[4] The Organ Symphony contains three movements: a contemplative prelude, a driving scherzo with a "bluesy" trio section, and a moderate tempo finale ranging in character from mournful to unrelenting.
Howard Pollack, a historian of American composers, states that the work is much more like a concerto, and that its progressive elongation of movements makes the last in particular seem to drag on in spots, but that "such flaws are more than compensated from by the music's vitality, brilliance, and individuality."
The scherzo reveals an equally familiar hallmark in its evocation of modern urban life—here propulsive, mechanical, jazzy, with an ironically robotized quotation of the French tune "Au Claire de la Lune," an homage, surely, to Boulanger...
The Finale, alternatively dirgelike and urgent (the composer's prophetic voice already making itself heard), ends triumphantly, as his music often does.The tonal material of the prelude can be found in its first four measures, based on the half-step/whole-step octatonic scale beginning on G♯ (G♯-A-B-C-D-D♯-F-F♯-G♯).
Pollack contends that sonata form is difficult to grasp in this movement, even for an experienced listener, and likens it to a passacaglia, with "its open unison theme, its contrapuntal exposition, its repetitive bass lines, its lack of clear thematic contrast, and, perhaps above all, its tonal stasis."
Musicologist Gayle Murchison posits that his use of the octatonic and whole-tone scales, polyrhythmic ostinato figures, and dissonant counterpoint proves his mastery of the modernist harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic techniques of the 1920s.
[5]" From the stage, Maestro Damrosch famously remarked, "if a gifted young man can write a symphony like that at age twenty-three, within five years he will be ready to commit murder," which was in Copland's words a joke meant to "smooth the ruffled feathers of his conservative Sunday afternoon ladies faced with modern music.
[7]" Just as contemporary critics rejected Copland's work for being too jazzy and too modern, receptive conductors and audiences were excited to hear his developing style.