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 o.

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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.”

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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
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instruments of the wind quartet respond with music that is even
more tonally
uncentered and that becomes increasingly agitated as the work
progresses.

9. 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

10. 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

11. Ives, progress in
music was an imperative, and that meant challenging listeners
to hear with fresh
ears.
Chapter 46Charles IvesThe Unanswered QuestionComposer
Profile: Charles IvesExploring The Unanswered
QuestionContrasting TimbresLayered TextureAtonal versus
Tonal HarmonyAnimated NotationAnimated NotationAnimated
Notation