<P> Henry and Sidney Cowell add that silence in the form of soft slow - moving concordant tones widely spaced in the strings move through the whole piece with uninterrupted placidity . After these tones have establish their mood, loud wind instruments cut through the texture with a dissonant raucous melody that ends with the upturned inflection of the Question . </P> <P> Wayne Shirley believed that The Unanswered Question shared "imagery, structure, and worldview" with "The Sphinx" (1847) by American Transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, and that the title derived from a line from the poem: "Thou art the unanswered question". While at Yale, Ives wrote his senior essay on Emerson, and shortly after composing The Unanswered Question, he composed his Emerson Overture, parts of which were later incorporated into the Concord Sonata . </P> <Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This section needs expansion . You can help by adding to it . (June 2013) </Td> </Tr> </Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This section needs expansion . You can help by adding to it . (June 2013) </Td> </Tr>

Charles ives’s the unanswered question is novel because of