"Serenity" is one of Charles Ives greatest songs, and one of his large list of short-length masterworks.

It is not known if this song uses any music Ives may have sketched for a Whittier Overture Ives planned as part of his projected "Men of Literature" series. Ives wrote a version of "Serenity" for unison chorus, string orchestra, harp, and timpani, according to some reports, but it appears to be lost.

Following his heart attack in 1918, and attendant diagnosis of diabetes (a diagnosis even more serious then—three years before manufactured insulin existed—than now), Ives seems to have begun thinking about his place in posterity. After a couple of decades of working mainly for the cupboard shelf, he got some of his music into order and self-published three important works. One was his "Concord Sonata" for piano, another was a pamphlet called Essays Before a Sonata, and the other was a volume of his songs. He started compiling the latter in 1919. It steadily grew in scope until it reached the size indicated by its title, 114 Songs.

Many of the songs in the volume were completed years before, and were simply edited and included. Many others, however, were either adapted from music that was originally composed for larger forces, retrieved from memory or notes, or newly composed.

It is likely that "Serenity" was composed from memory. It is a remarkable example of sustained mood in music, with daringly limited expressive means. The initial voice dynamic marking is pp for voice and pppp for piano (the latter barely audible). Ives directs the song be performed "Very slowly, quietly and sustained, with little or no change in tempo or volume throughout." Of the 27 measures of the song, 16 of them are identical: A pair of fairly ordinary chords, though there is a "false relationship" between them: a C natural in one and a C sharp in the other.

The effect is similar to that of another piece written at about the same time, Holst's "Neptune" movement of The Planets, which is also built on repeated chords with a false relation, and creates something of the same time-stopping effect.

There are no rhythmic dislocations, no superimpositions of unrelated musical material, not atonality—none of the things most associated with Ives. The song is a reminder that at any stage in his career he was capable of writing beautiful music by any standard. Ives himself appears later to have disparaged the work for just this quality: he described it as "namby-pamby" and "nice," two of the most damning words in his personal vocabulary.

However, it also was one of the works most responsible for building his reputation. Mary Bell sang "Serenity" at Carnegie Hall in the 1928 - 1929 season, and it was also among the six songs selected by Aaron Copland and Hubert Linscott for them to perform at the Yaddo Festival in May 1932, a concert that helped put Ives on the map.

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