Ives: The unanswered question

“The Unanswered Question”

Charles Ives
(1874-1954)

Fifty years ago hardly anybody had heard of Charles Ives, apart from a small band of dedicated champions of new American music. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, Ives is regarded as the great father figure among American composers, the very earliest and most original of them all, many of whose major works have begun to be heard with regularity. He remains controversial, even scoffed at in some quarters, but is indisputably a formidable presence in American music, and one recognized world-wide.

During the years when Ives’ work was just beginning to be heard, discussions of his music often seemed to be obsessed with what seemed to be an amazing string of “anticipations”: focusing upon innovations in rhythm, musical structure, sonority and all the musical elements which had usually been claimed to be the creation of figures such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok. Thankfully, now we usually focus upon the innate qualities of the music itself, rather than whether or not it was Ives who did something

FIRST, which really adds up to little more than citations in a musical record book. The small, zealous band of devoted Ivesians who by the 1930s were pressing for an acceptance of the music (among their number Elliott Carter, Nicholas Slonimsky, and John Kirkpatrick) had discovered in Ives a powerful artistic vision, remarkably fresh and original, as well as distinctly American in tone.

Ives’ “Americanness” has created mischief for the serious consideration of his work, sometimes leading to a veritable “Ives industry,” with much fuss made about the quirky, “ornery,” cussed aspects of the composer’s personality, with the risk that Ives may be seen as some sort of picturesque New England “character.” Ives’ use of a wide range of musical Americana (patriotic songs, Revival hymns, marching band tunes, echoes of ragtime and Victorian ballads) has led to this tendency to make the composer into a lovable old geezer. The fact is that the finest Ives compositions often exhibit a tough-mindedness, even a kind of bracing “abstract” quality which is very off a piece with the most innovative music written in the early 20^th century. Yet hardly any of this music was known at the time it was being composed----the Ives Third Symphony, written in 1904, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947!

The career can be summed up fairly briefly: solid musical training under an eccentric father (Ives’ greatest influence, as he never tired of insisting), advanced study at Yale under Horatio Parker, which was both highly professional and, in its rigid conservatism, deeply frustrating to the young composer. After Yale a successful public career in the insurance business, with composition reserved for evenings and weekend. Ives composed most of his important music in the space of little more than twenty years, many of the most important works written in the first dozen years of the century. Attempts to win publication and performance of his works were mostly abortive, and only in the years of Ives’ retirement did a trickle of public hearings begin to stir up interest in his music. Perhaps the signal event was the Town Hall premiere of the great “Concord” Sonata by John Kirkpatrick in 1939 which marked an important step in the direction of delayed recognition for Ives’ music.

“The Unanswered Question” encapsulates in the span of seven minutes some of the most vivid visionary elements in Ives’ music---music quite removed from the “picturesque” side of his personality, instead closely related to his private philosophical and spiritual preoccupations. There was a powerful influence throughout Ives’ life of the Transcendentalist movement of mid-19^th century New England, which found its fullest expression in the “Concord” Sonata, with its movement inspired by Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Thoreau. Here, however, we have a particularly private meditation upon spiritual matters set out in music of stunning simplicity. There are three instrumental elements, each with its own distinct coloration, rhythmic character---each utterly set apart from the others. A vast curtain of string sonority (nothing more than familiar diatonic chords) is unfolded in eerie stillness, forming a background to an unvarying intoning of a dissonant, unyielding phrase in a solo trumpet, heard in contrast to a succession of contrapuntal, chromatic passages in the winds. Ives states that the strings represent the “Silence of the Druids---who Know, See and Hear Nothing.” Seven times the trumpet intones “The Perennial Question of Existence,” heard each time in exactly the same tone of voice. The winds (representing human beings) seek to uncover “The Invisible Answer,” each response to the “Question” progressively more active, even frantic. In their frustration the winds become the “Fighting Answerers” as time goes on, and after a “secret conference” seem to realize futility, and begin to mock “The Question”---the strife is over for the moment. After they disappear, ‘the Question’ is asked for the last time, and the ‘Silences’ are heard beyond in “Undisturbed Solitude.”