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

[clive heath]

On the contrary, picking holes in people's arguments is what this is all about and there is lots to enjoy and to learn from.

[Richard Barrett]

picking holes in people's arguments is what this is all about

I see. But someone has to have the arguments for the holes to be picked in!

[Quarky]

I was going to qualify my ‘negative’ by adding in parenthesis ‘(or at least passive)’

I don’t know anything about DM’s career as a whole - but given his age I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he once considered himself to be out on a bit of a limb. Not someone passively acquiescing to the demands of the market place.

A very full autobiography (at least for a Web page):http://www.david-matthews.co.uk/biography/default.asp

" I now live in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a pleasant part of London with a wood at the top of my road, with my wife Jenifer. My recent music has become more diatonic, and I have been using folksong in some pieces, and incorporating birdsong into others. Landscape and the natural world have always been important stimuli for my music"

[Ian]

A very full autobiography (at least for a Web page):http://www.david-matthews.co.uk/biography/default.asp

" I now live in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a pleasant part of London with a wood at the top of my road, with my wife Jenifer. My recent music has become more diatonic, and I have been using folksong in some pieces, and incorporating birdsong into others. Landscape and the natural world have always been important stimuli for my music"

Thanks for the link

"Both Anthony Milner and Nicholas Maw -... - helped me gain the confidence to write as I wanted instead of feeling that I should try to compose like Boulez or Stockhausen, who dominated the musical scene in the 1960s."


which seems to illustrate something about him not considering himself to be a passive deliverer of the expected.

[ahinton]

A very full autobiography (at least for a Web page):http://www.david-matthews.co.uk/biography/default.asp

" I now live in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a pleasant part of London with a wood at the top of my road, with my wife Jenifer. My recent music has become more diatonic, and I have been using folksong in some pieces, and incorporating birdsong into others. Landscape and the natural world have always been important stimuli for my music"

Oh, dear - well, that surely won't do, will it? "Landscape and the natural world" have surely changed beyond recognition during the last 60 years or so and David Matthews would have been letting himself and his audiences down were he not to have taken fully on board those developments rather than seek somehow to deny their very existence by means of increasing diatonicism...

Phew...

[ahinton]

Thanks for the link

"Both Anthony Milner and Nicholas Maw -... - helped me gain the confidence to write as I wanted instead of feeling that I should try to compose like Boulez or Stockhausen, who dominated the musical scene in the 1960s."


which seems to illustrate something about him not considering himself to be a passive deliverer of the expected.

It does indeed although, speaking for myself (if I may be allowed this one brief digression), had I had to have any more lessons than the very few that I did with Anthony Milner before going to Humphrey Searle I reckon that I might well have felt sufficiently discouraged to decide to pack it all in, although what I'd have done instead I have less than no idea)...

[Serial_Apologist]

A very full autobiography (at least for a Web page):http://www.david-matthews.co.uk/biography/default.asp

" I now live in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a pleasant part of London with a wood at the top of my road, with my wife Jenifer. My recent music has become more diatonic, and I have been using folksong in some pieces, and incorporating birdsong into others. Landscape and the natural world have always been important stimuli for my music"

As Schoenberg said, there's nothing wrong with composing using the tonal system. It can, it seems to me, limit the areas of expresssed experience to those areas with which tonal harmony and its working out was associated when people experienced a different way of life, however; and the hegemonic dominance of commercial music will, by sheer weight of everyday familiarity, pre-ordain the listening experience in the direction of expecting those final resolutions to round things off nicely, so that anything not using them as waymarkers will be perceived as what is anomalous, not the other way around.

I'm not by any means claiming that this is in any way the conscious intention of composers such as David Matthews who ostensibly have lost confidence in creative stimuli they once drew sustenance from. But it seems to me that that loss is of part of a picture of a better society that would be aided by enriching, rather than narrowing, the area of shared experience available to all. And it makes me wonder: is this what the modernist composers ostracised, persecuted and half-starved under one form or another of Stalinism from the 1930s to the 1960s for writing music "incomprehensible" to the masses, and those who died in Nazi concentration camps for being Jewish and composing "degenerate" music, would have wanted from today's much-vaunted "freedom"?

[jayne lee wilson]

Jayne, this has become a very wide-ranging discussion, in case you hadn't noticed, in which the David Matthews piece was the starting point. If you think it's been no more than a mud-slinging session at the piece you haven't been paying much attention.



