In contrast to Ives's other works for large orchestra, which begin in quiet and meditative moods, the first-movement Prelude starts with a strong, maestoso, fortissimo bassline, immediately followed by a rising trumpet fanfare.

Ives bases this "Comedy" movement on Hawthorne's story "The Celestial Railroad", itself a trope on John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

Tunes quoted include "In the Sweet By-and-By", "Beulah Land", "Marching Through Georgia", "Ye Christian Heralds", "Jesus, Lover of my Soul" and "Nearer, My God, to Thee".

[2] The symphony ends with what Ives called "an apotheosis of the preceding content, in terms that have something to do with the reality of existence and its religious experience".

For example, in the second movement there is a passage (famously called the "Collapse Section") in which the orchestra divides into two groups, one playing in a slow 32 meter, the other in 44.

Also novel in the symphony is the use of quarter tones, heard both in the strings as well as in a dedicated quarter-tone piano that assumes 24 notes per octave.

In the second movement, the quarter-tone piano noodles a filigree pattern in quarter and regular tones to accompany a solo violin that intones the hymn "Beulah Land".

The symphony is scored for a very large orchestra: Distant choir ensemble, offstage Woodwinds Brass Percussion (8 to 10 players) SATB Chorus Keyboards Strings

[7] The 1965 performance score, published by G. Schirmer (AMP), has been supplanted by a new Charles Ives Society Critical Edition, 2011 (ed.

by William Brooks, James Sinclair, Kenneth Singleton, Wayne Shirley, and Thomas M. Brodhead), which presents the music in the largely unperformable but compositionally intriguing state in which Ives left it in his manuscripts, and then a necessary corresponding Performance Score (edited by Thomas M. Brodhead), which was premiered at the Lucerne Festival, August 26, 2012, under the baton of conductor Peter Eötvös.