David Matthews SYMPHONY NO. 8 First Performance 17/04/15

[ahinton]

After reading a few of the erudite posts on this thread, I suspect that 17/04/15 may well have also been the last performance of David Matthews's imaginatively titled SYMPHONY No. 8.

Getting second and subsequent performances of new works being the problem that it can often be, I would nevertheless counsel that, if its reception, including reviews, is anything by which to go, your suspicion will likely turn out to be unfounded, although only time will tell, of course, as I am unaware at this point that any further performance of it have yet been scheduled; that said, I don't think that the work is any more or less imaginatively titled than any other symphony to which its composer has given a number but no subtitle.

[french frank]

but whose "comfort zones" are under consideration here? - the composers' or the listeners' or both? - and how are they to be identified as such, especially as one person's "comfort zone" won't necessarily be another's

Exactly, only the individual knows the limits of his/her comfort zone. But being bemused by the radical new or irritated by 'musical conservatism' are equally moving out of one's comfort zone, where as a listener one feels comfortable.

[ahinton]

I certainly do think that large number of listeners feel quite satisfied with their own comfort zone(s). I was simply suggesting, timidly, that just as 'conservatives' may well be satisfied with what they know and are resistant to seeking out the 'new', so people who inhabit the 'new' have less interest in anything which they have 'heard before'.

I wondered, for example, when you said: ' "the need for tidy, dominant-into-tonic endings in which everyone lived happily ever after" irritates the hell out of me, it's musical conservatism in every sense' whether earlier composers such as Mozart or Schubert similarly irritated you, or whether the knowledge that, in their time, they weren't conservatives made a difference to what you heard and your reaction to it.

Interesting points. While assuming that the likelihood that Richard has the hell irritated out of him by that aspect of Mozart or Schubert is far less than the fact of their not being "conservatives" in their day making a difference to how he might hear their perfect cadences (as distinct from those written by other composers last week), the issues that continue to engage me here are (a) that "tidy" perfect cadences do not of themselves necessarily presume "everyone living happily after (and presumably because of) them" and (b) whether by definition perfect cadential endings are always of themselves indicators of "musical conservatism" even if they've been written long after the days when they were far more commonplace than is the case now; furthermore, given the thread topic, as I am not (as I mentioned earlier) especially exercised by the prevalence of V-I endings in the symphonies of David Matthews, I'm less than certain of the relevance of this reference in the present context.

[ahinton]

But they played with that, especially Haydn and Beethoven, a lot of wrong footing in regards to expectations and Mozart so gloriously chromatic about everything. Schubert transgressing the notion of form in every way. It's just that we hear it a little differently now.

But did everyone - or even most people - who listened to that music in its own day all hear it the same way at the time?

So in that sense unless you have something relevant to add to that domain ( and I for one don't dismiss the notion that this might be possible) why attempt a symphony?

Because you feel that you have something to say that's best expressed by writing one, presumably!

Oh! I guess that's where Matthew's 8th symphony is recalcitrant - it only has three movements.

So were all composers who wrote symphonies comprising other than four movements "recalcitrant"?!

I am a composer of sorts. I don't have the talent nor the strong backbone of belief in my own work as the likes of, e.g. Richard Barrett or ahinton. That said, even in my own very small world of not groundbreaking work, I could tell you and show you how what I do does really represent a development upon things past; to the extent when I call something a melody or harmony it probably isn't the same reference point as many people here would assume. As in Serial Apologist: no it doesn't follow at all that I would prefer a piece of Charles Ives to, say, Erwartung.

I remember Lutosławski saying in an interview once "we must find a new kind of melody". Now that can and could meen all manner of things to all manner of people, but it does at least point up, however indirectly, that there are already lots of different valid ideas of what constitues melody and the same can be said for harmony.

[french frank]

I am a composer of sorts.

You're very modest, hedgehog, too modest

I think my point was whether someone who is working creatively really hears the music in the same way, particularly if you are detecting forms which you feel instinctively you want to move away from. Does that make you feel that every composer should move away from them albeit doing it in a different way from you?

People who are purely or principally listeners may (do!) positively revel in hearing and re-hearing (and re-re-hearing) forms that you find outdated. Where one wants to move on, the other wants to stay in something like the same place. How objective can you be about composers who - I'm lost for words, sorry! - who … compose differently?

[Serial_Apologist]

I certainly do think that large number of listeners feel quite satisfied with their own comfort zone(s). I was simply suggesting, timidly, that just as 'conservatives' may well be satisfied with what they know and are resistant to seeking out the 'new', so people who inhabit the 'new' have less interest in anything which they have 'heard before'.

