Unsung Composers

Taking as our starting-point the year 1960, which are the best symphonies of the past fifty years? I would like more than simply a list of personal favourites, please! In other words, which symphonies would you hold up as worthy of being measured against the masterpieces of the past, whether sung or unsung? (Perhaps three symphonies per person plus reasons for nominating them.)

About the reasons, I apologize for my English:
1) Sciostakovich n.15
Great, even if not supreme, achievemente by an undisputed master in serious illness, always in touch with audience
2) Rautavaara n.3 (but I could have listed almost as well n.6, 7 or 8)
Great capability, after more "modern" experiences, to rework past languages in an idiom aiming to audiences
3) Tippett n.3
Grat freedom and indipendence of idiom , very strong personality, asking much, but not the impossible, to the listener).
(Other contenders: Sallinen, Weinberg, Bernstein, Arnold, Simpson, Schnittke).

I do tend to agree about the Shostakovich 15. This enigmatic, scary and ultimately confusing work written in difficult circumstances is the last words of a true master

Petterson 7; a conflictridden and ultimately supremely comforting score written by a master of sustaining unity out of simple motifs.

Nørgård 7; a true successor to the Impressionists, a colourful score of amazing compexity, a true successor to Ravels Daphnis and Chloe.

Many worthy names mentioned by Alberto, I love Sallinen, and would have liked to include Dutilleux, but three it is.

Tearing apart the concept of "best symphony" from "favourite symphony" is rather difficult ;D One tends to conflate the two propositions and assume that one's favourite symphonies are, ipso facto, favourites because they are superior to others ;D

I would have included Havergal Brian's 16th but as it was composed in 1960, it just misses out. I have a lot of sympathy for those already mentioned and I suppose that in the circumstances I too should nominate the Shostakovich 15th for the same reasons as those given by alberto and erato.

So my other two will be

1. Robert Simpson's 9th: an absolutely masterly composition of epic scale, profound, majestic, a worthy 20th century companion to the great symphonies of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Bruckner.

2. Vadim Silvestrov's 5th: an affirmation that a composer can in the late 20th century turn away from overly intellectual, arid, ugly music apparently written for the few to music which can touch the heart and soul of his listeners.

Even though several of my favorites were composed since 1960 I agree also of course, deciding which could possibly deserve repertory status, could possibly prove a life-changing experience for more than an outlying handful of musiclovers, etc. - is a difficulty! (And much as I love certain composers' symphonies their best music may be somewhere else in their output anyway; Holmboe's 9th packs quite the punch but his Requiem for Nietzsche may probably be his very most lasting work, for instance.)
Mieczyslaw Weinberg's 6th symphony, however, might have a chance and not a half-bad one at that.

And what about Symphony no. 3 by Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki?
I know that its minimalistic simplicity may irritiate many listeners but it apeals to quite big number of others who are great fans of that music. Anyhow for 1976 it was something extraordinary. I can remember my feelings - enthusiastic and I still like it!

Interesting: are these really comparable with the great works of the fifty years prior to 1960 - or are we witnessing the eclipse of the symphony as a public statement in our ever more privatised and atomistic world?

Only 3? I would perhaps say Britten's Cello Symphony (which just scrapes in, date-wise), Brian's 31st and Rubbra's Sinfonia Sacra.

But I'm glad someone else mentioned the Tippett 3rd and Simpson 9th, as they would be fighting with the above for a place too.

Yes...the Gorecki would certainly have to compete with the Silvestrov in my opinion, although its claims on the title of "symphony" might be disputed.

I have never taken to Britten's Cello Symphony at all....and I positively detest Tippett's 3rd :( :(  The Rubbra Sinfonia Sacra was one I really considered very carefully for inclusion though ;D

Well, I happen to think that the Simpson 9th is one of the greatest symphonies of any or all time :)

As for "the eclipse of the symphony"........not as long as really fine composers like John McCabe and David Matthews in Britain, Kalevi Aho in Finland and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in the USA are still writing symphonies ;D After them however....I am not so sure :(

It's not exactly a long roll-call, though, is it?
However, I'm waiting agog for further suggestions...

Just for the record ;D......

The fact that alberto and Jimfin regard Tippett's 3rd as one of the greatest symphonies of the past 60 years and I loathe the work is my problem not a comment on their taste.

Kokkonen 4th, Rubbra 8th, Shostakovich 13th

Quote from: Tapiola on Saturday 26 November 2011, 02:39
Kokkonen 4th, Rubbra 8th, Shostakovich 13th

Reasons, please?

My reasons may be too subjective. Each symphony hits me right in the gut in different ways. Rubbra, spiritually. Kokkonen, the natural world. Shostakovich, humanity as it really is. If I was to completely objective, I would have to think  harder!

So, a top 10 might include (in no particular order):
Silvestrov 5
Rautavaara 3
Norgard 7
Lutoslawski 3 or 4
Gorecki 3
Maxwell Davies ?
Corigliano
Kokkonen 4
Tippett 3 or 4
Simpson 9
Rubbra 8
Pettersson 7
Dutilleux ?
Sallinen ?
Weinberg ?

So - who/what have we left out?

A personal note: one of the reasons I take readily to, say, Simpson as opposed to, say Lutoslawski or Maxwell Davies, is that I can sense where he is going. Often this is a matter of Simpson preserving recognisable rhythms, whereas with other composers I feel continually lost, admiring many a beautiful sonority or striking phrase, but finding that I have no bearings by which to navigate the music. Is it me? Am I some sort of dolt incapable of following what other evidently listeners can follow? Or am I just a reactionary, subscribing as I do in general to the Simpson model of symphonism which requires a sense of travel and becoming?

I try to answer the to penultimate post, indicating further names.
IMHO there are at least several worthy symphonists (or authors of works titled symphonies ) not yet named before in the thread which have composed  symphonies since 1961.
David Diamond
Roy Harris
Walter Piston
Paul Creston
William Schuman
The above have followed a kind of straight way, and a tradition (maybe having given their best before 1961).
Still trustful to the Symphony I would list Gosta Nystroem and Vagn Holmboe.
I would list the maverick G.F. Malipiero as inventing and pursuing a kind of not-romantic symphony (he too at best before 1961).
Some modernists have come back to hints of the tradition : Henze from Symphony n.7 onwards.
Other have repudiated avantgarde idioms and embraced again tradition : Penderecky after the First,
Paart certainly with the neo-gregorian Third.
Kancheli is another who mingles past and modern .
Mine are just only a few suggestions. Indeed the last 50 years may be seen as not really discouraging (even if it would be idle to pretend that they are equal to 1911-1961....or to 1861-1911).

Quote from: Alan Howe on Saturday 26 November 2011, 14:11
So - who/what have we left out?

I like to be an advocate for Thomas Schmidt-Kowalski's Symphonie Nr. 4 in C-Dur op. 96 für großes Orchester (2003)  ;)

I have tried not to simply put-forward symphonies I 'like'. Rather, I have tried to stick to the spirit of the question and pick works that, whether I really like them or not, are worthy of being held-up as truly great symphonic works.

Kalevi Aho - Luosto Symphony (2003)
Malcolm Arnold - No 7 (1973)
John Corigliano - No 1 (1988)
Anders Eliasson - No 1 (1986)
Holmboe - No 9 (1967)
Lutosławski - No 3 (1973)
Nørgård - No 3 (1975)
Pettersson - No 7 (1967)
William Schuman - No 8 (1962)
Shostakovich Nos 13 (1962), 14 (1969) and 15 (1971)(all worthy in their ways)
Robert Simpson - No 9 (1982)
Tippett - No 4
Tubin - No 8 (1967)
Erkki-Sven Tüür - No 4 (Magma)(2002)
Weinberg - No 4 (1961)

I'm not sure about "best" but certainly the most striking symphonies have come from the pen of Arthur Schnittke.  Especially striking for me is his Symphony #1 (1969-74), which  I can only say has to be heard to be believed!

It's precisely music like Schnittke's that I can't make head nor tail of. It's me, I know - but I'd listen to Simpson all day - and Shostakovich, Schuman, Arnold, Holmboe, Pettersson, Tippett, Tubin, Weinberg, Rautavaara (No.3 at least), Harris, etc.  But once we're into Lutoslawski, Maxwell Davies, Schnittke, etc. I'm lost. There's a definite shift here away from 'the tradition', it seems to me - or at least, the tradition's being stretched very hard and far. Am I wrong? What's happening here?

A minor remark about a symphonist I like very much, I would say a "true" symphonist, with a keen sense for the form, a real ability to "build".
Dutilleux second and last Symphony ("Le Double") is (if I am right) from 1959.

Quote from: oldman on Saturday 26 November 2011, 17:43
I'm not sure about "best" but certainly the most striking symphonies have come from the pen of Arthur Schnittke.  Especially striking for me is his Symphony #1 (1969-74), which  I can only say has to be heard to be believed!

That wouldn't be Alfred Schnittke you're talking about, would it?

Oops that is alfred schnittke

My bad

Perhaps you were thinking of the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler?

Anyway, does anyone want to take up the issue I am describing - the contrast between, say, Simpson  whose music moves in a way I can understand and, say, Maxwell Davies whose music doesn't? What am I missing?

Interesting topic, but I can't add anything to this. I don't know what the BEST symphonies of the last 50 years anymore than I can tell you what the best symphonies of the last 150 years are! I certainly have my favorites, but it seems that they are rarely on a list of the best. What makes a symphony "best" to me is that it stirs the soul, has real energy, drive, testosterone...but also some moments of reflection, tranquility, repose. I don't even mind ugly, as the symphonies of Humphrey Searle are frequent visitors in my household. Robert Simpson hardly ever. Too bad about the 50 year limit, though. One of the strongest, best, and entertaining symphonies of our era was written in 1958 by V Giannini for wind band, not orchestra. That 3rd symphony is a marvelous work that showed once again (as if it needed being proven) that one could still write tonal music in clear styles using modern idioms that people enjoyed.

I don't know if I could come up with a top ten offhand, but the symphonies from the last 50 years that speak to me most strongly are:

Shostakovich 13th (one of my absolute favorite symphonies regardless of when composed)
Tippett 3rd
Harbison 1st
George Lloyd 8th
Havergal Brian 21st
Arnold 5th
Lutoslawski 3rd

And I suppose listing the Elgar/Payne 3rd symphony would be cheating . . .

are all of those _from_ 1961? :)
hrm. still not sure what my other two of three would be, but Shostakovich 14, like Weinberg 6, I think have a strong case to make both in musical content (very very strong), in choice of texts (in the case of the Weinberg mostly- the finale is an exception there I know), in unifying themes and their response to them (death in general, death of children.) The Shostakovich is the better work but I'd certainly advocate for the Weinberg and am pleased with the recent performances it's been receiving. I suppose that leaves one... (I have a notion I may want to leave a spot open for Ivanovs' symphony 13, which I haven't listened to just yet. Though some other works as usual seem to me like they could fit as a representative best work.
Though given that 50 years' worth of other eras rarely produce three excellent symphonies (depending of course on what barrier one is requiring them to vault ... ! ), perhaps two is enough.

Asked, what is the best symphony written in the last 50 years, my choice would be Robert Simpson's 9th, too.

For me, this work is the greatest achievement in building up organic evolution in music. Everytime I hear this work, I find it amazing, what it could be made out of so a simple opening motive - a kind of symphonic life story, the main material beeing "born" at the beginning, going through different stations of life and "dying" at the ending - and how all that is integrated in one flowing musical continuum, that never breaks into parts.

I add to my earlier indicated Gorecki's no. 3 the 15th by Shostakovich.
I am not a specialist in symphonies so I cannot add something specal or comment the pieces mentioned above.
From the late  three symphonies by Shostakovich I vote for no. 15 because it is purely instrumental piece aand in that sense more symphonical. And what is most important it is very dramatic piece written by seriously ill old composer and we can feel this in music especially in the last movement - passacaglia - extraordinary piece, very uncommon and the very end of it with the enigmatic percussion is something completely shocking! In teh biography of Shostakovich by Krzysztof Meyer there is one good impression (stated by one of the conductors); "It is music completely reduced to ashes, totally burnt out".
OK quotations of other music (Wilhelm Tell Wagner etc.) are - in my mind - strange and unnecessary but the impression of the symphony in its entirety is shattering.

I am very pleased to see so many members nominating Robert Simpson's 9th ;D

To my mind it is one of the great 9ths-worthy to stand shoulders with the 9th symphonies of Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner and Mahler( with Vaughan Williams, Rubbra and Pettersson not far behind). Yet it has only received one commercial recording (by Handley for Hyperion).

This is a symphony which should be taken up by a great living conductor and given the exposure it so richly deserves.

I love the description in the old Penguin Guide that the music sounds as though galaxies are forming ;D

Here another admirer of Simpson's 9th. I remember I couldn't believe what I was hearing when I listened to it for the very first time. It really is a colossal work.

I thoroughly agree: for me it blows away any symphony written within the time-span in question, with the exception of the very different late symphonies of Shostakovich. But am I just an unreconstructed conservative who cannot appreciate his more avant-garde contemporaries?

I'm afraid that I cannot in all honesty really contribute very much to this topic as my knowledge of symphonies written during the last fifty years is sadly limited

:(

but it seems to me that Robert Simpson's is a very significant voice, along with Shostakovich, Havergal Brian, Daniel Jones, Michael Tippett, Malcolm Arnold, Arnold Cooke, Graham Whettam and David Morgan (well, you should have expected a predominantly British bias). This is not to say that these are the 'best' by any means, but they are all composers who strike a chord with me.

:)

Quote from: Alan Howe on Sunday 27 November 2011, 20:05
But am I just an unreconstructed conservative who cannot appreciate his more avant-garde contemporaries?

Would that be so bad? You would be in an association with such conservative figures as Bach, Mendelssohn, Brahms, etc. Surely, not the worst company.

