Decoration Day According to Charles Ives

A Rainy Day in Camp (Winslow Homer, 1871)

Decoration Day is a masterpiece, with an ending that is the loneliest and one of the most touching I know of.
—attributed to Igor Stravinsky

Charles Ives wrote of his piece Decoration Day, the second of the four pieces included in his A Symphony: New England Holidays, that it “started as a brass band overture, but never got very far that way.” [John Kirkpatrick, ed., Charles E. Ives, Memos 101]