From Greenland’s Icy Mountains

Of the third movement Fugue, Ives’s program says only that it is “an expression of the reaction of life into formalism and ritualism.” … [It is] the kind of piece Ives used to play Sunday after Sunday at the organ. This particular one, transferred from the First String Quartet to the Fourth Symphony, is in a way the most revolutionary movement of all. …

The Fugue precedes in much the same gentle, beautiful way it did in the Quartet, now fleshed out in color with basses, flute, and clarinet, and with horns entering periodically in the manner of a [J.S.] Bach chorale prelude. … It ends nearly as did the original, but with the addition of a delicate shadow line in clarinet, and a trombone playing a fragment of “Joy to the World”: And heav’n and nature sing … repeat the sounding joy. … Ives found that joy in a New England church, in the revealed religion he called in the Essays “the path between God and man’s spiritual part — a kind of formal causeway.” Here that causeway is symbolized by the formal tradition of the fugue. The country church is not the end of the Pilgrim’s journey, but for Ives it is a critical stopping place.

— Jan Swafford, writing on Ives’s Fourth Symphony in Charles Ives: A Life with Music (1996)