I'd include Vasks Symphony No 2, the end of which I find very moving and the 3rd (Joie de Vivre) and 4th Symphony (The Four Provinces) by Irish composer John Kinsella (Marco Polo). I investigated this when a review described it as being in the spirit of Tubin and Lilbrn - two of my favourite composers. No 3 starts off rather like Bax' 3rd Symphony and is a very powerful work in a modern but tonal style. It is a very exciting symphony (Nielsen also comes to mind). Symphony No 4 is a musical traversal of the four provinces of Ireland in the order they are touched by the prevailing wind. I find the return of the prevailing wind motto theme at the end tremendously exciting and overwhelming. I'd support the Gorecki Symphony No 3 too and also David Matthews's 6th Symphony, with its Vaughan Williams influences.

I very much agree with your assessment of the Kinsella 3rd and 4th, Jeffrey ;D

Am very much looking forward to the new recording of the composer's 6th and 7th symphonies from RTE :)

Somehow, I feel I ought to be able to comprehend something with the title 'Symphony' - I certainly want to - and yet, it seems to me that a yawning gap has opened up between those composers who want to continue and develop 'the tradition' (e.g all those mentioned by Albion, above), and those who somehow want to deconstruct it so that it becomes something radically 'other' (Schnittke?) or write something that is so hard to comprehend that one is left not moved or exhilarated, nor emotionally drained, nor uplifted, but merely baffled, confused....

Is it me?

Living composers still writing 'genuine' symphonies which you (may) have a chance to hear would include:

John McCabe and David Matthews(Great Britain)
Kalevi Aho, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Aulis Sallinen(Finland)
John Kinsella(Ireland)
Halvor Haug, Ragnar Soderlind(Norway)
Krzystof Penderecki(Poland)
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich(USA)

It's not a very long list, is it :(   But all of these-at least to my ears-have the ability to write in long, extended paragraphs of genuinely symphonic dimensions and to touch the soul. I might add later Vadim Silvestrov(Ukraine) as well :)

Not to forget John Pickard and Matthew Taylor, who follow Robert Simpson's footsteps.

Quote from: Rainolf on Sunday 27 November 2011, 22:57
Not to forget John Pickard and Matthew Taylor, who follow Robert Simpson's footsteps.

Unfortunately neither Pickard's 2nd or 3rd symphonies has been commercially recorded(Symphony No.1 has been withdrawn for revision). Although if anyone has a copy of their broacast performances that would be hugely appreciated ;D ;D

Thank you for reminding me about Matthew Taylor though ;D I have been meaning to buy his First and Third symphonies for some time and had completely forgotten to do so. He is teaching a young friend of mine at the Royal Academy in London. Anyone got a copy of the BBC broadcast of the 2nd symphony?

I think that I should probably have mentioned too Panufnik's 9th "Sinfonia della Speranza", another magisterial 9th symphony and my favourite Panufnik ;D

Yes, Panufnik! Shame on me. Sinfonia Sacra (1963), Sinfonia Votiva and Symphony 10, all top notch. The others need more concentration from the listener to ever be performed often I'm afraid, but a magnificent series of symphonies. Much more Polish than British, more Polish in flavor than Lutoslawski

I would approach this in a slightly different way, given the underlying concern of the original question: from the 200 years prior to 1960, how many symphonies deserve to rank among the greatest?  That is, how many symphonies utilize the full resources available to the composer in the fullest manner?  How many are both structurally complex and powerfully emotional, operating consistently at the highest level?

Not so many as we might suppose, I would guess.  A certain number by Haydn, but no more than 20 or 30.  The last three by Mozart, and perhaps a couple of others.  Beethoven 3, 5, 6, 7, and 9 (and some might argue against 6!).  Schubert 8 and 9.  And then....?  Remember, we're talking 'greatest', not 'very good' or 'most popular'.

So (he says, rushing in where angels fear to tread)-- Nothing before Brahms and Bruckner, or at most Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, Mendelssohn 4, and Schumann 4.  Brahms 1 (though this would not be universally accepted, judging from various reactions over the years), and certainly 4 (2 & 3?  |Do they really hold up against the aforementioned pieces by Beethoven?).  Bruckner 4, 5 and 7, possibly, and certainly 8 & 9.  Saint-Saens 3?  Tchaikovsky 4, maybe 6.  Dvorak 7 probably, and I'd make a case for 8, as others would for 9.  Mahler 6, possibly 9.  Nielsen 4 &5.  Sibelius 4 & 5?  Shostakovitch 5, maybe 8, and 10.  Prokofiev 5?  A couple by Miaskovsky?  A couple by Hartmann?

And then, since I'm no doubt forgetting a few (Toch?  Martinu? Tubin?), we'll say that another dozen can be added.  This gives us, at most (assuming truly great symphonies don't come pouring out of the woodwork), some ninety or so truly great symphonies in two hundred years (simply accepting every symphony mentioned above as 'great').  Take off Haydn and Mozart, who wrote in a vastly different era and other vastly different circumstances than their successors, and the number drops by almost half.  So we have an average of somewhere between fifteen and forty-five great symphonies for each fifty years.  Just on the numbers I'd suggest that the last fifty years are holding up pretty well, even if you double the above numbers.

My nominations (sticking, almost, to the original three symphony limit)? 
Shostakovitch 13 absolutely, and 14 and 15 strongly.
Pettersson 7, and maybe 8.
Aho 7

There are, though, many other very fine symphonies of recent origin.  As I said, the last fifty years seem to be at least as productive as any other fifty year period after Beethoven.

The previous post ignores IMHO a considerable number of masterpieces:
Mozart 29, 35, 38
Beethoven 1, 2, 4, 6, 8
Berlioz Harold in Italy, Romeo et Juliette
Schumann 1, 2, 3
Mendelssohn 3
Liszt Faust
Rufinatscha 5, 6
Bruckner 6
Tchaikovsky 5
Raff 2-5
Draeseke 2, 3
Dvorak 6
Mahler - all?
Nielsen - all?
Shostakovich 1, 4
Elgar 1, 2
Prokofiev 1, 6
and many, many more....

And.....Ralph Vaughan Williams? 2 through 6 at least. Walton 1, Moeran 1, Bax 1-7.

Aren't we now straying from the original thread topic by widening the time-frame?

Anyway - last 50 years? Well, Dutilleux doesn't count (sadly) because his two date from the 1950s. For me, then, Pettersson 9, Simpson 9 (yet again!), Rubbra 9, Shostakovich 13 & 15, Henze 7 & 10, Matthews 6 (surely the best of his 7 to date?)...

We certainly have!  :P  It's just our enthusiasm.
May be old news, but Dutton recorded Matthews' 7th Symphony last July. John Carewe conducted. It may be released in February.

Was Boris Tchaikovsky yet mentioned here? He surely belongs to the great symphonists of the 2nd half of the 20th century, if you ask me. You maybee can hear, that he was a pupil of Shostakovich, but he had his original own voice. I would say, that Tchaikovsky had a greater inner repose than his teacher, calmer in its silent parts, more monumental in the energetic ones, but not less powerful and not less emotional moving than Shostakovich. A speciality of Tchaikovsky is his free handeling of rhythm and metre.

He wrote four symphonies, from which the 2nd and 3rd ("Sewastopol") I would call the most important. The 2nd is my second nomination for this tread. It is a three movement work of 50 minutes. There's a toccata like first movement with some calm introspective episodes, a silent and expressive slow movement and a march like finale, that culminates in a D major/minor chord at the end.

We have indeed strayed - but only in pursuit of an answer to the question of whether really fine symphonies have been written in the past fifty years. Clearly, there have been some. I'm still not persuaded, though, there there have been that many.

I do agree about Henze 7, having said that. Interestingly, that symphony seems to me to pay obvious homage to 'the tradition'.

Does anyone know Elliott Carter's 45 mins+ Symphonia of 1998?

Quote from: Dundonnell on Sunday 27 November 2011, 21:54
I very much agree with your assessment of the Kinsella 3rd and 4th, Jeffrey ;D

Am very much looking forward to the new recording of the composer's 6th and 7th symphonies from RTE :)

Thanks Colin - I have recently received the new Kinsella CD  ::)

No 6 sounds excellent on first hearing - he is such a worthwhile composer. No 7 is influenced by Sibelius's Symphony No 7 but is in no way derivative. I shall look forward to exploring this too but at the moment I am focusing on No 6.  As soon as I have heard it I want to play it again.

Quote from: Dundonnell on Sunday 27 November 2011, 22:52
Living composers still writing 'genuine' symphonies which you (may) have a chance to hear would include:

John McCabe and David Matthews(Great Britain)
Kalevi Aho, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Aulis Sallinen(Finland)
John Kinsella(Ireland)
Halvor Haug, Ragnar Soderlind(Norway)
Krzystof Penderecki(Poland)
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich(USA)

It's not a very long list, is it :(   But all of these-at least to my ears-have the ability to write in long, extended paragraphs of genuinely symphonic dimensions and to touch the soul. I might add later Vadim Silvestrov(Ukraine) as well :)

Nice list Colin. Aho is the one I need to explore more. I enjoyed Symphony No 4 on first hearing.

Quote from: Alan Howe on Monday 28 November 2011, 15:36
Does anyone know Elliott Carter's 45 mins+ Symphonia of 1998?

Yes - and how I came to omit it from my list I know not! Mea culpa! It's arguably one of Carter's most ambitious works and certainly one of his finest achievements. We'll sadly not likely get any more big, bold orchestral scores out of him these days - but he was a young lad of 87 when he completed it and, as  he'll be 103 on Sunday week, I suppose that he has at lest some excuse...

Quote from: ahinton on Monday 28 November 2011, 16:16how I came to omit it from my list I know not! Mea culpa! It's arguably one of Carter's most ambitious works and certainly one of his finest achievements.

I'm glad someone has heard this piece. My problem, though, is that I just don't get it - there's so much going on, but it all passes me by as a series of sonorities, some lovely, some harsh, some striking, etc, etc. So, how do I get a handle on this music? I have no problem with, say, Henze 7, but Carter is another story - almost another world to me...

Quote from: Alan Howe on Monday 28 November 2011, 08:07
The previous post ignores IMHO a considerable number of masterpieces:
Mozart 29, 35, 38
Beethoven 1, 2, 4, 6, 8
Berlioz Harold in Italy, Romeo et Juliette
Schumann 1, 2, 3
Mendelssohn 3
Liszt Faust
Rufinatscha 5, 6
Bruckner 6
Tchaikovsky 5
Raff 2-5
Draeseke 2, 3
Dvorak 6
Mahler - all?
Nielsen - all?
Shostakovich 1, 4
Elgar 1, 2
Prokofiev 1, 6
and many, many more....

Without wanting to hijack the thread, but in the interests of refining our understanding of what you mean by "masterpieces", could I ask a few follow-up questions?  Do you really consider, for example, Beethoven 1 & 2 to be at the level of, say, Mozart 40 and Haydn 44, or even Beethoven's own 3 & 7 (please note that I did, btw, include 6)?  Is every Mahler symphony as good as every other one?  Is Draeseke really at the level of Bruckner 8?  And so on.

I am sympathetic to many of these symphonies, and even love some of them (Bruckner's and Nielsen's 6, e.g.).  But I took the parameters here quite seriously, and given the implication of the word 'masterpiece', I'd even lop off some of the ones I mentioned, let alone these others.  Schumann is a wonderful composer, but I just can't see any of his symphonies as operating at or even near the level of Beethoven 3.  Likewise Mendelssohn.  The shattering impacts of Bruckner 9 or Shostakovitch 5, for example, combined with their technical strengths, raise these works above even others by the same composers (Bruckner 3 and Shostakovitch 7) which are otherwise powerful or enjoyable on their own.

By these standards, then, I am claiming that the number of truly great symphonies is always small (though the number of very good symphonies is much larger and possibly more subject to fluctuation from era to era).  But in either case, I see Aho, Pettersson, late Shostakovitch, Sallinen, and many other contemporary or recent as being major symphonists, with each having produced at least one work deserving the accolade "great".

There are clearly different levels of mountain peaks here - thus Beethoven 3 is a revolutionary masterpiece (an Everest, as it were), but Beethoven 4 is still a masterpiece (remembering that the Himalayas contain many very high peaks).

Anyway, we really mustn't get sidetracked here. I was, after all, asking what forum members consider to be the best symphonies of the past fifty years, thinking that some sort of consensus might be possible.

Quote from: vandermolen on Monday 28 November 2011, 16:00

Quote from: Dundonnell on Sunday 27 November 2011, 21:54
I very much agree with your assessment of the Kinsella 3rd and 4th, Jeffrey ;D

Am very much looking forward to the new recording of the composer's 6th and 7th symphonies from RTE :)

Thanks Colin - I have recently received the new Kinsella CD  ::)

No 6 sounds excellent on first hearing - he is such a worthwhile composer. No 7 is influenced by Sibelius's Symphony No 7 but is in no way derivative. I shall look forward to exploring this too but at the moment I am focusing on No 6.  As soon as I have heard it I want to play it again.

In case you shouldn't have noticed yet: I uploaded Kinsella's Sinfonietta to the Irish Music Folder some time ago! ;)

Quote from: britishcomposer on Monday 28 November 2011, 17:14In case you shouldn't have noticed yet: I uploaded Kinsella's Sinfonietta to the Irish Music Folder some time ago! ;)

Thanks.

:)

I'm sorry that I cannot join the discussions in this thread. Apart from Shostakovich's last symphonies and the Gorecki 3 I still don't follow contemporary symphonies. Over decades I did my best on Simpson (yes, also the 9th), Weinberg, Petterson, Schnittke, to name a few, but I completely miss the meaning. But I know, it's me. I'm too old-fashioned in my musical taste (however, Pink Floyd...). Mea culpa. I've stopped trying to understand contemporary "classical" music, because it doesn't reach my head and heart and I still come across so many unsung gems in the (pre and post) Romantic era (recently I've discovered Börresen).
Having said that, I take the symphonies by Schmidt-Kowalski (b. 1949) very seriously.

Quote from: Alan Howe on Monday 28 November 2011, 16:28

Quote from: ahinton on Monday 28 November 2011, 16:16how I came to omit it from my list I know not! Mea culpa! It's arguably one of Carter's most ambitious works and certainly one of his finest achievements.

I'm glad someone has heard this piece. My problem, though, is that I just don't get it - there's so much going on, but it all passes me by as a series of sonorities, some lovely, some harsh, some striking, etc, etc. So, how do I get a handle on this music? I have no problem with, say, Henze 7, but Carter is another story - almost another world to me...

