From blatant full–blown quotation to hidden allusions, the practice of musical borrowing constitutes a central feature of Ives's music. Since Ives borrowed in virtually all of his major compositions (mainly from hymns and popular music and to a lesser extent from European classical music), the subject is a vast one. Gradually a consensus has developed among scholars and critics that Ives carefully selected his borrowings for their common musical or programmatic denominators and that he exploited these shared characteristics with considerable skill and craft.

Ives perhaps borrowed more extensively and in more varied ways than earlier composers, but he was certainly not the first extensive musical borrower. In fact, Ives's predecessors both in Europe and America borrowed classical and folk music material or modeled their compositions on earlier masters far more than they ackowledged in public or private statements.

Beginning in the early 1980s the work of J. Peter Burkholder has cast considerable light on the range and complexity of Ives's borrowing as well as its diverse contexts and meanings. In the process Burkholder has demonstrated the limitations of the all–purpose designation “quotation.” In its place he has identified and described a wide variety of borrowing types, ranging, in roughly chronological sequence, from such familiar procedures as theme and variation, modeling, and paraphrase to the less common (although not unprecedented) practice of cumulative setting and later by increasingly complex borrowing techniques including quodlibet and collage. Literal quotation beyond a few notes is relatively rare, and even in those movements which employ cumulative settings, the full melodic statements heard at the end of the movement might be paraphrased versions of their tunes rather than their quotation.