Charles E. Ives (1874-1954)
The Unanswered Question (1907)

The majority of the oeuvre of Charles E. Ives were created within two decades, between 1896 and 1916. The year 1906 brought Two Contemplations na małą orkiestrę, both with their pwn title: (I) A Contemplation of a Serious Matter or The Unanswered Perennial Question and (II) A Contemplation of Nothing Serious or Central Park in the Dark in the Good Old Summer Time.
It is the composer himself who submitted the key to understand the cosmological “content” of The Unanswered Question in his metaphysical commentary. The sense of the piece can also be read in its spatial composition and the superposition of three different instrumental layers. Strings (off-stage or at a distance from the other instruments), subdued and engrossed in contemplation of pure harmony that goes on and on, express “the silence of the druids,” thus representing the idea of musica mundana. The highlighted and lonely trumpet (Ives allowed it to be replaced by an English horn or a clarinet, since he maintained that an instrument must not be an obstacle on the road towards the truth, which he saw as the aim of music) repeats a refrain of the “perennial question:” what is the meaning of human life? This single voice stands for musica humana. Flutes or “other human beings” depart on a quest for the answer. They act with growing earnestness and impatience; they become lost in dissonances and fall helplessly silent. The trumpet intones its question one final time, yet all that can be heard is endless music of the spheres.
Ives’s visions, inspired by American Transcendentalists, found a vivid resonance in Polish music – as can be seen from the telling title of a piece by Stanisław Krupowicz: Odpowiedź bez pytania, or The Unquestioned Answer…

Małgorzata Janicka-Słysz