Following Henry Bellamann's laudatory review in 1921, the Concord Sonata has been increasingly recognized as a significant work, both in Ives's compositional output and in American music as a whole. Among the last completed large-scale compositions of Ives's maturity, the Concord Sonata is further distinguished as the only composition for which Ives was motivated to prepare and distribute book–length program notes and as the first work the composer chose to publish at his own expense. This latter decision has considerably skewed the reception history of this unusual composer's music. As J. Peter Burkholder writes, “Ives is the only major composer whose works have come to light in approximately reverse chronological order, beginning with his latest, most difficult, and most idiosyncratic pieces.”

Nearly twenty years after Bellamann's review, the Concord Sonata, an important representative of Ives's late, difficult, and idiosyncratic compositions, acquired additional notoriety when it received its second unequivocally positive critical review in response to its Town Hall performance by John Kirkpatrick (1905–91) in 1939. Although the sonata had been formerly ridiculed almost without exception as unplayable, amateurish, and unreasonably modern, more than one influential critic was now prepared to extol the work as containing “music as beautiful at the very least as any composed by an American” or even as “the greatest music composed by an American.” Eight years later in 1947 the Concord Sonata became Ives's first multi–movement composition to appear in a revised second edition (unless otherwise noted, all page references in the present handbook will be keyed to this second edition, published by Associated Music Publishers).