The Unanswered Question V : The Twentieth Century Crisis

The Unanswered Question V : The Twentieth Century Crisis (1976) blends Documentary and Music elements. Top cast includes Leonard Bernstein. The plot follows a central conflict that grows in scope as the film progresses.

Actor: Leonard Bernstein • Provider: Netflix

This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse: Lecture 5 picks up at the early twentieth century with an oncoming crisis in Western Music. As these lectures have traced the gradual increase and oversaturation of ambiguity, Bernstein now designates a point in history that took ambiguity too far.