offbeat, you could do a lot worse than read
http://www.fullbooks.com/Essays-Before-a-Sonata.html for an insight into Ives's thinking.
Re. the symphony, Ives wrote this short note for a 1927 performance of the first movement and the comedy (today the second movement):
"This symphony...consists of four movements- a prelude, a majestic fugue, a third movement in comedy vein, and a finale of transcendental spiritual content. The aesthetic program of the work is...the searching questions of What? and Why? which the spirit of man asks of life. This is particularly the sense of the prelude. The three succeeding movements are the diverse answers in which existence replies...The fugue...is an expression of the reaction of life into formalism and ritualism. The succeeding movement...is not a scherzo...lt is a comedy in the sense that Hawthorne's Celestial Railroad is comedy....
The last movement (which seems to me the best, compared with the other movements, or for that matter with any other thing I've done)...covers a good many years.... In a way (it) is an apotheosis of the preceding content, in terms that have something to do with the reality of existence and its religious expenence."
I have no idea whether the mention of the comedy as the third movement was a slip by Ives, or whether he later re-orderd the movements.
