What does music mean? There’s a question for you.
From Pythagoras to Milton to Eliot, the tendency to view music as an analogue for language, a means by which to compose and express thought, has encircled the art form and raised issues about its nature as an aesthetic and intellectual entity. It has the power to express what words cannot, to move the listener more deeply than a verbal appeal to the emotions, perhaps holding a greater sway over the senses. It means a lot to countless, and has done throughout time regardless of fashions and cultures, but what precisely is its meaning?
In 1908, an American insurance executive called Charles Ives asked this question, which Leonard Bernstein retroactively verbalised as ‘Whither music?’ (that’s ‘academic’ for ‘where is music going?’). At the turn of the century, music, like other art forms, began to respond to the conceptual sway and formal challenge of modernism, in what could perhaps be described as a crisis point for tonality. Previously dependable systems of melody and harmony in the intellectualised Western Tradition no longer seemed appropriate for musical expression, leading composers like Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils in the Second Viennese school to adopt increasingly rogue, often mathematical practices to destabilise the idea of a tonal centre. It is to this wave of experimentation that the trajectory of Western music – in at least the first half of the 20th century – is indebted to, influencing to some extent everyone from Herrman to Kate Bush.
But the deconstruction of tonality and the greater overall reliance on unconventional techniques, whilst providing a direction for music’s development, did not put the kibosh on the matter of meaning.
Charles Ives, the son of an amateur bandleader, composer, and teacher of music theory, lived a life in which music was a meaningful if not a central presence. He had balanced college sport with composition, completing his first symphony in his senior year, and upon graduating founded an insurance firm which he was to head for the rest of his working life. In fact, it was only after his death in 1954 that much of his work reached publication and eventually international acclaim.
‘The Unanswered Question’, first put to paper in 1908 and continually revised over the next few decades, is a sonic cry out into the void. Ives’s elusive piece was first performed, first uttered in 1946 and has echoed throughout the Western musical consciousness ever since.
We begin with a sustained, muted, and serene G major chord in the strings, eventually gliding slowly and simply through a primary chord sequence that seems to unfurl an expansive and crucially unperturbed canvas. This is our setting, a ‘cosmic landscape’ as termed in Ives’s subtitle to the piece. The cosmos consumed much of Ives’s work, encapsulated in his unfinished ‘Universe’ Symphony that he embarked upon in the final years of his musical career.
Amid this serenity referred to as ‘The Silence of the Druids’, enters the eponymous question, a trumpet melody that enters disconcertingly on a lingering B flat. It is with this simple but unsettling dissonance between major and minor that Ives launches the ‘Perennial Question of Existence’, a motif that lasts just shy of two bars. The remaining three or so minutes consist of a dialogue between this restless melodic unit and a chorus of dissonant flutes, the ‘Fighting Answerers’, whose music – unstable, inconsistent, and increasingly imitative of the question it is posed – fails to resolve the simplicity of the trumpet’s call.
Now if that doesn’t sound like a pretentious piece of angst-ridden experimental art then you’ve found yourself, probably not for the first time, at odds with the likes of Leonard Bernstein; despite naming a lecture series after the composition, Bernstein found the piece as ‘naïve’ as it was enigmatic. Nevertheless, on an aesthetic level, it anticipates the explicitly atonal works of Schoenberg, inadvertently serving as an adjunct to what would become a momentous musical trend.
Ives’s piece seems to rely heavily on the paratext he offers us in annotations and prefatory notes, like the programmatic music of Romantic composers such as Hector Berlioz and Richard Strauss. With each portion of the orchestra assigned what are effectively dramatis personae, alluding to lofty philosophical entities like the authoritative ‘Druids’ who are unable to interpret this grand metaphysical question, Ives suggests that music is a medium of expression, able to pose a question and yet incapable of speaking for itself, hence raising the need for his guiding materials.
In this sense, not only is his question ‘unanswered’ and maybe unanswerable, but perhaps it is even unaskable. Yes, there is the level at which Ives’s text questions ‘Existence’, that most fundamental of queries, but above this, it is a question of questioning. What can music ask? This frustration with music as a communicative tool is as palpable as the dissonance of those struggling flutes. It might even be the impossibility of his question that contributed to his decision to drop music altogether in around 1924.
Though the inquisitor may have gone silent, the question Ives unleashed remained unresolved and unsilenced for decades since. That is, until this musical monologue, a call out into the void, received its response, forming an unlikely dialogue that spans decades and styles.
