whisper at a ppp dynamic the entire time to represent “The Silence of the Druids— Who Know, See, an Hear Nothing.” The trumpet echoes with “The Perennial Question of Existence” and a quartet of woodwinds reply as “Fighting Answerers.” After a heightened climax, as the woodwinds frantically search for an answer, the trumpets “Question” persists; however, in its final utterance it is met with a silent “Undisturbed Solitude.”
Note by Christina Dioguardi