Basically the plan of the movement is simple. The horn groups play in antiphony, each group having its own spatial position, motivic material and timbre at the outset. The interplay between the groups becomes more complex, and more and more ostinati are added to the accompaniment. The music works up to a final climax, then draws to a close.

The frenzied dance mounts in tension until it reaches a veritable climax: four massive chords from the full brass and organ are answered by four hammer-blows from pianos, woodwind and pizzicato strings. The music subsides as if exhausted at last. A solo horn bids farewell to first-group theme , and on a strange, plangent chord from the woodwind the movement ends.

If the scales used by the horns are oddly restricted, those used in the orchestral ostinati are odd in a different way. They are, it is true, diatonic scales (almost everything in the scherzo is diatonic): the climactic ostinato which enters at bar 587 is simply the scales of F and Ab juxtaposed. To the ear, though, it sounds like some strange new scale. The figure is set against the first-group's C minor/major theme played in canon at the unison by the first two groups of horns; and while these remain stubbornly in the same tonality the ostinato motifs swing wildly from one tonality to another. And just as Brian can achieve what seem to be complex polyrhythmic effects without leaving the strict 6/8 framework, so he produces what appear to be equally complex polytonal effects wholly within the limits of the diatonic, and indeed often pentatonic, scale.

At the climax of the movement the four shattering chords, marked ‘ff cresc’, consist simply of Db major on the trumpets and F minor on the trombones and tubas, both reinforced by the organ. This bitonal chord is contradicted four times by a D major chord on woodwind, pianos and pizzicato strings, marked "fff". As the music subsides it moves to a kind of pentatonic C tonality, and at last seems to agree with the solo horn as it sounds the "C minor/major" theme, far away, for the last time. But Brian still has a trick up his sleeve: the last note of the horn solo is not C but D. At last we perceive what the tonality of this theme really is; it is the Dorian mode on D. So we see that at the beginning there was no clash of keys between horns and timpani: the D minor Dorian and the C major scale use the same notes. If we now think of the "C minor/major" as a Dorian D-centred tonality, the rationale of the opening bars becomes clear.
Brian had made use of modes in the Gothic Symphony, and was to do so many times more, but his use of modes is neither that of Bartok and the European composers in the folk idiom, nor the bucolic pentatonicism of the early symphonies of Vaughan Williams. It harks back to early English music, to Tallis and before, when modes as well as hexatonic and pentatonic scales were part of the standard musical language, and when melodic lines for the different voices were written "horizontally", without regard for the "vertical" sound: and the listener received no sense of discord because the voice lines were heard as separate (though simultaneous) entities. Only with the coming of the Baroque era did the "vertical" element become important, so that such things as consecutive 5ths became musical solecisms. It is to the older tradition that Brian looks in his approach to tonality and counterpoint.

There is one last surprise to come. The final chord is spelt out from the top downwards by oboes, cors anglais, clarinets and bassoons; and a strange chord it is: not a bitonal chord, and not a note-cluster, this chord is indescribable in formal terms; and its sound is strange indeed, almost mocking. A bare 5th flicker from the violins; and as the strange sound fades, the final movement begins.