Watchman! is one of a group of four songs (
At the River is another) based on hymn-tune themes, adapted from some of Ives’s chamber works. The words are by John Bowring and the tune by Lowell Mason, but the song was adapted in 1913 from the wordless setting in Ives’s Violin Sonata No 2 of 1907, with the sometimes complex piano part untouched. Ives gave the same hymn-tune to the choir in the first movement of his Symphony No 4.
from notes by Calum MacDonald © 2008
