The generic title "Set" was one of Ives' favorites; he planned, at various times, at least 15 suites of short pieces with this title. Since Ives rarely had any prospect of getting his music performed or published, he often did not take the effort to put the music in final shape or draft a fair score.

This is one of the few sets Ives left in a fairly definitive form. Although some of the music in it dates back to 1902, Ives did produce a finished score for this Set in 1932 and it is among the most often performed of his "sets."

While working on these pieces Ives sometimes wrote out individual parts for them and went to Broadway. After the show was over, he would show up at the orchestra pit with a portfolio of music paper and a wallet full of cash, usually enough to convince the musicians to stick around and play through the weird music that Mr. Ives the insurance man brought for them. Whatever these musicians thought about the music (and their opinions varied but were mostly not good), Ives had learned that they would at least give it a chance and could play through it adequately, which was more than high and mighty symphony orchestra players were able to do.

Ives revised this Set several times from 1906 until the music was brought to completion in 1932.

Ives brought this Set to completion in 1932, revising the music several times from 1906 until.

The first movement, "In the Cage," later became one of Ives' most famous short songs. In it, a small boy watches a leopard pacing in its cage several hours, then asks, "Is Life anything like that?" In real life, the question was asked by Bart Yung, Ives' exiled Chinese revolutionary roommate. Ives precedes the atonal melody of the song with a remarkable drum ostinato under a claustrophobic rising pattern of ever-shortening notes, repeated several times. Its harmonies are revolutionary, being made of stacked up intervals of the fourth rather than the standard third.

"In the Inn," at nearly five minutes, is one of the longest movements in any of his "sets" for smaller ensembles. It is made up of ideas from several of the short piano studies that he had written, mostly with a kind of disjointed ragtime rhythm to it. In turn, this movement would become the basis for part of Ives' First Piano Sonata.

The conclusion is the remarkable "In the Night." This is one of Ives' first great "multi-layered" pieces. A trombone solo goes its own way, against a background wash of five separate lines, each with its own rhythmic figure that almost never coincides with another. The trombone, Ives wrote, represents an old man dying in the night, "sad, low in heart—then God comes to help him—brings him to his own loved ones....All around, the rest of the music is but the silence and sounds of the night—bells tolling in the far distance, etc."

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