PROGRAM NOTES

The Unanswered Question

Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Although Charles Ives wrote large-scale compositions, including four symphonies, one of his best known and most discussed works is an enigmatically titled seven-minute composition for an unusual combination of instruments. The Unanswered Question, subtitled “A Cosmic Landscape”, was written in 1908, but like many of his works, was not performed until late in his life, in this case, 1946.

Those who are interested in studying the creative process would do well to study the life and work of Charles Ives, who always seems to have had the capacity to look at the familiar in unfamiliar ways. He had some of the traits of the stereotypical eccentric and independent-minded New Englander, but he went far beyond ordinary Yankee ingenuity to become one of the most brilliant creative minds this country has produced.

As a young man he was both a fine athlete, playing at prep school and Yale, as well as a fine organist and thoroughly trained musician. Learning from his father, who had been a band master in the Civil War, he began early on to test the limits of traditional music by playing tunes in two keys at the same time, a technique which would become known as bitonality. Already in his youth he knew that he was a composer but knew also that the kind of music that he wanted to write would appeal to a limited audience and would not earn him a living. Consequently, he poured his creative juices into business, becoming a highly successful entrepreneur and a pioneer in the American insurance industry. Few of his business colleagues knew that he was a composer, for, after leaving the urban canyons of Manhattan, he would return to his pastoral Connecticut home to pursue his other career in solitude. For much of his career he received little public attention, and it was only late in his life that he began to be recognized as one of this country’s great musical pioneers. With uncanny foresight, he began to experiment with the most radical new techniques at the same time or even earlier than the great European modernists such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartok.

The Unanswered Question is just such a work which shows the composer experimenting with new techniques just beginning to emerge in Europe. Here, Ives divides his orchestra into three parts. The strings, playing slow, traditional chords, represent, in Ives’ own words, “The Silences of the Druids who Know, Hear, and See Nothing.”

These chords are in the traditional language of socalled tonal music, the language which had existed for centuries. Against this background, however, we hear a muted solo trumpet, which, according to Ives, plays “The Perennial Question of Existence.” This music is in the new “atonal” idiom and conflicts with the traditional chords.

The third element is a group of woodwinds, or as Ives puts it in his wry way, “flutes and other human beings” who are involved in the hunt for “The Invisible Answer.” Their dissonant answer becomes gradually faster and louder, but in the end the question remains unanswered. Recognizing the futility of the question, they mock it and then disappear. Finally, the question is asked one more time and the strings die away. As Ives put it, “the Silences are heard beyond in ‘Undisturbed Solitude.’” The composer has presented a metaphysical problem in music but perhaps has offered a purely musical one as well.

The Unanswered Question received considerable recognition when Leonard Bernstein chose it as the title for the series of Charles Eliot Norton lectures which he delivered at Harvard University in 1973. In the course of the lectures, Bernstein used the work as a kind of metaphor for the crisis of twentieth century music. (Intellectuals who are interested in Bernstein’s application of the principles of the eminent linguist Noam Chomsky to the language of music might like to know that the lectures are available in book form, as well as on YouTube with all musical examples performed.)

Whether or not Ives actually intended his Question to be, as Bernstein put it, “Whither music in our time?”, this music is undeniably prophetic. The conflict between traditional tonal music, i.e., music based on traditional scales with a single note serving as a center of gravity, and the new atonality did indeed become the Great Debate of twentieth century music, with some composers firmly entrenched in one camp or the other, and some with one foot in each.

In another way too, Ives anticipated future developments by allowing the three elements of his orchestra to coordinate themselves at will. (Sometimes several conductors are used to hold the work together.) Such license for the performer became common practice in the so-called “chance” music which was an important part of late twentieth century practice.

Finally, whether one hears The Unanswered Question as musical prophesy or as philosophical or even political prophesy, (the eminent musicologist Joseph Kerman called it “a foretaste of our own age, an age marked by the quiet desperation of noncommunication”), it is, in its own quiet way, an expressive and mysteriously moving composition.

El Paraíso según María (The Paradise According to Maria)

Juan David Osorio (b. 1985)

Composer and conductor Juan David Osorio was born in Medellín, Colombia, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in composition at the university there. Further study came at Eastern Michigan University with American composer Anthony Iannacone. Mr. Osorio has received various prizes as well as commissions from organizations such as the Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra and the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra. He is also active as a conductor and teacher in Colombia.

El Paraíso según María was written by commission in 2019 and dedicated to the young Colombian-American conductor, Lina González-Granados, then a conducting fellow with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and today a rising star in her field who was recently appointed Resident Conductor of the Los Angeles Opera. The premiere took place on 20 February 2020 by the Seattle Symphony under the direction of Ms. González-Granados, who is well known for her advocacy of Latin music.

According to the composer, the inspiration for the work comes from a nineteenth century novel, María, by the Colombian writer Jorge Isaacs. Set in the Cauca Valley region of southern Colombia, the story deals with the failed love affair of its two protagonists, María and Efraín.

Traditional music from that region forms the basis of the work. The work falls into two large sections, the first marked “slow and melancholic” and based on the alabaos, funeral songs that are sung throughout Colombia and often sung by slaves working in the fields. The opening melody is passed around various sections of the orchestra, with players required to sing as well as play. Players are occasionally granted the freedom to play outside the established pulse. The second section becomes energetic and rhythmic, now based on courtship songs called the currulao and the bambuco viejo. The music drives to an exciting conclusion. The composer has said that his aim was not a literal interpretation of the novel, but a personal interpretation based on the music of the region in which the story takes place.

