What it is
The Unanswered Question is the series of six lectures that Leonard Bernstein gave at Harvard University in the fall of 1973 as holder of the Charles Eliot Norton chair. The lectures, with examples played at the piano and, on video, with the Boston Symphony and the Vienna Philharmonic, were broadcast by PBS and published as a book (The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1976). The title comes from the piece by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question (1908), which Bernstein reads as the question "where is music going?" The theoretical model is Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics: the idea that there is an innate grammatical competence and a distinction between deep structure and surface structure.
The six lectures
| No. | Title | Thesis | Main examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Musical Phonology | music has universal sonic foundations; the harmonic series explains tonality | Mozart, Symphony No. 40; examples of harmonics |
| 2 | Musical Syntax | from deep structure to surface by transformations (repetition, deletion, inversion…) | Mozart, Symphony No. 40, rewritten to show the transformations |
| 3 | Musical Semantics | musical meaning is metaphorical: intrinsic metaphors (internal transformations) and extrinsic ones (extramusical associations) | Beethoven, Symphony No. 6 "Pastoral" |
| 4 | The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity | ambiguity (tonal, metric, semantic) makes music expressive, but it must be balanced by clarity | Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette; Wagner, Tristan und Isolde; Debussy, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune |
| 5 | The Twentieth Century Crisis | at the start of the 20th century ambiguity goes too far; even twelve-tone music remains tied to tonality through the harmonic series | Mahler, Ninth Symphony (Adagio); Berg, Violin Concerto; Ives, The Unanswered Question |
| 6 | The Poetry of Earth | tonality is the "poetry of the earth"; Stravinsky as a renewer of tonality with free dissonances and polytonality; praise of eclecticism | Stravinsky, Oedipus Rex (performed in full) |
Lectures 1–3 and 4 are explored in more depth in other entries of the archive ("Musical phonology, syntax and semantics" and "Ambiguity and expectation"); here we look at the overall path and the last two.
The fifth lecture: the crisis
- Bernstein contrasts Schoenberg and Stravinsky (taking up Adorno's dichotomy, which favored Schoenberg).
- Berg's Violin Concerto (1935) is for him a successful twelve-tone work because the row is constructed so as to simulate tonality (it contains triads and a whole-tone scale) and the piece ends on a B-flat major chord; it also contains the quotation of Bach's chorale "Es ist genug."
- The Adagio of Mahler's Ninth is read as a farewell to tonality.
- Ives, The Unanswered Question: the strings hold a G major chord pianissimo while the trumpet repeats its atonal "question" and the flutes answer more and more chaotically; for Bernstein the held chord represents the survival of tonality.
The sixth lecture: the answer
- Bernstein's answer to Ives's question is a yes to tonality, understood in a broad sense: even the most dissonant music rests on the natural relationships among notes.
- Stravinsky is the "poet of the earth": polytonality, ostinatos, free dissonances, but always with tonal centers; neoclassicism and "objective expressiveness."
- Eclecticism is the road of the future: combining different languages with tonality as the center of gravity.
- He introduces an "X factor" to describe the union of text and music.
Limits and criticism
Linguists and musicologists criticized the very loose use of Chomsky and some claims (for example, an example of a Balinese pentatonic scale judged imprecise and the thesis of a universal "monogenesis" of music). The series nevertheless remains a model of analytical popularization: every idea is demonstrated with music, at the piano and with the orchestra.
What a producer learns
- Deep structure and surface: a simple hook (deep structure) can be transformed into many surfaces (rhythm, timbre, harmony) without losing its identity.
- Controlled ambiguity: an ambiguous chord, a displaced meter, an avoided cadence work if there is a clear base to return to.
- Tonality as gravity: even in the most experimental tracks (glitch, ambient, noise) a tonal center (a drone, a pedal) helps the listener, like the G major chord in the strings in Ives's piece.
Exercise
Listen to Ives, The Unanswered Question (about 6 minutes). Then create a 2-minute piece with three layers like Ives: a very slow tonal drone (pad on a major chord, very low in volume), a repeated 5–6-note "question" in a solo timbre (trumpet or lead), and increasingly dense and dissonant "answers" from another group of instruments.
Related entries
Musical phonology, syntax and semantics (Bernstein), Ambiguity and expectation (Bernstein), Schoenberg: from extended tonality to atonality and twelve-tone music, The Tristan chord and Wagnerian chromaticism, The harmonic series and timbre, Polytonality and bitonality.