then we saw the stars again

Charles Ives – The unanswered question

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“there is a great man living in this country – a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one’s self and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives”
Arnold Schoenberg

“Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair”
Charles Ives

This would sum up quite accurately how Charles Ives saw his position as a composer. He never thought he could have made a true living out of it, and did not want his family to “starve on his dissonances”. And at the same time, he never wanted to compromise his art for the sake of conforming to the standards of his time.

As a result, he saw music as his true passion, a pastime really close to his heart and mind, a luxury that he could afford, as a very wealthy insurance businessman. And it’s only when you are free from all the other considerations that affect you as a composer (having to pay the bills, composing and performing music hoping that others “will get it”, getting a record deal with a major label) that you can really achieve something great. Something uniquely yours. Something that may also take a while to be understood.

Ives’s music was largely ignored for about 40 years, until the first wave of famous movie and radio composers started championing his works and praising his groundbreaking views on the nascent American music scene. The great Leonard Bernstein was an ardent supporter of Ives, and premiered some of his most important pieces and symphonies, almost 50 years after they had been composed. “The impossibilities of today are the possibilities of tomorrow”, Ives wrote, and when you listen to “the unanswered question” you definitely have a glimpse into the next century, right there in just over six minutes.

“The unanswered question” is one of the 2 metaphysical pieces that Ives wrote in 1906, the other being “Central Park in the dark”. Both compositions showcase some of Ives’s trademarks: polytonalities, polyrhythms, ingenious instrument placements in the sound spectrum, and an eerie, uncanny use of melody as a philosophical medium.
“The unanswered question” is over a hundred years old, but it hardly seems so. The suspended string section would fit in any post-apocalyptic record made this decade, in a way reminiscent of the latest Russian Circles album or even Godspeed you! Black Emperor. The beauty of it is that it never attempts at answering the question, and we can all fill in the blanks with our own existential doubts, fears, hopes and dreams. The insistent trumpet and woodwind motives bring the mystery to an unresolved close, and the piece ends as it started, on a single glacial, perfect major chord.

There is nothing else that sounds like Charles Ives’s music, or at the very least, his place in American Twentieth Century music is unique: not as popular as the first great composers like Gershwin or Ellington, or even Copland, but completely ahead of his time like Bartok. And like Bartok, his music works as a kaleidoscope of places and people. “Central park in the Dark” contains samples of famous ragtime songs and other popular showtunes, and you can hear marching bands in many of his symphonies and orchestral works. This was due partly to an experience he had as a child, when he heard two bands playing different songs at the same time on a field, and the conflagration of sounds and melodies stuck with him throughout his career as an “amateur” composer.

Ives was a true independent artist, in the purest sense of the word. Unaffected by norms, fashions or fads, he worked in the margins of popular music, perfecting an idiom that would take years to be revealed, understood and appreciated for what it would offer us.
As a musician, I couldn’t agree with his views more. I am lucky to have a job that pays the bills more than adequately, and I don’t think I’d like to put my music in a difficult position by compromising my vision and making things that only satisfy a general audience. I want to keep making music that I feel proud of, whether or not it finds commercial success – something that is too often taken as a yardstick of self-validation.

Now, here is a question I already have the answer for…

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This live performance was filmed at La Scala in Milan. The trumpet player is sitting in a box way up at the back of the theater, and the woodwind section is also separated from the strings. Other versions may place the instruments differently, something which Ives had thoroughly experimented with while conducting his own compositions.
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