Charles Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut, on October 20, 1874, and died in New York on May 19, 1954. The first performance of Three Places in New England took place in at Town Hall in New York on January 10, 1931, with Nicolas Slonimsky conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Boston. Three Places in New England is scored for piccolo (optional), flute, oboe, English horn, clarinet, bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, trombone, timpani, snare drum, bass drum/cymbals, piano, and strings. Approximate performance time is eighteen minutes.

Three Places in New England, designated by American composer Charles Ives as his Orchestral Set No. 1, and subtitled a New England Symphony, is a work in three movements, each based upon a geographic site that held particular significance for the composer. Like many of Ives’s works, Three Places in New England evoke memories of his beloved home region.

Although Ives completed the piece in New England in 1914, the first performance did not take place until 1931. Nicolas Slonimsky, the Russian-born conductor, musicologist, and composer, led the Chamber Orchestra of Boston in the January 10, 1931 premiere at New York’s Town Hall. Slonimsky conducted the work twice on this occasion. And although the execution of Ives’s revolutionary and challenging score was far from ideal, the audience demonstrated increased approval upon its repetition. Slonimsky described the work as “transcendental geography by a Yankee of strange and intense genius.” In time, Ives’s Three Places in New England has  become one of the composer’s most admired and performed works.

I. The “St. Gaudens” in Boston Common: The inspiration for the first movement is drawn from a sculpture by Augustus St. Gaudens honoring Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, leader of the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Infantry. The 54th, the Union Army’s first African American regiment, fought valiantly in the Civil War. Ives’s reverence for the memory of the honored soldiers is reflected in the quiet and reflective expression that pervades “St. Gaudens,” save a brief outburst toward the conclusion.

II. Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut: According to Ives: “Near Redding Center, Conn., is a small park preserved as a Revolutionary Memorial; for here General Israel Putman’s soldiers had their winter quarters in 1778-1779. Long rows of stone camp fire-places still remain to stir a child’s imagination.” The music depicts a child leaving a picnic and wandering toward the Putnam campsite, hoping “to catch a glimpse of some of the old soldiers.” The child dreams of encountering “the Goddess of Liberty,” Putnam’s soldiers, and the General himself. Awakened from his reverie, the boy “hears the children’s songs and runs down past the monument to ‘listen to the band’ and join in the games and dances.” Fragments of “The British Grenadiers” (a song appropriated by the American Revolutionaries), as well as several other melodies, are played throughout a movement that is notable for its remarkable density of thematic material.

III. The Housatonic at Stockbridge: According to Ives, this movement "was suggested by a Sunday morning walk that Mrs. Ives and I took near Stockbridge the summer after we were married. We walked in the meadows along the river and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist had not entirely left the riverbed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and the trees were something that one would always remember."