What is this "simple, visceral level"? Something calling itself a symphony and existing within such a long and complex tradition can only seem to appeal on such a level to those who have embedded themselves in that tradition and know their way around it. Nothing "simple" about that at all.

Indeed; and nobody is more insistent, if you don't mind me saying, than yourself; while some are opening up the discussion to talk about more general issues of which this piece may be a symptom, others are repeatedly just hammering away at the same "arguments" - "a piece of music can be whatever it likes", "David Matthews can write whatever he likes", which though they might be trivially true are really not much more than playground talk.

No pots and kettles...I'm never insistent about a position whether cultural or political; I might own, perhaps, to a gently l'art-pour-l'art aesthetic. One that views the modern world (and experience) of music, especially recorded music, to have become dizzyingly diverse. Making any judgement, let alone broader cultural argument, very difficult.

It was the very attempt to argue from, to, with or around a single work of art, getting very far away from an actual experience of it (let alone an artistic context), that I was offering a critique of - but with many a question, many a question mark. Not all that insistent, really, just suggesting further thinking, above all further listening. Trying to remind people of the best context for musical understanding - the composer's other works, then symphonic works by others in a broadly similar idiom. You can broaden a discussion after that, to other idioms, other issues, but it seems to me that to focus comments about "modernity" around a single piece is bound to become a building of castles-in-the-air; if you wish to pursue an argument about musical idiom and contemporaneity, isn't it better to look at schools, styles, broader trends? Doesn't that at least give your assertions greater weight?

"Simple, visceral level", RB? - Your response to the very sound of the music, as you listen to it. Which of course may not be entirely free of preconception, conscious or not...

(Shame to have to say so, but fhg continues to distort what I say: earlier, he had me suggesting the DM 8th was "one of his weaker works", now, that DM is a young genius surrounded by booing modernist fogeys etc... As most disinterested readers here will have seen, I never even approached either judgement. And he's evidently in denial about his own insults about the symphony and its composer - as I reported in #373, in answer to him.)

[aeolium]

I don't think there is anything unusual about composers writing in a conservative style, or that it is something that has happened disproportionately in the modern age. Isn't it the case that most composers, at any historical period, have written in a conservative style, that is, within the idiom prevailing at that time and even looking back to an earlier style? The composers who have created something genuinely new and style-changing are literally exceptional, although they stand out to us now because they have become part of the canon. And the reason for the dominance of the conservative style at any period is the predominantly conservative taste of the audience. At the same time, there is often a time-lag between the composition of ground-breaking works and their public acceptance: the Grosse Fuge, hardly entering the repertoire of string quartets for the best part of a century; the hostile reception and slow public acceptance of Mahler symphonies; the widespread antipathy, even to this day, to atonal works of the 2nd Viennese school. And look at the conservatism of concert programmes nowadays.

It's not difficult to think of works that consciously evoke or mimic an earlier style, even by composers who have otherwise written in a new and individual way and who have changed the musical language in some way: L'Enfance du Christ; the Holberg suite; the Classical Sympony; the Ancient Airs and Dances; Pulcinella. And there are works which seem to deny or ignore earlier musical revolutions, e.g. that of the 12-tone system, and yet retain a highly expressive personal style. I'm thinking for instance of Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, written in 1943 at the time of an existential struggle, yet a work containing echoes of the C19 serenades (particularly those with horns) and perhaps the Mahler of the Knaben Wunderhorn. Was that a work of denial, or was it, by setting poems of English writers of different centuries, honouring writers who had contributed to the civilization that was under threat?

But I think that the power of the conservative aesthetic, or of the retrospective style, goes beyond the works of individual composers and is an essential part of the way European culture has developed. Certainly there have been the ground-breaking artists and thinkers, but there has to be ground before it can be broken. How many artistic styles depend upon looking back: the neoclassical in architecture, painting and music; the romantic period's rediscovery of medievalism with the neo-Gothic and Arthurian myth; even the Renaissance with its rediscovery of the ancient world and its intense interest in Hellenic models? Doesn't this suggest that at any period in history there is a tension between the conservative and the avant-garde, that retrospection is at least as much a part of cultural identity as curiosity and innovation? When one talks about having a response to one's time, I think that means having a response to the past as well, because the past is always with us (as, sadly, is all too apparent in some countries). Surely this is particularly true of traditional cultures where there is oral, not written, transmission of music; here, the preservation of musical tradition is intensely bound up with cultural identity.

