If one allows oneself to contemplate the notion that anything from history is now - or can now be or has somehow become - an anachronism, one is allowing oneself to fall into a large trap of one's own making. "Pastiche" has been mentioned, yet I sense none of that in the symphonies of Maxwell Davies, (David) Matthews or John McCabe, three living composers with 23 symphonies between them to date.
i've only ever heard one of Davies' symphonies, which seemed like an attempt to "update" Sibelius with more "universal" techniques (european modernism & touches of the cultural tourism prevalent in so much music nowadays). he has a reputation for being quite the thorny modernist, so i ought by rights to
enjoy his music, but i just can't get into it ??? ;) i have the Matthews 1, 3 and 5, which haven't made a significant impression of substance on me, but i have enjoyed some of Matthews's music so maybe i should listen again. McCabe is an unfamiliar name to me.
Anthony Payne has never written a symphony (of his own!) and has said in unequivocally forthright manner that he never will write one, despite his work being steeped in traditions and despite his having as much idea about symphonic writing as anyone alive, as his work on Elgar 3 well demonstrates.
i don't know Payne either. i've seen the score to Elgar 3, which struck me as quite similar to everything else by Elgar and therefore successful in that regard ( :P ), but never really listened to it with a comparative ear for the rest of Elgar's work.
Personally, I do not see that there is "no point" in writing symphonies today, fore that is surely a matter for each composer to decide for his/her own reasons.
well, that's exactly the point. i'd be very curious to hear why composers who write symphonies do so.
I have not written one (well, I have written one work that I wanted to be a kind of c.40-minute four-movement symphony condensed into a single one of around a quarter of that duration and called it Sinfonietta) but I have no objection in principle to the notion of writing symphonies, either on a basis of perceived anachronism or indeed on any other grounds; I just don't feel that I am likely to write even one work to which I could give the title "Symphony" (let alone "Symphony No. ×") despite having written works that are reliant on what might loosely be described as symphonic thought. So - it's each to his/her won, methinks; certainly, the symphony is no more dead than the string quartet!
indeed. actually, i myself wrote a symphony for string orchestra, when i was much younger... ok, 18. not that much younger. which i viewed as a sort of "culmination" of everything i'd written up to that point, and therefore a cause for stock-taking. what stock i did take made me deeply uncomfortable with the whole idea of writing symphonies and prompted me to throw out all of my earlier compositions and start from scratch, as i'm sure every composer does at least two or three times in their life.
I respect dyn's views but if she is of the opinion that a modern British composer like Robin Holloway is to be criticised for "being stuck in a museum of the past" and write that George Rochberg is one of her "least favourite" musical thinkers then I rather doubt that we shall find much common ground :)
re holloway - i am going off his own comments about his own music & that of the present. that of his music that i've heard is actually rather good when he forgets that it's not possible to be original in the 21st century any more and one must write in reference to the past etc etc, for instance in the third concerto for orchestra which he presented in one of the composition classes at cambridge (and spent so long talking about it that we didn't have time to hear the whole thing :( )—solid & exciting stuff regardless of its "traditional" nature. dude just needs to relax a little more. i don't think i've ever met anyone so neurotic :P
Holloway is a composer I am determined to get to grips with, having willfully ignored his music for too long. I recall reading the (probably) famous interview with Rochberg published several years ago in "Tempo" magazine in which he attempted to justify his change of musical direction. Dyn obviously disapproves(probably not the right word!) of Rochberg's thinking but, since it clearly made sense to him and since the result was music with which I am more than comfortable, it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I could agree with her.
re rochberg - actually, i think i disapprove of rochberg's philosophy for reasons you might agree with. he states that he abandoned serialism because it was impossible to express emotion, tranquility, wit, energy, etc through it. (
i state that he abandoned serialism because his serial music was, honestly, pretty lousy. he should have used his first symphony as a starting point instead, it's a much more successful & interesting work) but in his music what we find is intentional pastiches of other composers—in other words, he didn't believe it was possible to express emotion, tranquility, wit, energy, etc without resorting to languages invented by others. there was no such thing as a
personal language of emotion, tranquility, und so weiter anymore; and
that is something with which i quite strongly disagree. he should have spent more time looking into the music of e.g. Creston, Tippett, Shostakovich, Messiaen, Dutilleux, Vaughan Williams, etc etc all of whom did it quite well without openly paying homage to or unconsciously stealing from other composers most of the time.
Were I a young (or even youngish) composer I MIGHT think differently. I might wish to strike out in a different direction. But I am not. I am an orchestral music lover(I cannot claim to be a "specialist" ;D). I know what I like but (a) am of an exploratory nature within the broad scope of such music and (b)-I hope-that I can be educated to be a little more adventurous in at least investigating a number of composers I had, probably wrongly, regarded as outside my "comfort zone".
that's fair enough. i have no idea how far your tastes extend in either direction, so i won't comment.
personally my night listening playlists include Stockhausen, Mozart, Cordier, Radulescu, Medtner, Zelenka and Cassidy and i spend quite a lot of my daytime listening to music from the last 20-30 years, which happens to include very few symphonies. i imagine you could describe me as an "eclectic" although most of my generation would find my tastes unaccountably narrow for the almost complete absence of anything with a beat >.>
edit: also i am a "she", for future reference