Brief as this song is, it contains numerous elements that are keys to Ives and his music. The song is only nine measures in length and lasts only about three-quarters of a minute.

This brevity is typical of dozens of songs and short pieces of orchestral and chamber music in Ives' output. Often he set these down and achieved a particular mood or idea that he could use in larger works. Another typical aspect of the song is that the words are his own and are a reflection of the past. Even more, they are a direct expression of the deep loss Ives felt at his father's untimely death when Ives was only 20 years old.

It makes reference to George Ives as a musician in its haiku-like 17 syllables: "A sound of a distant horn, O'er shadowed lake is borne, my father's song." The elder Ives was deeply interested in acoustic effects of distance, sounds over water, the lowering of pitch that can happen in echoes, and so forth. Charles Ives was preoccupied with all these things in his music, which led him into radical modernism, even while emotionally he often seemed concerned with portraying as golden times the boyhood and teenaged years he spent with his father.

This music first was born as an orchestral piece called The Pond, given catalog number Kv 21, and dated to 1906 in John Kirkpatrick's essential listing of Ives' compositions. It is likely that it already existed in its song form then and was turned into the orchestral piece. Nevertheless, it was not published as a song until Ives self-published his 114 Songs in 1922 and prepared (in 1921) its definitive song setting, giving it the title "Remembrance."

It is just a scrap of melody over a murmuring, slowly descending piano arpeggio pattern first seeming to be in the key of G, then solidly in C. Surprising slips of harmony at the very end bring it to end on a mysterious, lightly dissonant chord probably rooted on D.

It is one of the most evocative and affecting of Ives' many miniature masterworks.



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