Video Account of “The Unanswered Question”

Last night my wife and I returned to SFSymphony+ to view another of the recently uploaded videos. This time Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted members of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in a performance of Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question.” Many still tend to shy away from Ives’ music, which remains a “stylistic outlier” in the symphonic repertoire over half a century after his death. Nevertheless, “The Unanswered Question” tends to be one of his more accessible compositions, if only for its brevity and its narrative infrastructure.

That infrastructure amounts to a “conversation” between two instrumental resources which takes place before the “backdrop” of string players (which may be either a quartet or a larger ensemble). The question is posed by a solo instrument, which is usually a trumpet (Principal Trumpet Mark Inouye on the video):

courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony

The “reply” comes from a wind quartet (two flutes, oboe, and clarinet in this video performance). The scare quotes are meant to convey that the trumpet is not satisfied and repeats the question. This back-and-forth exchange repeats several times, but the trumpet is never satisfied as the winds get more agitated and dissonant. Ultimately, the winds give up, leaving the trumpet to ask the question one last time.

Salonen’s conducting scrupulously maintained the overall rhetoric of quietude. However, the video account of the performance was interleaved with a diverse assortment of “natural” images, possibly suggesting that the “question” being posed has something to do with the nature of our role in a vast cosmos:

screen shot from the video being discussed

This video “interpretation” leaves the viewer with the impression that, however simple the trumpet’s question may be, any answer is beyond the scope of what any mere mortal can conceive.

Sadly, the video director was not identified, either on the Web page for viewing the video or on the video itself. This was, to say the least, more than a little frustrating, as was the failure to identify all of the performing musicians by name. This video account of “The Unanswered Question” is as compelling as the music itself, and such a blatant failure to give credit where credit is due seriously undermines such a brilliant partnership of music and video.