Culprit #5: Musical Directors

Throughout much of the early 20th Century, European audiences knew American composers as specialists in short orchestral works full of charming folk tunes; it was widely believed that there was no such thing as an American symphonist. This was, of course, wildly untrue, given that composers such as Copland, Harris and Ives had already dipped their toes into the field. American orchestras, while willing to occasionally give their fellow countrymen an airing on European soil, were nonetheless not brave enough to allow an American symphony to be the centrepiece for a concert. One only has to look at the NZSO’s 2010 programme to observe the same effect in this country; New Zealand composers are being relegated to the Made in New Zealand concert, although this does at least tend to make it the most exciting musical event of the year.

Orchestras tend to stick to a certain format of programme for their concerts; most NZSO concerts open with an overture or tone poem (in past years this has often been a New Zealand work), followed by a concerto, and a symphony after the interval. This means that, unless a particularly famous (by classical standards) soloist is performing, the symphony is the main focal point of the evening; much of the potential audience will either come or not come depending on which symphony the orchestra performs. Performing something ‘risky’, like music written in the last century, could easily cost the orchestra great big piles of money. This ensures that new symphonies will never be commissioned by any important orchestra without substantially more funding backing them than the NZSO (which is quite extraordinary, considering that the NZSO is funded by the New Zealand government). Given that almost all composers outside of Finland now lack the stipends that supported composers of national importance or aristocratic favour in the 18th and 19th centuries (and the USSR), composing anything they are not commissioned to write is financially unviable, particularly without any assurance that an orchestra will actually have the courage to do a performance.

Culprit #6: A Certain Flavour of Criticism

For almost as long as certain pieces of music have been designated “symphonies”, debate has flourished about what exactly constitutes a symphony, and how far its boundaries may be pushed while retaining the title. The symphony can be said to have essentially superseded the baroque dance suite, or at least the overture thereof. Through a series of complicated musical machinations this overture became the sonata, then the sinfonia. The Classical symphony carried on the traditions of the dance suite both in the sonata form of its opening movement and in the eclecticism of the following movements – although some composers chose to refine this somewhat. Essentially, the dance suite/symphony had become the title of this blog. In the process, it lost most of its functionality, becoming listening rather than dancing music, and this created a problem for the budding musical form, which now had to rely on a little more than some technical competence and a steady metre to attract an audience – the composer’s task was to move people mentally rather than physically. In doing so it absorbed many of the techniques that had heretofore been used in various other ‘serious’ forms of music, particularly contrapuntal techniques used in fugues or trio sonatas, employing them as means of development. This was, essentially, a form of pure music, but the ‘purity’ of a symphony is only as much as a composer is willing to put in.

Most of the symphonies performed today are from the Romantic period, with a few 20th Century neo-Romantic items of greater or lesser quality. The values of the time obviously permeated the music considerably; most of the symphonies played by orchestras today could easily be tagged with the phrase ‘unabashedly grandiose’. What affected the music so much was not really any great change in musical parameters, but in the way that composers thought about music, placing heavy reliance on musical signs to trigger emotional reactions. Although some composers were able to maintain quite rigid structural parameters in their symphonies, others eschewed them altogether. Beethoven’s Third Symphony, considered by many to be a model of technical perfection, was also probably the earliest important symphony to reflect the new extramusical sensibilities. It was only twenty-five years before Berlioz took this to what seemed like its utmost extreme with Symphonie Fantastique.

At every point in the symphony’s development radical changes have been stubbornly opposed by critics trying to impose a rigid definition. Even in the era of the dance suite composers would take flack for introducing new, illicit dances. One of the greatest difficulties for a composer wishing to write a symphony has always been persuading certain people that what they are listening to is, indeed, a symphony. Three movements? It’s not a symphony! More than two themes in the first movement? It’s not a symphony! A theme that doesn’t modulate to the dominant? It’s not a symphony! A scherzo without a trio? It’s not a symphony! The first movement has largely been the sticking point, with even a usually open-minded critic like Robert Simpson criticising works that he felt moved too far away from the themes-development-recap formula. Some radical neo-romantics suffered derision from both sides. Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony “Leningrad” was attacked continuously for its unconventional first movement – first by establishment critics who felt that the ostinato section – Shostakovich’s Bolero – distracted from traditional development. Never mind that Shostakovich uses the other twenty minutes of the movement for development, and that the bolero is a highly complex referential construction. The Seventh was also attacked post-war by the Darmstadt school for its brash and uncomplicated patriotism, which seemed to be stuffed with one-dimensional signifiers. Never mind that they (and, in fact, everybody else) got the meanings of these signifiers, at least from Shostakovich’s perspective, horribly, hopelessly and hilariously wrong for thirty years.

Culprit #3: Feminism (I’ll try to explain myself)

An article I saw  on Gloria Coates’ website noted that, throughout the course of Western art music, symphonies by female composers have been few and far between. In large part this is due to the general lack of female composers until the beginning of the twentieth century, but even the inspirational Romantic composer Clara Schumann failed to dip her toes into the genre. There certainly is some kind of inherent masculinity in the nature, linguistics and history of the symphony that may constitute a turn-off. [the author of that article] assigns gender roles to the themes of traditional sonata form, so that the male (first) theme acts to subjugate the female (second theme). I’m not entirely sure that such a theory actually applies outside the realm of musicology, but it is possible that what might be appealing to a male composer – the very controlling nature of forcing themes into the traditional structure – might be unappealing to a female composer.

