Three Places in New England, S. 7

I. The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and His Colored Regiment): Slow and hazy, built from fragments of old tunes that drift in and out of the strings. It honors the Boston memorial to the Black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts, and the music seems to march at a distance without ever arriving.

II. Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut: A Fourth of July picnic. Two village bands come toward each other playing different tunes at different speeds, and the pile-up is deliberate. Listen for scraps of marches colliding. A quiet stretch follows as a boy wanders off and imagines old soldiers, before the commotion returns and the movement stops abruptly.

III. The Housatonic at Stockbridge: A river in morning mist. The strings play soft, slowly shifting waves while a hymn-like tune rises in the winds and brass. The sound swells to a broad climax and then thins back to near silence.

Ives was an insurance executive who wrote music on the side. He drew this piece from memories of Boston, Connecticut and a walk by the Housatonic River, and finished much of it in the 1910s. For years almost no one played his scores. The piece was first performed in New York in 1931 by a chamber orchestra from Boston led by Nicolas Slonimsky, and it became one of the works that brought Ives to wider attention. Ives revised the score several times, and printed editions differ in details.