The Unanswered Question

[13] He also made a small but significant change to the "question motif", which had originally ended on the note that began it, but now remained unresolved.

The premiere performance of this version occurred on May 11, 1946 at McMillin Theatre, Columbia University in New York City, played by a chamber orchestra of graduate students from the Juilliard School and conducted by Edgar Schenkman (on-stage), with the strings led by Theodore Bloomfield (off-stage).

[14] [b] The original version of the work was not premiered until March 17, 1984, when Dennis Russell Davies and the American Composers Orchestra performed it at Symphony Space in New York City as part of the "Wall-to-Wall Ives" series.

In the foreword to the score, Ives wrote that the wind's music "need not be played in the exact time position indicated.

Leonard Bernstein added in his 1973 Norton Lectures, which borrowed its title from the Ives work, that the woodwinds are said to represent our human answers growing increasingly impatient and desperate, until they lose their meaning entirely.

Meanwhile, right from the very beginning, the strings have been playing their own separate music, infinitely soft and slow and sustained, never changing, never growing louder or faster, never being affected in any way by that strange question-and-answer dialogue of the trumpet and the woodwinds.

In the end, when the trumpet asks the question for the last time, the strings "are quietly prolonging their pure G major triad into eternity".

[20]Henry and Sidney Cowell wrote: "Silence is represented by soft slow-moving concordant tones widely spaced in the strings; they move through the whole piece with uninterrupted placidity.

After they have gone on long enough to establish their mood, loud wind instruments cut through the texture with a dissonant raucous melody that ends with the upturned inflection of the Question.

[1] Matthew McDonald noted that Ives "recalled how The Unanswered Question was one of several pieces that was 'played — or better tried out — usually ending in a fight or hiss...'"[22] shortly after its composition.

"[22] Ives' biographer Jan Swafford called the piece "a kind of collage in three distinct layers, roughly coordinated".

[citation needed] Ives use of separate groups of instruments placed apart on the stage and playing in independent tempos influenced the work of American composer Henry Brant.

[4] The music was used in the 1972 short film directed by Donald Fox based on the tale "Young Goodman Brown" by author Nathaniel Hawthorne.