I'm sure that lots of people have heard it, although I am aware of only one recording (conducted by that excellent Carter interpreter Olly Knussen). I can't tell you how to get a handle on it, but surely your description doesn't apply to its Adagio tenebroso middle movement, does it? - there's not so very much "going on" at any given moment in most of that, after all. The outer movements are pretty active, I grant you, but most engagingly so, to my ears and mind. It's well worth getting to now and is not in general terms as hyperactive as quite abit of the much earlier Concerto for Orchestra, great as that is (and less than half the length).

Would Simpson have regarded Carter's Symphonia as a symphony? Any opinions?

Kinda surprised (though maybe I shouldn't be) that no one mentioned anything by Hovhaness. I have a soft spot for his #50 (Mount St. Helens) at least. I know there's some people in here that hate his music but I do not share that view in the least....

Quote from: Alan Howe on Monday 28 November 2011, 20:41
Would Simpson have regarded Carter's Symphonia as a symphony? Any opinions?

No opinion from me but only the question "if only one could have asked him"! I remember the first movement coming out on its own, as all three did, in fact, as though they were separate items written, as indeed they were, to separate commissions for different orchestras - I could see that this was a symphony in the making for the get-go, for all that Carter had not completed a "symphony" per se (his A Symphony of Three Orchestras using the term rather more as had Stravinsky in his Symphonies of Wind Instruments) for some 56 years at the time he penned its final double barline; whatever Simpson might have thought of it, however - either in general terms or specifically as "a symphony" - it's a great and magical work and richly deserves to be taken up by all the world's major orchestras.

That's very interesting, Alistair. Which other symphonies written in the last few decades would you also want to point me to, besides Carter's Symphonia?

Quote from: britishcomposer on Monday 28 November 2011, 17:14

Quote from: vandermolen on Monday 28 November 2011, 16:00

Quote from: Dundonnell on Sunday 27 November 2011, 21:54
I very much agree with your assessment of the Kinsella 3rd and 4th, Jeffrey ;D

Am very much looking forward to the new recording of the composer's 6th and 7th symphonies from RTE :)

Thanks Colin - I have recently received the new Kinsella CD  ::)

No 6 sounds excellent on first hearing - he is such a worthwhile composer. No 7 is influenced by Sibelius's Symphony No 7 but is in no way derivative. I shall look forward to exploring this too but at the moment I am focusing on No 6.  As soon as I have heard it I want to play it again.

In case you shouldn't have noticed yet: I uploaded Kinsella's Sinfonietta to the Irish Music Folder some time ago! ;)

I had not only noticed but had downloaded the Kinsella Sinfonietta ;D

However....I feel that I ought to point out that there is an Irish Music Downloads section containing music by Gerard (not Gerald) Victory, Brian Boydell, Seroise Bodley, Arthur Duff, Frederick May and John Kinsella's Sinfonietta whilst the same works  together with Kinsella's Symphony No.6 are also located in the British Music Broadcasts sections (as indeed are all the Stanford uploads).

This duplication seems to be  a source of probable confusion and it might be better to merge the two threads into one.?

The last thing in the world I would wish to do is to create more work for anyone but............ ;D

(My apologies for the obvious fact that this post should have been sent as a separate message to one of the Administrators or to Albion ::))

I wonder whether this stimulating essay by David Matthews has something to say to the issues we are discussing:   


Renewing Musical Tradition

A paper given at the conference 'Redefining Musical Identities' in Amsterdam on 31 August 2002

In thinking about tradition, I want first briefly to consider the somewhat erratic history of music in England. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, English polyphonic music was as rich as in any other part of Europe, and Tallis and Byrd are the equals of Josquin and Palestrina. In the seventeenth century there were a number of fine composers and one outstanding individual genius, Purcell. The eighteenth century was dominated by Handel: whether he counts as English I'm not sure, but if Conrad is an English novelist and curry an English food, then I think he probably can. I do feel that the melodies of Messiah for instance have an English character which is hard to define but easily recognizable (you find the same in Purcell). We missed out almost completely on the Classical and Romantic periods, and apart from Arne who wrote the national anthem and 'Rule Britannia', there are no English composers to speak of from Handel until Elgar, who finally was able to write the great English symphony and concerto (two of each) and also - which is not always acknowledged - the first great English string quartet. Not opera, however: this was left to Britten, and then Tippett, both of whom also wrote first-rate string quartets, and Vaughan Williams and Tippett some first-rate symphonies. It was of great advantage to twentieth-century English composers that there was no national tradition of the symphony and string quartet to inhibit them, and so they were able to make substantial contributions to both of these forms.

Britten in some ways might be seen to be something of an outsider in relation to an English tradition. He began by rejecting all his English contemporaries except for his teacher Frank Bridge and, interestingly, Delius - both of whom looked more to continental models than did either Vaughan Williams or Holst. As a teenager, under the guidance of Bridge, Britten was influenced first by Debussy and Ravel and then by Schoenberg - some of his teenage music is almost atonal. This was a passing phase; in his early twenties he came under the influence of Mahler, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartók and Shostakovich, and out of all these, his earlier immersion in the music of Beethoven, and his own natural originality, he formed a very personal, firmly tonal style - perhaps the most confident use of tonality, in fact, in the mid-twentieth century. He made settings of poetry in French, Italian, German and Russian as well as English. All of which goes to show that eclecticism seems rooted in the English character - it can also be observed in Purcell, Elgar and Tippett. Despite Britten's interest in setting foreign languages, it is his settings of English words, in which he was influenced both by both Purcell (a composer he performed and edited) and by folksongs (of which he made many settings) that most clearly define him as an English composer.

Like Elgar, Britten became a popular composer in his lifetime, largely because of his gift for melody, which seems quite unselfconscious - a rare gift in the twentieth century except among popular composers like Gershwin and Irving Berlin. (The operetta Paul Bunyan, by the way, shows that Britten could have had a career writing Broadway musicals.) His opera Peter Grimes demonstrates this gift for memorable melody to a high degree and this was one of the chief reasons for its immediate success. Both Britten and Tippett took a very different approach to the characteristic modernist one of standing aloof from one's audience. This was partly from political conviction - they were both socialists (also incidentally pacifists). Both of them were insistent on the composer playing an active role in society as a communicator. Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time and Britten's War Requiem are both large-scale public statements on issues of war and suffering and individual conscience, written in a highly communicative musical language. Both works have affected large numbers of people while making no artistic compromises. Are such works possible nowadays in our different cultural climate? It is difficult to say a definite yes, because there seem no longer to be composers of stature who are using the kind of comprehensive musical language they did, and there also seems to be a shying away from large-scale statements by mainstream composers.

The majority of British composers since Britten and Tippett have rejected their influence, but a few have not, for instance Nicholas Maw and Judith Weir, and also myself. When I first began to compose in the 1960s it was unfashionable among my generation to compose tonally, but I was encouraged in my belief in the continuing validity of tonality by the achievement of Britten and Tippett, and I was also impressed by the way they had taken traditional forms such as the symphony and string quartet and vitally renewed them. As a composer, both these forms have been very important to me. During my lifetime I have seen a dramatic shift back to tonality by many composers, but it appears to me that all of them practise a narrower form of tonality than that used by either Britten and Tippett, which continued to employ such essential devices of classical tonality as modulation and a properly functioning bass line. I should like to quote here a passage from my essay in the book Reviving the Muse:

"Most contemporary music is static; but stasis, it seems to me, is ideally a condition to be achieved, as for instance in Beethoven's last piano sonata where the static, contemplative slow movement is heard as a consequence of the dynamic drama of the first movement. The dynamic use of tonality will involve both modulation and the rediscovery of dissonance as a disruptive force. Although one can no longer easily define the difference between consonance and dissonance, it is still possible to conceive of harmony as either stable or unstable. Unless there are real harmonic contrasts in a piece, it cannot have dynamic movement. Perhaps, because our most frequent experience of movement nowadays is as a passenger in a car, train or plane, observing the landscape speeding by while we ourselves remain still, most fast movement in contemporary music, whether tonal or atonal, is merely rapid motion without any involvement of physical energy. Fast music in the past was related to the movement of the body, walking, running or dancing." [1]

Dance and song are the fundamentals of music. That should hardly need to be questioned, yet in the twentieth century, while dance and song naturally stayed the basis of popular music, the doctrines of post-Second World War modernism tried to eliminate both dance and song from serious music and to create an irrevocable gulf between serious and popular music. This was a costly mistake. In the past, serious music had always stayed closely in touch with the vernacular language of popular and folk music, until Schoenberg renounced the use of the vernacular at the start of the last century. At first, he and a few others were very much on their own; other modernist composers such as Stravinsky and Bartók continued to base their language on folk music. Both Tippett and Britten had a creative relationship with folk music. In Tippett's early music the melodies are derived from folksong in a similar way to his predecessors Vaughan Williams and Holst; later he substituted the more contemporary vernacular of African-American blues and jazz, but the idea of a vernacular language that stood behind his music remained important for him, as it did for Britten. Britten's musical thinking was grounded in the idea of song, from his earliest childhood when his mother sang to him, and later when he accompanied her singing at the piano. Although he rejected the kind of nationalistic attitude to folksong exemplified by Vaughan Williams, Britten, as I have noted, made many highly original settings of folksongs, from Great Britain, France and the USA.

Classical sonata form included a dance movement, originally a minuet, then the scherzo which was at first a speeded-up minuet and then became a form in its own right. Contemporary scherzos often have little connection with dance rhythms, and it has seemed to me that composers should try to restore this lost dance element back into music. We need a contemporary archetype to replace the minuet, and it should be a popular form, known by everyone. Contemporary popular music ought to provide one, but rock music, which has abandoned the formal dance and, as Roger Scruton showed in his paper, has also largely abandoned vital rhythm, may not be of much use here. But the tango seems highly suitable: its rhythms are infectious, and erotic - as both the minuet and the waltz were once considered to be, though time has now dulled them. The tango already has a historical place in European music: composers who have written tangos since the 1920s, including Stravinsky, Martinu and Schnittke; it also has its indigenous South American tradition, and there are the many tangos by Piazzolla which are attempts to create a kind of folk art. But as far as I know the tango has not been used before in a symphony or a string quartet. In my Fourth Symphony I made the second of its two dance movements a tango, written in simple ternary form, and in my more recent Ninth Quartet there is a more complex tango which I should like to play for you. This movement contains three successive tangos, the second of which is also a development of the first, and the third a derivation from the first. This is followed by a recapitulation of all three tangos played simultaneously. So there is a connection here with sonata form, as in some of Beethoven's scherzos.

The post-war modernists, in their general renunciation of everything to do with the past, rejected the idea of repetition and development, aiming instead at a heightened sense of the moment. So that the traditional conception of a piece moving through time on a journey towards a destination was abandoned. The experiment produced some interesting results: for instance Boulez's cummings ist der Dichter, which is constructed rather like an artichoke where one gradually removes the leaves one by one to reveal the heart, the most precious part, within. But sonata form, which is based on the ideas of statement, development, repetition, and contrast, and which is the most sophisticated form for conveying the idea of a journey through time, seems to me to offer a far richer musical experience. Sonata form also seems an inexhaustible archetype. Like the sonnet, it is familiar to all educated people. The moment of recapitulation in a sonata movement offers a particular opportunity for innovation because of all the precedents that will subconsciously be in the minds of the audience. I can suggest here as a general principle that the more familiar a device, the more chance one has to confound expectation, which is what real innovation is. The moment of recapitulation was greatly heightened by Beethoven in his symphonies, culminating in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony where we feel a whole new world being revealed, familiar but also totally different. There is another superb example of an innovative moment of recapitulation in the first movement of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, where the music as it were gathers itself together and finally makes a very clear statement, as if everything before had been hidden in mist and the sun has just appeared. Recapitulation cannot really operate without tonality, which is perhaps why Schoenberg more or less abandoned it in favour of continuous development. But development cannot make its full effect unless there is a return to stability.

The finale of a symphonic piece, if one is using a multi-movement form, is a problem: it has been since Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Of Bruckner's many attempts to solve the finale problem he only succeeded absolutely once, I think, in his Eighth Symphony, and he spent the last years of his life trying in vain to complete his Ninth. We cannot now, it often seems, sum up decisively and comprehensively, perhaps because we no longer feel the confidence of composers in the past. It is probably better to end on a less serious level, as many Classical works do. I am only raising this problem to state it, not to offer solutions; but it is something that composers of the future can go on profitably addressing. I can however point here to one very successful solution to the finale problem in Britten's Third Quartet, which was almost his last work, and in which you feel that his whole life's work is at stake, if he fails to provide the right ending; but he does, and his finale is both a resolution and a new departure towards the door that he did not open.

In their string quartets, Britten and Tippett make use of old contrapuntal forms. Britten uses the chaconne form in his Second and Third Quartets, while Tippett's Second and Third Quartets contain fugues - the Third Quartet has no less than three fugal movements. The history of the fugue since Beethoven, whose fugues are the most remarkable in all music apart from Bach's, is somewhat patchy: there are few outstanding examples of later nineteenth-century fugues, and many are somewhat perfunctory - for example Liszt's - though there is a splendid culmination of the nineteenth-century conception of the fugue in the first movement of Mahler's Eighth Symphony. In the twentieth century the Bachian fugue was revived by neo-classical composers, but it often sounds rather artificial and unconvincing. Tippett, on the other hand, who undertook an exhaustive study of fugue and counterpoint with a notable teacher at the Royal College of Music, R.O.Morris, took up the challenge of the dynamic, Beethovenian fugue and had remarkable success with it, especially in the Third Quartet and the finale of the First Symphony, which is modelled on the finale of the 'Hammerklavier' Sonata. Can anything more be done with this much used form? Contemporary composers would appear to think not, but I have recently turned to the fugue in my Eighth String Quartet and have also composed a series of fifteen fugues for solo violin, some of which are in four parts - Bach does not go beyond three - and which contain some formal experiments, such as a slow fugue with a fast coda, and some textural ones - a pizzicato fugue, for instance, and a tremolo one which is also palindromic. I have come to the conclusion that there are still plenty of things to be done with this challenging form (and it is extremely challenging as one cannot help putting oneself in hopeless competition with Bach).

