the unanswered question

gah, it's a good thing charlie's not around to see the current government, it'd have killed him

am i right in that john adams said this was a big inspiration for his 9/11 piece or am i imagining that?

David Jaffe believes that there is text that goes along with the music:

The text of the piece was assembled by the composer from fragments from Carl Sandburg, Tertullian, Leo Tolstoy, Lenin, Rudyard Kipling, Matthew Arnold and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Wanting the Impossible

Credo quia impossibile.

Pure. . .sorrow is as impossible as pure. . .joy.

The substitution of the proletarian for the bourgeois state is impossible without a violent revolution.

I am the Prophet of the Utterly Absurd,

Of the Patently Impossible and Vain.

Still bent to make some port he knows not where,

Still standing for some false impossible shore.

How often have I said to you

that when you have eliminated the impossible,

whatever remains, however improbable,

must be the truth? (Jaffe 1996)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unanswered_Question

Although the opening of the piece seems like a sound collage, Adams does not mingle noises, words, and tones randomly. He sets them in a careful, therapeutic course from the secular to the sacred, leading to a vision of redemption when the sonic chaos converges to form a vast carillon. First we hear only street sounds, as if the walls of the concert hall had been blown away. In place of Adams's usual percussive groove a taped boy's voice repeats the word "missing," a verbal heartbeat that gives the unformed sound of cars and footsteps a rhythmic undertow. The chorus (at first wordless), strings, and harps enter, playing slowly rocking lines that sound like a medieval chant. Are we in the street, a concert hall, or a cathedral? The choral syllables slowly become stammered words and phrases: "re-mem ... re-mem ... re-member," "you will ... you will ... you nev ..." Noises, words, prayers: for ten minutes the music seems to drift uncertainly and in fragments on memories of Ives's The Unanswered Question, in which a distant trumpet poses the eternal question of existence. Over undulating ripples in the woodwinds the children's chorus picks up the gentle rocking lines of the opening with new words that are at once journalism and incantation: "I see buildings, I see water." Without warning the orchestra blasts a sustained chord of anguish, announcing a move to the next level of contemplation. The music becomes simpler. The two choruses repeat the words, now in full sentences, of fathers, mothers, sisters ("The daughter says, 'He was the apple of my father's eye'"), intensifying at the lines "I wanted to dig him out. I know just where he is."

http://www.earbox.com/sub-html/souls/souls-schiff.html

have never seen those. definitely like him though.

xpost, not this piece, more the Fourth. Adams is a big Ives-head.

xpost, oh well there you go

should I give that Adams piece another chance? he really throws me.

according to the npr website article on on the transmigration of souls, " References to The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives used by permission of Peer International Corporation."

i've never listened to a ton of adams, but now i'm intrigued and want to hear this one

what I've heard ('shaker loops', 'nixon', 'transmigration') spells things out a bit too plainly for me to really get into. his recording of Ives' Fourth was kind of too precise, the piece is supposed to be cosmic and writhingly impossible. but I should hear more than I have.

i was just listening to a clip of transmigration and it is a little to cheesed up for my taste. and i felt like the trumpet was way too fast to even capture the essence of the unanswered question.

for me, probably any 9/11 memorial piece will be too cheesed up, though. i feel like anything you write as tribute pieces end up being cheesey (although often crowd-pleasing) and just exploits a tragic situation.

tehresa, have you read this -- http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/025207078X/104-6461741-8675115?v=glance&n=283155

whenever I'm down, I just re-read parts of it

ooooooooooh i need that.

i haven't read it but i've been meaning to get this for the past 7 years. supposedly it has great anecdotes.

that does look like the dirt, I just bought a copy

my three favorite books on Ives are his Memos, the Perlis book and the Henry Cowell bio. the latter in particular is just one of the most inspiring things I've ever read, almost surreal -- it's out of print, if you see a copy don't pause.

i got a really crappy schoenberg book on sale at barnes & noble; it is called "The Musical Journey of Arnold Schoenberg" or somesuch. also, it may not be really crappyy bit i got sidetracked quick and didn't get much further than 50-60 pages in.

milton, you got that book? how is it?