I wondered, for example, when you said: ' "the need for tidy, dominant-into-tonic endings in which everyone lived happily ever after" irritates the hell out of me, it's musical conservatism in every sense' whether earlier composers such as Mozart or Schubert similarly irritated you, or whether the knowledge that, in their time, they weren't conservatives made a difference to what you heard and your reaction to it.

The latter as far as my own listening is concerned. In other words, music of the past whose language has become so habitually ingrained requires one to endeavour to reconfigure ones listening to hear it anew, as it was when it was first heard.

I'm just wondering to what extent the retention or resuscitation of tonality as an ordering principle in symphonic-type composition and its erstwhile sub-types, is what divides views on Matthew's eighth symphony? Is the whole idea of tonality, the great tradition Robert Simpson saw as summed up for the modern age in Nielsen's seizing the baton from Beethoven? Someone here will be quick to remind us that the later Simpson symphonies were not regarded as being tonal as far as being framework determining in this sense. This has been replaced by some composers returning to tonality, not in some kind of history-challenging bedrock sense that can then slip nonchalantly into commercialism, as has happened with some former Minimalists - but maybe in some tacit sense which will only be sensed as for example Peter Maxwell Davies's and Henze's symphonies might one day be, given that underpinning tonal architecture has been described as underpinning them. For others, such as maybe Goehr, tonality has lost its once-venerated post-Renaissance universality, and is reduced to a "colour" or expressive device, or evocatively associative, as a Tango might be considered. The tacit criticism I sense in Boulez's criticism of Dutilleux would once have been that tonality, the bedrock of symphonic thought, has outworn its capacity to be an organising principle in musical thought since somewhere around the year 1908, and that thereafter, anyone therefore composing an atonal symphony, such as Roberto Gerhard, forfeits any right they may have assumed or had foisted on them to be considered to be advancing music in new directions, rather as would a modern-day architect designing a building constructed using caste iron. Schoenberg, on the other hand - as we were reminded a few years ago on the old boards by someone whose name might best not be mentioned, saw tonality as safeguarded within 12-tone serialism, thereby re-valdating the concept of symphony in a post-tonal age, (though AS only composed two symphonies, both of them tonal, albeit attenuatively), though to a Boulez it would probably take a somewhat old fashioned listening approach (like mine) to hear it thus.

[ahinton]

I'm just wondering to what extent the retention or resuscitation of tonality as an ordering principle in symphonic-type composition and its erstwhile sub-types, is what divides views on Matthew's eighth symphony?

Well, Richard has clarified that he's not expressing negative views about beause of its tonality.

Is the whole idea of tonality, the great tradition Robert Simpson saw as summed up for the modern age in Nielsen's seizing the baton from Beethoven? Someone here will be quick to remind us that the later Simpson symphonies were not regarded as being tonal as far as being framework determining in this sense. This has been replaced by some composers returning to tonality, not in some kind of history-challenging bedrock sense that can then slip nonchalantly into commercialism, as has happened with some former Minimalists - but maybe in some tacit sense which will only be sensed as for example Peter Maxwell Davies's and Henze's symphonies might one day be, given that underpinning tonal architecture has been described as underpinning them.

Interesting thoughts, although the notion of Simpson's later symphonies not being regarded as tonal doesn't quite work for my ears!

For others, such as maybe Goehr, tonality has lost its once-regarded post-Renaissance universality, and is reduced to a "colour" or expressive device, or evocatively associative, as a Tango might be considered.

As to the notion of V-I cadential conclusions irritating the hell out of anyone, I've only ever done that once, years ago (and in C major at that!) and I did think long and hard before letting it go but decided to do so because the work just flatly refused to end any other way; I hope that it wouldn't irritate the hell out of anyone and I certainly have no sense that it would generate any kind of "happily ever after" feeling!
But, if so, is it necessarily and identifiably any more so than any other aspect of the music's content? Tonality is a matter of degree in any case and some listeners perceive tonal references, tonal allusions, tonal underpinning and the rest more than some others might in any given work.

The tacit criticism I sense in Boulez's criticism of Dutilleux would once have been that tonality, the bedrock of symphonic thought, has outworn its capacity to be an organising principle in musical thought since somewhere around the year 1908

I think so too, except that I'd raise eyebrows at a year as early as 1908!

and that thereafter, anyone therefore composing an atonal symphony, such as Roberto Gerhard, forfeits any right they may have assumed or had foisted on them to be considered to be advancing music in new directions.

I don't know what Boulez thought of Gerhard's symphonies or indeed what he might have thought, or still thinks, about composers wishing to write symphonies whose tonal bonds have been loosened as much as is the case in those of Gerhard, Henze, Sessions and others.

Schoenberg, on the other hand - as wee were reminded a few years ago on the old boards by someone whose name might best not be mentioned, saw tonality as safeguarded within 12-tone serialism, though to a Boulez it would probably take a somewhat old fashioned listening approach (like mine) to hear it thus.

