Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question remains one of his most enduring and accessible works. Composed in the summer of 1906, the piece did not receive a proper premiere performance for nearly forty years, when it was rescued from obscurity for an all-Ives program at Columbia University’s Second Annual Festival of Contemporary Music.

Since he worked primarily as an insurance agent, Ives’s music remained largely unknown to all but a small circle of American composers who championed his work. Such seclusion fostered Ives’s rigid individualism and penchant for experimentation in his compositions—his use of polytonality, atonality, tone clusters, and other “modern” compositional devices antedates their broader adoption by decades.

The Unanswered Question is one such prescient work, a mixture of elements layered atop one another in a musical collage that Ives referred to as a “cosmic drama.” Three separate musical entities interact, each with a distinct programmatic role, which Ives elaborates in a preface to the score. The static string parts (originally written to be performed out of sight and off stage) represent “the Silences of the Druids—who Know, See and Hear Nothing.” The serene atmosphere of “silences” is pierced seven times by the solo trumpet statements, which stand for “the Perennial Question of Existence.” After each trumpet “question” is asked, a flute quartet that Ives deems the “Fighting Answerers” offers “the Invisible Answer,” which struggles throughout the piece to give an adequate response to the trumpet’s question. Each time the question is posed, the “Fighting Answerers” become more agitated, growing in length and volume as they offer up frustrated answers to “the Perennial Question of Existence;” the last iteration even mocks the question through imitative repetitions that explode into utter chaos. The work ends with a final statement of the trumpet’s question, resounding unanswered into the sonic mist of the strings, which all the while remained stoic and unaffected by the exchanges.

Today, Ives’s combination of simultaneously occurring independent lines is regarded as a hallmark of his style; as The Unanswered Question amply demonstrates, Ives’s experiments are not arbitrary sonic concoctions. Rather, The Unanswered Question offers the listener a chance to sonically engage with the complex questions of life and existence. For, as Ives biographer Jan Swafford remarks about The Unanswered Question, “in contemplating the sublime mystery of creation, a question can be better than an answer.”