The best symphonies of the past 50 years?

[Peter1953]

I'm sorry that I cannot join the discussions in this thread. Apart from Shostakovich's last symphonies and the Gorecki 3 I still don't follow contemporary symphonies. Over decades I did my best on Simpson (yes, also the 9th), Weinberg, Petterson, Schnittke, to name a few, but I completely miss the meaning. But I know, it's me. I'm too old-fashioned in my musical taste (however, Pink Floyd...). Mea culpa. I've stopped trying to understand contemporary "classical" music, because it doesn't reach my head and heart and I still come across so many unsung gems in the (pre and post) Romantic era (recently I've discovered Börresen).
Having said that, I take the symphonies by Schmidt-Kowalski (b. 1949) very seriously.

[ahinton]

how I came to omit it from my list I know not! Mea culpa! It's arguably one of Carter's most ambitious works and certainly one of his finest achievements.

I'm glad someone has heard this piece. My problem, though, is that I just don't get it - there's so much going on, but it all passes me by as a series of sonorities, some lovely, some harsh, some striking, etc, etc. So, how do I get a handle on this music? I have no problem with, say, Henze 7, but Carter is another story - almost another world to me...

I'm sure that lots of people have heard it, although I am aware of only one recording (conducted by that excellent Carter interpreter Olly Knussen). I can't tell you how to get a handle on it, but surely your description doesn't apply to its Adagio tenebroso middle movement, does it? - there's not so very much "going on" at any given moment in most of that, after all. The outer movements are pretty active, I grant you, but most engagingly so, to my ears and mind. It's well worth getting to now and is not in general terms as hyperactive as quite abit of the much earlier Concerto for Orchestra, great as that is (and less than half the length).

[Alan Howe]

Would Simpson have regarded Carter's Symphonia as a symphony? Any opinions?

[TerraEpon]

Kinda surprised (though maybe I shouldn't be) that no one mentioned anything by Hovhaness. I have a soft spot for his #50 (Mount St. Helens) at least. I know there's some people in here that hate his music but I do not share that view in the least....

[ahinton]

Would Simpson have regarded Carter's Symphonia as a symphony? Any opinions?

No opinion from me but only the question "if only one could have asked him"! I remember the first movement coming out on its own, as all three did, in fact, as though they were separate items written, as indeed they were, to separate commissions for different orchestras - I could see that this was a symphony in the making for the get-go, for all that Carter had not completed a "symphony" per se (his A Symphony of Three Orchestras using the term rather more as had Stravinsky in his Symphonies of Wind Instruments) for some 56 years at the time he penned its final double barline; whatever Simpson might have thought of it, however - either in general terms or specifically as "a symphony" - it's a great and magical work and richly deserves to be taken up by all the world's major orchestras.

[Alan Howe]

That's very interesting, Alistair. Which other symphonies written in the last few decades would you also want to point me to, besides Carter's Symphonia?

[Dundonnell]

I very much agree with your assessment of the Kinsella 3rd and 4th, Jeffrey

Am very much looking forward to the new recording of the composer's 6th and 7th symphonies from RTE

Thanks Colin - I have recently received the new Kinsella CD 

No 6 sounds excellent on first hearing - he is such a worthwhile composer. No 7 is influenced by Sibelius's Symphony No 7 but is in no way derivative. I shall look forward to exploring this too but at the moment I am focusing on No 6.  As soon as I have heard it I want to play it again.

In case you shouldn't have noticed yet: I uploaded Kinsella's Sinfonietta to the Irish Music Folder some time ago!

I had not only noticed but had downloaded the Kinsella Sinfonietta

However....I feel that I ought to point out that there is an Irish Music Downloads section containing music by Gerard (not Gerald) Victory, Brian Boydell, Seroise Bodley, Arthur Duff, Frederick May and John Kinsella's Sinfonietta whilst the same works  together with Kinsella's Symphony No.6 are also located in the British Music Broadcasts sections (as indeed are all the Stanford uploads).

This duplication seems to be  a source of probable confusion and it might be better to merge the two threads into one.?

The last thing in the world I would wish to do is to create more work for anyone but............

