[2] The Protestant hymns "Jesus Loves Me" and "How Firm a Foundation" serve as a thematic basis for the symphony,[3] but the work is also influenced by other historic sacred music styles.
[1] The work is scored for two flutes (one doubling on piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drums, rattle, tambourine, triangle, cymbals, tamtam, bass drum, and strings (violins I & II, violas, violoncellos, and double basses).
"[4] Writing in The Weekly Standard, Algis Valiunas opined that the work "stands worthily beside the far more famous orchestral music of Aaron Copland.
"[5] Richard Buell of The Boston Globe further praised that the work's "peculiar procedures somehow suggest that Thomson has given both a kit for a symphony and the improbable assembled thing itself.
In an era when his modernist colleagues often revered complexity, Thomson took a radical turn to simpler writing, and his cinematically sweeping melodies evoke vast expanses of the American prairie.