I have used the chaconne form myself, notably in an orchestral piece called simply Chaconne, which in fact consists of two chaconnes played consecutively and also in contrapuntal combination. It also has a programmatic connection with a sequence of poems by the contemporary English poet Geoffrey Hill about our first civil war, The Wars of the Roses, in particular one especially bloody battle in that war, the Battle of Towton. My piece is partly a meditation on the sombre mood of the poem sequence and partly an evocation of the battle. I'd like to play you the last few minutes of the piece, which consists of three consecutive sections. The first is the battle scene, which I hope illustrates my point about dissonance as a disruptive force: it is deliberately dissonant and intended to be quite shocking because it evokes painful events, but the level of dissonance here is markedly higher than in the remainder of the piece and therefore makes a more telling effect within the whole. The second section is a melody for solo viola over quiet but still dissonant harmonies; again, I think the language is appropriate here because this is intended as a lament; lastly comes a passage for strings which is an attempt to provide consolation; it's much less dissonant, and I feel that the counterpoint here is itself the vehicle of consolation and a more effective one than a simple harmonised melody would be. More than anything else, counterpoint enables you to raise the expressive level of your music. In fact if I had one piece of advice for a young composer it would be: learn how to use counterpoint, and I would qualify that with a remark of Busoni's: make your counterpoint melodious.

Quote from: Dundonnell on Monday 28 November 2011, 21:58
However....I feel that I ought to point out that there is an Irish Music Downloads section containing music by Gerard (not Gerald) Victory, Brian Boydell, Seroise Bodley, Arthur Duff, Frederick May and John Kinsella's Sinfonietta whilst the same works  together with Kinsella's Symphony No.6 are also located in the British Music Broadcasts sections (as indeed are all the Stanford uploads).

This duplication seems to be  a source of probable confusion and it might be better to merge the two threads into one.?

Yes, I feel the same. :)
But I have quite another problem: I have always considered Williamson and Kelly as Englishmen and can hardly get used to the fact that they sit now comfortably in the Australian Music Folder? Wouldn't it be nice to copy them into Albion's BMB as well? ;)
(Oh dear, I'll make it all worse...  :-\)

Quote from: Alan Howe on Monday 28 November 2011, 21:58
That's very interesting, Alistair. Which other symphonies written in the last few decades would you also want to point me to, besides Carter's Symphonia?

I'd thought that I'd already answered that earlier!

Anyway, in response to the substantial quotation from David Matthews, here's another which, whilst not quite so germanely on the subject of the symphony per se, nevertheless has some commonalities with the piece quoted in terms of its reference to the histgory of fugue, a form which has had its own input into the symphony de temps en temps:

The Art of the Fugue
Expanded version of a review of The Art of Fugue by Joseph Kerman
for the London Review of Books, 2006

Counterpoint, the art of combining two or more independent melodic lines, is the prime distinguishing feature of Western music. Music began with monody - unaccompanied melody - and with rhythmic patterns beaten out on sticks and drums. The majority of the world's folk music is monodic. Often percussion underlines the rhythm, and sometimes a drone is added, an unchanging note in the bass, which keeps the tune in touch with the earth as it makes its aerial flights: this is a feature of some of the most sophisticated non-Western musics, for instance Classical Indian. Indonesian music uses heterophony - different versions of the same melodic line sounding together. Imitation is occasionally found in other non-Western musics. But European counterpoint is something else altogether. Counterpoint is a conversation; it acknowledges the presence and participation of the other. Two independent voices may be played by the same musician, on a keyboard for instance, but they are more often given to two players, who must listen to each other. It is significant that counterpoint grew to maturity in Europe where the concept of democracy was born.

By no means all European music is predominantly contrapuntal; much of it is melody with harmony, and this kind of music has the widest popular appeal. Even a complex piece such as a Beethoven symphony will almost always have a main melodic line that you can sing or whistle your way through. But try whistling a Bach fugue. After the first few bars where the main subject is announced unaccompanied, the music divides into two parts, then three, then possibly four, or even five or six. The contrapuntal discourse is continued throughout the duration of the piece. How can you hear all these lines at once? Most of us probably don't. The experience of listening to a fugue is stimulating yet at the same time forbidding. This is the most intellectual music that has been devised. But it is also capable of expressing emotion on the highest level, and where intellect and emotion are in perfect balance, the result can be sublime. To give three supreme examples: the B minor fugue in Book 1 of Bach's '48', the six-part ricercare from the same composer's Musical Offering, and the opening fugue of Beethoven's C sharp minor Quartet, op.131.

In the preface to his new book on Bach's keyboard fugues, Joseph Kerman quotes Charles Rosen's perceptive comments:

"The 'pure' fugue, the meditative fugue, is basically a keyboard work for Bach ... Only the performer at the keyboard is in a position to appreciate the movement of the voices, their blending and their separation, their interaction and their contrasts. A fugue of Bach can be fully understood only by the one who plays it, not only heard but felt through the muscles and nerves." [p.xvii]

Rosen is surely right, and in the same way a string quartet is best understood by a player taking an active part in the instrumental conversation. Mere listeners, however, should not despair. It is possible, with practice, to learn to hear contrapuntal music, especially if you can read music and follow a score. Then you will see as well as hear how, for instance, in the first fugue of the '48' - one of the 16 fugues that Kerman analyses in some detail - the first seven notes of the subject are inverted - turned upside-down - in two overlapping sequences as the second voice comes in with the subject a fifth higher, as prescribed by the rules of fugue. This little piece of clever craftsmanship - one of many in the course of this fugue - is, on rehearing and in contemplation, much more than that; it becomes a mystery - the uncanny power of counterpoint to suggest the unfathomable.

Fugue developed out of canon or round, music making strict use of the device of imitation, and exhilarating to perform, as anyone who has sung Frère Jacques or London's Burning will know. Canon is a ubiquitous compositional resource: it can even be found in rock music - for instance the Beatles' 'She Said Se Said', and the fade-out endings of a number of Beach Boys' songs. Fugue is a freer form than canon, but there is a general scheme that most fugues adhere to. First, an exposition: the voices enter with the subject one by one, in a four-voice fugue in soprano, alto, tenor and bass registers (in any order). As the second voice enters the first voice continues with an accompanying 'countersubject', which must fit the subject whether it is played below it, or above. Additional countersubjects may be invented for further entries of the subject. Devising memorable countersubjects is a test of compositional prowess, one at which Bach especially excelled. A development follows where both themes appear in new keys (if it is a tonal fugue) and combinations. Then a return to the home key; finally a 'stretto' where the subject entries overlap, typically over a sustained note in the bass emphasizing the main tonality.

Kerman's book, which usefully includes a CD containing scores of all the fugues discussed and recordings of some of these played on piano, harpsichord, clavichord and organ by Davitt Moroney and Karen Rosenak, concentrates on analytical detail and does not attempt to put Bach in the wider context of fugal writing throughout musical history. He assumes a fair amount of prior knowledge, including understanding the vocabulary of harmony; but musically literate readers will find their appreciation of these fugues greatly enhanced by the insights that Kerman brings from a lifetime's study as he examines the music with scrupulous care, bar by bar. His prose is technical but never dry. Reading his commentary on the B major fugue from Book II of the '48', for instance, made me think anew about the way the subject rises, falls, and rises again to a higher note, and how this contour is mirrored in the progress of the fugue, so that the highest note reached, a B, which occurs three times but only on its third appearance is entrusted to the subject, feels there like the climax of great aspiration. It descends from this high point:

"With the greatest dignity and calm. With no harmonic undercutting and no tumble of faster notes ... The soprano response feels like a slow, deep bow ... touched with something like regret, though feelings are blurred by another suspended note ... Even as the fugue quietly gives up aspirations for the heights, it moots confident new possibilities, even now, for breadth."

Eloquently precise. Music like this attains such expressive perfection that I for one am reduced to bathos in attempting to describe my reactions to it. Kerman is undaunted. He concludes his book by asking himself what he has tried to do, questioning the very practice of writing about music, and gently justifying it: 'Talk mediates, differentiates, elucidates, and consoles; we use words, however imprecisely, to talk about love and death because talk, it seems, we must. We also use and surely must use words to talk about music.' [p.147]

The art of fugue had only been practised for a hundred years or so when Bach brought it to perfection, an achievement insufficiently appreciated by his contemporaries, some of whom thought the whole thing out of date. The new classical style which swept through Europe in the mid-18th century, and whose first practitioners included Bach's sons, was one centered more on accompanied melody than polyphony. But fugue did not die out with Bach; there was soon to be a revival of interest, and in fact there has been virtually no major composer since Bach who has not written at least one notable example of a fugue. There are exceptions: Chopin's forms admitted Bachian counterpoint, but not the fugue, which must have seemed alien to his Romantic, poetic sensibility. (It had not appeared so to his more Classically-oriented contemporaries Mendelssohn and Schumann; Schumann's sparkling fugal conclusion to his Piano Quintet, for instance, comes as a delightful bonne bouche.) Chopin was the most modern, least antiquarian of all the early Romantics: adapting the sonata was the furthest he was prepared to go in accommodating himself to the recent past; otherwise he transformed contemporary dance idioms (such as the mazurka) or invented new forms (such as the Ballade), in which the fantastic flowers of his melodies could find space to open and bloom. Wagner, in some ways the inheritor of Chopin's erotically-charged Romanticism, learned the art of fugue from Theodor Weinlig, a successor to Bach as Cantor of St Thomas's, Leipzig, and there is a fugue in the finale of the symphony he wrote when he was twenty. His mastery of Bachian counterpoint in Die Meistersinger is flawless, above all in the wonderful fugato ensemble at the end of Act Two; but, as with Chopin, there was no place for a full-blown fugue in his mature music. Nor in Sibelius, who nonetheless showed sufficient mastery of counterpoint - and in particular the Palestrinean counterpoint of the openings of his Sixth and Seventh Symphonies - to demonstrate that he too could have written an interestingly individual fugue had he chosen to do so. Even Debussy, who was primarily a harmonist, might at least have begun to think about fugue if he had lived to experience the neo-classical revival of the 1920s and been able to pursue the more linear style he was developing in his last chamber sonatas.

The revival of the fugue after Bach gets properly under way with Haydn's finale fugues in the last two of his op.20 string quartets. Haydn may not have known Bach's fugues, but both Mozart and Beethoven revered Bach - and Handel - and both made transcriptions of fugues from the '48'. Mozart transcribed three for string trio to which he added preludes of his own; Beethoven made a string quartet version of the C sharp minor fugue from Book 1, whose influence can be heard in his own great C sharp minor fugue in the op.131 Quartet. Mozart's own fugues sometimes seem to want to outdo Bach in sheer cleverness, as in the Adagio and Fugue, K546, where the tense fugue subject drives relentlessly through the music, as insistently memorable in inversion as it is the right way up. In the finale of the 'Jupiter' Symphony, Mozart dazzles the listener as he nonchalantly shows off every contrapuntal trick in the book. Here is the spirit of Apollo: pure delight in the form. With Beethoven, for whom the fugue became more and more important as he ventured into new areas of artistic aspiration at the end of his life, Apollo is joined by Dionysus in the duality that Nietzsche thought essential to the highest art. Dionysus prevails in the most extraordinary fugue of all, the Grosse Fuge that Beethoven originally conceived as the finale of the B flat Quartet, op.130, but later detached to form a self-sufficient piece. As the opening Allegro charges along with manic exuberance, there is a feeling of exploring completely uncharted territory, like pioneers in the Australian outback. Huge vistas are glimpsed but are tantalizingly out of reach. The pace is relentless, the dynamics always forte. Then suddenly it stops, and a new fugue begins, slow and full of intense lyrical emotion. And then a third: a rough-edged, unbuttoned dance which sometimes loses all sense of key. So Beethoven has contrived to encompass all the elements of the symphony within the texture of the fugue. This music will always sound 'modern' because it is stretching the limits of the possible; it is still fiendishly difficult to play. No fugue since has ever been quite so adventurous on every level.

Many Romantic composers would have been wise to heed Schumann's warning: 'The emptiest head thinks it can hide its weakness behind a fugue; but a true fugue is the affair of a great master.' Liszt's fugues, for instance, tend to show up his deficiencies as a contrapuntist. His chromatic harmony sounds laboured, and he quickly runs out of steam. The whole philosophy of Romanticism, after all, was opposed to that of the baroque: the individual, revolutionary voice, whose natural expression was heightened melody, in contrast with the voice of the community still grounded in political stability and religion, and symbolised by polyphony. The majority of later 19th-century fugues are choral, and are descended from Handel rather than Bach, a routine part of the ubiquitous oratorio which was the pious Victorian counterpart to Wagner's unleashing of erotic feeling in his operas. Most of them are dutifully dull, but the best composers, such as Brahms in the German Requiem, or Elgar in The Dream of Gerontius, overcame pedantry with intellectual passion. The choral fugue that opens Berlioz's Grande Messe des Morts is compellingly unorthodox, the subject making a dramatic downward swoop on the words 'Requiem aeternam' while the countersubject sets the same words to a tremulous descending chromatic scale; at one point each entry of the subject surges in a tone higher than its predecessor, producing great cumulative power. Berlioz too found a fresh and colourful use for fugato to portray the brawling Montagues and Capulets at the start of his Roméo et Juliette. Mahler, as a student at the Vienna Conservatoire, neglected his counterpoint studies and failed his examination, and this seems to have spurred him on later to become an ardent student of Bach and eventually the most accomplished contrapuntist of all the Romantics. The influence of Bach may be heard as early as the Second Symphony, and is all-pervasive in the finale of the Fifth. It reaches its climax in the central double fugue in the first movement of the Eighth Symphony, where Mahler also almost matches the striving intensity of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.

The 19th-century vocal fugue reaches its apogee in the fugal finale of Verdi's Falstaff, the last operatic music he wrote. Verdi had already composed a remarkable and innovative fugue. 'a light hearted Grosse Fuge', as Julian Budden has described it, in his E minor String Quartet, his only mature piece of chamber music. In introducing the fugue to the operatic ensemble, he was bringing to fruition what Mozart had hinted at in the final ensemble of Don Giovanni. At the end of Falstaff all the characters assemble on stage to pronounce their verdict on life: 'Tutto nel mondo è burla'. It is a compositional triumph: a last summoning up of all Verdi's powers in an effusion of contrapuntal jest.

