War. Colonel Robert Shaw was the White Boston commander who led the Regiment in their assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Of the six hundred men who stormed the fort, 272, including Shaw, were killed, captured, or wounded. They were subsequently recognized for their courage and valor in battle. Composed between 1913 and c.1923 and revised in 1929, it is possible that initial sketches of this piece were penned as far back as May 1911, at the time of Ives's move to Hartsdale, New York. A distinguishing characteristic of the movement is its sophisticated handling of harmonic progressions, technically atonal though supporting a diatonic melody dominated by the interval of a minor third. Ives referred to the piece as a brooding "Black March", inspired by a reflective experience at the monument. The piece evokes images of a long, slow march South to battle by the 54th. It achieves this with the use of minor third ostinatos in the bass. Ives uses chromaticism, placed distantly below the main themes, to make it sound like a vague recollection of the events rather than a vivid depiction. The piece builds to a dynamic high before rapidly receding, perhaps to signify the fate of the regiment at Fort Wagner. From a full, rich C-major chord at measure 63 (rehearsal letter H), the music falls into minor disarray and, for the last minutes, it can be heard as a solemn memorial to those lost or the crushed hopes of hundreds of black soldiers who had come to fight for the freedom of other blacks. Borrowing Of particular significance is the main melody, which is made up of a patchwork of motives from old plantation tunes or parlor songs such as "Massa's in the Cold Ground" and "Old Black Joe", and the patriotic Civil War songs "Marching Through Georgia" and "The Battle Cry of Freedom". The paraphrasing of these pieces is especially clear in the opening bars of the piece, where motives from the three main sources interweave to create an American-sounding pentatonic melody typical of many 19th-century American songs. Throughout the opening of the piece, ostinatos based upon minor third intervals are heard in the bass instruments. These are intended to evoke images of a solemn trudge down to battle. They, too, are derived from the same four source materials as the main melody. Throughout "Marching Through Georgia", "Old Black Joe", "The Battle Cry of