4/18/20

View fullsize

Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Today’s piece comes from the one of the first internationally renowned American composers, who (even before he began receiving recognition for his works) was also an accomplished insurance agent. Charles Ives was quite experimental for his time, with musical techniques like polytonality, aleatory, and microtonality which often warranting him the title of a modernist composer. The Unanswered Question (1908; rev. 1934) showcases Ives’ style and experimentation with polytonality, and is often regarded as one of his most famous works (the piece has been referenced in many other composers' pieces, including John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls). The piece is centered around a recurring trumpet call (the question) floating atop a bed of strings, with a quartet of winds attempting to give some sort of answer each time the question is posed. The responses become increasingly agitated as they fail to achieve their goal. Charles Ives would go on to compose a large quantity of piano literature, song collections, and even some scale orchestral works, but in the last 25 years of his life (when he started gaining recognition for his output of music) he did not compose new works and instead focused much more time on revising past works. Today’s piece, Three Quarter-Tone Pieces is one of his last completed works, and perhaps his most refined use of microtonality.

Since the late Baroque era, western music has been almost entirely based on the scales and modes of 12 evenly spaced pitches. On a piano, this can be seen as all of the notes in between each repeating set of two and three black keys. While the music of many other cultures (like Indian or Chinese traditional music) have utilized notes outside of that collection, it took until the 20th century for experimentation with microtonality to become popular in the western canon. This brings us to Charles Ives, who in this work utilizes two pianos - one tuned normally and the other tuned up a quarter tone (the space between two adjacent notes on a normal piano) - to compose a piece (or rather, three pieces) that has twice the amount of pitch material to use. Breaking away from the traditional approach of pitch space and western harmony reveals just how much our ears have become accustomed to the 12-note equal tempered system.

The effect in this piece is quite haunting at first, but Ives actually approaches this foreign frontier of microtonality quite logically. The first two pieces, Largo and Allegro, utilize the quarter tones as passing notes or as different levels for familiar harmony to exist on. To see what I mean, pay attention to the score video (which I’ve linked below) and consider how Ives will present a melody or harmonic statement in one piano and then transpose the fragment into the other, creating this unsettling shift between the tonal centers. Often times, the effect makes it sound like the piece is being played on a single piano that is being re-tuned in real time. The most overt instances of this can be seen when Ives writes in a chromatic scale, but with the notes bouncing between the two pianos, thus going through all the possible notes in a particular range. The third piece, Chorale, steps away from this and attempts to marry the two pianos in one single harmonic language. A good example of this is Ives’ use of the “neutral third” - a note that sits halfway between a major third and a minor third, giving it this distinctly ambiguous sounds that resembles a triad but does not point to one tonality or the other. The aural effect of this union may or may not be that palatable, but regardless, Charles Ives was certainly breaking new ground in the world of art music.

It will almost certainly take more than a single listening of the pieces for you to become accustomed to the use of microtonality, but that is completely understandable. I’ve mentioned in previous posts that composers often (and unabashedly) push the boundaries on what sounds good or even works as a piece of music. Without that drive, music would develop much more slowly and seem far less interesting as an artistic field. As with any form of art, it is always a struggle to have an even balance of the expected and unexpected in order to create something interesting. Three Quarter-Tone Pieces is by no means an every-day piece to listen to, but once in a while, I find it to be a nice challenge for my ears. Personally, my favorite piece of the three is the second, where Ives purposefully comes off as rambunctious and abrasive. Even though there are some chords that always incur a wince, the approach to it is nothing more than playful and unabashedly strange. Microtonality continues to be a significant part of contemporary music today as composers find more and more ways to use it, whether it be in an unsettling way or not. Charles Ives constructed something very new and strange in this piece, and whether or not it works in appealing to an audience, there is certainly something to be learned from it. So, even if it seems unbearable after the first few chords, try to sit with it and learn a little bit about it - after all, all three pieces together only total about 10-12 minutes.