I completed the first draft of my fourth symphony in the summer of 1963 just prior to my entering graduate school at USC. The work was inspired by Martin Luther Ling's "I have a dream" speech given on August 28 of that same year. The symphony then lay dormant for several years until I wrote a new version during the early 1990s. The final version was completed in early 2005, some forty-two years after I began it. As with all of my symphonies, Symphony No. 4 has five movements in a vaguely palindrome form