(My apologies for the obvious fact that this post should have been sent as a separate message to one of the Administrators or to Albion )

[Alan Howe]

I wonder whether this stimulating essay by David Matthews has something to say to the issues we are discussing:   


Renewing Musical Tradition

A paper given at the conference 'Redefining Musical Identities' in Amsterdam on 31 August 2002

In thinking about tradition, I want first briefly to consider the somewhat erratic history of music in England. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, English polyphonic music was as rich as in any other part of Europe, and Tallis and Byrd are the equals of Josquin and Palestrina. In the seventeenth century there were a number of fine composers and one outstanding individual genius, Purcell. The eighteenth century was dominated by Handel: whether he counts as English I'm not sure, but if Conrad is an English novelist and curry an English food, then I think he probably can. I do feel that the melodies of Messiah for instance have an English character which is hard to define but easily recognizable (you find the same in Purcell). We missed out almost completely on the Classical and Romantic periods, and apart from Arne who wrote the national anthem and 'Rule Britannia', there are no English composers to speak of from Handel until Elgar, who finally was able to write the great English symphony and concerto (two of each) and also - which is not always acknowledged - the first great English string quartet. Not opera, however: this was left to Britten, and then Tippett, both of whom also wrote first-rate string quartets, and Vaughan Williams and Tippett some first-rate symphonies. It was of great advantage to twentieth-century English composers that there was no national tradition of the symphony and string quartet to inhibit them, and so they were able to make substantial contributions to both of these forms.

Britten in some ways might be seen to be something of an outsider in relation to an English tradition. He began by rejecting all his English contemporaries except for his teacher Frank Bridge and, interestingly, Delius - both of whom looked more to continental models than did either Vaughan Williams or Holst. As a teenager, under the guidance of Bridge, Britten was influenced first by Debussy and Ravel and then by Schoenberg - some of his teenage music is almost atonal. This was a passing phase; in his early twenties he came under the influence of Mahler, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartók and Shostakovich, and out of all these, his earlier immersion in the music of Beethoven, and his own natural originality, he formed a very personal, firmly tonal style - perhaps the most confident use of tonality, in fact, in the mid-twentieth century. He made settings of poetry in French, Italian, German and Russian as well as English. All of which goes to show that eclecticism seems rooted in the English character - it can also be observed in Purcell, Elgar and Tippett. Despite Britten's interest in setting foreign languages, it is his settings of English words, in which he was influenced both by both Purcell (a composer he performed and edited) and by folksongs (of which he made many settings) that most clearly define him as an English composer.

Like Elgar, Britten became a popular composer in his lifetime, largely because of his gift for melody, which seems quite unselfconscious - a rare gift in the twentieth century except among popular composers like Gershwin and Irving Berlin. (The operetta Paul Bunyan, by the way, shows that Britten could have had a career writing Broadway musicals.) His opera Peter Grimes demonstrates this gift for memorable melody to a high degree and this was one of the chief reasons for its immediate success. Both Britten and Tippett took a very different approach to the characteristic modernist one of standing aloof from one's audience. This was partly from political conviction - they were both socialists (also incidentally pacifists). Both of them were insistent on the composer playing an active role in society as a communicator. Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time and Britten's War Requiem are both large-scale public statements on issues of war and suffering and individual conscience, written in a highly communicative musical language. Both works have affected large numbers of people while making no artistic compromises. Are such works possible nowadays in our different cultural climate? It is difficult to say a definite yes, because there seem no longer to be composers of stature who are using the kind of comprehensive musical language they did, and there also seems to be a shying away from large-scale statements by mainstream composers.

The majority of British composers since Britten and Tippett have rejected their influence, but a few have not, for instance Nicholas Maw and Judith Weir, and also myself. When I first began to compose in the 1960s it was unfashionable among my generation to compose tonally, but I was encouraged in my belief in the continuing validity of tonality by the achievement of Britten and Tippett, and I was also impressed by the way they had taken traditional forms such as the symphony and string quartet and vitally renewed them. As a composer, both these forms have been very important to me. During my lifetime I have seen a dramatic shift back to tonality by many composers, but it appears to me that all of them practise a narrower form of tonality than that used by either Britten and Tippett, which continued to employ such essential devices of classical tonality as modulation and a properly functioning bass line. I should like to quote here a passage from my essay in the book Reviving the Muse:

"Most contemporary music is static; but stasis, it seems to me, is ideally a condition to be achieved, as for instance in Beethoven's last piano sonata where the static, contemplative slow movement is heard as a consequence of the dynamic drama of the first movement. The dynamic use of tonality will involve both modulation and the rediscovery of dissonance as a disruptive force. Although one can no longer easily define the difference between consonance and dissonance, it is still possible to conceive of harmony as either stable or unstable. Unless there are real harmonic contrasts in a piece, it cannot have dynamic movement. Perhaps, because our most frequent experience of movement nowadays is as a passenger in a car, train or plane, observing the landscape speeding by while we ourselves remain still, most fast movement in contemporary music, whether tonal or atonal, is merely rapid motion without any involvement of physical energy. Fast music in the past was related to the movement of the body, walking, running or dancing." [1]

