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A Question is Better than an Answer
In Charles Ives's most famous work The Unanswered
Question, a miniature he called a "cosmic drama," one finds distilled
his revolutionary means, and more importantly the ends of his singular art.
The piece is a kind of collage in three distinct layers, roughly coordinated.
In the background a quiet and hauntingly beautiful chorale of strings represents,
said Ives, "the silence of the Druids." Over that silence a solo trumpet
proclaims, again and again, an enigmatic phrase representing "the perennial
question of existence." In response to each question, a quartet of winds
Ives called the "fighting answerers" runs around in search of a reply,
becoming more and more frustrated until they reach a scream of rage. Then the
trumpet proclaims the question once more, to be answered by silence.
From the beginnings of his public career, Ives
was proclaimed a prophet in discovering on his own, before anyone else, most
of the devices associated with musical Modernism: polytonality, polyrhythm,
free dissonance, chance and collage effects, spatial music, and on and on-most
of them already on display in The Unanswered Question, written in the first
decade of the 20th century. It was a long time before people began to ask whether
Ives was innovating for the sake of innovation or getting at something deeper.
He was indeed getting at something, and that too is part of The Unanswered Question.
Entirely with tones and a simple dramatic program, Ives makes a philosophical
point: a question is better than an answer, in the immensity of creation. And
those determined to force the answers are apt to look foolish in the face of
that immensity. In all his work Ives was getting at something, always in his
singular way. In The Unanswered Question we see the elements of his art in a
nutshell: a work at once timeless and revolutionary, spiritual and concrete,
comic and cosmic.
On a larger canvas one finds the same kind of
point in the grand pandemonium of the second movement, called "Comedy,"
of Ives's masterpiece the Fourth Symphony. In the vertiginous climax of the
movement he stacks up a brass-band march, "Yankee Doodle," bits of
"The Irish Washerwoman," snatches of ragtime, atonal fistfuls of piano,
and an assortment of other freelance manifestations. In the concert hall, those
masses of sound tumbling and crashing in air are sui generis and jaw-dropping.
The whole movement feels rather like being transported into the moil of Manhattan
in a particularly riotous rush hour. Such a cityscape, as a matter of fact,
is the picture Ives the long-time Manhattanite intended to paint. It is a memorable
specimen of his singular Impressionism. Debussy's Impressionism is about nature,
wind and waves; much of Ives's music, busy or simple, wild or sentimental, is
about scenes in the life of families, communities, and nations: cityscapes,
holiday parades, barn dances, camp meetings, football games, the polyrhythmic
patter of feet passing on the street. Ives composed all those and a good deal
more-including a number of sweet songs right out of the Victorian parlor.
In the Fourth Symphony's Comedy, the astute listener
will notice something remarkable about this apparent bedlam: in its outlandish
fashion, with sometimes a dozen and more separate parts roaring along together
each on its own path, all this grand and glorious noise is somehow