Elgar/Payne Symphony No 3 - is it to fade out of sight ?

[Serial_Apologist]

And also

One problem I imagine facing anybody who sets out to "complete" or make performable an unfinished late work by a composer is how much do you base your own work on what the composer had done in previous works and how much you try to second guess what innovations the composer might have done had s/he lived and continued to develop their expressive language.

The fragmentary sketches Sibelius left of his eighth symphony are frustratingly tantalising in that respect!!!

[Richard Barrett]

how much do you base your own work on what the composer had done in previous works and how much you try to second guess what innovations the composer might have done had s/he lived and continued to develop their expressive language.

One problem being that the second alternative is pretty much impossible, given that composers' evolutions are hardly ever linear or predictable. My feeling is that once you get into the zone of hardly any material and no idea of structure, as is the case with the last movement of this work as I understand it, anything is possible. Berio's Rendering is a more interesting and expressive realisation of Schubert's sketches than is Newbould's version, because it expresses the sense of loss and incompletion and impossibility in a way that a musicologist would never think of doing. But I don't think there are really any rules for ways in which issues like this are to be approached - for myself I seem to have found a position of inconsistency where I think Mahler 10 is endlessly fascinating but a four-movement Bruckner 9 not really at all.

[ahinton]

I don't think there are really any rules for ways in which issues like this are to be approached - for myself I seem to have found a position of inconsistency where I think Mahler 10 is endlessly fascinating but a four-movement Bruckner 9 not really at all.

No rules, for sue, but whereas Mahler left something in every bar of his Tenth Symphony, work on Bruckner's Ninth's finale over the years has depended to some degree on ever more material in the composer's hand being discovered although, of course, there's no evidence that he ever wrote a note of the Coda. It's probably just me, but I've listened to Bruckner 9 less fequently than any of his other symphonies (at least until reently) beause I know that I'm going to be short changed and left in the air after that Adagio, magnificent though it is. OK, I could say the same for Schubert 8, I guess although that strikes me as a somewhat less "unfinished" work in the form of the two movements that Schubert himself wrote than the first three of Bruckner 9 (although again that's only a personal viewpoint).

[visualnickmos]

- like somebody making a very good imitation of a Turner painting, but making sure that the "Fred Bloggs" signature is clearly on view.

"Plagiarism" is a word that springs to mind, then. Comes under the umbrella of 'based on' which in all of its possible interpretations covers a multitude of sins - including, 'cannibalising', 'bastardising', 'inspired by' and so on. At best it is really only an (informed?) second-guess at what the composer might have done. He or she might have done anything. For anything to be truly creative and from the heart, it can only come in its entirety from the artist/creator themselves. Okay Mr Payne et al may well have composed some very pleasant music, but in my view it is wrong to hang it on the Elgar hook, as seems to be the case - I'm NOT saying they are hanging it on said hook, but that is how it appears to have come to be perceived. The word 'Elgar' seems to be the USP. In my books, that is just plain wrong. I would be furious if someone took a sketch of mine and painted a finished canvas claiming it to be 'how I would have developed' or 'the direction my creativity was headed for' Total b******s! How dare anyone assume such a thing - nobody has any idea where the composer or artist was going. Attempting to use academic means to predict a creative process is farcical in the extreme.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Well, no - because "plagiarism" would only be suitable if Payne took what Elgar had already written and pretended it was all his own work, which he very significantly didn't.

[Pabmusic]

That could be the case but I suspect that it could as easily have been something that might have occurred to Elgar himself; OK, we don't know how he'd have ended the symphony but one of the problems with what faced Tony Payne was the fact that Elgar had written so little since the cello concerto of 15 years earlier and so his approch might have been somewhat different to his earlier music anyway.

AP says that the idea was based on The Waggon (Passes) from the Nursery Suite of 1930.

[Pabmusic]

Well, no - because "plagiarism" would only be suitable if Payne took what Elgar had already written and pretended it was all his own work, which he very significantly didn't.

It's a little more like pseudepigrapha - passing your work off as someone else's - but there's no suggestion here of trickery or dishonesty.

