Stone traces the performance history and historical importance of Ives's Fourth Symphony and describes each movement in detail. Stone attacks what he considers the noncommittal quality of Ives's music, his reluctance to compose using his own thematic ideas, as well as Ives's tendency to build complex and unconventional musical structures from simple and familiar tunes that have no musical relevance to the whole work and no interrelationship among themselves. While the symphony is significant for its historic interest and because in makes an enormous impact on anyone who listens to it, Stone concludes that its many self-contradictions in taste, artistry, and spirit seem too serious and too powerful to permit wholehearted acceptance.

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: Wendy Jeanne McHenry