All of the works on this album can be considered "early" works, in that even the newest ("Three Places in New England") almost "makes it" into the first fully-productive decade of Ives's life as a composer. It is actually a canard - and an unfair appraisal of Ives the composer - to state that his music became more complex, both harmonically and rythmically, as he grew older. He wrote complex works as a relatively young man, and simple works as he got older. The "long arc" of his work was not from "the simple to the complex" but from the "commonplace (in terms of its materials, not its complexities, for which rhythmic and harmonic complexities abounded) to the ultimately transcendental, whether simple or complex."