Thomson composed this first of his three symphonies in Europe between 1926 and 1928. After orchestrating it for standard-size orchestra (double winds, brass, tympani, strings, and three percussionists), he brought the finished work with him to the U.S. on a visit in 1929. During the same gestating period he wrote the opera Four Saints in Three Acts to a text by Gertrude Stein. Thomson had not yet heard any music by Charles Ives (most of which was composed between 1900 and 1918), which likewise featured hymn tunes, parlor songs, marches, and the like. Most other persons hadn't heard it either, even privately, before Nicolas Slonimsky led a chamber-orchestra version of Three Places in New England (ca. 1908-1914) in 1931-1932 for avant-garde audiences in New York, Havana, and Paris.

During his four-month stateside visit, Thomson played Symphony on a Hymn Tune for Serge Koussevitzky, then in his fifth year as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (a post Thomson's student reportage from Paris in 1921 had helped the Russian-born maestro to secure). Koussevitzky praised the first three movements, but after the last one "threw up his hands" and said "I could never play my audience that," urging Thomson to write a new, presumably more "serious" finale. Although hurt by the rebuff, Thomson did not; instead, he put the work in a drawer where it remained until 1945. By then he was in his fifth year as chief music critic of The New York Herald Tribune. Artur Rodzinski, then music director of the New York Philharmonic, asked Thomson to conduct the symphony himself, which the composer did on February 22, 1945. "The press," he wrote, "was almost wholly disapproving," especially his New York Times counterpart (and beleagured rival), who dismissed it as "trivial and inconsequential."

Oddly, not even Ives' belated recognition a year later (when New York's tastemakers discovered the Third Symphony) encouraged a revival of Thomson's kindred work, until Howard Hanson conducted it for Mercury Records in 1965. Erich Leinsdorf championed it in his terminal seasons as a global guest conductor, before and after Thomson's death in 1989. In 2000, Naxos released an outstandingly insightful recording of all three Thomson symphonies by James Sedares and the New Zealand Symphony, resulting in worldwide recognition.

Thomson himself described the work as "a set of variations on the hymn How Firm a Foundation. Each movement consists of a further set of variations tightened up in various ways, the first in the manner of a sonata, the second as a Bach chorale prelude, the third as a passacaglia. The fourth is twice tightened-up, once as a fugato, once as a rondo." He also included a second hymn, Yes, Jesus Loves Me, plus the secular For He's a Jolly Good Fellow. Composer John Cage, in pointing out a wealth of sly parodies and irreverent puns, suggested that the work be subtitled "Musique concrète: Four Adventures in Collage Twenty Years Ahead of Their Time."

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