the unanswered question

programme

Charles Ives (1874-1954)

The Unanswered Question

Steve Reich (°1936)

Proverb

Gavin Bryars (°1943)

The Sinking of the Titanic

Steve Reich (°1936)

Tehillim

Part I: Psalm 19:2-5

Part II: Psalm 34:13-15

Part III: Psalm 18:26-27

Part IV: Psalm 150:4-6

extra information

Ives: The Unanswered Question

Composition was never more than a glorified hobby for the American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954). He earned his living through his own insurance company. However, the compositions he wrote in the evenings and on weekends are extremely advanced for his time. For example, Charles Ives was using bitonality and polyrhythms long before Stravinsky and Bartók.

In 1906, Charles Ives composed two pieces for chamber music ensemble: The Unanswered Question and Central Park in the Dark. While the latter work describes reality (that of a hot summer night in New York’s Central Park) in the form of a tone painting, The Unanswered Question is metaphysical in concept. Strings represent the eternal silence of the druids - or, in the words of Blaise Pascal, “le silence éternel des espaces infinis” – while a solo trumpet queries the purpose of life a total of seven times. Woodwinds attempt to formulate an answer, but dissolve into dissonance before eventually giving up. The three instrument groups - the strings, the trumpet and the woodwinds – play at different tempos and actually require a conductor each. This creates a fascinating dialogue between the trumpet and the woodwinds, independent of the strings which remain indifferent.

When composing The Unanswered Question, Charles Ives was inspired by the ideas of the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and the writings of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). The title is derived from a verse from Emerson’s poem The Sphinx.

Like Jean Sibelius, Charles Ives composed little as he grew older. He did revise many works, however, including The Unanswered Question, in the 1930s. The piece would not be premiered until 1947. Later, The Unanswered Question gained international renown through Leonard Bernstein, who used the title for his famous six-part series of lectures at Harvard University (as part of the Norton Lectures).

Reich: Proverb

The American composer Steve Reich (1936) has been fascinated by the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein since his student days. He wrote his Bachelor’s thesis on the Austrian philosopher, and has based two compositions so far on excerpts from Wittgenstein: Proverb (1995) and You Are (Variations) (2006). There are also a number of links between Reich’s deceptively simple, minimalist music and Wittgenstein’s pithy philosophy of language. Neither of them are fond of stylistic pretension (“wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen“), both consign whole worlds of moral, ethical, metaphysical and religious beliefs to the dustbin, and both investigated the concept of their own languages instead.

In his composition Proverb, Steve Reich used a short quotation from Culture and Value, a selection of Wittgenstein’s personal notes. The sentence “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life” forms the basis of a 14-minute composition for three sopranos, two tenors, two vibraphones and two electric organs. Not only does the text serve as an explanation of the piece in itself, it is also exemplary of Reich’s career as a minimalist composer.

Steve Reich composed Proverb in 1995 and dedicated it to the English choir director and baritone Paul Hillier. Hillier directed Reich’s multimedia opera The Cave in 1993 and provided Reich with an intensive introduction to medieval polyphony. Consequently, the tenor duets in Proverb are an ode to the French composer Perotinus, one of the founders of the ars antiqua.

Bryars: The Sinking of the Titanic

The story goes that the musicians working aboard the RMS Titanic kept on playing for as long as possible in order to calm the passengers. One of the survivors later reported: “Many brave things were done that night but none more brave than by those few men playing minute after minute as the ship settled quietly lower and lower in the sea... the music they played serving alike as their own immortal requiem and their right to be recorded on the rolls of undying fame.”

The English double bassist and minimalist composer Gavin Bryars (1943) composed The Sinking of the Titanic, a composition for strings and electronics, on the basis of this story in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bryars imagined how the musicians kept repeating the same hymn over and over as they sank deeper and deeper into the ocean. Inspired by the experiments of John Cage, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown, the hymn becomes submerged ever deeper under interviews with survivors, Morse code signals played on wood blocks, sound effects that attempt to reconstruct the impact of the iceberg on the ship’s hull, and so forth.

What is unusual about the composition is that it has been left open to new influences. The piece was performed in a swimming pool in Brussels in 1990. On this occasion, the musicians were placed on a raft floating upon the water. The Sinking of the Titanic has also been performed in an empty water tower. “Although I conceived the piece many years go,” explains Gavin Bryars, “I continue to enjoy finding new ways of looking at the material in it and welcome opportunities to look at it afresh.”

Reich: Tehillim

From the 1980s on, Steve Reich also wrote compositions inspired by historical themes. In Tehillim - Hebrew for ‘Psalms’ - he contemplates his Jewish roots. This work consists of four movements and was written for four female voices (a high soprano, two lyrical sopranos and an alto), piccolo, flute, oboe, alto oboe, two clarinets, six percussionists, two electric organs, two violins, viola, cello and double bass.

Stravinsky had already set psalms to music in 1930 with his Symphony of Psalms. However, in contrast to Stravinsky, Steve Reich did not use Latin translations but the original Hebrew texts. The rhythm of the music flows directly out of the rhythm of the psalm text. Tehillim, therefore, does not consist of short rhythmic patterns which are repeated over and over and, as such, is a highly atypical composition for Steve Reich. “This is the first time I have set a text to music since my student days and the result is a piece based on melody in the basic sense of that word.”

The first two movements of Tehillim were premiered in 1981 under the direction of composer-conductor Peter Eötvos, who convinced Steve Reich to write a slow third movement to follow the two fast movements; something the minimalist composer, still fascinated by the repetition of short rhythmic motifs, had never done before. This resulted in a dark, introspective and particularly chromatic piece that transitions into a fast fourth movement without a break. Tehillim – and particularly the third movement – is one of the most expressive compositions that Steve Reich ever wrote.