Change of pace -- my symphony

Dear Greg, Glad to see you up and about again and writing your blog! I recently broke my leg in a similar household accident to yours and often have thought about you. In bocca al lupo with your symphony~
Rafael

And my sympathy to you! Note to other readers of my blog: Broken legs are not contagious...they really aren't...

I listened to the computer-based version of said symphony last night, and I must say it is an impudent little rascal, and I loved most of it.

Over the past hundred or so years, I have been moaning that classical music had gotten too far from its roots -- dance. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, ad infinitum wrote music that, somewhere or other within its duration, was based on dances. But the modernistic [has to be read with scorn] guys wrote stuff that even PDQ Bach, with his notorious two-left feet, wouldn't have tried to pass off as dance.

Your little rascal of a symph returns to the roots. And even I -- a notorious hater of all popular music written since the big-band era [see note below] -- enjoyed the doo-woop derived passages in the second movement.

Now, if only more musicians would follow your lead.

*There is an exception or two. One of them is "She wore an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini" in the original Brian Hyland (?) arrangement, which is masterful.

Now about that CD you warned us about . . .?

"Impudent!" I love that. A composer friend heard the piece in South Dakota-- actually he heard it five times -- twice in rehearsal, and three times in performance -- and called it "quirky." So, impudent and quirky. Not bad at all.

Thanks for listening, Paul. Your comments warm my heart. Though I always want to stick in a personal disclaimer, applying to me, but of course not necessarily to anyone else. I like a lot of modernist music, and I don't see my symphony, or anything else I write, posed against modernism. In fact, Webern is a constant influence on everything I compose. When I said that to the composer I mentioned above, he caught on right away -- "Yes, in the pointillistic scoring." (See the score of the last movement.) I went through a modernist crucible at one point in my composing life, learned a lot, was influenced forever, and don't regret a moment of it.

Which is certainly not to rebuke anyone who really does find my music a refreshing alternative to modernist scores. Modernism had far too much influence, as I've said many times.

And, Paul -- thanks so much for your comment on my doowop movement and your love of big band music. I always thought of that doowop movement as, secretly, a version of doowop as if scored for big band. I say "as if" becuase the ensemble I used -- two horns, two oboes, bassoon, and strings -- is very, very far from a big band, and in fact it's a kind of orchestration tour de force to create something like a big band feeling with that ensemble. But if Paul sees any resemblance, then I'm very flattered.

A long-time buddy of mine, same age as me, went to a concert recently: Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn.

He said that, of the three, the only one he enjoyed was the Haydn.

I know that feeling myself. More and more, FJH is rising higher and higher on my enjoyment scale. I think he's due for a significant surge within the next twenty years.

That's good and bad. It's good if it means that SOMEONE is appealing to people. It's bad if it means orchestras have to reduce the players on stage in order to play music that people want to hear.

What is it about the Haydn symphony that made it popular in its time? I don't know that, but I can list some of the characteristics:

-short
-direct
-acknowledged popular music and dances of its time.
-humor, ranging from wit through things such as refusing to end a phrase when it seemed it would (continuing on, instead) thru the sheer nonsense of fiddles tuning up in the middle of a movement of the "distrait" symphony.

Greg's symphony relates to most of those characteristics. It should be popular, but it may not be, because when people pay big bucks, they want to hear a big orchestra.

But there is no reason why the characteristics listed above cannot be orchestrated for the big symphony.

Morton Gould did that in his "Latin American Symphonette" and "American Symphonette No. 2" They were new music in old bottles -- a modern orchestra playing modern music within the format of the "classical" symphony. They were popular. Me and all my buds loved them. And one movement from each -- the Guaracio and the movement featuring the trumpet -- got played on radio shows and juke boxes.

If we hadn't been immersed in the "if it ain't hard to listen to, it ain't worth listening to" syndrome, more composers would have followed Gould and it is likely we wouldn't be playing to gray headed, dwindling, audiences.

So, there, I said it and I'm glad/

Greg--

This question is not meant to be confrontational, but rather provocative, in that I'm interested in your ideas. Given your very deep pessimism about the future of music, which seems almost fatalistic and times, as though concert music's demise is inevitable, why did you write this piece?

Thanks in advance, and I look forward to hearing it.

Steve, I've been wondering when someone would ask me some variant of this question. So thanks for breaking the ice!

I don't have any simple answer. I like classical music. I like writing it. I like hearing the music I write. If I didn't compose, I'd feel I had a limb I wasn't using. And then there's something else. Comfortable as I am with these future-of-classical-music questions, I'm even more comfortable being a musician among musicians. That's my natural home base. I think like a musician; I hear like a musician. I went to see the movie telecast (if that's the term) of the Met's "Il Trittico," and while the people I'm with have much that's interesting to say about the staging and the experience of seeing live opera in a movie theater, I come out raving about a chord at the climax of "Suor Angelica" -- high C for the soprano, G in the bass, while the rest of the orchestra piles up D, F, A, and C. A pure postwar pop-music chord, decades before its time. I heard the chord, and could all but see the musical notation floating right in front of my eyes. That's the kind of thing my mind tends to fasten on, during performances.

When I'm thinking about music in this way, and even more when I'm composing, I don't get involved in future-of-classical-music thoughts. I love music too much. The future is another story. Maybe the performances where I can think about classical music details, and hear my music done, will diminish or die out. There certainly seems to be a chance of that. I'll mourn, if that happens. But I'm sure something will survive, and that I'll have plenty of chances to write music of some kind.

I thought the answer was something along those lines. I'm glad you set it down.

Yes, you like to hear the music you write. And perhaps, just as much, the music you hear in your imagination demands to be written down and heard outside your head.

Especially when a commission is involved! :)