Counterculture of the 1960s of Timothy Leary to "Turn on, tune in, drop out", hoped to change society by dropping out of it. Looking back on his own life (as a Harvard professor) prior to 1960, Leary interpreted it to have been that of "an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis ... like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots." As members of the hippie movement grew older and moderated their lives and their views, and especially after US involvement in the Vietnam War ended in the
Symphony on a Hymn Tune thing itself. There's nothing extraneous, it's strong as hell and the parts fit, but you could swear that some of them have deliberately been put in upside down." Carol J. Oja of NPR especially praised the fourth movement, "Alla breve," saying, "The fourth movement reveals how Thomson transforms melodic material. Sometimes he does so transparently, sometimes with intentional 'wrong' notes. In an era when his modernist colleagues often revered complexity, Thomson took a radical turn to simpler writing, and his cinematically sweeping melodies evoke vast expanses of the American prairie." Significant passages from "Symphony on a Hymn Tune" were reused