The “Overture Habit” and Symphony No. 2

      In Symphony No. 2 Ives borrows not only from tunes popular in his youth, but also from some of his own earlier compositions, including several overtures, some early organ music, and a “Revival Service” for string quartet, now all lost. In his introduction to the 1951 publication, Ives wrote that the second theme of the last movement was “partly from an early short piece called The American Woods,” and goes on to say that “the part suggesting a Steve Foster tune, while over it the old farmers fiddled a barn dance with all its jigs, gallops and reels, was played in Danbury on the Old Wooster House Bandstand in 1889.”  In 1932, Ives had been more specific, that the symphony

was the result of the overture habit, common about two generations ago. The [Adagio cantabile] was a part from a Revival Service for string quartet, and played in Center Church, [New Haven]—but this was revised (à la Brahms at Parker’s suggestion), and scored in 1909 or 1910, when the symphony was copied out in ink by Mr. Price. … Some of the themes in this symphony suggest Gospel Hymns and Steve Foster. (The last movement was a kind of overture—played partly as a shorter piece by Father’s Orchestra [in] 1889, [and by] the Danbury Band—[with the tune] The Red White and Blue and old barn-dance fiddles on top.)⁹

The Red White and Blue is another name for the patriotic song Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, which, with accompanying fiddle tunes, is the principal unifying feature of Symphony No. 2. 

Ives’s characteristically offhand remarks about his earlier works and the “overture habit” provide a key to the unusual formal structure of this five-movement symphony. Although Ives does not refer specifically to the common form of overture—a slow introduction leading through a concluding half cadence to a “sonata allegro” movement—he was entirely familiar with the structure not only as organist and concertgoer but through the repertoire staples of his father’s band and orchestra. The symphony’s five movements are best seen as a symmetrical structure in which the third (middle) movement functions as a meditative interlude between two introduction-and-allegro “overtures” that are thematically related—principally to each other, but also to the middle movement. Ives provides further unity in this symphony through his reliance on its principal key of F in movements two, three, and five in its pastoral, meditative, and triumphal guises respectively, and by his extensive use of harmonic relationships a minor third apart.

— Jonathan Elkus, from the critical edition