art music in the 20th century

Art Music in the 20th Century

The Unanswered Question , Charles Ives , always ahead of his time , Ives conceived of music in ways that other composers wouldn 't try for several more decades . In construction and content , this piece remains one of the twentieth century 's most original . With The Unanswered Question Ives began his investigation of the most fundamental question of life and existence (Echols Zahler 1985 . Why are we here ? Or , perhaps , how are we here ? Or , are we alone ? In 1906 Ives sought universal answers about life itself , answers that

dealt in the broadest sense with the human condition . The Unanswered Question is an exercise in the relationship of different sets of musical images , played together . The questioner is a solo trumpet , with a pleading unsettled phrase repeated , almost identically , several t times . A quarter of flutes attempts to answer but each answer get increasingly dissonant , agitated , and inconclusive While this is going on and after all the questions and responses have been uttered , the strings calmly play a series of tonal chord progressions that form an otherworldly hymn , suggesting the eternity of the universe . The Unanswered Question can also be savored as pure abstraction

Charles Ives (1874-1954 ) is another important composer , active in the first decade to whom talk of discontinuous stylistic citations and allusions being used to form a fragmented organism can usefully be applied (Botstein 1992 . In The Unanswered Question (1906 ) for strings four flutes , and trumpet , a troubled human traveler discordantly confronts the impassively...