Ives, The Unanswered Question

I have inserted Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question this week into the sequence of performance picks that I had planned. Somehow, unanswered questions seem appropriate at the moment, but I will leave it at that and let you make of it what you will.

Ives (1874-1954) wrote the work originally in 1908 and then revised it in the 1930s. It was not performed until 1946.

This short work has a simple, straightforward form. Over a slow moving, chorale-like background in the strings a trumpet asks the same “question” seven times. After each iteration of the question, a woodwind quartet (here all flutes) offers an increasingly incoherent attempt to answer. The strings are slow, tonal, ethereal. The trumpet “question” is atonal. The three musical components have separate tempos and are rhythmically independent. In other words, there is some flexibility built into the score concerning timing. The sequence of events is set and coordinated, but not in the sense of having the bar lines match up in the score.

Of course, all of this lends itself to numerous extra-musical interpretations. Leonard Bernstein offered a lecture series at Harvard based in part on the work, although the six lectures dealt with many broader philosophical and aesthetic questions. You can currently find those lectures on YouTube. Each runs more than an hour, so set aside some time.

Ives posited that the strings represent “The Silence of the Druids — who Know, See and Hear Nothing.” Others commentators focus on how the strings remain placid and unchanged—undisturbed by the back and forth of the trumpet and winds. Most agree they represent something eternal (I would opt for something more eternal than Druids). Against this, the trumpet asks a question that might be considered out of character, or perhaps even irrelevant. And the futile attempts of the poor winds to provide an answer might seem angry or comical. 

Eventually the winds gives up hope of answering. After the fifth answer (at 4:27) they sound a low chord during the sixth iteration of the question, as though stopping their ears. Then they turn to mocking the question. Note how the flute imitates the question at 4:49. They offer nothing in reply to the seventh statement of the question, and the piece ends with the strings sounding a final, unadorned G major chord.