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:
- Washington's Birthday
- Decoration Day
- The Fourth of July
- Thanksgiving and Forefathers' Day
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 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.[1]
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."[2]
- ^ Ives, Charles (1972). Memos. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. p. 95. ISBN 0-393-30756-5.
- ^ Swafford, Jan (1996). Charles Ives: A Life with Music. NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. pp. 229. ISBN 0-393-03893-9.