Performance

The Unanswered Question

0 upcoming performances in New York

Charles Ives’s *The Unanswered Question* is a compact experiment in musical perspective: a steady, distant backdrop, a lone voice that poses a repeated “question,” and an ensemble that answers with growing agitation. Written in 1908 and later reworked in the 1930s, it only reached the concert stage in the mid-1940s, arriving after its ideas had already seeded modern American music. At David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic and conductor Kwamé Ryan place it alongside Barber and Stravinsky, where its cool, open-ended ending reads less like a puzzle than a statement of artistic intent.