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

[teamsaint]

i think RBs point about the composers/musicians response to their own time (and place/experience/background/expressed world view/whatever) is critical. But our response is only determined our our perception of those situations, and its really important to embrace the full reality of that, which is that those perceptions of that are inevitably flawed.
Accepting this helps (me) to deal with, for example, thinking about how, original or derivative a piece of work may be, the much quoted Sgt Pepper being a good example of work where people have very differing opinions and understandings about the composers responses to their environment.

[jayne lee wilson]

It's an obvious point perhaps, but to reflect upon ( or judge) an "8th Symphony" without hearing the other 7 is perhaps a little...injudicious?

Listening again to D. Matthews Symphonies 1-3 yesterday (all very intricate & concentrated one-movement structures)... you can easily relate 1 and 3 to each other, and as coming from the Tippett/Britten line - but doing something strikingly new with it; but with No.2 you can only think "WHAT the?! Where on Earth did that come from?" If I played Richard a snatch from 2 or 5 he'd probably not believe it was the same composer, and if serious listening means anything, surely it means listening contextually. I realise some will say, "oh but a work must stand alone"... well, as Brahms said about an obvious echo of his own, "any fool can see that". But imagine hearing Beethoven's 8th before all his others, and thinking "Bit noisy and I wish it had a slow movement", or Mahler 8 and saying "impressive, but I hate opera, so..."

From one angle (of bewilderingly many, in 2015!) you could see the 8 David Matthews Symphonies, in all their dazzling variety, as asking the question "What can a symphony be today?" or "What does it mean to write a symphony now?". Either in the context of all other symphonies, tonal or not, all around us & instantly available... Or specifically in today's cultural moment.
But I think that the audible relation of Matthews' works to a recognisable recent tradition (perhaps with the exception of No.2!) is a strength, not a weakness; and from there you can begin to consider what the more reflective, somewhat less intense or agonised moods of Nos 7 and 8 might "mean"...

[Beef Oven!]

i think RBs point about the composers/musicians response to their own time (and place/experience/background/expressed world view/whatever) is critical. But our response is only determined our our perception of those situations, and its really important to embrace the full reality of that, which is that those perceptions of that are inevitably flawed.
Accepting this helps (me) to deal with, for example, thinking about how, original or derivative a piece of work may be, the much quoted Sgt Pepper being a good example of work where people have very differing opinions and understandings about the composers responses to their environment.

Fortunately, I only have Symphonies 1,3 & 5, so the forum is spared any nonsense from me on this symphony. I quite like the symphonies that I've heard and I am looking forward to hearing 6 (and then maybe 7).

But there is one thing I'll say!

What rankles about all this, is that conservative music like Matthews' will be recorded and performed, whereas music that does not conform to traditional sound worlds and formats (and to my mind more interesting music) really struggles to even get to the foothills.

[Serial_Apologist]

What rankles about all this, is that conservative music like Matthews' will be recorded and performed, whereas music that does not conform to traditional sound worlds and formats (and to my mind more interesting music) really struggles to even get to the foothills.

There was a time, (late 60s/early 70s) when majors took an interest; today I tend to find such recorded stuff on display at gigs: Cafe Oto used to lay CDs out on a table just inside the entrance next to where you paid - not sure about now as their musical policy has changed somewhat - and also at the Vortex, also a stone's throw for you, where one of the partners who runs it also runs Babel records and has a boxful of stuff on the end of the bar: a bit jazzy, p'raps, for your listening regime? but bands usually charge punters just a tenner per album.

[Beef Oven!]

There was a time, (late 60s/early 70s) when majors took an interest; today I tend to find such recorded stuff on display at gigs: Cafe Oto used to lay CDs out on a table just inside the entrance next to where you paid - not sure about now as their musical policy has changed somewhat - and also at the Vortex, also a stone's throw for you, where one of the partners who runs it also runs Babel records and has a boxful of stuff on the end of the bar: a bit jazzy, p'raps, for your listening regime? but bands usually charge punters just a tenner per album.

I must say that I recognise what you say about the late 60s/early 70s. It does feel that 'the music scene' is far more conservative nowadays (or a least any development has fizzled out).

I like a fair bit of jazz, particularly free jazz and similar and European artists too (they seem more adventurous to me, than the Americans).

But I was really thinking of "classical" music.

[ahinton]

It's an obvious point perhaps, but to reflect upon ( or judge) an "8th Symphony" without hearing the other 7 is perhaps a little...injudicious?

Listening again to D. Matthews Symphonies 1-3 yesterday (all very intricate & concentrated one-movement structures)... you can easily relate 1 and 3 to each other, and as coming from the Tippett/Britten line - but doing something strikingly new with it; but with No.2 you can only think "WHAT the?! Where on Earth did that come from?" If I played Richard a snatch from 2 or 5 he'd probably not believe it was the same composer, and if serious listening means anything, surely it means listening contextually. I realise some will say, "oh but a work must stand alone"... well, as Brahms said about an obvious echo of his own, "any fool can see that". But imagine hearing Beethoven's 8th before all his others, and thinking "Bit noisy and I wish it had a slow movement", or Mahler 8 and saying "impressive, but I hate opera, so..."

From one angle (of bewilderingly many, in 2015!) you could see the 8 David Matthews Symphonies, in all their dazzling variety, as asking the question "What can a symphony be today?" or "What does it mean to write a symphony now?". Either in the context of all other symphonies, tonal or not, all around us & instantly available... Or specifically in today's cultural moment.
But I think that the audible relation of Matthews' works to a recognisable recent tradition (perhaps with the exception of No.2!) is a strength, not a weakness; and from there you can begin to consider what the more reflective, somewhat less intense or agonised moods of Nos 7 and 8 might "mean"...