In the 20th century the instrumental fugue made an impressive return. At the start of the century we find Bartók modelling the fugal first movement of his First String Quartet on Beethoven's op.131, and Schoenberg in his own First Quartet also taking up the challenge of Beethoven's late quartets - the first two composers to do so since Schubert and Mendelssohn made their tentative response; even Brahms had been daunted. Bartók went on to incorporate a fugue into the Allegro movement of his Third Quartet in a very Beethovenian way, and to write a measured fugue of masterful order and precision as the opening movement of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. The neo-classical movement after the First World War brought the fugue back into fashion. Busoni, who had already found his own way to an independent kind of neo-classicism, had in 1910 completed Bach's unfinished fugue from The Art of Fugue in his Fantasia Contrappuntistica, with masterly daring. Ives, another independent, working in isolation in New England, delighted in contrasting the wildest musical experiments with the orthodox harmony and counterpoint he had learned as a student at Yale. In his Fourth Symphony, he follows the polytonal second movement, probably the most revolutionary music he ever wrote, with a fugue based on the hymn From Greenland's Icy Mountains, whose orderly calm is only momentarily threatened by dissonance. Stravinsky, not a natural contrapuntist, absorbed himself in Bachian counterpoint in his neo-classical period and wrote an affecting, chromatic fugue in his Symphony of Psalms. Later in the 1930s he made an assiduous study of Beethoven's late fugues which bore fruit in the fugal finale of his Concerto for Two Pianos. Tippett, after studying at the Royal College of Music, decided to study Bachian fugue privately a few years later with R.O.Morris, an outstanding teacher of counterpoint. Tippett took the composition of fugue very seriously and it accorded with his belief at the time that a composer should go back to Beethoven to heal some of the wounds that modernism had inflicted. Several fine examples in Tippett's string quartets show evidence of Beethovenian labours. His friend and rival Britten had studied 16th-century counterpoint at the Royal College with John Ireland: it was one of the few disciplines he had not learned already from Frank Bridge. In his young maturity, Britten threw off several brilliant fugues with apparent ease; in particular the concluding fugue of the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra is an example of the kind of carefree cleverness for which, absurdly, he was criticised at the time. Hindemith's many fugues tend towards earnest academicism, in contrast to Shostakovich's fresh and expressive set of 24 Preludes and Fugues in all the keys, composed in 1950-1, a deliberate homage to Bach's '48' and a impeccable answer to the avant-garde of the time who were pronouncing that such things were no longer possible.

The nearest the fugue came to a modernist gesture was probably Ernst Toch's 1930 Fuga aus der Geographie. This is a four-part spoken fugue, whose rhythms follow the natural rhythms of the carefully-chosen words. The subject, given to the tenors and needing Savoy Opera dexterity to deliver, is:

    Ratibor! und der Fluss Mississippi und der Stadt Honolulu und der See Titicaca
    der Popocatopetl liegt nicht in Canada sondern in Mexico Mexico Mexico

... at which point the second voice comes in, and the standard fugal procedures are worked through. Toch's fugue has a distant cousin in the 'Sirens' chapter of Ulysses, where Joyce - who might have wished to be a composer rather than a novelist, had he been able - attempts to use some of the techniques of fugue in a striking display of sonorous prose. He sets out his thematic material in an introduction - 'Bronze by gold', etc. - and then develops it into rounded, musical sentences: 'Shrill, with deep laughter, after, gold after bronze, they urged each each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze, shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter.' There is an illusion of counterpoint in the juxtaposition of overheard conversation, snatches of songs, and onomatopoeic sounds. At the same period, musical modernism could initially accommodate the fugue (in Berg's Wozzeck for instance). Schoenberg wrote (in 1936): 'In its highest form . . . nothing would claim a place in a fugue unless it were derived, at least indirectly, from the theme', hinting at a connection with his 12-note method of composition; and indeed, 12-note fugues are quite feasible, though Schoenberg himself avoided them. It may be argued, however, that in denying the tonal basis on which the fugue had always relied, a great deal of its strength is lost. In turning against Schoenberg and the continuing emphasis on melody in his interpretation of the method, the post-war European avant-garde also renounced all traditional devices of counterpoint, rules of harmony, and regular rhythm, deeming them obsolete in their quest for a new-found language. Instead, Boulez and Stockhausen pursued the ideal of the sonic 'moment' in a floating world free from measured time. This most extreme phase of post-war modernism has long since passed, and the majority of composers nowadays are trying, in various ways, to reinstate what was temporarily discarded. Few composers today, however, are writing fugues, and it has to be asked if fugue can still make a valid contribution to contemporary musical language.

My own answer would be yes, and I can point to several examples of contemporary fugue that, in my view, demonstrate its continuing vitality. Their composers will probably not become household names, but then I would hardly expect the art of fugue ever to be modish and popular when the art of serious contemporary music itself has become an unfashionable minority interest. Before I'm tempted to lament any further the reluctance of many to engage with the difficult and the complex in music today, despite its undiminished intrinsic power to move the emotions, I had better name my fuguists: first, the Scottish composer Alistair Hinton, who in the huge finale of his nearly three-hour String Quintet (1969-77), included a 20-minute fugue, or rather three continuous fugues, modelled on the Grosse Fuge and rivalling it in its scope and emotional intensity, if not quite achieving its transcendental vision. Hinton's first fugue, in similar dotted rhythms, has the fierce energy of Beethoven's opening fugue; his second fugue, in total contrast calm and sweet-toned and sounding like a piece from the Renaissance, begins and ends with a canon whose theme becomes a fugue subject in its central section; the third employs subjects and countersubjects from the first two fugues together with new themes of its own, and combines all together in the most learned (yet never pedantic) style, with the themes played backwards and in inversion, all the time gradually generating another volcanic eruption of Beethovenian energy. In the spirit of his friend Kaikhosru Sorabji, who wrote many gargantuan fugues in his still hardly known keyboard works, Hinton has continued to include large-scale fugues in his own pieces, including the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Grieg and Sequentia Claviensis, both for piano.

My second fugue composer is the Moravian, Pavel Novák, who has been working for the past 17 years on another vast project, a set of 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano based on the Old and New Testaments (twelve for each part). The second set is still to be completed; the first has so far only had one complete performance, by William Howard, for whom the work is being written. Novák has a radically unorthodox attitude to fugue: the first fugue, evoking the creation of heaven and earth, has only one voice, and no counterpoint; the sixth fugue is built on a one-note theme and employs only seven notes altogether. The music grows into greater complexity as the world grows with it. A fugue without counterpoint might seem a contradiction in terms, but Novák somehow contrives to give substance to his omissions. The background to his music is rich and firmly-rooted enough to enable him at times merely to sketch in the foreground. It is impossible to know yet what the cumulative effect of the whole work will be, but what he has composed so far constitutes one of the most impressive piano works of recent times.

Shostakovich's fugues had brought a new sense of spacious calm into the fugue: they are fugues for the unchanging landscape of Russia. The immense canon that opens Górecki's Third Symphony (if anyone has paid enough attention to this carelessly heard piece to notice that it is a canon), beginning in the double basses, growing to encompass the whole string section, and again receding, has the same sense of space and of gradual, unhurried movement, like a slow journey across some featureless plain. Canon is well suited to Górecki's pared-down musical language; fugue perhaps would be too active for him. In Howard Skempton's recent and remarkably beautiful string quartet, Tendrils, the texture is one of continuous canon. While the mood is one of sustained contemplation, there is much more contrast than in Górecki. Skempton's Shostakovich-like chromaticism keeps the music in a continuous state of mild tension, which the abrupt resolution into E flat at the end does not altogether dispel. Skempton may now be ready to write a contemplative fugue; he certainly doesn't think it impossible.

At this point I should declare an interest. I had used canonic devices in my own music for many years, but it was not until 1998 that I felt able to introduce a fugue, a contemplative one somewhat indebted to Beethoven, into my Eighth String Quartet. It seemed to work. The following year, at a concert in London, I heard my violinist friend Peter Sheppard Skærved play Bach's G minor solo Sonata, which contains an elaborate three-part fugue. I wondered if it was possible to write a four-part fugue for solo violin, something that as far as I knew no-one had attempted, for the obvious reason that four-part counterpoint on a violin is virtually impossible. I wrote a few bars and sent them to Peter, who to my surprise pronounced them playable. So I finished the piece, in a neo-Bachian E minor, and thought of it as a one-off technical exercise until Peter persuaded me to write more. I wrote another four-part fugue, in A minor but highly chromatic and almost atonal; then, over period of nine months, carried on writing them occasionally until I had 15, cast in the more practical keys. Only five of them are four-part fugues, and even in these there is little continuous four-part writing, which would be almost intolerable for the listener, let alone the player. There are two two-part fugues and the rest are in three parts. I amused myself with the kinds of games that fugal writing seems to encourage: my first two-part fugue has a ten-note theme derived from the keys of all the fugues in my series in the order they appear (major and minor counted as one) and it modulates in turn through all these keys before returning to its home C minor. One fugue was entirely pizzicato. Another was based on a blackbird's song. I was learning a new skill, like a painter learning how to etch. Because I hadn't been to a music college, I had never learned the art of fugue formally. Perhaps those who have to go through what at the time may seem merely an academic chore cannot associate it afterwards with living music. I'm grateful to have discovered the sheer pleasure of fugue by myself, without any prejudices.

Even if counterpoint is presently neglected, it will not die out: it is too rich a resource. In his exemplary little book, Counterpoint, Edmund Rubbra, no mean practitioner himself of the art of fugue, wrote: 'The history of Western music is the history of the form-compelling power of counterpoint.' That is justification enough for its survival. Throughout Western music's history, composers who have possessed what Rubbra defined as 'an intuitive grasp of the essential spirit of fugue' have been able to renew this most intriguing and demanding of all contrapuntal forms, and there seems no valid reason why, if composers can learn to master it, the art of fugue should not continue to evolve in the future; in Rubbra's words, 'an evolution that never destroys the basic nature of the form'.

Quote from: britishcomposer on Monday 28 November 2011, 22:19

Quote from: Dundonnell on Monday 28 November 2011, 21:58
However....I feel that I ought to point out that there is an Irish Music Downloads section containing music by Gerard (not Gerald) Victory, Brian Boydell, Seroise Bodley, Arthur Duff, Frederick May and John Kinsella's Sinfonietta whilst the same works  together with Kinsella's Symphony No.6 are also located in the British Music Broadcasts sections (as indeed are all the Stanford uploads).

This duplication seems to be  a source of probable confusion and it might be better to merge the two threads into one.?

Yes, I feel the same. :)
But I have quite another problem: I have always considered Williamson and Kelly as Englishmen and can hardly get used to the fact that they sit now comfortably in the Australian Music Folder? Wouldn't it be nice to copy them into Albion's BMB as well? ;)
(Oh dear, I'll make it all worse...  :-\)

I think that you will find that Albion has already moved Williamson at least into the British section ;D

Now I am wondering about my possible Panufnik uploads ;D

(Repeated apologies....this should be elsewhere :-[)

Alan Howe, thanks for the Matthews essay: very illuminating, although I am speechless at his suggestion that there were no great romantic composers in the UK before Elgar! I suppose that was received wisdom for his generation and he's been unable to move past it. But generally a very interesting analysis, especially of influences.

So you did, Alistair. Many apologies!
How about this for a provocative thought on my part?> Simpson would have said that any composer who doesn't fundamentally believe in tonality cannot write a symphony.
BTW: I've just listened again to Matthews 6 - magnificent!

Quote from: Dundonnell on Monday 28 November 2011, 22:28
I think that you will find that Albion has already moved Williamson at least into the British section ;D

Now I am wondering about my possible Panufnik uploads ;D

(Repeated apologies....this should be elsewhere :-[)

Oh, yes, I missed to notice Williamson! :D

(Well, now that your big project has endend we must somehow try to keep John busy...  ;D ;D ;D)

Quote from: Alan Howe on Monday 28 November 2011, 22:33
So you did, Alistair. Many apologies!
How about this for a provocative thought on my part?> Simpson would have said that any composer who doesn't fundamentally believe in tonality cannot write a symphony.
BTW: I've just listened again to Matthews 6 - magnificent!

Far be it from me to disagree with Robert Simpson of all people on a subject so close to him and of which he had so profound a knowledge born of very considerable first-hand experience - but I do nevertheless disagree with him about that! It seems to me to be an unusually dogmatic statement that probably means that it wouldn't have been possible forhim to do it without such a belief. In any case, what precisely might he have meant by a "belief" in tonality? I suspect that he probably meant a willingness on the composer#s part now to eschew tonality (a term which, in any event, represents as broad a church as churches get).

Matthews 6 - magnificent? Yes, unquestionably so! (and it doesn't have a tango in it like his 4th symphony and 8th and 12th quartets and other pieces - Strictly Come Daving and all that?)...

Quote from: Jimfin on Monday 28 November 2011, 22:32
Alan Howe, thanks for the Matthews essay: very illuminating, although I am speechless at his suggestion that there were no great romantic composers in the UK before Elgar! I suppose that was received wisdom for his generation and he's been unable to move past it. But generally a very interesting analysis, especially of influences.

I'm quite sure that David Matthews would have been expressing an opinion of his own here rather than merely trotting out any received one. In any case, was there any great Romantic composer of Elgar's stature in Britain before him? - I'm talking of the Elgar of the Enigma Variations, Gerontius, the first two symphonies, Alassio and the violin concerto here - and that's quite some dozen years' work. What the much more ready availability of swathes of British music from the latter half of the 19th century tells me, at least, is that the answer to this is probably a rather more convincing "no" than was the case at a time when considerably less of it had come forward as evidence.

I can't deny that Elgar represented a standard greater than anyone before him: I would still say he is probably still the greatest symphonist the UK has produced. But to suggest that there was no one of interest in the 19th century, which is more or less what was said, ignores the not inconsiderable achievements of Potter, Bennett, Sullivan (whom Elgar is said to have admired for his Overture di Ballo and Golden Legend), Parry, Stanford and Cowen, in my opinion. That said, I greatly admire Matthews' own symphonies and his attitude towards the tradition (ie, that he considers that there is one).

