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Chapter 46Charles Ives

The Unanswered Question Composed: 1908

Ives, like other modernists working in the early twentieth century, was trying to

find new means of musical expression that went beyond standard conventions of

harmony and melody. Nowhere is this struggle between old and new styles more

evident than in The Unanswered Question.

Listen to the Text

Composer Profile: Charles Ives Listen to the Text

Ives (1874–1954) both absorbed and rebelled against almost every musical

tradition of his time. The son of a Civil War bandmaster, he grew up in Danbury,

Connecticut, where he learned many different kinds of music: the orchestral

repertory of the concert hall, church hymns, band music, and popular songs in the

parlors of the town's homes. Ives worked all of these idioms into his own music,

often in the same work.

As a composer, Ives's career path also went against the grain. If a composer “has a

nice wife and some nice children,” he once asked, “how can he let them starve on

his dissonances?” His “day job” was in insurance, and as it turned out, Ives did

quite well for himself. He composed in his spare time, but his music was rarely

performed or published during his lifetime. Declining health forced him to more or

less give up composition after 1918. Only toward the end of his life did critics and

performers begin to take note of his music. By the time he died, he was recognized

as a pioneer who had challenged convention and gone against the grain well before

other American composers would take up the cause of modernism.

Charles Ives in his study, ca. 1947. He would not achieve widespread fame as a

composer until after his death, when he began to be recognized as one of the

pioneers of musical modernism.

Exploring The Unanswered Question Listen to the Text

First, listen to Ives's composition, using the following prompts as a guide. Then

read the discussion of how the elements of music operate in this piece.

• Timbre: Listen for the distinctive sound of three different groups of

instruments: strings, solo trumpet, and a quartet of wind instruments (two flutes

and two clarinets).

• Melody: How many distinct themes can you identify?

• Texture: Listen for the layered texture of these instruments. Notice that the

strings play continuously, while the trumpet and the quartet of winds come and

go.

• Harmony: Which group plays the most conventional-sounding musical

harmonies? Which plays the most unconventional musical harmonies?

♫ Listen to This First

Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question

Contrasting Timbres The music is performed by three contrasting groups of instruments:

• Strings: A small string orchestra of violins, violas, cellos, and double basses

plays throughout the entire work from beginning to end, without pause.

• Solo trumpet: A single trumpet interjects what Ives called “The Unanswered

Question” at five different points over the course of the piece.

• Wind quartet: An ensemble of four wind instruments (two flutes and two

clarinets) responds to the trumpet's “question,” each time with a different

“answer.”

Layered Texture Many composers had used contrasting groups of instruments before—think of

Vivaldi's “Winter” from The Four Seasons (violin versus string orchestra; see

Chapter 17) or Mozart's Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 488 (piano versus full

orchestra; see Chapter 26)—so the idea of having two groups of instruments in

dialogue with one another was certainly not new. What is unusual here is the

manner in which the strings seem utterly oblivious to the dialogue taking place

between the two groups of wind instruments (the solo trumpet and the flute

quartet). The result is a kind of layered texture in which three blocks of sound—the

strings, the solo trumpet, and the winds—are moving completely independently of

one another.

Atonal versus Tonal Harmony Ives uses these contrasting timbres and textures to highlight, in microcosm, the

conflict between two very different harmonic languages: tonal and atonal.

Tonal music establishes a harmonic center of gravity, a central note (the tonic) that

provides a strong sense of resolution and closure. We have talked about the role of

the tonic in Chapters 19 and 41, for example. There is an experiment that you can

use to help clarify the significance of the tonic. When we sing the end of “The

Star-Spangled Banner” (“. . . home of the brave”), the note for “brave” is the tonic,

also known as the “tonal center,” of the melody. Try singing the last phrase but not

the last note (“O'er the land of the free, and the home of the . . .”: if you end on the

word “the,” you will immediately sense the strength and pull of the tonic note in

tonal music. You want to go there!

Atonal music, by contrast, has no harmonic center of gravity. No single note exerts

the kind of force, the attraction, that we find in the tonic note in tonal music. Or, to

put it more positively, all notes in atonal music are of equal weight: No particular

note is more important than any other. Without a tonal center, everything our ears

have come to expect notes to do, in the music we have listened to so far in this

book and in the music we hear most often in the world around us, simply does not

happen. Not only do notes not follow other notes the way we expect, but notes do

not line up together the way we expect to hear them, and often they sound like they

clash—like they are wrong. This sound is called a dissonance. (The opposite

sound, the one our ear finds naturally right, is called a consonance.) A

dissonance gives us the sense that something has not quite been finished or

resolved, as in the following animated notation.

Animated Notation Dissonance

In The Unanswered Question, the strings play in a decidedly tonal fashion, moving

in a slow, steady pace, almost as if playing a very slow hymn. What little

dissonance we hear is carefully resolved: Nothing is left open-ended or unresolved.

The solo trumpet, by contrast, repeatedly poses a five-note figure—the

“Question”—that implies no tonal center at all and is completely open-ended. Its

contour is jagged, moving first down before leaping upward dramatically. The

instruments of the wind quartet respond with music that is even more tonally

uncentered and that becomes increasingly agitated as the work progresses.

Animated Notation The Trumpet's “Question”

The note progression is as follows: B flat, line 3; B flat, line 3; C sharp, line below

staff; E natural, line 1; E flat, space 4; C natural, space 3. The shape of the contour

is starts flat, then goes down slightly, up greatly, and then down.

Animated Notation The Wind Quartet's Response

Part 1 in the wind quartet plays the note, F natural, while part 2 plays the note, F

sharp. The two notes are dissonant.

Ives himself hinted at the symbolism behind these contrasting elements of tonal

(strings) and atonal (trumpet, wind quartet). He compared the strings to “Druids”

who “know, see, and hear nothing.” The trumpet, by contrast, poses what Ives

called “The Perennial Question of Existence,” in exactly the same manner each

time and without variation. The quartet of flutes, in turn, attempt to answer the

trumpet but becomes increasingly turbulent each time and eventually begins to

“mock” the trumpet's question. By the end, only the sound of the strings remains,

and the question remains unanswered.

It is revealing that Ives chose to represent this metaphysical debate through a

contrast of the musical old (conventional harmony and regular rhythms within a

single tempo) and the musical new (unconventional harmony and irregular rhythms

across shifting tempos). Like other modernist composers of the early twentieth

century, he was trying to shock listeners out of what he perceived to be their all-

too-comfortable habit of listening to “beautiful” music—listeners who, like the

“Druids” of The Unanswered Question, are content within themselves and

oblivious to all that is around them. Ives elsewhere noted that music is all too often

treated as a “narcotic,” something that dulls the senses rather than arouses them.

And a narcotic, he maintained, was no basis for progress. For Ives, progress in

music was an imperative, and that meant challenging listeners to hear with fresh

ears.