The further removed we are from the era of the American iconoclast Charles Ives (1874-1954), the stranger his music sounds. His impressionistic soup of polytonality and clashing rhythmic episodes, so unfathomable at the time, is now familiar fare: many composers have utilised such juxtapositions for decades. On the other hand, the hymn tunes, marches and parlour songs that permeate his soundscapes, which would have acted as a hook for contemporary audiences, are now so far from our idea of popular music as to seem quaint and alien. The tone poem Central Park in the Dark provides a good example. A harmonically indeterminate mist is shattered by a distant jazz band playing the old number, Hello, my baby: a song that has not echoed through Central Park in 80 years.

Similar tunes turn up in the New England Holidays Symphony, which is in fact four separate tone poems yoked together rather than a truly symphonic conception. The Sailor’s Hornpipe and the barbershop quartet favourite Goodnight, Ladies float around in the first piece, Washington’s Birthday.

The better known Three Places in New England and The Unanswered Question are more subtly integrated, the latter having a philosophical rather than a pictorial basis. The triptych’s...