[visualnickmos]

Well, no - because "plagiarism" would only be suitable if Payne took what Elgar had already written and pretended it was all his own work, which he very significantly didn't.

I wasn't suggesting for one moment that Payne plagiarised, but merely that plagiarism is a word that comes under the umbrella of 'based on'. Anyway, perhaps I'm wandering too far off-topic; fact is Mr Payne studied some sketches, preliminary workings and so on, and composed what is by all accounts a fine piece of music, with those in mind. Nothing wrong with that per se. It's just my own personal view that I feel that in a creative sense it is not the right thing to do, as a point of principal - in any creative or art form. I accept that many will not agree - but surely that's the beauty of forums like this - to debate, make points, etc, etc

[jayne lee wilson]

...and sometimes composers owe a great deal to those dedicated scholars and musicians who raised up a given work from an unfinished or sketched form to a fully-orchestrated one.
Besides the Enescu examples I gave above, I'd offer Skalkottas' Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra. One of his best, most beautiful and catchiest pieces, he left it in a short score for 2 Violins and Two Pianos - rather dense and unappealing to the ear. He did intend to orchestrate it; alas he died before this could be achieved. Kostis Demertzis' orchestration is, for those who know Skalkottas from the BIS series, wonderfully true to his sound and idiom, a great gift to the composer and to his listeners.

The notes to the earlier BIS 2 Piano/2 Violin recording suggested that such an undertaking would be "very risky", almost impossible; Demertzis' marvellous realisation proved triumphantly that this wasn't the case; it just needed another supremely gifted and empathetic musician to achieve it...

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I wasn't suggesting for one moment that Payne plagiarised, but merely that plagiarism is a word that comes under the umbrella of 'based on'. Anyway, perhaps I'm wandering too far off-topic; fact is Mr Payne studied some sketches, preliminary workings and so on, and composed what is by all accounts a fine piece of music, with those in mind. Nothing wrong with that per se. It's just my own personal view that I feel that in a creative sense it is not the right thing to do, as a point of principal - in any creative or art form. I accept that many will not agree - but surely that's the beauty of forums like this - to debate, make points, etc, etc

Absolutely - and I didn't mean to suggest that I thought that you were suggesting ... I've got lost in this sentence.

[visualnickmos]

Absolutely - and I didn't mean to suggest that I thought that you were suggesting ... I've got lost in this sentence.

Me too! I think I've done this one to death... I'll stick to the two that he DID finish - more than happy to enjoy them time and time again.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Me too! I think I've done this one to death... I'll stick to the two that he DID finish - more than happy to enjoy them time and time again.

- if it's any consolation, you're in good company: Theodore Adorno made very similar comments about performing editions of the Mahler #10 to those you make in your #68.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The first Proms performance from 1998 (mentioned by Pet and others earlier in the Thread) is available on youTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tnor-Hg7Utc

... as is the second Proms outing, conducted by Martyn Brabbins in 2004 (mentioned by Sir Velo); preceded by an out-of-lip-sync interview with Payne by Verity Sharpe, with contributions by Tom Service:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BKyxKWHkFw

[Richard Barrett]

It's just my own personal view that I feel that in a creative sense it is not the right thing to do, as a point of principal - in any creative or art form.

This formulation of yours has made me think, and I think that in the end my own personal view is the same. With the stress on the "personal" - I can't imagine why a creative artist would feel the need to inhabit, as it were, the personality of another artist, from a different point in history ("they do things differently there"), when life is short and there is so much to do in terms of finding a way to explore uncharted musical territory; I can't imagine feeling the need to express one's relationship to a particular music in that sort of way. But of course people are different.

[Conchis]

This formulation of yours has made me think, and I think that in the end my own personal view is the same. With the stress on the "personal" - I can't imagine why a creative artist would feel the need to inhabit, as it were, the personality of another artist, from a different point in history ("they do things differently there"), when life is short and there is so much to do in terms of finding a way to explore uncharted musical territory; I can't imagine feeling the need to express one's relationship to a particular music in that sort of way. But of course people are different.

These were my thoughts when I listened to someone's (I forget whose) 'reconstruction' of Beethoven 10. I found it massively unmemorable. What was the point?