Times music critic Olin Downes wrote on the "tardy recognition" of Charles Ives, who was 71 in 1946. Downes praised the "singularly individual quality of his art" and bemoaned the fact that his work had been seldom performed. The impetus for this evaluation was a concert the preceding week of American music by living composers given by the New York Little Symphony at the Carnegie Chamber Music Hall (later renamed the Recital Hall). The program included the world premiere of Ives' Third Symphony which had been written 40 years earlier. Downes thought it "far surpassed everything else on the program for virility, originality, and essential modernity" and he noted that his fellow critics were unanimous on this point.
He compared his reaction to the Third Symphony to the feeling he had experienced at a 1927 concert at Town Hall when he had heard a work of Ives for the first time. It was a movement from Ives' Fourth Symphony that had so affected him. At that time, Ives was a virtual unknown, although he was already past 50. Downes also remembered a later event when the Ballet Russe, looking for a score by an American composer, dismissed the Ives' work he had recommended as too derivative of Stravinsky, although, in fact, his work predated Stravinsky and the resemblances were superficial. But this was one of the dangers of working in relative obscurity and outside the European-dominated mainstream. His frequent incorporation of American popular, folk and band music also made him seem "provincial" to the European music elite.
Ives had a day job as an insurance executive most of his life. Having suffered a near fatal heart attack two decades earlier as well as deteriorating eyesight, he had written little new music for decades. Downes regretted that few of his songs had ever been sung and little of his chamber music played. Conductors shied away from his orchestral work because they thought the music was hard to play. But, Downes pointed out, a minor orchestra had just proved itself able to do justice to an Ives' composition. That performance of the Third Symphony proved to be a turning point, finally winning Ives major recognition including the 1947 Pulitzer Prize in music. He died in 1954.