Charles Ives was an athletic youth who was on the baseball team and wanted to be a composer. He father had been bandmaster of Danbury, Connecticut and was fond of musical experiments. He separated his band and had it play in different keys and tempos, just to see what it would sound like. For ear training he had his family members each sing in a different key at the same time. He experimented with distance and spatial effects, and sometimes retuned the piano strangely. As a teenager, Ives wrote a fugue in which each successive entrance is in the next higher key in the circle of fifths.

At Yale University, young Ives liked to play wild "take-offs" on the piano for his roommates, creating musical descriptions of football games and other events on the Yale campus. There were no rules to these take-offs. One of them celebrated the first forward pass in football history.

In the composition class of European-trained Horatio Parker, things were different. The rules had to be followed. This symphony was written in Parker's class, and it was Ives' graduation thesis and had to please Parker. Ives was fractious but not wholly rebellious. He thought his father was much more imaginative than Parker, but he also recognized that Parker was an actual composer who knew how to put music together, which George Ives was not.

But Ives would often write things Parker's way, then change them. For instance, the first movement of this symphony (Allegro) is in an academic sonata-allegro form. Ordinarily, the first subject shifts to the dominant key of the composition at its end. Ives starts shifting his key center almost immediately, so that it runs through at least six different keys even before the first subject is done. And the movement ends in another key than the home key. At Parker's insistence, Ives wrote a tamer version, which Parker essentially approved. Ives didn't like it, and asked permission to go back to the original version. Parker, having seen that his student could compose up to rule, allowed this, insisting, however, that it end "properly" in D minor. The result is an attractive and rather academic work with orchestration that is best described as that of a composer who is still learning.

Having politely ended the first movement in D minor, Ives begins his second movement in G flat, a very remote key, which Parker made him change to F, the academically "correct" key. The change is of little consequence. What is important is that this Adagio molto (Sostenuto) contains truly inspired melodic writing. The orchestration is considerably more skillful here as well. The third movement is a pretty typical scherzo with trio (Scherzo: Vivace). Ives writes a fast-moving canon for the scherzo and uses something like a Victorian popular song with Brahmsian inspiration for the trio section.

The finale is in the then-fashionable "cyclic" form; it is built on themes that have come earlier in the symphony. The first subjects of the first two movements are used as the contrasting subjects of the sonata-allegro form. Where Ives uses the first-movement material, he also partially reverts to the less accomplished orchestration of that section of the work. In all it is an effective work, a cut above the usual student production. People who know Ives sense that the composer is here fenced away from his usual gleeful originality.

After Ives' death in 1954, his widow donated his manuscripts to Yale University. From this material the symphony was finally published in 1971, and then reissued in a corrected edition by the Charles Ives Society.

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