Dance and song are the fundamentals of music. That should hardly need to be questioned, yet in the twentieth century, while dance and song naturally stayed the basis of popular music, the doctrines of post-Second World War modernism tried to eliminate both dance and song from serious music and to create an irrevocable gulf between serious and popular music. This was a costly mistake. In the past, serious music had always stayed closely in touch with the vernacular language of popular and folk music, until Schoenberg renounced the use of the vernacular at the start of the last century. At first, he and a few others were very much on their own; other modernist composers such as Stravinsky and Bartók continued to base their language on folk music. Both Tippett and Britten had a creative relationship with folk music. In Tippett's early music the melodies are derived from folksong in a similar way to his predecessors Vaughan Williams and Holst; later he substituted the more contemporary vernacular of African-American blues and jazz, but the idea of a vernacular language that stood behind his music remained important for him, as it did for Britten. Britten's musical thinking was grounded in the idea of song, from his earliest childhood when his mother sang to him, and later when he accompanied her singing at the piano. Although he rejected the kind of nationalistic attitude to folksong exemplified by Vaughan Williams, Britten, as I have noted, made many highly original settings of folksongs, from Great Britain, France and the USA.

Classical sonata form included a dance movement, originally a minuet, then the scherzo which was at first a speeded-up minuet and then became a form in its own right. Contemporary scherzos often have little connection with dance rhythms, and it has seemed to me that composers should try to restore this lost dance element back into music. We need a contemporary archetype to replace the minuet, and it should be a popular form, known by everyone. Contemporary popular music ought to provide one, but rock music, which has abandoned the formal dance and, as Roger Scruton showed in his paper, has also largely abandoned vital rhythm, may not be of much use here. But the tango seems highly suitable: its rhythms are infectious, and erotic - as both the minuet and the waltz were once considered to be, though time has now dulled them. The tango already has a historical place in European music: composers who have written tangos since the 1920s, including Stravinsky, Martinu and Schnittke; it also has its indigenous South American tradition, and there are the many tangos by Piazzolla which are attempts to create a kind of folk art. But as far as I know the tango has not been used before in a symphony or a string quartet. In my Fourth Symphony I made the second of its two dance movements a tango, written in simple ternary form, and in my more recent Ninth Quartet there is a more complex tango which I should like to play for you. This movement contains three successive tangos, the second of which is also a development of the first, and the third a derivation from the first. This is followed by a recapitulation of all three tangos played simultaneously. So there is a connection here with sonata form, as in some of Beethoven's scherzos.

The post-war modernists, in their general renunciation of everything to do with the past, rejected the idea of repetition and development, aiming instead at a heightened sense of the moment. So that the traditional conception of a piece moving through time on a journey towards a destination was abandoned. The experiment produced some interesting results: for instance Boulez's cummings ist der Dichter, which is constructed rather like an artichoke where one gradually removes the leaves one by one to reveal the heart, the most precious part, within. But sonata form, which is based on the ideas of statement, development, repetition, and contrast, and which is the most sophisticated form for conveying the idea of a journey through time, seems to me to offer a far richer musical experience. Sonata form also seems an inexhaustible archetype. Like the sonnet, it is familiar to all educated people. The moment of recapitulation in a sonata movement offers a particular opportunity for innovation because of all the precedents that will subconsciously be in the minds of the audience. I can suggest here as a general principle that the more familiar a device, the more chance one has to confound expectation, which is what real innovation is. The moment of recapitulation was greatly heightened by Beethoven in his symphonies, culminating in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony where we feel a whole new world being revealed, familiar but also totally different. There is another superb example of an innovative moment of recapitulation in the first movement of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, where the music as it were gathers itself together and finally makes a very clear statement, as if everything before had been hidden in mist and the sun has just appeared. Recapitulation cannot really operate without tonality, which is perhaps why Schoenberg more or less abandoned it in favour of continuous development. But development cannot make its full effect unless there is a return to stability.