The other problem with a symphony is that, at least following the Classical period, it tends to be big. I mentioned earlier the slightly egotist efforts by some composers to write as many symphonies as they possibly can, but in fact, for most composers, just one symphony is a massive undertaking. For these composers, a symphony might be a “masterwork” or a “magnum opus”. Both have heavily masculine implications, possibly making them more appealing to male than female composers. By avoiding the “symphony” title and form, composers both female and male could continue to create immense works without necessarily attracting these implications

Not that I would really have any idea!

Culprit #4: Theodor Adorno

The ideas of Theodor Adorno were hugely influential over the European post-war avant-garde movement. Adorno advocated the rejection of the established forms of art, which had, by their highly regulated nature, served to enslave the minds of the European populace, and could be used by those in power as a means of controlling their citizens. Adorno’s theory essentially simplifies down to the idea that the arts act as conditioning agents for societies;  if the arts do not force people do think, then they will not gain the ability to think about what actually goes on in their societies. Rulers can trigger particular conditioned responses by encouraging certain forms of art.

These effects are felt doubly with music, where particular musical elements automatically trigger particular emotional responses as a matter of course. Certain modes are used to encourage particular emotions, as are certain tempi and instruments. The encouragement of martial music, for instance, is intended to create patriotic and militaristic feeling through culturally engrained associations. Adorno’s goal was ripping all of this up, to start afresh with culturally unfamiliar and ambiguous material, to create a music of constant change. The symphony, with its formalised structure and tonal implications, was not going to survive Darmstadt. Composers who remained relatively uninfluenced by Adorno’s ideas – the neo-romanticists, who developed from 19th century music rather than in opposition to it – were as a result far more likely to compose symphonies. Messiaen, probably the only significant early Darmstadt composer to write anything resembling a traditional symphony, wrote this before the publication of the Philosophy of Modern Music.

Here are a couple of contributing factors. But probably not the actual cause, which is pretty obvious really. That’ll come ‘soon’.

Culprit #1: The Try-hards?

Let’s be perfectly honest, there is no other way classify the symphonic work of Derek Bourgeois, a composer whose music I do rate… sometimes. Bourgeois is fond of comparing himself to the late Havergal Brian, composer of 32 symphonies, most of them written in old age. Bourgeois is a composer whose work is sometimes conceptually very strong, and who rarely has trouble finding material to fill up his music. Unfortunately, this material is not always quite up to scratch, and his concepts are by no means as poetic in practical use as in reality. Bourgeois currently seems to be writing three or four symphonies every year – no mean feat, especially considering the sheer size of these works, using large orchestras and durations of up to two and a half hours. To mark his equalling the mark of his apparent hero Brian, Bourgeois wrote his thirty-second symphony in thirty-two movements, possibly a landmark blow for the idea of symphonic coherence. To be fair, Brian’s best-known work, the Symphony No. 1 ‘, is nearly as sprawling, and ways in at two hours of immense orchestral and choral work, but its immensity is equalled only by the strength of organic growth in the material. Bourgeois seems to be so caught up in ‘beating’ his idol that in the process he has forgotten how to write coherent music.

Of course, Bourgeois is far from the most prolific modern composer of symphonies. That role belongs to the erstwhile Finnish conductor/composer Leif Segerstam (and his beard). Segerstam has composed well over two hundred symphonies; many of these are really known only to the composer himself, although he and his beard will be premiering one with the NZSO later this year.

What was the point of this section? Since the end of the Classical period, symphonies have been monumental efforts in the careers of their composers, with years of preparation and writing going into their creation. The drive to create multitudinous symphonies by composers such as Bourgeois and Segerstam necessarily reduces the amount of compositional energy that can be put into each one. They are wasting their artistic freedom by not imposing any kind of self-discipline, producing music from their egos, rather than their hearts and minds. The problem is that nobody cares whether your penis is two hundred and twenty symphonies long. Sure, it’s an exercise in following one’s own instincts, but it’s a purely self-interested one, not seeking to have any effect on the wider world of music whatsoever.

Culprit #2: Film?

Many of the composers who do choose to write symphonies are those for whom the genre still entails the vast emotional, often programmatic nature that it often became during the Romantic period. This is by no means an irredeemable perspective – after all, many of the great early twentieth century composers suffered from the same affliction. Sadly, the influence that 19th century music had on twentieth century film scoring seems now to be flowing back in the other direction, with some composers bringing film score cliché back into the concert hall (to say nothing of the performance of certain film scores themselves). While this seems largely to be a youthful phenomenon, there are nevertheless a few reasonably well-known composers whose work suffers embarrassingly from this malaise.

One of the most prominent of these composers is the Russian-American Alla Pavlova, whose work includes at least four symphonies. Most of her thematic material, and also most of her orchestral writing, appears to have come straight from the score of a really awful romantic film. To an extent this is redeemed by Pavlova’s skill in symphonic development itself; her music stands up on its own ‘merits’, without requiring an accompanying film, but her reliance on sweeping string chords and rhapsodic violin melodies gives her work a sense of sameness that prevents it from reaching the great emotional depths that Pavlova so plainly desires.

On the other hand, she does have a pretty amazing last name.