Quote from: ahinton on Tuesday 29 November 2011, 07:02was there any great Romantic composer of Elgar's stature in Britain before him?

No, but I don't think that really matters and should certainly not be a barrier to either exploration or appreciation - as Jimfin rightly points out there was a vast amount of attractive, expertly fashioned and highly enjoyable music composed in Britain throughout the nineteenth century.

Quote from: ahinton on Tuesday 29 November 2011, 07:02What the much more ready availability of swathes of British music from the latter half of the 19th century tells me, at least, is that the answer to this is probably a rather more convincing "no" than was the case at a time when considerably less of it had come forward as evidence.

For me, these swathes can never be too broad.

:)

We're off topic, gentlemen....

Quote from: Alan Howe on Tuesday 29 November 2011, 17:31
We're off topic, gentlemen...

Indeed so - but I've already pointed that out before when that topic was first expanded in an attempt to broaden the agenda to include symphonies written before 1961!

It's been argued that, in Britain, for example, when those three symphonic "M"s - Matthews, McCabe and Max - have all shuffled off their respective Mortal symphonic coils, the prospects for new British symphonies will look somewhat bleak; there are other composers prepared to address the symphony in Britain today, but relatively few and far between, I suspect - and likely to be yet more so when those Ms are no longer with us. And it's not just the composers whom one might expect to eschew symphonic practice, either; not long after the emergence of Elgar 3, for example, I asked Anthony Payne when he might write his own first symphony and he immediately and firmly retorted "never! - or maybe not even that soon!"...

Quote from: ahinton on Tuesday 29 November 2011, 17:46

Quote from: Alan Howe on Tuesday 29 November 2011, 17:31
We're off topic, gentlemen...

Indeed so - but I've already pointed that out before when that topic was first expanded in an attempt to broaden the agenda to include symphonies written before 1961!

I think the topic was expanded not so much to 'broaden the agenda to include symphonies written before 1961' but, rather, in an attempt to establish whether the number of 'the best symphonies' written in the past 50 years is comparable with the numbers of  symphonies of equivalent merit written during similar periods in years gone by.  This seems to me to be at least a legitimate aspect of the debate within the subject heading.

Lionel is right: an attempt was being made to compare the period in question with past periods. However, I don't think the question of whether there was a symphonic tradition of merit in the UK pre-Elgar is relevant here.

What I just can't escape is the sense that David Matthews is onto something important. He also writes this:

Renewing the Past, some personal thoughts
[Originally published in Reviving the Muse: Essays on Music After Modernism,
edited by Peter Davison, Claridge Press, 2001]

An individual composer cannot predict the course of musical history, nor can he or she tell others how they are to compose. But since composers are no longer the natural inheritors of a tradition and of a musical language they can unthinkingly adopt, they must choose their own particular language themselves and also work out their relation with the past, and in doing so, they will inevitably acquire an overall view of what music, from their perspective, should be. My own view is founded on a few central principles, which were unfashionable at the time I began to write music in the mid-1960s but which now, at the start of the twenty-first century, have come to seem quite legitimate, except to those diminishing few who attempt to hold on to the rigid prescriptions and proscriptions of modernism. These are: that tonality is not outmoded but a living force; that the vernacular is an essential part of musical language; and that the great forms of the past, such as the symphony, are still valid. The remainder of this essay will attempt to elaborate and justify these three propositions.
It hardly needs to be said now that the proclaimed dogma of the post-Second World War avant-garde that tonality was dead was mistaken. Tonality flourishes again everywhere, and by no means only in the simplistic form adopted by the minimalists. My own attitude to tonality, in one sense, is straightforward: I hear music tonally, so it would seem perverse to resist what I hear. Although many passages in my music move away into regions where a sense of tonality is lost, I am always compelled eventually to bring the music back to a tonal centre. I am conscious of a balance to be preserved between stability and instability. When I listen to non-tonal music, it is very difficult for me to hear it except in relation to tonality: non-tonal music seems fundamentally unstable. This seems quite reasonable if one hears music as an expressive language, as I do. The alternative is to hear it as pure sound, which my ears will not allow me to do.
The temporary eclipse of tonality began with Schoenberg, who obsessively pursued the advanced chromaticism of Tristan and Parsifal to its logical conclusion, where extreme emotional states could be expressed by means of a totally chromatic musical language, free from any sense of tonal stability. His Mosaic, law-giver's personality led him to codify this Expressionist language, which had been an ideal vehicle for the nightmare worlds of Erwartung and Pierrot Lunaire, and to propose his new method of composition based on the equality of all twelve notes of the scale as a wholesale replacement for the tonal system. Schoenberg's authority was such that he and his successors have had an enormous influence on the music of the second half of the twentieth century. This is a curious phenomenon: as Deryck Cooke remarked, it was "as though the whole main modern movement in literature had taken Joyce's Finnegans Wake as its starting point." [1]Schoenberg's belief in the comprehensiveness of his system ("every expression and characterization can be produced with the style of free dissonance" [2]) was, however, mistaken: the musical modernism that stemmed from him is almost invariably limited to a narrow range of expression, which stays at a pitch of high tension, and cannot naturally evoke states of joy, gaiety, exuberance.
This might be called the common sense view of Schoenberg, but I think it is nevertheless true. It is, of course, a simplification, ignoring, for instance, the deep attachment Schoenberg retained to tonality which means that none of his serial works - the late ones especially - are entirely free from tonal references. He did not go as far as Berg, the modernist composer whom everyone loves, who reconciled serial technique with tonality by deliberately choosing twelve-note rows with tonal implications and using these rows with great freedom, and who was thus able to combine Expressionism with late-Romantic eroticism and tenderness. The purist Webern, on the other hand, abolished all sense of tonality, and his serial works really do breathe the air from other planets. Other, later classics of serial modernism such as Boulez's Le marteau sans maître, Stockhausen's Gruppen and Stravinsky's Aldous Huxley Variations inhabit a world of intellect and refined sensation, but one remote from human feeling. It was a path that, pursued further, could only lead to sterility; and it is interesting that Boulez (for instance in Rituel) and Stockhausen (in Inori) have both made some accommodation with tonality, and Stravinsky in his final work Requiem Canticles partly reverted to the harmonic world of his earlier music.
Modernism in all the arts has often mirrored the isolated, anguished state that the twentieth-century artist found himself in. While a sense of isolation is almost inevitable, given the breakdown of a common culture, does it follow that all serious artists must also be afflicted with existential angst? There is a genuine art to be made out of existential despair (for instance the early works of Peter Maxwell Davies), but composers should beware of the self-indulgent use of an extreme language, which should not be an easy option. On the other hand, it seems particularly difficult nowadays to take an opposite standpoint. In writing tonal music and trying through it to express the sheer joy and exuberance I often feel at the fact of being alive, was I simply being naive, out of touch with the modern world? I was encouraged in what I was attempting to do by hearing the music of Michael Tippett and reading his writings on music. Tippett in the 1930s opted to be a tonal composer of a strongly conservative kind, using melodies derived from folksong and aiming at a classicism modelled ultimately on Beethoven. In an article in 1938 he had written: "An artist can certainly be in opposition to the external 'spirit of the age' and in tune with some inner need, as, for instance, Blake was. A composer's intuitions of what his age is really searching for may be, and probably will be, not in the least such obvious things as the portrayal of stress and uncertainty by grim and acid harmonies. The important thing...is that he should be in some living contact with the age." [3] Tippett associated tonal stability with psychological wholeness, which he himself achieved through a rigorous course of Jungian self-analysis. The split psyche associated with modern man, on the other hand, found its most appropriate means of expression in atonality. What Tippett said, and the music he wrote that demonstrated his beliefs, such as The Midsummer Marriage, made perfect sense to me, though ironically in the late 1960s he seemed to be betraying his ideals in a quest for novelty. It is significant that he later regretted some of his more extreme experiments, and in old age reverted to a much more stable kind of music, culminating in his last piece, the serenely beautiful Rose Lake.
Although as a young composer I had no wish to follow Boulez or Stockhausen, I was, as a romantic adolescent, immersed in the early work of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, in Scriabin and Szymanowski, in Strauss's Salome and Elektra, and above all in the symphonies of Mahler, who was the most important influence on the music I began to compose. My music became highly chromatic and had a strong flavour of pre-war Vienna. I sensed the need to purify this language with a strong dose of classicism, but I was not clear how it was to be done. In the early 1970s I reached a compositional crisis and for several years was unable to finish a work that satisfied me. Around that time I met the Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe and became his composing assistant for several years, and in 1974 he invited me to come and stay in his house in Sydney. Living there for several months as far away from Europe as it was possible to get had a profound effect on me: I was able to look at Europe with a detachment never before possible. From Australia, with its relaxed way of life, its burgeoning new culture and its strong belief in itself, the contemporary culture of Europe seemed exaggeratedly neurotic. Hearing European modernist music in Australia, it sounded bizarre: why all this tension and agitation? I was not so laid-back as to imagine that music could do without tension altogether, but a certain redressing of the balance seemed necessary. Peter's own music, which combined European and Asian influences, achieved an equilibrium of romantic expressiveness and classical poise. Peter reminded me that contemporary European music was an exception to the rest of the world, where a stable, tonal basis to music had never been called into question. Although the particular manner of his music has always seemed an ocean's distance from my own, Peter has been one of the strongest influences on my subsequent development, and I hold his own compositions in the highest regard.
D.H.Lawrence's perception of Australia as an untouched land where life "had never entered in" but was "just sprinkled over" [4] remains largely true, and the real subject of all Australian art is the extraordinary Australian landscape. But the European artist cannot free himself entirely either from history - of which our man-made and man-ravaged landscapes speak eloquently - or from musical history. Minimalism, a born-again tonal language that disregards the past, is not really suited to Europe: though a product of New York, it seems most at home in California where the sun shines and the burden of history weighs lightly. Minimalism is a secular, hedonistic music: the so-called 'holy minimalism' we have in Europe, in the music of Pärt, Górecki and Tavener, is different in essence; but these composers have also tried to escape the past, or at least the past since the Renaissance, reverting to medieval Christian ideals much as the Pre-Raphaelites tried to do in the nineteenth century. Like Pre-Raphaelitism, theirs is a somewhat artificial stance, though the strength of all three composers' religious convictions gives a depth to their music, which might otherwise sound dangerously thin. I recognize the value of traditional religious faith to provide a foundation for art: those who have such faith are enviably secure, and their art will reflect this (in music, Messiaen is the best recent example). Speaking for myself, however, I cannot ignore either the Renaissance or Romanticism, both of which represented huge and irreversible strides away from Christianity and its central doctrine of man's reliance on God and the Church for salvation, and towards a conception of man on his own, self-reliant, though able to discover the divine element that is within us. This was already inherent in the humanism of the Renaissance, and became the philosophy of Romanticism. Because of its over-optimistic idealization of human potential, Romanticism failed to bring about the wholesale transformation of mankind that many of its proponents hoped for, but that does not mean that there is any other real substitute for its essential beliefs.
Beethoven still seems to me the ideal of the modern composer, for Beethoven won through his personal anguish towards a profound spirituality in the Missa Solemnis and the late sonatas and string quartets that is the equal of the unselfconscious spirituality of medieval music, but which Beethoven achieved by himself. Beethoven's dramatic use of tonality within sonata form, whose parameters he expanded enormously in his late works, made his spiritual quest in music possible. Wagner attempted a similar path, expanding Beethoven's forms still further into music drama. Wagner's great achievement was the comprehensiveness of his musical language: he developed chromaticism to an unprecedented level of expressive power, so that, for the first time, the overwhelming force of sexuality finds its full musical equivalent; but alongside this precarious chromaticism is a stable, elemental diatonicism. In Parsifal the struggle between eroticism and spirituality is finally resolved in the latter's favour, in a sublimated A flat major. Whether Wagner achieved true spirituality in Parsifal is still a controversial topic, which it is impossible to pursue further here; but the immense yearning for transcendence in the work cannot be denied. The same conflict between body and spirit, between disruptive chromaticism and stabilizing diatonicism, is found in Mahler, Wagner's truest successor; but Mahler was less in thrall to sensuality than Wagner and there is a more natural spiritual quality to his music. Mahler's attitude to tonality, as a drama mirroring the drama of life, is, like Wagner's, indebted to Beethoven: the drama is eventually resolved: triumphantly, as in the majority of the symphonies; tragically, as in the Sixth; or transcendentally, as in Das Lied von der Erde or the Ninth. This dramatic approach still seems to me to be valid, even if one chooses not to work on such a large scale as Mahler - which is wise advice for most composers.
What I should like to suggest (once again to compress a huge topic into a few sentences) is that, if tonality is to regain its full power, it must be used dynamically again. Most contemporary tonal music is static; but stasis, it seems to me, is ideally a condition to be achieved, as for instance in Beethoven's last piano sonata where the static, contemplative slow movement is heard as a consequence of the dynamic drama of the first movement. The dynamic use of tonality will involve both modulation and the rediscovery of dissonance as a disruptive force. Although one can no longer easily define the difference between consonance and dissonance, it is still possible to conceive of harmony as either stable or unstable. Unless there are real harmonic contrasts in a piece it cannot have dynamic movement. Perhaps because our most frequent experience of movement nowadays is as a passenger in a car, train or plane, observing the landscape speeding by while we ourselves remain still, most fast movement in contemporary music, whether tonal or atonal, is merely rapid motion without any involvement of physical energy. Fast music in the past was related to the movement of the body, walking, running or dancing. The fundamental importance to music of dance is something I shall return to later.
It was Schoenberg who also brought about the other revolutionary change in twentieth-century Western music when he renounced the use of the musical vernacular. Throughout its history, European art music maintained a close contact with folk music, on which its modal and diatonic melodies were based, and there was no unbridgeable gap between serious music and popular, right up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Schoenberg himself had used diatonic melody naturally and skilfully in his early works, notably in Gurrelieder. In the scherzo of his Second String Quartet, the work in which he brought tonality to its breaking point, Schoenberg quotes the well-known Viennese popular song 'O, du lieber Augustin' and makes a point of repeating its refrain 'Alles ist hin' ('it's all over'). For Schoenberg now, the use of the diatonic vernacular was indeed over: he banished it from his subsequent, non-tonal music, except once or twice as a ghostly, poignant memory (as in Pierrot Lunaire). Schoenberg still based his music on melody, but on the chromatic, synthetic melodies he derived from his note rows (it is impossible to believe they are not in some way synthetic). Webern, once again, went further than Schoenberg in virtually excluding recognizable melody from his serial music, and the post-war Darmstadt composers, under the influence of Adorno, turned Webern's composing principles into a creed. Adorno's neo-Marxist argument was that 'mass culture', which includes popular culture, based on tonal clichés, is another bourgeois-imposed opiate, a device for keeping the masses in subjection; serious composers therefore should have nothing to do with this corrupt musical language and so must embrace its opposite, serialism, an esoteric high art music for the elite. [5]
This was a drastic over-simplification: tonal clichés and bad popular music are one thing, to reject all post-Mahlerian tonal music including Sibelius and the neo-classical Stravinsky, as Adorno did, is quite another. Just as with the arguments against tonality, we can now see that these ideas, which for a time sustained modernism at least as a valid musical style, are, as general principles, simply erroneous. Jazz and popular music are an integral part of twentieth-century art and Gershwin and Ellington, for instance, are two of the century's most significant composers. Tippett, who was the last major British composer to use folksong as a foundation for his music, was also one of the first in this country to realise that blues and jazz - and later, rock - could be a viable alternative vernacular to folksong. This idea had already been adopted by the Neue Sachlichkeit composers of Weimar Germany. By the time Tippett began to compose, folksong had died out as a living force, except in the remotest parts of Britain, but it did not simply disappear into the museum culture of the Cecil Sharp Society and Morris dancing. In the 1950s and 1960s young, mostly urban people began to revive folk music at the same time as they began to listen to and to play rock, the new popular music derived from black American blues and white Country and Western music. Blues, rock and folksong from Britain and North America united into a common new vernacular language. It is a true vernacular, for its new music has largely been written by the musicians who sing and play it, unlike the popular music of the first half of the century which was for the most part the product of non-executant composers.
Tippett's use of the blues as a vernacular, for instance in A Child of Our Time and the Third Symphony, is successful because he grew up with the blues as a natural language. He was less happy with rock, because he did not grow up with it, and I find his introduction of the electric guitar into his opera The Knot Garden faintly embarrassing, even if I warm to his intentions. My own generation, those born during and immediately after the Second World War, encountered the beginnings of rock as we were emerging from childhood into adolescence, and for many of us it was a crucial event. Some of my earliest genuine musical experiences were of hearing mid-1950s rock - Elvis Presley and Little Richard: the effect on me of this wildly orgiastic music, so different from anything I had encountered in my cosy suburban childhood, was overwhelming. The Beatles were hearing and absorbing this music at the same time, as well as older types of popular music, and they seem to have inherited the folksong tradition instinctively (Paul McCartney has told me that he did not remember hearing any folksongs while he was growing up). One of the earliest recorded Beatles' songs, 'I saw her standing there' is, as Wilfrid Mellers has remarked, pure folk monody: an utterly simple four-note melody with prominent flattened sevenths. [6] It was through hearing songs like this that my generation were reintroduced to the folk tradition.
In listening to rock music, I rediscovered the elemental power of tonality. Rock musicians, ignorant of musical history, used the triad as Monteverdi had used it at the start of Orfeo, as if it were a freshly-minted sound. Taking their cue from rock music, the minimalists too used the triad in this way. Both showed that even the most over-exploited musical cliché can be renewed from a state of innocence. The majority of composers, myself included, are not innocent in this way, yet any language handled with real confidence can have validity: conviction can overcome selfconciousness. I agree with Alfred Schnittke when he wrote: "Contemporary reality will make it necessary to experience all the musics one has heard since childhood, including rock and jazz and classical and all other forms, combining them into a synthesis... The synthesis must arise as a natural longing, or through necessity. " [7] Schnittke's own work went a long way in putting these ideas into practice. Many others are thinking along similar lines. The vernacular has indeed been rehabilitated, and if all is again open to us, then the renewal of melody which is contemporary music's most serious need may be possible. For the loss of accessible, singable melody in the music of Schoenberg and his successors was a devastating blow to its comprehensibility. The masterpieces of European music in the past all had an immediately accessible surface layer, which was primarily the melodic line. The fact that the majority of the musical public are as likely to miss the deeper, structural level in Beethoven as they are in Boulez is not an argument against the desirability of an accessible surface, for Beethoven's melodies are the keys that give access to the deeper levels of his music.
The contemporary Western vernacular may not be much help here, for contemporary rock music demonstrates an increasing impoverishment of melody (as Roger Scruton has convincingly argued in The Aesthetics of Music [8]) and indeed of rhythm and harmony, so that it now offers meagre rewards to anyone who wants to make use of it. My own generation was more fortunate. It may be that the necessary renewal of melody will come from outside Western culture, from parts of the world where a living folk tradition still flourishes, one that has not yet been exploited and corrupted by commercialism. Whatever way, it must happen, for unless our musical culture is once again founded on melody, it is moribund.
Postmodernism, then, permits a return to music of all the elements that modernism proclaimed were done with for ever. But if we are all postmodernists now, we should not be superficial in our attitude to the past, parading styles like dressing up in old clothes. Much postmodernist art ransacks the past indiscriminately, with little sense of history. A more responsible attitude is to attempt to integrate the present with the past by re-establishing a continuity with those forms from the past which contain the greatest accumulation of historical meaning. I have been much concerned throughout my composing life with two of these forms, the symphony and the string quartet. The first is a public form, the second private, but they share the same Classical archetype, which is so well-known that almost everyone who listens to music will have some notion of what a symphony or string quartet should be. According to Hans Keller's useful theory, the richest kind of musical experience is provided by "the meaningful contradiction of expectation" [9]. This assumes that the listener will have some idea of what to expect, so that he will be pleasurably surprised by the contradictions that an inventive composer will provide. If on the other hand you attempt to be wholly new, then no real surprises are possible. To write a movement in sonata form is somewhat daunting, as you are competing with - and almost inevitably failing to equal - the many supreme examples of such movements from the past. But it gives you access to a world where meaningful contradiction has been practised for two-and-a-half centuries, and although many of the devices of confounding expectation have been over-exploited and have themselves become clichés, it is not impossible to renew them by inner conviction; and there are still new games to play.
One game nineteenth-century composers played was with the repeat of the exposition. Up to Beethoven's time, this was a formality. Beethoven was the first to dispense with it, for instance in the first 'Rasoumovsky' Quartet, op.59 no.1, where he pretends to repeat the opening of the exposition, then, just when we have accepted this, the music sheers off into the development. Throughout the nineteenth century composers either continued to use the repeat convention, which because it was no longer taken for granted could itself become a surprise, as in Mahler's First Symphony; or else devised cunning ways of disguising their intention not to repeat - an outstanding example is in the first movement of Dvorák's Eighth Symphony. In the finale of my own Fourth Symphony, a modified sonata movement, I have taken the game a stage further. The exposition begins to repeat, but after three bars it goes off into what sounds like the development. After less than three bars of this, however, there is a pause, and the exposition material begins again, though not quite exactly as before, so there is still a little confusion...but after six bars of this we are finally launched into a proper repeat, after this triple bluff. Except that it is a quadruple bluff, for this repeat is not quite an exact one, though the changes are so subtle I should not be surprised if they are not noticed.
My Fourth Symphony contains two scherzos in its five-movement scheme, both of which have connections with the contemporary vernacular. The first, in a hard-driving tempo, is based on fragments of melody which could be from rock music, while the second is a tango, which I thought of as a contemporary substitute for the Classical minuet. The tango form has been used by composers (including Stravinsky and Martinu) since the 1920s and it seems to me to be an ideal archetype, with its infectious rhythms and erotic overtones that the waltz and the minuet once possessed, but which have been dulled by time. What is crucial is that dance rhythms must find their way back into contemporary music. Dance was another of post-war modernism's puritanical exclusions, because of its supposed tainted association with popularism. I am tempted to abandon rational argument here, throw up my hands and cry "what nonsense". Music began with song and dance, and however sophisticated it becomes, it must never lose touch with these essential human activities. The Classical symphony achieved an equilibrium between mind and body by following an initial sonata allegro, where the intellect was dominant, with a song and a dance movement; the finale was then often a movement of play: the body's energy enhanced by intellectual games.
Because the Classical style produced nothing of great value in this country and our own symphonic tradition only truly began with Elgar, it may be easier to write symphonies and string quartets today in Britain than in Germany or Austria. The symphonies of Vaughan Williams and Tippett, and the string quartets of Tippett and Britten, represent outstanding innovatory attitudes towards these forms. It is not fully appreciated just how rich a quartet culture there is currently in Britain, with many young ensembles of the highest quality who are keen to include new works within their repertoire. The typical concert in which a contemporary string quartet is played alongside works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert is, to my mind, a most rewarding experience: the new work often gains in juxtaposition with the old, through the stimulating contrasts in style and technique within an identical medium. The string quartet, perhaps even more than the symphony, seems infinitely capable of renewal, and I should be content to write nothing but string quartets for the rest of my life, since the possibilities for variation within this most satisfyingly balanced of ensembles are so rich. In my recent Eighth Quartet, I cast off long-held inhibitions and introduced not only a folksong, as part of a modern Pastoral - alive to the precariousness of modern landscape as well as to its beauty - but also a fugue, as the middle section of a slow finale. The fugue is the most apparently exhausted of all forms, as many perfunctory fugues in twentieth-century music appear to prove. Yet Tippett was able to renovate the form in his Third Quartet, which contains three fugal movements, as was, more recently, Robert Simpson in his magnificent Ninth Quartet. It depends once again on conviction - and of course on technique. In my Ninth and latest Quartet, a tango is succeeded by a moto perpetuo which ends with a reference to the style of the Irish Reel, a folk form that is still exuberantly alive.
Composers can never know how their audiences will hear their music; they can be certain that it will not be as they hear it. Although I do not think of the audience when I am composing, but only of the notes I'm writing, and sometimes of the players I'm writing them for, I do seek a creative dialogue with my audience, and hope for some kind of appreciative understanding of what I am trying to do. The deliberate refusal of some modernist composers to engage with an audience, and the consequent unintelligibility of their music is, I think, a sad feature of contemporary musical life. It has never been the attitude of more than a small minority, but it has done great damage in making the very notion of 'contemporary music' a frightening prospect for many listeners. Repairing the damage has always been one of my chief concerns, and I dream of a time, when, as in the past, contemporary music will once again be the focus of interest for the majority of concert audiences. It is probably a fanciful dream, but its only chance of fulfilment is in the hands of composers.
[1]      Deryck Cooke, Vindications, Faber, 1986, p.195

