The Chamber Symphony was originally not an autonomous concert piece. Eisler wrote the music to the instructional nature film White Flood in 1940, in New York and Pennsylvania. He soon renamed it simply Chamber Symphony and continued to use the music without change. The five movements correspond to the film sequences: Vulcanism, Wind, Water and Ice (Movement I), The Return of Life in Areas Freed from Ice (Movement II), The Voyage of a Ship Through a Bay in Alaska (Movement III), The Birth of a Glacier in the Mountains and its Downward Slide Towards the Valley (Movement IV), The Death of the Glacier When it Reaches the Coast (Movement V).
Eisler repeatedly alluded to the purpose of this film score, thus also in 1942 in an address to the Rockefeller Foundation, where he spoke of the distance of independent musical forms of image which can only be made suitable for film through the closeness and precision of its details. In the Complete Edition, the Chamber Symphony – which the Eisler scholar Eberhardt Klemm calls Eislers most important instrumental work – can be found in the definitive version of 1961 for the first time in a text-critical form.