Living Symphonists

[Alan Howe]

Try this link...
http://www.paulwilkinson.co.uk/index.htm

[Christo]

Is that Halifax UK or Canada (or the Halifax banking group  )?

Oh dear. I didn't realize colonists from Yorkshire settled in Canada and started a bank instead of doing a proper job.  I mean Halifax UK, of course. Where else would a composer find inspiration for a symphony? 

[Christo]

Try this link... http://www.paulwilkinson.co.uk/index.htm

Yes, that's him. He's also active on Twitter and for some reason,  following me. (My tweets are in Dutch.  )

[eschiss1]

but I can't stand the music of the last 100 years.

...
wow. Nothing written since 1913, I guess that would be?
Ok... (though I guess Medtner's "Night Wind" sonata (1911) sneaks through barely, maybe...)

[Delicious Manager]

but I can't stand the music of the last 100 years.

Oh, please!!

[JollyRoger]

Sergei Slonimsky....awesome!!
Extremely prolific and extremely gifted..
Non believers - just listen here:
http://classical-music-online.net/en/composer/Slonimsky/985

[JollyRoger]

but I can't stand the music of the last 100 years.

Oh, please!!

Of the last 100 years, what is good is magnificent, but what is bad is nauseating foolishness..eg..John Cage.

[JollyRoger]

I did not want to go on a rant about what I see happening every day in Britain and the USA. Sorry. I place most of it at the feet of serialism (destroyed any interest left in modern music among audiences since the early 50s)  and "diversity" and of course TV and Rupert Murdoch. But enough!

I do concur with your overall impression that for the most part, serialism has been a failed exercise in musical esoteria and nothing more.(some Frankel excepted) ..perhaps more rewarding to compose than to hear..I don't get Sessions, or Searle, or Reich, or Cage..and I thought it might be me. As far as Murdoch, I have not heard his symphonies..where can I listen to them?  (Tongue in cheek)

[Jimfin]

Reich bores me to tears. I like Cage's ideas: he's an experimenter, and actually some of the sounds he produced were very beautiful, but like so many composers, he thought experimenting was the only thing that mattered in composition. Sometimes you have to act on the results of your experiments. I wouldn't want to eat food which was a chef's first attempt: I'd expect something he had perfected. Or, to use another analogy, I don't want to love a different person every night: after trying a few, it's nice to settle down and grow with one person.

[Dundonnell]

I did not want to go on a rant about what I see happening every day in Britain and the USA. Sorry. I place most of it at the feet of serialism (destroyed any interest left in modern music among audiences since the early 50s)  and "diversity" and of course TV and Rupert Murdoch. But enough!

I do concur with your overall impression that for the most part, serialism has been a failed exercise in musical esoteria and nothing more.(some Frankel excepted) ..perhaps more rewarding to compose than to hear..I don't get Sessions, or Searle, or Reich, or Cage..and I thought it might be me. As far as Murdoch, I have not heard his symphonies..where can I listen to them?  (Tongue in cheek)

I don't "get" most Sessions either-Symphony No.1 is an exception.

Searle is also a tough nut to crack, especially Symphonies Nos.3-5, but I think that the Searle 1st and 2nd Symphonies are quite magnificent
Sir Adrian Boult conducted a brilliant performance of the Searle Symphony No.1 on a Decca LP which I hope to digitise soon(the performance has never been released on cd). The lento slow movement of Symphony No.2 contains one of the grandest and most baleful fortissimo climaxes I know in music. All but the First of Searle's symphonies is under 20 minutes on length. Their total neglect, outside of the CPO set, is quite astonishing.

(I shall start a separate thread about him, I think.... )

[Christo]

(I shall start a separate thread about him, I think.... )

Oh dear .. 

[BFerrell]

One caveat about serialism though,  REAL composers that try their hand at serialism still sound like themselves and use it only as one tool of many. Serial Copland sounds like Copland, so to Stravinsky, Kokkonen, Rochberg, Searle etc.  And, I greatly admire Hugh Wood. Serialism from the hacks and intelligentsia all sounds the same. Bleak, empty and cerebral.  As Prokofiev warned so long ago, if composers turn away from the noble, uplifting, beautiful, the crowds will look for it in "vulgar" music. Of course, it happened as he said.

[Jimfin]

Quite. There is nothing wrong with serialism as an invention, as a tool, but it should be added to the tools at a composer's disposal, not used to remove all the others. Any 'theory' or 'method', be it sonata form or Wagnerian Leitmotiven, is only creative if it adds to what is already there.

[eschiss1]

Yes, preserve us from academics who use serial techniques, like Dmitri Shostakovich and others.

I have a notion what you're trying to say as opposed to what you actually are saying, though I still disagree with all but the obvious part of it, quite possibly...

[semloh]

Getting back to "living symphonists"  - I see that back in 2002, on the occasion of his 88th birthday, Henry Brant described himself as "the second oldest living composer of nonpopular music, after Elliott Carter". Brant died in 2008, but Carter lives on, at 103.

I like Carter's verdict on serialism ("minimalism"):

"If you write one bar and then repeat it over again, the music ceases to have anything to do with the composer, from my point of view, anyway. It means a person's stopped living. It doesn't have anything to do with music. .....Well, it obviously does, because some people think it's very good. But I don't understand that. I think that one of the big problems we live with is that that kind of repetition is everywhere, in advertising, in public address systems, and in politicians always saying the same thing. We live in a minimalist world, I feel. That's what I think. Those other people can think what they think." 

(Quotation from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/3599302/Minimalism-is-death.html )