A Symphony: New England Holidays

A Symphony: New England Holidays, also known as A New England Holiday Symphony or simply a Holiday Symphony, is a composition for orchestra written by Charles Ives. It took Ives from 1897 to 1913 to complete all four movements. The four movements in order are:

The movements coincide with each season; winter, spring, summer, and fall, respectively. While together these pieces are called a symphony, they may be played individually and thought of as separate works. As Ives dictates in his very own Memos:

“…There is no special musical connection among these four movements…which leads me to observe that quite a number of larger forms (symphonies, sonatas, suites, etc.) may not always necessarily form, or were originally intended to form, such a complete organic whole that the breath of unity is smothered all out if one or two movements are played separately sometimes.”

Holiday Symphony exemplifies Ives’s varied, unique use of dissonance that gave his works a more dynamic range of emotion. “Each [movement] expresses its particular scene and feeling…[using] the mingling of stylistic voices, the meta-style, that had become second nature to Ives. They all contain the shared “pattern of splicing introverted slow music and extroverted fast music.”

Charles Ives got the idea to write a holiday symphony during the summer of 1905. He wanted to write each movement as if it were based on a grown man’s memory of his childhood holidays. “Here are melodies like icons, resonating with memory and history, with war, childhood, community, and nation.” Ives constructed these movements based on personal memories from his past, including his father, George Ives, and the town of Danbury. His father had a huge impact on Ives’s compositions, especially after he died in November 1894. Ives lived in Danbury throughout his childhood, a town which holds many of the life experiences that inspired him to compose a Holiday Symphony.

New England Holidays exemplifies “multi-tonality in the reharmonization of borrowed music…and [mixing of] several keys.” This work is notorious for its quotations, in particularly, its complex overlapping of multiple sources. Without the plethora of quotation, Holiday Symphony would lose its ability to call forth memories and emotions. The first three movements of Holiday Symphony were performed in the United States and Europe in 1931 and 1932 under the direction of Nicolas Slonimsky. “The concerts created great excitement: laughter, protest, enthusiasm. Ives’s music never occupied more than a single modest spot on each pair of programs, but several important critics singled it out for serious and admiring comment.”

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