This famous work — utterly quiet, serene, and solemn — is as different as could be from the cheerful clatter of “The Rockstrewn Hills.” It requires two conductors. Ives himself described it best:

The strings play ppp throughout, with no change in tempo. They represent “The Silences of the Druids” who know, see, and hear nothing. The trumpet intones “The Unanswered Question of Existence” and states it in the same tone of voice each time. But the hunt for “The Invisible Answer” undertaken by the flutes and other human beings [Ives is personifying the other woodwind instruments] gradually becomes more active and louder. The “Fighting Answerers” seem to realize a futility, and begin to mock “The Question” — the strife is over. . . .
After they disappear, “The Question” is asked for the last time, and the “Silences” are heard beyond in “Undisturbed Solitude.”

What is so novel here — what rivals in innovativeness any of the experiments of the European modernists of the time — is the concept of three distinct, independent levels of music. The smooth string choir, playing consonant harmonies, is one. Another is provided by the dissonant woodwinds, a more and more taunting modernist challenge to the strings. Then there is the single trumpet, sounding like a voice, all the more solemn and haunting for asking its Question only about half a dozen times in the whole composition.

These simultaneous levels do not fit together in the least, in terms of traditional polyphony. Their precise rhythmic or contrapuntal relationship is left to chance. Yet this unusual nondialogue between “Silences,” “Questioner,” and “Answerers” proves to be both coherent and poignant: a foretaste, perhaps, of our own age, an age marked by the quiet desperation of noncommunication.

Listen to one or two of the many performances of this extraordinary work available on YouTube.