ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 17, 1997 TAG: 9703180097
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS HENSON THE ROANOKE TIMES
FIRST ARE the strings, holding a major chord so low and still you can barely feel it. The chord expands in slow motion, a note shifts here, now another. Like changes in a cloud. The strings move carefully from one cluster of tones to another. Finally they return to that first major chord, drawing it out like a blade.
And then the trumpet, a distant and crystalline voice, imposes five simple notes. At first it sounds awkward against the strings, a dissonant faux pas. However, as the trumpet's fifth note fades you realize something. This is not a melody you're hearing. In these five simple notes is a question. The Question.
And while the strings drone on, four flutes respond, confused and unsure. They are trying to provide an answer. But they can't.
So begins "The Unanswered Question" by Charles Ives, one of America's most original composers. And while his music is probably more influential than it is known, his unorthodox compositional style and controversial history have provided listeners with more questions than answers.
"It's a magical piece," says David Wiley, music director of the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra. He will be conducting the symphony and full chorus tonight when they perform music with a celestial bent, including "The Unanswered Question."
The piece was written around 1906; Wiley believes it was 70 years ahead of its time. "For me, I'm fascinated by the layers," he says. "Ives is kind of foreshadowing the chromaticism of [Arnold] Schoenberg, [Alban] Berg and [Anton] Webern."
This "cosmic drama," as Ives called it, is a sort of six-minute "Peter and the Wolf" for philosophers. "You have the strings, which represent the harmony of the spheres -
unchanged by anything," says Wiley. "On top of that you have the trumpet intoning the perennial question of existence. And the woodwinds are the squabbling philosophers, they get more and more dissonant each time they try to answer the question."
For Ives, a composer and successful businessman at the turn of this century, contemplating the sublime question of existence was far more interesting than finding the answers. It's a philosophy that dictated his compositions from early on, setting him apart even when America had but a few of its own composers. He tinkered with the oddities of music, writing in quirky, ill-fitting tunes to jolt the listener.
Music of the ages
Probably his biggest musical influence was his father, George Ives, a band leader for the Union Army during the Civil War. "Don't pay too much attention to the sounds, for if you do, you may miss the music," his father once said, according to 1995 biography of Charles Ives, ``Charles Ives: A Life With Music,'' by Jan Swafford. "You won't get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds."
As an example, his father presented the off-key singing of the town stonemason at camp meetings. "Watch him closely and reverently," he told his son. "Look into his face and you'll hear the music of the ages."
Indeed, George Ives often sat young Charlie at the piano for hours, making him play in one key and sing in another to "stretch" his ears.
Perhaps the most formative experience in Charles' life was a parade masterminded by his father, in which several marching bands converged on the town square. The combination of several boisterous tunes in various keys delighted Charles, who was about 6 at the time. The effects of the experience later appeared repeatedly throughout his music in passages that pit whole sections of an orchestra against another in multiple rhythms and terse dissonances.
A curious mind at work
Born in Danbury, Conn., in 1874, Charles Ives began playing organ for the Baptist church at the age of 14. In those days in America, music was largely a pursuit for women's clubs. Ives was more keen on baseball and other sports. When it came to music, he hated "sissies who couldn't stand up and take their dissonances like a man."
As a student of composer Horatio Parker at Yale University, Ives was often frustrated by his teacher's adherence to the rules of harmony. Ives' musical experiments often earned him sharp criticism and low grades.
Ives spoke bitterly of Parker until the end of his life. When Ives moved to New York to begin his career in insurance, he still played organ for several churches. He was a prolific composer in his 20s and 30s. He would often attend musicals with a piece he was working on tucked under his arm. After the show he would pay the orchestra to read through his work.
Still, the spirituals of the church found their way into most of his works. In his 4th Symphony, for instance, you can hear "Nearer My God To Thee" fit uneasily over a tuneless accompaniment, while "Sweet By and By" may disappear entirely beneath a hectic cacophony.
An avid reader and fan of Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ives created music that was equal parts thought and experience. Pieces like "The Gong on the Hook and Ladder," "Central Park in the Dark" and "Three Places in New England" amplified the sounds around him. Meanwhile, "The Majority," "Lincoln: The Great Commoner" and "The Things Our Fathers Loved" expressed a deeper understanding of the American experience.
"Thoreau was a great musician," Ives once wrote, "not because he played the flute, but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear 'The Symphony.''' Ives found a rhythm in Thoreau's prose that metered nature and found harmony in solitude.
As with a lot of music written in this century, Ives' music is often as challenging to the listener as it is to the performer. "Two Camps," for instance, requires a pair of orchestras playing different tunes simultaneously. Strange tonalities and jolting rhythms are common in his work. For this reason, the few Ives pieces performed during his lifetime were often failures.
While fellow American composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein have enjoyed greater celebrity, Ives' music is now considered to be just as "American."
His life was a paradox of personal wealth and a great kinship with the common man. Ives made a very comfortable living in the insurance business. But, when he won the Pulitzer Prize for his 3rd Symphony in 1942, he gave the money away. "Prizes are badges of mediocrity," he said. Still, he hung the certificate on his wall.
Ives died in New York in 1954. The classical music world caught up with him 20 years later when many of his manuscripts were discovered, published and performed for the first time. The dissonances had sweetened with time. The hundreds of folk and spiritual tunes embedded in the works offered ingots of tonal gold to be studied extensively.
These days, there are yearly Ives festivals in New England, Ives web sites, biographies and recordings. His music is performed around the world. Thoughtfully American and undeniably stubborn, in the music of Charles Ives is the thunder of a curious mind at work.
A 15-cent piece
While studying "The Unanswered Question," David Wiley met up with the original manuscript by accident. "I was coming back from New York, after a performance, and saw exits for Danbury," he says. "I decided to break up my drive while I was in the neighborhood. I'd go into these stores and say I was interested in information about Charles Ives.
"All these old people would just start talking and telling me, 'the Ives' house was over there last week. But I think they moved it to the park the other day.'" He found Ives boyhood home, but it was locked up. "So, I puttered around, looking in the windows and then headed back into town.
"Well, I stopped at a sort of general store and mentioned that I wanted information on Charles Ives and the owner said, 'you've come to the right place. Just upstairs is the Charles Ives museum.' He got the key, we went up the back stairway and there's this room. In this glass case was the original draft of 'The Unanswered Question.' And the guy is like, 'do you want a copy of that?' And I said, 'why yes, in fact I would!'
"We went downstairs to the Xerox machine, and I copied it for 15 cents."
Wiley says the piece fits in perfectly with tonight's celestial theme. Also slated for performance are Haydn's "The Creation" and Gustav Holst's "The Planets." These massive pieces will feature a full chorus and will be enhanced with a light show.
"The Planets," which has a movement for each planet in the solar system, was completed in 1916, before the discovery of Pluto. So, the Roanoke Symphony has commissioned a Pluto movement as well. Wiley will also give a post-concert talk in which he will entertain questions.
However, it is unlikely that the maestro will answer the perennial question of existence. After all, Charles Ives didn't.
The Roanoke Symphony Orchestra performs tonight at 8 in the civic center auditorium. 343-9127.
LENGTH: Long : 155 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: YALE MUSIC LIBRARY. 1. The manuscript of Charles Ives'by CNB``Unanswered Question'' 2. and (inset) a portrait of the composer.