[2]      Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, Faber, 1975, p.245

[3]      Michael Tippett, 'Music in Life' in Music of the Angels, Eulenberg Books, 1980, p.33

[4]      D.H.Lawrence, Letter to Else Jaffe 13 June 1922, in The Collected Letters of D.H.Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore, Heinemann, 1962, vol.2, p. 707

[5]      See Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, Oxford 1997, pp. 468-472

[6]      Wilfrid Mellers, Twilight of the Gods, Faber, 1973, pp.34-5

[7]      Alfred Schnittke, Tempo 151, December 1984, p.11

[8]      Roger Scruton, op.cit., pp. 500-506

[9]      A full explanation of the theory can be found in Hans Keller, 1975 (1984 minus 9), Dennis Dobson, 1977, pp.136-9

We probably should not forget that the excellent British symphonist Arthur Butterworth is still with us at the great age of 88 :)

His Symphony No.6 was, apparently, performed recently in St. Petersburg although I am unaware of any broadcast in this country yet. Butterworth's Symphony Nos. 1, 4 and 5 have been recorded commercially(No.1 twice) and Nos. 2 and 3 are available for download here.

....and of course Derek Bourgeois is up to Symphony No. 67, although I have only heard No. 2 (again available on this forum) ;D

Quote from: Alan Howe on Tuesday 29 November 2011, 20:18
Lionel is right: an attempt was being made to compare the period in question with past periods. However, I don't think the question of whether there was a symphonic tradition of merit in the UK pre-Elgar is relevant here.

What I just can't escape is the sense that David Matthews is onto something important. He also writes this:

Renewing the Past, some personal thoughts
[Originally published in Reviving the Muse: Essays on Music After Modernism,
edited by Peter Davison, Claridge Press, 2001]

...

Mon Dieu! This is turning into a David Matthews thread now! Should one be started, perhaps? (he's hardly "Unsung", of course, but...)

What I'm trying to get at is what David Matthews is suggesting, namely that the serialist modernists have taken music down a musical cul-de-sac where the sort of public statement that a symphony is supposed to be becomes impossible - indeed unintelligible. Of course, it could simply be that others can understand Carter, etc. better than I - which is entirely probable!

... Carter is a serialist? (not according to Wikipedia, fwiw. And speaking only for myself I find most of Carter's later (and not always just later) music that I've heard considerably less intelligible than that of several who do use twelve-tone techniques in their music, e.g. Benjamin Frankel and, more "rigorously" when it suits him (and as it suited him and not according to the so-called "original rules" for what that's worth...), Roger Sessions, for example...

The British symphonic tradition only truly began with Elgar?- -- maybe a brief David Matthews thread should indeed be started if only because of all the many silly Ex Cathedra (not the best expression, but.. evidenceless pronouncements shouted from the ...)
statements that article contains that need a bit of taking apart. Liszt thought only composers were the best informed critics but on the rare occasion I do wonder.

You are right, strictly speaking, about Carter, Eric. However, Wikipedia does say this about him:

His music after 1950 is typically atonal and rhythmically complex, indicated by the invention of the term metric modulation to describe the frequent, precise tempo changes found in his work. While Carter's chromaticism and tonal vocabulary parallels serial composers of the period, Carter does not employ serial techniques in his music.

