[6] The quartet is a programmatic work depicting four men who "converse, discuss, argue (in re 'Politick'), fight, shake hands, shut up – then walk up the mountain side to view the firmament!
"[7] Author Matthew McDonald wrote that the quartet "is the only multi-movement work Ives completed after The Celestial Country... whose movements all belong to an 'original grand conception,' as opposed to being partially or completely culled from earlier pieces,"[8] and that "Ives conceived of the quartet movements as integrated components of a single musical narrative.
In keeping with the dramatic conception suggested by the titles of the movements, Ives treats the four instruments with an unprecedented degree of individuality: each has its own special character, and the overall quality of the work results from a sort of forced amalgamation of the four different textural components.
Jan Swafford wrote: "In this movement the programmatic idea of a heated conversation is rendered by complex, chromatic, dissonant counterpoint.
Otherwise the four voices are distinct in a more traditionally contrapuntal way, the mostly atonal harmonies producing a sonority close to what Schoenberg was developing during the same period, a continent away.
[15] After a quiet passage marked "Largo sweetota" and another outburst, there is a loud, dense section, after which the second violin drops out, only to return, insistently playing exaggeratedly regular rhythms against the other instruments' constantly-changing subdivisions.
[16] The instruments briefly come together, playing in rhythmic unison, but things soon fall apart in a passage marked "Allegro con fuoco (all mad)" that again recalls the opening.
"[20] In keeping with the program ("walking up the mountain side to view the firmament"), the instruments slowly unite in their efforts to achieve their goal, culminating in a "transcendental" ostinato passage during which the cello plays a slow, majestic descending whole tone scale beginning and ending on D, strongly reminiscent of the ending of the last movement of Ives' Symphony No.
The four men’s communion with nature on the mountaintop is evoked by the first violin, which reaches higher on its E-string than most composers or players of the time would have dared to attempt, as it paraphrases the hymn 'Nearer, My God, to Thee'..., the title suggesting the ultimate object of the ascent up the mountain.
And whilst that of course is somewhat absurd from the present-day standpoint, and indeed was turned on its head by Charles Ives who had four very irascible characters climbing a mountain and shrieking at each other...
"[29] As characteristic of Ives' style, he quotes American tunes including "Dixie's Land", "Marching Through Georgia", "Turkey in the Straw", "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean", "Massa in De Cold Ground", "Bethany", "Nettleton", and "Westminster Chimes", alongside quotations from works of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and even Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" theme.