Charles Ives, "Unanswered Question"

As far as we know, there is no other composer in the history of Western music who, along with his creative activity, has successfully worked in a profession so far away from the inner life that musical art entails, such as insurance sales. Indeed, the American composer Charles Ives achieved an enviable financial position shortly into his adult life, becoming a respected insurance professional before the age of 35. With his life financially solved, he went on to dabble in music.

Early Years
Born in Danbury, Connecticut, on October 20, 1874, Charles Edward Ives' musical talent quickly revealed itself. At the age of 10 he was playing drums in the band his father directed, at twelve he was a skilled organist at Sunday services at the local Presbyterian church, and by thirteen he had composed his first piece: a sort of requiem in tribute to his dead cat. He entered Yale at the age of 20 and not without effort four years later received his diploma after submitting an interesting if somewhat conventional symphony.

A successful executive
As a graduate working as an organist at the Central Presbyterian Church in New York and facing the difficulties of the job, he realized that he was living in a country where the process of capitalist accumulation and the emergence of new types of property was gaining momentum, while insurance was becoming an increasingly promising activity in the service sector. In 1902 he decided to try his luck. Soon after, he became independent and together with a friend founded the first Life Insurance Mutual in Manhattan.

Charles Ives (1874 - 1954)

Within a few years, Charles Ives had become a successful insurance executive who, while riding the commuter train from his home to his Manhattan offices, would compose music with complete freedom, not caring what the world would think of his work.

"Unanswered Question"
Written for trumpet, winds and string orchestra, the work is one of the two short orchestral pieces that made up the diptych Two Contemplations of 1906, where, according to scholars, the composer's language and musical ideas can already be seen. It is a sort of "nocturnal music" for strings on which a protagonist trumpet stands out, carrying the melodic line, and asking a question, superimposed on an orchestral ensemble to which it does not seem to belong.

Bernstein's opinion
In 1967, Leonard Bernstein gave the following masterful description of the work:

"Ives assigns this question to a solo trumpet who intones it six separate times.
And each time there comes an answer, or an attempt at an answer, from a group of woodwinds. The first answer is very indefinite and slow; the second is faster, the third even faster, and the sixth so fast it comes out like wild gibberish. These woodwinds, according to Ives, represent human answers, growing increasingly impatient and desperate, until they lose their meaning entirely. And all this time, right from the beginning, the strings have been playing their own music, infinitely soft and slow and sustained, never changing, never growing louder or faster, never being affected by that strange question-and-answer dialogue of the trumpet and the woodwinds. It is as though the strings were the great galaxy of stars, which keeps slowly, imperceptibly circling about over our heads, as we ask questions and try to give answers..."

Andrés Orozco-Estrada conducts the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.