Quote from: eschiss1 on Wednesday 30 November 2011, 18:16
The British symphonic tradition only truly began with Elgar?- -- maybe a brief David Matthews thread should indeed be started if only because of all the many silly Ex Cathedra (not the best expression, but.. evidenceless pronouncements shouted from the ...) statements that article contains that need a bit of taking apart. Liszt thought only composers were the best informed critics but on the rare occasion I do wonder.

Well, if one such thread is indeed started, I would hope that you'd accordingly do the first bits of taking apart in order to tell us all exactly what it is that you're talking about; the fact that there were plenty of British symphonies before Elgar's first (as Mr Matthews surely knows at least as well as, if not better than, you and I do) hardly undermines Mr Matthews's statement, for he's not undermining those earlier British symphonies but aiming to put matters into perspective. Out of interest, what 19th or very early 20th century British symphony/ies do you personally consider to be at least of the order of Elgar's first?

The question is not so much whether symphonies before Elgar's were the equal of his two completed works, but whether the tradition began before that. I would say that the symphonies of Potter, Bennett and Sullivan do not really represent any tradition in themselves and stand as slightly isolated examples, but I think one can make a good case that the symphonies of Parry and Stanford were very much part of the ensuing tradition, particularly as so many of their pupils went on to write symphonies under their influence: VW, Tovey, Benjamin, Dyson, Moeran, Jacob... I don't think that's the same as denying that Elgar's symphonies represented the greatest British ones to date when they were written.

Let's get away from the issue of British symphonies pre-Elgar...

What about Ivanovs' last symphonies? I would vote for n.20. I also think that nobody has mentioned so far Boris Tischenko. I find really interesting his 5 Dante Symphonies. (which have been composed from 1997 to 2005).
  I also would like to thank so much all the members of the forum who voted for Simpson's 9th symphony because they made me discover a magnificent work that was unknown to me.

Having read through all the above posts, it seems that there are two relevant discussions going on here.  One is simply a list of symphonies people think worthwhile; another (the more interesting, imo) is an attempt to determine whether or not some sort of great symphonic tradition has been lost or abandoned by recent composers.

This latter reminds me of the story about Brahms and Mahler.  Supposedly they were walking along a mountain stream and Brahms was declaring sadly that when he died the great symphonic tradition would die with him.  Mahler suddenly stopped, pointed at the stream, and exclaimed.  'What is it?' Brahms asked. 'The last wave,' Mahler replied.  Brahms acknowledged the humor but not the point.  Something of the same sort seems to me to be going on in discussions which attempt to demand that music follow a prescribed path or be declared to somehow be out of bounds.

Nor am I a big fan of claims that music needs to become more 'accessible'.  Henry Pleasants made this charge in The Agony of Modern Music decades ago, arguing that jazz would be the salvation of serious music.  It wasn't.  Now David Matthews is making the same sort of claim about rock.  It isn't (just listen to Glass's desperate attempt to inflate pop music into a symphony (his David Bowie piece for a demonstration).  But the fact, so far as I can see it, is that music doesn't need saving.  Rather, music education does.  There is less and less of it, and what there is is too often truncated or squeezed in with other, unrelated, matters.  As a result, listeners are simply not equipped to be interested in music that doesn't conform to 'masterpiece marketing' (but this is another topic).

So, back to the great tradition  Is there anyone who would argue that there were 150 genuine masterpieces of the symphony between 1810 and 1960?  Let's assume so, especially since 'masterpiece' is a pretty flexible term.  I have taken the liberty of providing a list of symphonies, one per year, from 1961 to 1986, a list created in about 20 minutes of scanning Baker's and a few CDs for confirmation of dates.  Every one these, I would say indisputably, composed by someone not only aware of but working within the 'great tradition' (although I don't necessarily endorse each and every one of these as a 'masterpiece' per se).  This suggests to me that there is no genuine downturn in either the tradition or works connected to it.

1961: Shostakovitch 12
1962: Shostakovitch 13*
1963: Brian 21
1964: Toch 7
1965: Harris 10
1966: Harrison 'on G'*
1967: Pettersson 7*
1968: Schuman 9
1969: Shostakovitch 14*
1970: Aho 2*
1971: Shostakovitch 15*
1972: Pettersson 10*
1973: Sallinen 2
1974: Pettersson 12
1975: Schuman 10
1976: Aho 5
1977: Hanson 6*
1978: Pettersson 14
1979: Sallinen 4
1980: Aho 6
1981: Simpson 8
1982: Creston 6*
1983: Graunke 7
1984: [oops- I somehow missed this year; I'll throw in Holmboe's 1988 12th, since he hasn't even been mentioned yet :) ]
1985: Sallinen 5
1986: Rautavaara 5

I am sure that plenty of people will rush to add symphonies I've 'forgotten.'  This will simply help make the point more fully....

Quote from: theqbar on Thursday 01 December 2011, 11:54
What about Ivanovs' last symphonies? I would vote for n.20. I also think that nobody has mentioned so far Boris Tischenko. I find really interesting his 5 Dante Symphonies. (which have been composed from 1997 to 2005).
  I also would like to thank so much all the members of the forum who voted for Simpson's 9th symphony because they made me discover a magnificent work that was unknown to me.

Splendid that you should have discovered the Simpson 9th through this thread :)

That is one reason why forums like this exist and are so enormously valuable :)

Regarding Tishchenko's five Dante Symphonies I must confess to finding them pretty hard going. His Symphony No.5 is however a particularly impressive composition.

I will be re-visiting the Simpson 9th tonight. ;)

Some years ago, the outstanding American composer Steven Stuckey admitted to liking and respecting Roy Harris (at his nadir when our conversation occurred). I do, too, if not with as much affection as Bruckner elicits, still with rather the same kind of affection. The "10 decibel" recording of Harris 12, generously uploaded by shamokin88, has raised my earlier high opinion of Harris the symphonist even further. An utterly original work, programme music in a way, but with a serious demeanor and craft out of the great symphonic tradition.

I haven't heard Harris 11, written for the NY Philharmonic, but Albany has been touting Harris 9 as "the great American 9" for many years, and if 11 is anything like as original as 12, it may be "the great American 11." : )
I love VW 8 (in the Haitink performance) and 9 (in several performances, especially Previn and Haitink). Like those VW masterworks, the late Harris symphonies will not likely "bring the house down," but as a group, contrary to everything I was taught two generations ago, they are, I believe, deserving candidates for the canon.

Is there a download of Simpson 9 in the BMB corner?  Or maybe just the British music thread?

Quote from: JimL on Friday 02 December 2011, 02:29
Is there a download of Simpson 9 in the BMB corner?  Or maybe just the British music thread?

I am afraid not :(

The work was first performed by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, who commissioned the work, on April 8th, 1987. It was recorded by the same orchestra for Hyperion on 7th-8th February 1988.

"The Independent"(British newspaper) said "Awesome: few symphonies have better deserved the description of a cathedral in sound since the first movement of Bruckner's Ninth itself".

Lionel Pike wrote in the cd booklet "This symphony is not only a mighty study of musical motion, comparable to those we find in Beethoven and Sibelius, it is also a study of the power of a simple musical germ to generate enormous paragraphs of music. It is of immense directness and power, and enshrines all that is best in symphonic writing, while still remaining completely unified and original. This symphony is a giant written by a giant among symphonists".

It is-to my ears(and obviously a number of others on this forum)- quite simply a sublime masterpiece of concentrated power and quite breathtaking grandeur.

Will add a bit more by Private Message :)

There must be others like me here who find Simpson 9 among the most utterly sterile large-scale symphonic constructions (I won't say "creations") they have ever encountered, - however technically brilliant it might be, - absent any shred of heart or humanity, and unlike in what one might refer to as the "cosmic dimension" of a Beethoven, Bruckner, or Sibelius Symphony without a "call" to something potentially transcendent in us either. 

I have often thought an appropriate literary preface to the work might be Pascal's famous lines:

   "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after,
     the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which
     I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here
     rather than there, why now rather than then."

*shrug* speaking just personally I'm more convinced by and interested in other works - symphonies and others - of his.

Quote from: Greg K on Friday 02 December 2011, 05:43
There must be others like me here who find Simpson 9 among the most utterly sterile large-scale symphonic constructions (I won't say "creations") they have ever encountered, - however technically brilliant it might be, - absent any shred of heart or humanity, and unlike in what one might refer to as the "cosmic dimension" of a Beethoven, Bruckner, or Sibelius Symphony without a "call" to something potentially transcendent in us either. 

I have often thought an appropriate literary preface to the work might be Pascal's famous lines:

   "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after,
     the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which
     I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here
     rather than there, why now rather than then."

I am sure that there probably are others on here who share your views about the Simpson 9th and, if they do so, they may well join in the discusssion and say so with their reasons.

I profoundly disagree with your assessment....but then there are at least a couple of members who have mentioned the Tippett 3rd Symphony as one of the best symphonies of the past 50 years and that is a work I positively detest.

I simply cannot abide anything Rachmaninov wrote apart from the First Symphony, 'The Bells' and 'The Isle of the Dead'(although I once liked the Symphonic Dances ;D). One of my dearest friends and a member on here-Johan Herrenberg-loves the Music of Frederick Delius whereas I am bored to tears by most of Delius's music. I happen to think that, with the exceptions of his 1st, 2nd and 8th symphonies Gustav Mahler is grossly over-rated.

Our musical tastes, as in other forms of the arts, will inevitably, naturally and quite properly, differ. But if we respect the fact that what brings us together is a love of Music then those differences are healthy differences which distinguish but not divide us :)

No disrespect towards or attack on Simpson 9 lovers, of course (given such a tiny presence here, my judgement will hardly matter much in any case).  I have just never understood the felt passion it's devotees so fervently express for a piece so completely devoid of any feeling and passion and fervency. I still listen to it from time to time and always unfailingly it evokes precisely nothing or nothingness in me, - neither attraction or revulsion or any response at all in fact.  It is just an empty structure really, probably ingeniously built, but with nothing "inside".  Why does it exist (I ask myself)?

I fear that nothing I could write would dissuade you from your view of the Simpson 9th, any more than anyone will convince me that later Tippett makes much sense(to me, at least ;D). I am sorry that you find it, as you say, "devoid of any feeling and passion and fervency" :(

It will in no way assist to read something like this-written by a Simpson admirer from Michigan:

"It is autumn again; and for me, that means it is high time to listen to some music composed by Robert Simpson. The late Mr. Simpson was, in my humble opinion, the greatest composer of the second half of the twentieth century. I also find that there is no better music to listen to on a chilly fall evening than something composed by Mr. Simpson.

Simpson's ninth symphony is a monumental thing of beauty. It is like scaling the sheer face of a majestic mountain. This one movement masterpiece builds slowly with an intrinsic intensity. It then keeps on building. Then it builds some more. The climax is breathtaking.

Then what after the climax? Is this piece just an extended nerve-racking thrill ride?

No. It is not. It is much more. To return to the previous mountain scaling metaphor...The real treat of this symphony, at least as far as I am concerned, is the sense of release, the sense of exasperated wonder that is expressed in the fading, echoing, post-climactic ending to the piece.

Some folks, including Mr. Simpson himself, compare this symphony to Bruckner's sixth. I can see why. It does share a lot of characteristics with that symphony. I would also add that there are parts reminiscent of Bruckner's ninth as well. Yet, while I am a great admirer of Bruckner (actually, I am a Brucknerian to the core), I would have to say that this piece transcends both symphonies; and I can pinpoint the exact spot where it occurs-the moment Simpson attains his peak and then reverses his way down into the ecstasy of the ending. I know of few moments in the vast span of twentieth century classical music that could even compare, much less measure up.

Isaiah 40:31 says: "Yet those who wait for the LORD Will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not become weary." The same could be said (In a little less spiritual way) about this symphony. Those who are brave of heart and sound of mind enough to endure the climb, will see the view from the top. What a view it is."

We shall agree-with mutual respect-to differ in our opinions of the Simpson and leave it at that :)

Interesting to juxtapose that quote from Isaiah with mine from Pascal as attempts to verbalize the Symphony's evocations.  We hear with different ears.

Personally, I'll have both Simpson and Tippett....

Quote from: Alan Howe on Friday 02 December 2011, 20:03
Personally, I'll have both Simpson and Tippett....

:) :) :)

...and I am so glad that both composers give you pleasure, Alan :)

Tippett  I can take up to but not including, the Concerto for Orchestra. After around 1962 his music is way over my head :(

Re. Tippett: in general I agree. But I can take the symphonies: No.4 in particular made an impression on me from the moment I heard Solti conduct it. I'm not saying it's my favourite music, but I can certainly appreciate it. Which is more than I can say for Elliott Carter.

I'm in the middle of trying to come to grips with Maxwell Davies' 3rd. My goodness, that's a big beast. I'll let you know when I've come out the other side...

Quote from: Alan Howe on Friday 02 December 2011, 22:50
Re. Tippett: in general I agree. But I can take the symphonies: No.4 in particular made an impression on me from the moment I heard Solti conduct it. I'm not saying it's my favourite music, but I can certainly appreciate it. Which is more than I can say for Elliott Carter.

I'm in the middle of trying to come to grips with Maxwell Davies' 3rd. My goodness, that's a big beast. I'll let you know when I've come out the other side...

Oh, the Maxwell Davies symphonies are pretty taxing too ;D I can just about get a handle on them but it is hard work sometimes :)

Tippett No.4.....almost ;D  Tippett No.3......never ;D :(

At least this thread has made me dig up my Simpson 9 for a relisten, but it will have to wait in the que. Currently making a stab at the complete Rheinberger piano music on Carus.

Quote from: theqbar on Thursday 01 December 2011, 11:54
What about Ivanovs' last symphonies? I would vote for n.20. I also think that nobody has mentioned so far Boris Tischenko. I find really interesting his 5 Dante Symphonies. (which have been composed from 1997 to 2005).
  I also would like to thank so much all the members of the forum who voted for Simpson's 9th symphony because they made me discover a magnificent work that was unknown to me.

I've always liked Ivanovs. There is a good Naxos CD Symphony with symphonies 8 and 20 on - both excellent. No 11 is one of the best, but sadly never released on CD. There are some fime Marco Polo and Campion issues too.