Ives’ “The Unanswered Question”: Perennial Mysteries in a Cosmic Expanse

The fifth installment of Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Harvard lecture series, The Unanswered Question, takes on “The Twentieth Century Crisis.” Drawing upon linguistics and its subcategory of phonology, Bernstein outlines an aesthetic crisis: the gradual over-saturation of ambiguity which, amid increasing chromaticism, stretched tonality and 19th century Romanticism to the breaking point, resulting in the twelve-tone music pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg. Underlying the aesthetic crisis is a deeper and more terrifying reality: With the …

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Aftertones of Ives

Mahler, Schoenberg, Sibelius, Debussy, Ives, and other voices from the past emerge throughout the music of John Adams like fleeting ghosts. These voices are present in Adams’ towering neo-minimalist, neo-romantic symphony, Harmonielehre. They can also be heard in Slonimsky’s Earbox, the composer’s brief 1995 tone poem, premiered by Kent Nagano and the Manchester, UK-based Hallé Orchestra on the occasion of the September, 1996 opening of Bridgewater Hall. The title refers to Nicolas Slonimsky (1894-1995), the Russian-born American conductor, composer, musical theorist, and author. …

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The Unanswered Question

In the virtual isolation of early twentieth century New England, an organist and insurance salesman named Charles Ives (1874-1954) was imagining shocking and innovative new music. Ives created atmospheric collages of sound. He poured fragments of American folk songs and other material into a musical melting pot to create an exciting cacophony. Much of his music became widely known only decades later when other composers embraced similar techniques. Previously, we listened to Thanksgiving …

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