I don't recall that and am not quite clear at this remove what might have been meant by it; if it relates in some what to your own listening approach, does that mean that your ears have a tendency to find tonal references, allusions, underpinnings and the like where some other listeners might not and, if so, what does that mean to you?

[Serial_Apologist]

I don't recall that and am not quite clear at this remove what might have been meant by it; if it relates in some what to your own listening approach, does that mean that your ears have a tendency to find tonal references, allusions, underpinnings and the like where some other listeners might not and, if so, what does that mean to you?

I'm afraid I'm one of those people (I hope there aren't too many!) who tends to impose associations that probably aren't there on unfamiliar music! I do like the idea that the greatness of tonality runs like some kind of DNA through Schoenberg's 12-tone compositions, and those whom I hear as continuing in his slipstream such as Skalkottas, Gerhard, Dallapiccola, Goehr, David Blake. I find something illuminating in the rich imagery of their musics, which are all pretty conventional in comparison with Richard Barrett's music and his work with improvising musicians whom I nevertheless seek to listen to likemindedly, imposing my own sense of pulses and other assumed continuities which may or may not actually be there and just getting off on sonorities similar to the way I do listening to a great piece of orchestration by say Boulez or Takemitsu. I like complexity - it seems somehow ingrained in art that seeks to mirror or express the complexity of the age we live in. It strikes me that pop music has probably stayed idiomatically in the restricted rhythmic and harmonic range it has occupied longer than any other kind of music I can think of outside modern Europeanj-influenced cultures; even (even!!!) Mozart's music (and the music of lesser others of is time) evolved more than European and American chart pop music has in the past 45 years, making Seargent Pepper-period Beatles still sound progressive to this day because it willingly embraced its time in all its complexities and contradictions, albeit starting from a simpler base in R&B etc. Why is pop stuck? Because it resists change and its promoters instill a complememtarily stuck ethos in its consumers' heads, and to reinforce the common perception that nothing will or can change for the better. This, along with the sense of achievement in getting to grips with it all, (and parallel developmenjts in jazz), is why my sympathies lean heavily towards music that pushes its own boundaries. I think a lot of new music has got stuck and is backward-looking because civilisation has got stuck in a karmic-like vicious circle, repeating the same old same old till the end of time!

Hope than answers some of your questions!

[ahinton]

I'm afraid I'm one of those people (I hope there aren't too many!) who tends to impose associations that probably aren't there on unfamiliar music! I do like the idea that the greatness of tonality runs like some kind of DNA through Schoenberg's 12-tone compositions, and those whom I hear as continuing in his slipstream such as Skalkottas, Gerhard, Dallapiccola, Goehr, David Blake. I find something illuminating in the rich imagery of their musics, which are all pretty conventional in comparison with Richard Barrett's music and his work with improvising musicians whom I nevertheless seek to listen to likemindedly, imposing my own sense of pulses and other assumed continuities which may or may not actually be there and just getting off on sonorities similar to the way I do listening to a great piece of orchestration by say Boulez or Takemitsu. I like complexity - it seems somehow ingrained in art that seeks to mirror or express the complexity of the age we live in. It strikes me that pop music has probably stayed idiomatically in the restricted rhythmic and harmonic range it has occupied longer than any other kind of music I can think of outside modern Europeanj-influenced cultures; even (even!!!) Mozart's music (and the music of lesser others of is time) evolved more than European and American chart pop music has in the past 45 years, making Seargent Pepper-period Beatles still sound progressive to this day because it willingly embraced its time in all its complexities and contradictions, albeit starting from a simpler base in R&B etc. Why is pop stuck? Because it resists change and its promoters instill a complememtarily stuck ethos in its consumers' heads, and to reinforce the common perception that nothing will or can change for the better. This, along with the sense of achievement in getting to grips with it all, (and parallel developmenjts in jazz), is why my sympathies lean heavily towards music that pushes its own boundaries. I think a lot of new music has got stuck and is backward-looking because civilisation has got stuck in a karmic-like vicious circle, repeating the same old same old till the end of time!

Hope than answers some of your questions!

More than! No time for more right now other than once again to offer you many thanks!

[Richard Barrett]

it willingly embraced its time in all its complexities and contradictions

This is the crux of it, in my opinion. (As opposed to the talk about comfort zones, for example.) Being a response to its time instead of being a rejection of it or, worse, just a symptom of it.

Obviously there's a big difference between Mozart or Schubert and someone in 2015 composing "like" Mozart or Schubert (not that I'm saying DM is doing that!). Their music was an authentic response to its time. That's the main reason I prefer to hear it in historically-informed performance - because then you can hear better how new it was. It isn't a question of constantly being after unfamiliar experiences. I still go back to listen to music that I first encountered forty years ago. If music is (for want of a better word) fresh, it remains fresh.

