I am interested in Dr. Schaarwachter's cut-off date of 1945.
There were a number of British Symphonists whose works bridge that divide:
Pre-1945:
Richard Arnell: Symphonies Nos.1-3
Stanley Bate: Symphonies Nos. 1-3 (No.3-1940) (No.4-1954)
Sir Lennox Berkeley: Symphony No.1-1940 Symphony No.2-1958
Havergal Brian Symphonies No.1-5
Alan Bush: Symphony No.1-1939/40 Symphony No.2-1949
George Lloyd: Symphonies Nos. 1-3
Edmund Rubbra: Symphonies Nos. 1-4
Cyril Scott: Symphonies Nos. 1-3 (No.4-1951/52)
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Nos. 1-5
Sir William Walton: Symphony No.1-1934/35 Symphony No.2-1960
William Wordsworth: Symphony No.1-1944 Nos. 2-8-1947 onwards
The Gordon Jacobs Symphony No.2 was written in 1945, and the Daniel Jones Symphony No.1 and Sir Michael Tippett Symphony No.1 in 1944/45.
There is, perhaps, no great problem in relation to some of these composers. The five Havergal Brian written prior to the Second World War divide rather neatly from those written after the war beginning with the Sinfonia Tragica.
But with composers like Vaughan Williams or Edmund Rubbra I could see an issue in only discussing the symphonies written prior to 1945.
Any cut-off date will impose such problems of course.....I fully accept that. It will be interesting to hear how the author deals with the issue.
Immensely time-consuming though such a task will be (and, with the symphony far from dead, will also continue to be), one would like to think that he will explore the post-WWII British symphony in a subsequent volume or volumes; I will perhaps write to ask him about that. There would be a vast amount of territory to cover, even in writing about the best known of those composers whose symphonic canon began after 1945, such as Arnold and Simpson (who are no longer with us) and Maxwell Davies, Matthews and the astonishingly prolific Bourgeois (who alone has written 102 of them to date, the most recent two dating from this year) who may yet write more of them (and, of course, there are plenty more post-1945 British symphonists to consider).
