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

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

And-at the other hand- wasn't it CM von Weber who said about Beethoven's 7th "this is the non-plus-ultra of madness. B is rife for the mad house" or similar expressions?

Apparently not - the only source for this comment is in the work of the unreliable Schindler.

Such was stated on the BaL on Beethoven's Seventh a couple of months ago, at any rate.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Does your inclusion of 'bravely' and 'meaningful' (not that I'm intending to dispute them) lead to the position that writing a symphony for a symphony orchestra is no longer an interesting exercise? [Is there a 'Yes' or 'No' answer?] Or can it still be done in a 'brave' and 'meaningful' way?

It can - but, in the Matthews Eighth, it hasn't.

I can't imagine how it could - but I keep listening to new works called "Symphony" by their composers in the hope that revelation will emerge.

[Serial_Apologist]

I think that it can and that there is evidence in support of such a belief, though I cannot imagine trying one meself...

John Picard's third represents for me an important contribution to the literature in that to my ears it represents a detailed complexification of idiom compared to David Matthews', and that's all I ask of contemporary orchestral or chamber music, even if it is a big ask!

[Serial_Apologist]

It can - but, in the Matthews Eighth, it hasn't.

I can't imagine how it could - but I keep listening to new works called "Symphony" by their composers in the hope that revelation will emerge.

Precisely my own feeling.

[Richard Barrett]

each (for want of an alternate phrase) variation of a "new simplicity" is different from anything that has appeared before

... so in what sense could it be called a "return"? - this is my point. Maybe the alternating tendency towards complexity is just as much (or as little) of a "return". I say this because the establishment of a "new simplicity" is often accompanied by an insistence that it represents a "return" to some kind of natural order - while actually it could just as easily be said that a "natural order" (such as that we see around us!) is just as likely to be highly complex, depending perhaps on how closely one looks at it.

And - something that's just occurred to me - I don't think that rapid evolutions in musical style are always in the direction of a sudden increase in simplicity. Take for example the development of serial music in the years after 1945: this very explicitly involved a rejection of many of the assumptions behind previous ways of doing things, but could be described as embodying an increase in complexity rather than a "return" to something else.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... so in what sense could it be called a "return"? - this is my point. Maybe the alternating tendency towards complexity is just as much (or as little) of a "return". I say this because the establishment of a "new simplicity" is often accompanied by an insistence that it represents a "return" to some kind of natural order - while actually it could just as easily be said that a "natural order" (such as that we see around us!) is just as likely to be highly complex, depending perhaps on how closely one looks at it.

Perhaps - and I hesitate to suggest this to you of all people - because we tend to think of "simple"/"basic" structures in nature as "developing" into more complex organisms? There aren't (WAY out of my own "comfort zone" here) examples of complex organisms spontaneously coming into existence and developing/evolving into less complex/"simple" ones?

[Serial_Apologist]

Perhaps - and I hesitate to suggest this to you of all people - because we tend to think of "simple"/"basic" structures in nature as "developing" into more complex organisms? There aren't (WAY out of my own "comfort zone" here) examples of complex organisms spontaneously coming into existence and developing/evolving into less complex/"simple" ones?

Relationships between organisms in an evolving ecosystem also appear to become more complex as time goes on; my non-expert hunch (!) would be that, often for very good practical life-protecting or enhancing purposes, ways of understanding have to involve more and more complex thinking processes, sometimes resorting to or drawing on computer calculations, which come to have their analogies in musical and artistic means and modes of expression. And this is even before one considers the constant bombardment of information to which we are all of us more and more subject, as PM Davies and Carter have acknowledged.

[Richard Barrett]

we tend to think of "simple"/"basic" structures in nature as "developing" into more complex organisms? There aren't (WAY out of my own "comfort zone" here) examples of complex organisms spontaneously coming into existence and developing/evolving into less complex/"simple" ones?

Well... the limbs of whales and dolphins are indeed a lot simpler in structure than those of their land-living ancestors, for example, which would have been a gradual process of reduction over evolutionary time. Another relevant example perhaps: the single cells of multicellular organisms tend to be a lot simpler than the individuals of ancestral unicellular organisms. And thirdly there was the so-called "Cambrian explosion" of 550 million years ago in which the range of animal "designs" (relatively) suddenly increased before many of them became extinct, leaving behind not much more than the range of phyla we are now familiar with, so you could say that viewed as a whole the fauna of the world underwent, for whatever reason, a rapid increase in complexity followed by a slower decrease.

This is of course straying a long way off topic. The thing is that if we think of, as you say, simple or basic structures being primordial and (as you didn't say!) somehow "pure" or whatever, why is it that (in human culture, say) they always have a tendency to complexify? That seems to be in a way a more "natural" process than that of forcing everything back to simplicity again.

