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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.