ABSTRACT
In January of 1918, in his forty-fourth year, Charles Ives sketched out a short piece for chamber orchestra similar in style to a number of works he had written during and after 1906. There are three other important Ives works in which questions and answers assumed prominence in subtle ways. Two are for theater or chamber orchestra, The Pond and The Unanswered Question; and one a movement of the Fourth Violin Sonata, an earlier version of which had been called, Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting. In The Pond, another chamber piece of 1906, related references are both richer and subtler. In its original form-it is a “song without words"-in which the actual words are written in below the lead line. One of lves’s most spectacular achievements is the invention of a form which logically uses consonance and dissonance in a single piece; this occurs in the music for small orchestra called The Unanswered Question.