Technologically, music had developed to an almost unrecognisable extent by the time Laurie Spiegel emerged onto the scene. The bold doctrines of Schoenberg and co. eventually subsided, but the fundamental attitude of rebellion against prevailing Western orthodoxy continued to fuel the engines of artistic movements. More and more composers looked to the East, incorporating microtones into their compositions (pitches between conventional intervals – something which Ives’s father George had experimented with in the late 19th century) and developing a greater confidence with rhythm. At the forefront of the American avant-garde (of which Ives may be seen as a progenitor) was a generation of artists working around New York in the 60s who became known for their ‘minimalist’ style, their pieces were often highly repetitive and featured relatively few instruments. Among peers like La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass (all of whom flirted with the burgeoning possibilities of electronic instruments), Laurie Spiegel found her place as a pioneer of this new music.
Self-trained in string instruments and only learning Western notation at the age of 20, Spiegel received a traditional education in composition like many in the avant-garde. In the mid 1970s she began working with synthesisers — a term she uses reluctantly, preferring to think of the sounds produced by the Buchla and EML machines as ‘real music made on real instruments’, as opposed to something imitative. Often opting to use mathematical formulations and algorithms to govern the melodic content and structural content of her pieces, by 1980 she had collected enough material for an album.
‘The Expanding Universe’ runs at a little over two and a half hours long, with the eponymous track, a sprawling, glacial blend of electronic sound lasting just shy of thirty minutes. The album forms a musical cosmology suitable to its title: at points aggressively radical, such as the mathematically dictated ‘Kepler’s Harmony of the Worlds’ written to correspond to a Renaissance work of astronomy that ended up aboard the 1977 ‘Voyager’ probe, and at others refreshingly buoyant, as in ‘Music for Dance II’ and ‘II’. But amid the noise, variously tonal and atonal, we get perhaps her most popular piece (if Spotify’s two million listeners are anything to go by).
‘The Unquestioned Answer’ is best described as a palliative to this existential anguish of Ives’s piece and question. Based around a single Buchla melody line that elides and bleeds into its various iterations, the piece is the embodiment of the New Age mindset. Optimistic, soothing, and refreshingly elemental, it is a track that could easily go on indefinitely beyond its assigned six and a half minutes. Indeed, I often find myself lost in an almost euphoric state playing the song on repeat – something that can’t be said of ‘The Unanswered Question’.
There’s no doubt, with a title like that, that Spiegel’s work is in direct dialogue with Ives’s, just over seventy years its elder. Even their respective dates, 1908 and 1980 are (albeit coincidentally) mirrored.
Ironically, Spiegel’s ‘Answer’, beneath the surface serenity, leaves one rather basic question: What is the key? Built upon a string of ninths, fourths, fifths, and sixths, with a central repeated tonic of E-flat, never in the piece do we hear the crucial third note, the G or G-flat, that would help us determine whether it was in E-flat major or minor. We thus end up in a similar place as with the ‘The Unanswered Question’, whose layered major and minor tonalities cancel one another out. The tonal centre of the piece, E-flat is ‘unquestioned’, and while the true harmony of the piece remains a mystery, our ears are satisfied with this state of ignorance.
Spiegel thus allays our anxieties. Her answer is ‘unquestioned’, without conflicting counter melodies or threatening dissonance. There is no real sense of anticipation or climax that one would expect from a traditionally structured piece of music. Instead, Ives’s fears of inexpression, of meaninglessness, are put to rest – if not indefinitely, then at least for the seven sublime minutes of Spiegel’s ‘Answer’.
Curiously, just as Ives’s work took decades to be heard and appreciated, it has only really been in the last ten years or so that Spiegel has received the attention she deserves, thanks in part to the rerelease of ‘The Expanding Universe’ in 2012. In interviews, she has stressed the need for ‘human expression’ in music, acknowledging that others in pursuit of this have tended to value technique over ‘musical content’. In ‘The Unquestioned Answer’, the content is the state of being content, at peace with what we do know and feel, as opposed to reaching for what we do not.
So, to return as Charles Ives does to this opening question: ‘what does music mean?’ or to Bernstein’s ‘whither music?’.
To answer with the words of Laurie Spiegel, written on the cover of her album, ‘Music isn’t verbal or conceptual.’ It is simply what it is. And I think that’s as satisfying an answer as any.