My column in this week's New Yorker, on symphonies of the post-Mahler era, is rooted in old loves. I fell for Mahler and Sibelius as a teenager, and soon began exploring the myriad byways of twentieth-century symphonic writing, often following recommendations in Fanfare magazine. Fanfare led me to, among others, Eduard Tubin, whose symphonies I blasted at high volume throughout my freshman year of college, to the puzzlement of my roommates. At my college radio station, I presented a show called The Twentieth-Century Symphony, which featured not only the obvious Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen, Shostakovich, Vaughan Williams, and Ives / Harris / Schuman / Copland but also the likes of Bax, Hartmann, Pijper, Vermeulen, Henze, Killmayer, Kelterborn, Bentzon, Holmboe, Valen, Haug, Saeverud, Nørgård, Kokkonen, Sallinen, Nystroem, and Pettersson. Tubin's Sixth was the theme music for my other radio show, Music Since 1900. And my first published piece of music writing, in a WHRB Program Guide from 1988, was a review of the Hyperion CD of Robert Simpson's Sixth and Seventh Symphonies.
There is, to be sure, a great deal more to be said about latter-day symphonic writing than my New Yorker piece could accommodate, and for some months I expect to be receiving letters of the "What about Schreker?" variety. At least twenty or thirty other symphonists* might have been mentioned, in addition to the above-named and those who appear in my column: for example, Hindemith, Schmidt, Schnabel, Wellesz, Honegger, Roussel, Milhaud, Chávez, Villa-Lobos, Casella, Gerhard, Florence Price, Cowell, Sessions, Riegger, Siegmeister, Piston, Thomson, Carter, Harrison, Bernstein, Foss, Antheil, Mennin, Diamond, Creston, Rochberg, Bolcom, Harbison, Walker, Branca, Zwilich, Rangström, Langgaard, Alfvén, Aho, Rautavaara, Szymanowski, Górecki, Lutosławski, Prokofiev, Miaskovsky, Popov, Shebalin, Weinberg, Karamanov, Ustvolskaya, Kancheli, Pärt, Tüür, Narbutaitė, Alwyn, Britten, Arnold, Lloyd, Tippett, Rawsthorne, Frankel, Grace Williams, Davies, Isang Yun, Toshi Ichiyanagi, etc, etc. My ever-patient editors would, however, have balked at publishing an annotated telephone directory. So few of these works stand any chance of being played in today's orchestral culture, which, as Bob Shingleton has often observed on his Overgrown Path blog, runs on a celebrity logic, with a select roster of brand names being used to sell tickets and hundreds of others being thrown by the wayside. Fortunately, recorded archives are vast, and in the digital age can be explored more easily than ever before.
*Note: I'm excluding from the category "symphonists" those who composed just one or two symphonies, no matter how fine (Webern, Korngold, Weill, B. A. Zimmermann, Barber, Walton, William Levi Dawson, Shapero, Fine, Wolpe, Dutilleux, Berio, Gubaidulina, R. Murray Schafer, etc).