Danzón No. 2

Arturo Márquez (b. 1950)

Arturo Márquez is today widely recognized as one of the most important Mexican composers of his generation. Born in Álamos, Sonora, he was educated at the Mexican Music Conservatory in Mexico City, and later received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the California Institute of the Arts. Both his father and grandfather were musicians, teaching him various styles of Mexican folk and popular music, which have been an important influence on his own work.

Among his most popular works are his danzones, written for various combinations of instruments and which have become increasingly popular with dance companies as well as in the concert hall. The danzón is an elaborate formal dance in 2/4 time which evolved out of the Cuban habanera, combining European elements with African rhythms. It is still considered the official dance form of Cuba but has also been popular in Puerto Rico and in the Mexican state of Veracruz, where Márquez found his sources.

The Dánzon No. 2 has become one of the most often performed concert works by any Mexican composer. It was commissioned by the National Autonomous University of Mexico and premiered in 1994 in Mexico City. The work falls into a number of different sections, featuring various instruments as soloists and changing in tempo and mood: some sections slow and elegant, some nearly raucous. Continuing throughout are the irresistibly exhilarating crossrhythms and syncopations which would eventually evolve into dances like the cha-cha and the mambo. Márquez has achieved something which only very good composers have been able to do: take music from folk and popular sources and transform it into elegant and sophisticated concert music without losing the vitality and character of the original.

Cello Concerto in B minor, op. 104

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)

Aside from the occasional bout of homesickness, Dvořák’s three year stay in the United States from 1892 to 1895 was primarily a happy and productive period. He received a handsome salary as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, was duly lionized by America’s glitterati, and still found time to write music that would eventually rank among his most popular works, such as his Ninth Symphony, “From the New World”, and the Twelfth String Quartet, known as the “American.”

In 1894 Dvořák would begin work on a cello concerto that would eventually rival even the “New World”

Symphony, written the year before, in popularity. Dvořák’s friend Hanuš Wihan, cellist and founder of the Czech string Quartet, had for some time been trying to persuade the composer to write a cello concerto. The cello is today such a popular instrument and the general level of performance so high that it is difficult to imagine that there was a time when some composers were skeptical of its effectiveness as a solo instrument. Any doubts that Dvořák might have had were apparently overcome when in March of 1894 he attended a performance in which Victor Herbert, then the principal cellist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, played his own Cello Concerto No. 2. This, incidentally, is the same Victor Herbert who is best known to the general public as the composer of such popular operettas as Naughty Marietta and Babes in Toyland, and is credited with being the conductor who first developed the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra into a major ensemble. Dvořák was hugely impressed by Herbert’s skillful writing as well as his virtuosity, and by the end of the year had begun work on his own concerto. The first draft was finished in New York in February of 1895, but revisions were made after Dvořák returned to Bohemia for good in May of that year, and a number of technical details were worked out in close consultation with Wihan. This, incidentally, was the concerto that caused Johannes Brahms, then near the end of his life, to say that if he had known it were possible to write such a work, he himself would have written a cello concerto long before.

The opening movement honors the classical tradition that allows the orchestra to state the primary thematic material before the soloist enters. There are two main themes, the first a broad and passionate one in the somber key of B minor and the second a tenderly lyrical one heard first in the French horn in a major key. (Much of the drama of the concerto depends upon the opposition between major and minor keys.)

After the soloist has restated these themes comes the expected development section. Here the composer chooses to use primarily the first theme, most strikingly in the beautiful passage where the notes of the first theme are doubled in length, transforming the melody into a hauntingly sad episode sung by the cello and accompanied by the flute. (The flute appears in all movements of the concerto, “turning up when least expected”, as musicologist Joseph Kerman has so quaintly put it, “like one of those small birds on the back of a hippopotamus.”) Perhaps because the first theme had already seen so much action, Dvořák defies tradition and begins the recapitulation of the movement with the second (major key) theme stated in the full orchestra. Also unusual is the fact that the movement ends not in the dark opening key of B minor, but in a triumphant B major.

The second movement is in three parts, or what music theorists call ABA form, a prosaic fact that says nothing about the intensely emotional nature of the writing. The A section is a beautifully reflective melody in a major key. The contrasting middle section is announced unmistakably by an orchestral outburst in G minor. The searingly passionate melody then sung by the cello is in fact a song of Dvořák’s written some years earlier called “Leave Me Alone.” It had great personal significance for the composer because it was a personal favorite of his sister-in-law Josefina Čermáková, with whom he had been deeply in love as a young man and who had just taken ill when work on the concerto began. The final A section is a free treatment of the opening major key melody.

The finale is dominated by a brisk, march-like theme in B minor. There was substantial disagreement about this movement with Wihan, who had wanted to insert his own cadenza. Dvořák had strong reason to resist the idea of a typically flashy cadenza, for Josefina had died in the meantime and it was his idea to end the work with a coda in her memory. This touching passage contains quotes of material from the first two movements, including, as might be expected, a reminiscence of “her song.” Sad as these reminiscences might be, Dvořák chooses to end the movement not in B minor but in a blaze of B major glory.