For chorus; piccolos I-II, flutes I-III, oboes I-II, clarinets I-III, optional saxophones (alto, tenor, baritone), bassoons I-III; horns I-IV, trumpets I-VI, cornets I-II, trombones I-III; timpani, snare drum, tenor drum, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, light gong, heavy gong, tom-tom, high and low bells; piano four-hands, celesta, organ, ether organ (theremin) ad libitum; strings with solo players
Composed  1910—16
First performance  of movements I and II 29 January 1927 in New York by the Pro Musica1 Society (50 members of the New York Philharmonic), Eugene Goosens conducting; entire work performed 26 April 1965 in Carnegie Hall by the American Symphony Orchestra, New York, Leopold Stokowski conducting
Published by  Associated Music Publishers, Inc. (New York, 1965); movement II published in Henry Cowell’s New Music Edition (San Francisco, 1929)
Duration:  about 30 minutes

You’re in for a shock if you’ve never heard Ives’s Fourth, perhaps the greatest and surely the most complicated manifestation of American impressionism there is.  Ives incorporated into it, during its long period of genesis, many of his favorite principles, such that the Fourth Symphony offers a fine summary of his style.  The four movements are radically different in performing force (and thus wildly impractical to rehearse), the first for chamber orchestra with chorus, the second for the extended orchestra and assisting conductors, the third for a handful of winds, organ, and strings, and the fourth for the full orchestra with chorus.  Ives said that the work concerned the questions What? And Why? Posed in the first movement; the other three movements supply different levels of response.
The Fourth Symphony is set in motion, after a cosmic orchestral sigh, by violins and harp musing absently on the Lowell Mason hymn, Bethany; this continues through the movement, and the tune goes on to become a major component of the other movements.  A solo cello begins In the Sweet By and By.  A star is sighted, the symbol of both Truth and Mystery: Ives began to think in these terms with the August 1910 appearance of Halley’s Comet.  The musical allusion is to the Star of Bethlehem, for a chorus sings Watchman Tell Us of the Night—of the “glory-beaming star.”  (Or does it?  The score calls impishly for “voices, preferably without voices”). 

“Watchman, tell us of the Night” is, says Ives, an Eternal Question.  Does this great celestial event bring hope and joy or more problematic quantities?  The possible answers come in three movements: a comedy, a fugue of deep religious feeling, and a musical apotheosis.
The comedy, a scherzo, is another of Ives’s Fourth of July movements, with quiet episodes built on Pilgrim hymns always swamped by the brass and drums.  The movement begins quietly with suggestions of dawn and, at the queasy string quarter-tones, yawns on awakening.  The bustle begins: a screaming fanfare in the high winds announces Tramp, Tramp, Tramp in the trombones.  A ragtime march breaks in, then a bit of In the Sweet By and By.  All this culminates in an explosive statement of Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.  Now, to parody “polite salon music,” there is cocktail piano with, as though from two different rooms, a solo violinist and violist plugging away in syncopation, still taken with the sweet by and by.  The confusion grows complete: cornets launch into Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground, the trombones into Beulah Land.  After another explosion come echoes of the cocktail scene, as though a door has been closed and the street noises shut out; then a final orchestral potpourri of a half-dozen songs at once, including Turkey in the Straw and a bar of Yankee Doodle.  Suddenly the bubble bursts, with the violas the last to dart away.

Ives notates the fugue in half notes, to give it an old formal look: one response to the questions of the prelude is religious ritual.  The subjects are drawn from the hymns From Greenland’s Icy Mountains and All Hail the Power, with solo horn or trombone as the celestial voice.  When the movement begins to approach its climax the pipe organ enters, and with increasing dissonance the Maestoso is reached.  At the end comes a quotation by the brass soloist of “And Heaven and Nature sing” from Joy to the World.

The last movement, an apotheosis of all that came before, begins with numerous references to the Prelude: the harps and violins form a distant choir, the double basses refer to the Mason hymn, and a “battery unit” of percussion players, oblivious to everything else, plays its tattoo.  The momentum gradually builds, and at length the chorus reenters with a wordless rendering of Bethany.  Nothing is left at the close but a glimpse of percussion and the distant violins.