Well said!

I wonder if in his second he was responding to a different time? Actually, the more I think about this "responding to one's time" thing the more implausible it seems to become. Apart from the fact that we all react differently to most things and some of us might react differently to the same or similar things at different times, depending on circumstance, take, for example, Weinberg, Dutilleux and Arnold, or Carter, Pettersson and Britten, each group of composers born within a few years of one another and whose musics are all so different; did any one of each group of three respond to his time any more effectively or persuasively then either of the others? Their upbringings and environments were all different, of course, so for that reason alone this would seem somewhat less than likely, I imagine. Or what of four composers born in the same year (two of them even on the same day) and the same country - Ferneyhough, Bryars, Matthews (D) and Holloway - whose musics are even more different to one another...

[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).

But where might you draw the line here? There's no such thing as "being a pianist" there's only playing the piano? There's no such thing as "being a research neuroscientist", there's only conducting neuroscientific research? There's no such thing as society, only individuals (and no, neither of us would say that and mean it any more than did the person to whom is has nevertheless been widely ascribed). Pardon my own apparent inbecility, if you will (and not if you won't, of course), but I'd always thought of you as a composer because you compose...

[jayne lee wilson]

Fortunately, I only have Symphonies 1,3 & 5, so the forum is spared any nonsense from me on this symphony. I quite like the symphonies that I've heard and I am looking forward to hearing 6 (and then maybe 7).

But there is one thing I'll say!

What rankles about all this, is that conservative music like Matthews' will be recorded and performed, whereas music that does not conform to traditional sound worlds and formats (and to my mind more interesting music) really struggles to even get to the foothills.

Er....

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_nr_n_0?fst=as%3Aoff&rh=n%3A229816%2Cn%3A505586%2Ck%3Arichard+barrett&keywords=richard+barrett&ie=UTF8&qid=1429988768&rnid=520920

[Beef Oven!]

Er....

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_nr_...68&rnid=520920

Er, what? I bought that in 2012. And three or for other CDs by this composer, along the way.

It hardly contradicts my point.

And I'm also talking about performances, not just CDs.

[jayne lee wilson]

You want it, we got it...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_6?url=search-alias%3Dpopular&field-keywords=unsuk+chin&sprefix=unsuk+%2Cpopular%2C130&rh=n%3A229816%2Ck%3Aunsuk+chin

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_15?url=search-alias%3Dpopular&field-keywords=sebastian+fagerlund&sprefix=sebastian+fager%2Cpopular%2C130&rh=n%3A229816%2Ck%3Asebastian+fagerlund

etc etc....

As for tired old "conservatives".... D.Matthews is about as conservative as The Tardis...with rather less fustian surfaces, however....

[Beef Oven!]

You want it, we got it...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_6?url=search-alias%3Dpopular&field-keywords=unsuk+chin&sprefix=unsuk+%2Cpopular%2C130&rh=n%3A229816%2Ck%3Aunsuk+chin

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_15?url=search-alias%3Dpopular&field-keywords=sebastian+fagerlund&sprefix=sebastian+fager%2Cpopular%2C130&rh=n%3A229816%2Ck%3Asebastian+fagerlund

etc etc....

As for tired old "conservatives".... D.Matthews is about as conservative as The Tardis...with rather less fustian surfaces, however....

Thanks, a few interesting things to check out.

[Richard Barrett]

It's an obvious point perhaps, but to reflect upon ( or judge) an "8th Symphony" without hearing the other 7 is perhaps a little...[I]injudicious?

I don't think that's obvious at all! I'm not that keen on Beethoven's 8th either... Mahler's on the other hand is never very far away from my thoughts. In fact I first heard it when I had little idea who Mahler was, and it led me to a close and lasting relationship with his work which DM's 8th emphatically hasn't. "What can a symphony be today?" - why is that an interesting question, I wonder? I agree with BO (how often does that happen?) that contemporary composition seems in general to be much more conservative than it was forty years ago.

[jayne lee wilson]

What can a symphony be now.... or perhaps what can a classical symphony be now, can it exist at all... is an intensely involving matter for me partly because I carry around symphonies by Schumann, Bruckner, Sibelius, Nielsen, Roussel and many others in my head, my "living memory". I love this music. So it's thrilling to discover work that relates to that tradition, but which makes it new, being created today or in the recent past - and also means (for some of us, at least) that it is a living tradition...

[ahinton]

What can a symphony be now.... or perhaps what can a classical symphony be now, can it exist at all... is an intensely involving matter for me partly because I carry around symphonies by Schumann, Bruckner, Sibelius, Nielsen, Roussel and many others in my head, my "living memory". I love this music. So it's thrilling to discover work that relates to that tradition, but which makes it new, being created today or in the recent past - and also means (for some of us, at least) that it is a living tradition...

It's the bit in brackets that seems to me to be of the essence here; some others may simply not engage with this but perhaps some others again do not wish to do so as it seems to them not to accord to the world view to which they choose to subscribe...

There's cutting edge on the one hand - and cutting ice (or not) on the other...

[Richard Barrett]

I love this music. So it's thrilling to discover work that relates to that tradition, but which makes it new, being created today or in the recent past - and also means (for some of us, at least) that it is a living tradition...

I don't get the logical connection implied by the "so". And as I said before, relating to a tradition and "making it new" has always in the past involved really "making it new" rather than doing not very much more than preserving it. In the past, many musical forms - I don't need to list them, surely - have disappeared altogether when "making it new" involved going beyond their limits. I love much of the music you mention too. So it's thrilling to hear it and to experience the originality and authenticity of it.