Tom Johnson
Charles Ives in
It is February 28, and the Brooklyn Philharmonia’s
‘American Marathon’ has already made its way through a good many chamber and
choral works and a Stephen Foster medley. Now it is time for the Charles Ives
‘Unanswered Question.’ Lukas Foss leans over to the microphone, apparently
feeling a need to somehow underline the special importance of this work. He
says simply that it is a prophetic piece which, though written in 1908,
prophesies in many ways the beginning of new music.
‘Is there a work that prophesies the end of new music?’
comments a disgruntled man in the row behind me.
There is a small string orchestra at the front of the stage,
and at the rear we see the backs of the four woodwind players, facing the
assistant conductor. Foss gives the downbeat and the wonderfully ethereal
string music begins. But no one is playing. All the musicians are sitting
quietly with their bows in their laps. Apparently a few other players have been
ensconced off stage somewhere. It is a nice touch.
My thoughts drift back to the very first time I heard this
piece. It was in a record store in
Now the trumpet comes in with the first statement of the
question. Wilmer Wise plays the haunting six-note melody as well as anyone
could, and it has a special effect since it drifts down from one of the boxes
at the side of the opera house. The intervals sound as strange as ever. As many
times as I’ve heard this piece, I never can quite remember what those five
pitches are. But whenever I hear them, they sound familiar.
Now the strings on stage join the invisible players, and their
slow-motion chorale takes on a lusher quality, but it
is still very soft, and the curious harmonies are still unpredictable. Now the
conductor at the rear of the stage gives a downbeat, and we hear the first
scrambling woodwind answer to the trumpet’s question.
Someone laughs. Do they really think the piece is funny? Maybe
they are just amused at the idea of listening to woodwind players who have
their backs turned to the audience. Or maybe the music is really getting to
them, and this is nervous laughter - an attempt to keep in contact with the
everyday reality they are used to.
My thoughts go back to the Ives score, which suggests that all
the string players perform behind a screen, and I begin wondering why
conductors never seem to do it that way. It doesn’t matter, I guess, as long as
there is some attempt to place the three musical elements in independent
situations, and Foss’s solution is probably as good as any.
I recall an issue of Soundings where Philip Corner devoted
several pages to trying to analyze ‘The Unanswered Question.’ His subjective
poetic comments did seem to say something, and they have perhaps influenced my
own perceptions of the piece. But even those who know Ives’s music as well as
Corner does can’t really explain the odd chord progressions of the string
music, or the curious tonality (or is it atonality) of the trumpet line. The
piece is an unanswered question in more than one way.
We are up to the fifth statement of the trumpet’s question
already, and the piece seems to be going by faster than it ever has. Could Foss
have taken some cuts, or sped up the string music? More likely, it is only my
own sense of timing which is different now. When I first heard the piece it
seemed to suspend itself forever, and time almost stopped with the magic of the
music. But of course, I had never heard static nondevelopmental
music before. By now I have heard a lot of it, and I suspect that a conductor
would have to do a 20-minute version of this eight-minute piece in order to
recreate for me now the extreme timelessness which I sensed when I first heard
the work.
My thoughts go back to the late Alvin Etler,
and to a conversation we once had when I was studying composition with him. I
had brought up the subject of ‘The Unanswered Question’ for the umpteenth time,
and said in my cocky, studentlike way that I would
like to be able to answer it some day. He was fond of the piece too, but he had
already discussed it with me about as much as he cared to, so he gently pointed
out that it would be more fruitful if I put away my dog-eared Ives score and
studied some Stravinsky or Webern or something for a
while. He was right, of course. Obsessions seldom pay off. And yet, I couldn’t
help feeling then, and even now, that any composer who really understood the
machinations of that piece wouldn’t find it necessary to study all the others.
‘The Unanswered Question’ ended and the man behind me continued
complaining to his wife, who had apparently dragged him to the concert. ‘He
could have put more Gershwin and stuff. It didn’t have to be like this.’
— The Village Voice, March 15, 1976