As to whether a modern work is expressive of capitalist realism, that to me is about as meaningful as saying that Haydn's work is expressive of aristocratic feudalism and subservience to Catholic hierarchy, or that Schumann's piano music was a sop to the bourgeoisie's desire for private entertainment: it says nothing about the work's craft or its power to affect people. And there doesn't seem to me to be any necessary association between the degree of a composer's musical originality and his political ideas. The highly original Haydn was notably conservative politically, repelled by the revolutionary assault on aristocracy, a supporter of the Habsburg empire and a pious Catholic. Schoenberg the musical radical was the same man who said at the outbreak of WW1 "Now we will teach [the French and Russian composers] to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God." Conversely, Alan Bush who was a committed Communist and some of whose works were premiered in the GDR was musically conservative (at least from the works of his I have heard, and from critical reputation). And Ethel Smyth, imprisoned for her suffragette activities, was though an accomplished composer not by any means radical in style: the chamber music of hers that I have heard is essentially Brahmsian in style.

I don't think there is anything wrong about conservatism in art. On the one hand it can provide a bedrock of style from which the avant-garde artists can depart. On the other it can serve that audience, which may represent the majority in any age, which cannot assimilate the avant-garde without the elapse of a significant period of time.

[Richard Barrett]

Boulez or Stockhausen, who dominated the musical scene in the 1960s.

Except of course that they didn't.

[Richard Barrett]

I now live in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a pleasant part of London with a wood at the top of my road

He is certainly strongly connected to the realities of our time is he not.

[ahinton]

No pots and kettles...I'm never insistent about a position whether cultural or political; I might own, perhaps, to a gently l'art-pour-l'art aesthetic. One that views the modern world (and experience) of music, especially recorded music, to have become dizzyingly diverse.

It was the very attempt to argue from, to, with or around a single work of art, getting very far away from an actual experience of it (let alone an artistic context), that I was offering a critique of - but with many a question, many a question mark. Not all that insistent, really, just suggesting further thinking, above all further listening. Trying to remind people of the best context for musical understanding - the composer's other works, then symphonic works by others in a broadly similar idiom. You can broaden a discussion after that, to other idioms, other issues, but it seems to me that to focus comments about "modernity" around a single piece is bound to become a building of castles-in-the-air; if you wish to pursue an argument about musical idiom and contemporaneity, isn't it better to look at schools, styles, broader trends? Doesn't that at least give your assertions greater weight?

Eloquently and pertinently expressed, as usual!

[ahinton]

Except of course that they didn't.

No, indeed they didn't, but at the same time I do think it not unreasonable to point out that increasing familiarity with their work perhaps brought about quite a change in some people's awareness in UK than was the case in some other European countries, perhaps largely because, before the days of the so-called "Manchester School", much of English music thinking and experience could be described as non-progressive and narrow-minded.

[Richard Barrett]

As to whether a modern work is expressive of capitalist realism, that to me is about as meaningful as saying that Haydn's work is expressive of aristocratic feudalism and subservience to Catholic hierarchy

Well, it was! But the difference is that in Haydn's time creative musicians had no choice but to be beholden to princes or bishops, or the commercial theatre, as in Handel's London. With the French Revolution and its aftermath came the idea that artists could, might eventually, be free from such subservience, or at least that it was now possible to express the possibility of such freedom. You can't uninvent that! - you can only ignore or deny it... or of course embrace it.

[ahinton]

He is certainly strongly connected to the realities of our time is he not.

If by that you intend to convey a view that merely living where he now does somehow disconnects him from the realities of our time (whatever they might be), I think that you might do well to put that gun away before shooting yourself in the other foot; much as I have taken a broadly differing view to yours about David Matthews and what makes him tick as a composer, this is the first - or at least the most notable - example of gratuitous insult that I have read from your otherwise well informed and engaging writings. Do you really suppose that he's wilfully shut himself up in his home there in order to protect himself from the risk of having to witness any or all of "the realities of our time" and that this is why he writes as he does in such a way as to persuade you of his alleged "denial" of most of what's happened in Western "classical" music over the past six decades or so?

Good grief!