I don't think I hold these opinions just because I'm involved creatively in music-making. Anyway it's not necessarily the case that listeners are doing anything less creative than people who call themselves composers.

[ahinton]

This is the crux of it, in my opinion. (As opposed to the talk about comfort zones, for example.) Being a response to its time instead of being a rejection of it or, worse, just a symptom of it.

Obviously there's a big difference between Mozart or Schubert and someone in 2015 composing "like" Mozart or Schubert (not that I'm saying DM is doing that!). Their music was an authentic response to its time. That's the main reason I prefer to hear it in historically-informed performance - because then you can hear better how new it was. It isn't a question of constantly being after unfamiliar experiences. I still go back to listen to music that I first encountered forty years ago. If music is (for want of a better word) fresh, it remains fresh.

I don't think I hold these opinions just because I'm involved creatively in music-making. Anyway it's not necessarily the case that listeners are doing anything less creative than people who call themselves composers.

"People who call themselves composers" would surely not decline to call themselves listeners as well, though, surely?!...

There is today, however - and has for quite some time been - a "tradition" (for want of a better word - a "practice" might be more appropriate) of listening to the music of the past as well as the present which was by no means as prevalent or indeed not possible to anything like the same extent in Mozart's and Schubert's day; I'm also conscious of the reservations expressed by Robert Simpson on HIPP performance as the only way properly to perform the music of the past (although the term HIPP had yet to establish itself as such as that time) that we cannot listen to the music of Bach as Bach's contemporaries did (however it might be performed) because we have listened to Xenakis (and I doubt that Simpson referred to Xenakis very often!).

Wouldn't you also be prepared to consider that it might have been somewhat easier for the music of Mozart, Schubert and their contemporaries to write music that could be seen as an authentic response to their respective times than is the case today? And in any case, given that we know a great deal more about past times today than Mozart's and Schubert's contemporaries did, mightn't a fuller response to our time need to some extent to embrace reflect that knowledge and consciousness of the past and its relationship with the present as well as the present itself?

I don't even think that this is necessarily an issue that affects only our time and only composers today (David Matthews, for example) who write in ways that don't appeal to you because to hear them as though they are other than an authentic response to their time; whilst there can be little doubt that the music of, say, Britten, Vaughan Williams and most especially Tippett has to some degree affected the ways in which David Matthews thinks and works (not that I am suggesting that his music sound like a mere pale reflection of theirs!), those composers were variously writing at the same time as Varèse, Schönberg, Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis et al, so the question to be asked (if indeed there is one) might not so much be "which of those composers best responded to their time in their music?" as "did all of those composers respond to their time in their own different ways?"

Just a thought...

[french frank]

"People who call themselves composers" would surely not decline to call themselves listeners as well, though, surely?!...

Though it is surely relevant what it is they choose to listen to and, on the other hand, what they don't listen to, much, (not necessarily as deliberate avoidance but because there are other types of music that interest them more)? There is today a vast range of "People who call themselves composers", and presumably there is a mild tendency, in some cases, for their listening choices to reflect their own composing style? Or is that invariably a wrong assumption?

[Should mention that the phrase "comfort zone" was first mentioned in #76].

Wouldn't you also be prepared to consider that it might have been somewhat easier for the music of Mozart, Schubert and their contemporaries to write music that could be seen as an authentic response to their respective times than is the case today?

Addressed to Richard, but a good question. The range of music existing today, old and new, popular and 'art', must be bewildering in its variety and scope.

[Tevot]

Well I would like to thank you Jayne and Alistair for posting your thoughts.
I have listened now 3 times and this work is fast becoming a favourite of mine.
Only managed to get the thing out of my head this evening by listening to Manfred

Wow Edgy - that sounds like a double bill and a half !!

I must give this Matthews chappie a spin...

Best Wishes,

Tevot

[Richard Barrett]

there is a mild tendency, in some cases, for their listening choices to reflect their own composing style? Or is that invariably a wrong assumption?

What I was saying is that if there's any reflection going on it's more likely to be in the other direction. So I do think that's a wrong assumption. The reason I used the phrase "people who call themselves composers", by the way, is that really there's no such thing as "being a composer", there's only creating music (or not). It's not like being a murderer, in the sense that if you've done it once you are that thing for the rest of your life!

(And I'm quite aware it was me who first mentioned "comfort zones" - I was a bit doubtful about using the phrase then, having never liked it much, and in retrospect I think it's an experiment I won't be repeating!)

[ahinton]

The reason I used the phrase "people who call themselves composers", by the way, is that really there's no such thing as "being a composer", there's only creating music (or not). It's not like being a murderer, in the sense that if you've done it once you are that thing for the rest of your life!

Gesualdo, anyone?...