Arnold's Symphony No. 8 was completed in London in November 1978. Commissioned by the Rustam K. Kermani Foundation in Kermani's memory, the work was given its first performance in Albany, New York's Troy Savings Bank Music Hall on May 5, 1979, with the Albany Symphony conducted by Julius Hegyi. The work was mistakenly published as Op. 121 and is sometimes referred to as such, but Op. 124 is its correct designation.

From 1972 to 1977 Arnold lived in Ireland, and it was toward the end of that time that he started sketching the Symphony No. 8. Despite the fact that the work was completed after Arnold had moved back to England, the Irish influence remains clear, specifically in the use of a quasi-Irish marching tune that Arnold had written for his film score to The Reckoning. That march tune plays an important role in the first of the symphony's three movements, an Allegro, which opens with a dissonant, militaristic flourish, dominated by heavy brass and percussion. The Irish tune makes its first appearance in the piccolo, with a quiet, sustained, discordant string chord underneath it. Later taken up by the harp, strings, trumpet, and bassoon, this Irish tune fights with the opening dissonant music for prominence through much of the movement. In the end, after a brief elegy in the strings, the march tune finally wins out.

Elegiac strings also open the second movement, Andantino. The mood is dark and rather sad as the main theme travels from bassoon to horns to muted strings. But the textures, by contrast, are frequently gentle, even fragile, with delicate tuned percussion and harp creating a shimmering backdrop toward the movement's end. A jaunty, Prokofiev-like woodwind theme opens the final movement, marked Vivace. A darker string theme pulls the music back briefly to the turbulent mood of the first movement. The strings comment polyphonically on the first theme, which is subsequently turned by tuned percussion into what has been called "cocktail lounge" music. The dark second theme is taken up by the woodwinds in canon, but the jaunty main theme returns in the full orchestra, leading to a final climax and decisive closing chords.

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