Soliloquy is a remarkable anticipation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone system. It was apparently written at the Ives family retreat at Pine Mountain, Connecticut in August, 1904. (The latest he could have written it is 1907, when he sent it to a copyist.)

Both the sentiments of the text (which is by Ives himself) and the style of the music are very similar to those of the more ambitious song "On the Antipodes." As is that song, "Soliloquy" is a highly dissonant experiment in what would later be called serial composition, for both in the accompaniment and in the vocal part Ives tends to present all twelve notes of the chromatic scale before repeating one; this some twenty years before Arnold Schoenberg published his Method of Composing Using Twelve Tones.

"On the Antipodes" had a text that stated several pairs of opposite attributes of Nature. Ives personalized a similar dichotomy here in his text:

"When a man is sitting, before the fire on the hearth, he says, ‘Nature is a simple affair.'

"Then he looks out the window and sees a hail storm, and he begins to think that "Nature can't be so easily disposed of."

The first of these lines is delivered in a slow tempo, in a kind of relaxed, half-spoken drawl, mostly on the pitch "F." The piano part is made of chords that are easily analyzed in traditional terms as they are built in thirds: The first is a standard and entirely consonant D-flat Major chord. Then is a somewhat dissonant e minor chord with an added A natural. Then comes a stack of two chords at once: The lower chord is a D Major chord , the upper chord is a b-flat minor chord, and there are an E and a G held over from the previous chord. This yields all twelve notes.

Then as the man looks out the window the song vaults into an allegro tempo, the vocal line turns entirely twelve-tone, and the accompaniment consists of rolled, hard dissonant chords. There is a remarkable measure where a chord spread over five octaves collapses on itself until a sonority of nine notes is crushed into a single octave; then the sonorities open up again like a fan until the first chord is reached.

After that, the same kind or rolled chords return, but this time rolling downward. Ives biographer David Wooldridge ranked it as one of Ives' seven best songs. Later biographer Jan Swafford did not mention it in his book, or at least considered it insufficiently interesting to include it in his index. (Of the two biographers, Wooldridge is the one more impressed by Ives' innovation per se.

This writer ranks it somewhere in between. It is a forceful musical statement, concisely making a genuine point, but there is also a sense that Ives is too wrapped up in his novel procedures.

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