What Went Wrong? Part One
The symphony has, it would be fair to say, fallen rather out of fashion during the modern/post-modern era. Many composers appear to consider it to be an unwieldy, unnecessary, 18th century relic, and many of the composers who do utilise it are stuck in a very much an antiquated musical paradigm, churning out putrefied (neo/post)-romantic mush. To be fair, some of this mush is still vastly more attractive than most of the output of actual Classical and Romantic symphonists, but there is something about it that rings a little hollow. What went wrong?
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.