To this end, the paraphrasing of American folk tunes is an important device, providing tangible reference points and making the music accessible despite its avant-garde chromaticism.

The satisfaction that Ives derived from working on the Fourth of July (the third movement of his Holiday Symphony), in which he used the trio (or middle) section of 1776, may have been the catalyst for inspiring him to reuse these lost songs and create a longer piece.

The final version of the piece clearly resembles its source materials, but many of the complex musical jokes that littered the originals had been replaced with simpler alternatives.

The thorough reworking required to transform Three Places from an orchestral score to one that could be performed by a much smaller chamber orchestra renewed Ives's interest in the work.

Ives was glad to have his piece played, but his comments on the rescoring include, on the full score of The Housatonic at Stockbridge, "piano may be used for Bassoons throughout… a poor substitute….

"[This quote needs a citation] Three Places was first performed on February 16, 1930 under Slonimsky's direction before the American Committee of the International Society for Contemporary Music in New York City.

Slonimsky conducted the work in Paris on June 6 at a concert he described as "absolutely extraordinary"[This quote needs a citation] because so many important composers and critics of the time were in the audience.

[citation needed] For instance, in The "St. Gaudens", Ives paraphrases ragtime, slave plantation songs such as "Old Black Joe" and even patriotic American Civil War tunes such as "Marching through Georgia".

After Slonimsky's retirement from conducting, the piece lay dormant until 1948, when longtime BSO concertmaster Richard Burgin programmed it on a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert.

In the 1970s, interest in Three Places in New England was piqued once again, this time regarding the differences between the original 1914 scoring, much of which had been lost, and the 1929 chamber-orchestra rescoring for Slonimsky's chamber orchestra.

James Sinclair of Yale University, after extensive research, concluded that the 1914 orchestration could not be recreated in its entirety since only 35% of the second movement had survived Ives's cutting for the 1929 version.

Sinclair created what is currently believed to be the closest replication of the 1914 score for full orchestra by extrapolating Ives's scraps, sketches and notes.

[2][3] The first movement of Three Places is a tribute to the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial near the corner of Beacon and Park Streets in Boston, Massachusetts.

A distinguishing characteristic of the movement is its sophisticated handling of harmonic progressions, technically atonal though supporting a diatonic melody dominated by the interval of a minor third.

A distinguishing characteristic of this movement is the combination of multiple divisions of the orchestra playing against each other while occasionally throwing in asymmetrical phrases or wild dissonances.

The opening measures are typical of Ives in their heavy chromaticism and varying time signatures (44 against 98) to create the sound of community marching bands.

This touchingly realistic interpretation resolves shortly after the start of the piece into a B♭ major march, but chromaticism and disarray are never far from breaking through, giving the impression that the musicians in this band are only amateurs.

Borrowed tunes include "The British Grenadiers", John Philip Sousa's "Semper Fidelis", "Liberty Bell" and "The Washington Post", Henry Clay Work's "Marching Through Georgia", "The Girl I Left Behind", "Arkansas Traveler", Stephen Foster's "Massa's in the Cold Ground", George Frederick Root's "The Battle Cry of Freedom" and "Tramp!

First drafts were written primarily in the summer of 1908, reworked in 1911 and then again in 1913, extending the atmospheric depiction of mists and running water far longer than the original first two measures.

It was arranged as a song in 1921 to lines excerpted from Robert Underwood Johnson's poem To the Housatonic at Stockbridge, but this final movement of Three Places in New England is purely orchestral.

This piece was inspired by a walk Ives had taken with his new wife, Harmony, in June 1908 on a honeymoon hiking trip in western Massachusetts and Connecticut, a rural setting they enjoyed so much that they chose to go back to the Berkshires the very next weekend.

He used irregular, quasi-isorhythmic ostinatos in the violins to create the image of mist and fog rolling over swirling waters, and an English horn and violas to mimic the sound of singing from a church across the river.

The original symphonic version was purely instrumental, but conductor Michael Tilson Thomas took the liberty of adding a full choir to sing the "Dorrnance"-based melody in place of the horns/woodwinds/lower strings when he rerecorded the work in 2002 with the San Francisco Symphony on the RCA label.