[ahinton]

Well... the limbs of whales and dolphins are indeed a lot simpler in structure than those of their land-living ancestors, for example, which would have been a gradual process of reduction over evolutionary time. Another relevant example perhaps: the single cells of multicellular organisms tend to be a lot simpler than the individuals of ancestral unicellular organisms. And thirdly there was the so-called "Cambrian explosion" of 550 million years ago in which the range of animal "designs" (relatively) suddenly increased before many of them became extinct, leaving behind not much more than the range of phyla we are now familiar with, so you could say that viewed as a whole the fauna of the world underwent, for whatever reason, a rapid increase in complexity followed by a slower decrease.

This is of course straying a long way off topic. The thing is that if we think of, as you say, simple or basic structures being primordial and (as you didn't say!) somehow "pure" or whatever, why is it that (in human culture, say) they always have a tendency to complexify? That seems to be in a way a more "natural" process than that of forcing everything back to simplicity again.

That's all interesting, however far from the topic it might be (and it's not really in any case to the extent that the side issue of complexity has come up in its context). But why would anyone want to "force" anything back to simplicity for the sake of so doing? Where music and other things are concerned, there is in any case a place for both simplicity and complexity of utterance and the sheer range of complexities is as immense as the degrees of those complexities are variable - by which I mean, for example, that just because a piece or a passage from one might happen to be broadly tonal and include allusions to "traditional" harmony does not of itself even guarantee that those harmonic relationships - still less its rhythms, polyphonies, melodic shapes and structures - will necessarily be "simple"; Schönberg's D minor quartet, E major Chamber Symphony and Erwartung could reasonably be regarded even today as quite complex in their own right and on their own terms, yet each embraces "traditional" tonal harmony and other aspects of "traditional" writing.

[clive heath]

Quite apart from skulls, spine ribs etc

http://www.ftexploring.com/askdrg/askdrgalapagos3.html

tells you of at least part of the blue whale skeleton soon to replace Dippy in the Natural Current Events Museum (get it?)

[ahinton]

Quite apart from skulls, spine ribs etc

http://www.ftexploring.com/askdrg/askdrgalapagos3.html

tells you of at least part of the blue whale skeleton soon to replace Dippy in the Natural Current Events Museum (get it?)

Well, "Do whale's have bones or is their skeletal structure all cartilage?" wouldn't pass the For3 Pedants' Paradise test, would it?!

What next? Composers from Wale's?...

[clive heath]

Just trying to add some wit which along with vigour, grace and charm seem to elude those who spend inordinate amounts of time eliminating any such attributes from their compositions in the name of modernity which isn't better just different.

[Roehre]

Just trying to add some wit which along with vigour, grace and charm seem to elude those who spend inordinate amounts of time eliminating any such attributes from their compositions in the name of modernity which isn't better just different.

That's just a matter of adding some accidentals and some harmonically independent (counter-)melodies to your scores, as Charles Ives did

[Richard Barrett]

Just trying to add some wit

Try a bit harder maybe!

S_A, I'm not sure about organisms in an evolving ecosystem inevitably becoming more complex. Some certainly do, but the most numerous life-forms in the world by far are bacteria (their biomass exceeds all plants and animals on the planet put together), and while they continue to evolve often rather quickly they're no more complex than they were a couple of billion years ago. But in any case care should be taken in extrapolating from something like organic evolution to something like musical composition! - what does "complexity" actually mean in this context? As it happens I was talking to a colleague about this earlier today. An idea we tried out was that it's a measure of how many different pathways and perspectives a listener can take through a piece of music, though this idea of course begs many questions.

[ahinton]

Try a bit harder maybe!

S_A, I'm not sure about organisms in an evolving ecosystem inevitably becoming more complex. Some certainly do, but the most numerous life-forms in the world by far are bacteria (their biomass exceeds all plants and animals on the planet put together), and while they continue to evolve often rather quickly they're no more complex than they were a couple of billion years ago. But in any case care should be taken in extrapolating from something like organic evolution to something like musical composition! - what does "complexity" actually mean in this context? As it happens I was talking to a colleague about this earlier today. An idea we tried out was that it's a measure of how many different pathways and perspectives a listener can take through a piece of music, though this idea of course begs many questions.

Indeed - this very "what is complexity in music" is quite a vexed question - or at the very least a broad one with even broader possible answers. One example might be the most elaborate and intricate of Godowsky's 54 Studies on the Études of Chopin - pianistically complex and complex in other ways as well, yet his harmonic language by no means hurls lances into the future and might even be argued to be less "forward looking " than Chopin's own from decades earlier...