This is a one-movement symphony in a gentle and melodic late-Romantic style by a composer who is mostly remembered for brasher, more modernistic music.

John Alden Carpenter was born to one of the first families of Chicago, grandson to Benjamin Carpenter and a direct lineal descendant of John and Priscilla Alden, the Plymouth Pilgrim couple immortalized in the poem "The Courtship of Miles Standish." Benjamin established a retail store and chandlery, trading with Great Lakes merchant ships, and was a pioneer ship-owner in that trade, and was the first President of the Board of works of the young city of Chicago. His son George B. Carpenter was the father of John Alden Carpenter (1876 - 1951), who studied music at Harvard with John Knowles Paine then returned to Chicago to take his place in the family firm.

Therefore he was, like his nearly exact contemporary Charles Ives, primarily a businessman and a composer in his off hours. Because he shared management duties with his brothers, John Alden had time to compose, and received wide attention. His best known works are the jaunty post-Impressionist orchestral suite Adventures in a Perambulator (1915), the brash and jazz-infused ballet Krazy Kat (1921), and the modernistic ballet in Futurist style Skyscrapers (1923 - 1924). Film producer Walt Disney planned to use Perambulator in the second Fantasia feature film, but the project was aborted.

Following the initial success of Adventures in a Perambulator after its premiere by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1915, Carpenter began work on his Symphony No. 1, which he subtitled Sermons in Stones, after a line in Shakespeare. The work was a large-scale, three-movement symphony, highly praised when the Chicago Symphony performed it, but not in demand thereafter. In contrast to the Impressionist-tinged Perambulator, the First Symphony is more Germanic in character, though without the late-Romantic sense of angst.

This revision of the symphony came about when conductor Frederick Stock asked Carpenter for a work to be played in the 1940 season of the Chicago Symphony (commemorating its 50th Anniversary), Stock, who had returned to his earlier Romantic style a few years earlier, found that he could rescue the First Symphony by drastically re-working it. [The authoritative Grove's Dictionary lists the revision as Symphony, C, to distinguish it from the original version; however, it has been recorded as Symphony No. 1 (1940)].

In its new form it is a distinctly different work. Carpenter condensed it into a one-movement work less than 20 minutes long. Internally, it falls into five sections, but as the rich main melodies of the composition continue to work themselves out across the breadth of the entirety, and because the tempo markings of the first four of them are all some variety of a Moderato tempo, these divisions are not easily noticeable. What is remarkable is the continuous flood of rich, songful melody that rolls through the entire symphony. The mood is peaceful, "and in these days," the composer wrote in 1940 for its premiere, "perhaps that is something."

© All Music Guide