The finale of a symphonic piece, if one is using a multi-movement form, is a problem: it has been since Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Of Bruckner's many attempts to solve the finale problem he only succeeded absolutely once, I think, in his Eighth Symphony, and he spent the last years of his life trying in vain to complete his Ninth. We cannot now, it often seems, sum up decisively and comprehensively, perhaps because we no longer feel the confidence of composers in the past. It is probably better to end on a less serious level, as many Classical works do. I am only raising this problem to state it, not to offer solutions; but it is something that composers of the future can go on profitably addressing. I can however point here to one very successful solution to the finale problem in Britten's Third Quartet, which was almost his last work, and in which you feel that his whole life's work is at stake, if he fails to provide the right ending; but he does, and his finale is both a resolution and a new departure towards the door that he did not open.

In their string quartets, Britten and Tippett make use of old contrapuntal forms. Britten uses the chaconne form in his Second and Third Quartets, while Tippett's Second and Third Quartets contain fugues - the Third Quartet has no less than three fugal movements. The history of the fugue since Beethoven, whose fugues are the most remarkable in all music apart from Bach's, is somewhat patchy: there are few outstanding examples of later nineteenth-century fugues, and many are somewhat perfunctory - for example Liszt's - though there is a splendid culmination of the nineteenth-century conception of the fugue in the first movement of Mahler's Eighth Symphony. In the twentieth century the Bachian fugue was revived by neo-classical composers, but it often sounds rather artificial and unconvincing. Tippett, on the other hand, who undertook an exhaustive study of fugue and counterpoint with a notable teacher at the Royal College of Music, R.O.Morris, took up the challenge of the dynamic, Beethovenian fugue and had remarkable success with it, especially in the Third Quartet and the finale of the First Symphony, which is modelled on the finale of the 'Hammerklavier' Sonata. Can anything more be done with this much used form? Contemporary composers would appear to think not, but I have recently turned to the fugue in my Eighth String Quartet and have also composed a series of fifteen fugues for solo violin, some of which are in four parts - Bach does not go beyond three - and which contain some formal experiments, such as a slow fugue with a fast coda, and some textural ones - a pizzicato fugue, for instance, and a tremolo one which is also palindromic. I have come to the conclusion that there are still plenty of things to be done with this challenging form (and it is extremely challenging as one cannot help putting oneself in hopeless competition with Bach).

I have used the chaconne form myself, notably in an orchestral piece called simply Chaconne, which in fact consists of two chaconnes played consecutively and also in contrapuntal combination. It also has a programmatic connection with a sequence of poems by the contemporary English poet Geoffrey Hill about our first civil war, The Wars of the Roses, in particular one especially bloody battle in that war, the Battle of Towton. My piece is partly a meditation on the sombre mood of the poem sequence and partly an evocation of the battle. I'd like to play you the last few minutes of the piece, which consists of three consecutive sections. The first is the battle scene, which I hope illustrates my point about dissonance as a disruptive force: it is deliberately dissonant and intended to be quite shocking because it evokes painful events, but the level of dissonance here is markedly higher than in the remainder of the piece and therefore makes a more telling effect within the whole. The second section is a melody for solo viola over quiet but still dissonant harmonies; again, I think the language is appropriate here because this is intended as a lament; lastly comes a passage for strings which is an attempt to provide consolation; it's much less dissonant, and I feel that the counterpoint here is itself the vehicle of consolation and a more effective one than a simple harmonised melody would be. More than anything else, counterpoint enables you to raise the expressive level of your music. In fact if I had one piece of advice for a young composer it would be: learn how to use counterpoint, and I would qualify that with a remark of Busoni's: make your counterpoint melodious.

[britishcomposer]

However....I feel that I ought to point out that there is an Irish Music Downloads section containing music by Gerard (not Gerald) Victory, Brian Boydell, Seroise Bodley, Arthur Duff, Frederick May and John Kinsella's Sinfonietta whilst the same works  together with Kinsella's Symphony No.6 are also located in the British Music Broadcasts sections (as indeed are all the Stanford uploads).

This duplication seems to be  a source of probable confusion and it might be better to merge the two threads into one.?

Yes, I feel the same.
But I have quite another problem: I have always considered Williamson and Kelly as Englishmen and can hardly get used to the fact that they sit now comfortably in the Australian Music Folder? Wouldn't it be nice to copy them into Albion's BMB as well?
(Oh dear, I'll make it all worse...  )

[ahinton]

That's very interesting, Alistair. Which other symphonies written in the last few decades would you also want to point me to, besides Carter's Symphonia?

I'd thought that I'd already answered that earlier!

Anyway, in response to the substantial quotation from David Matthews, here's another which, whilst not quite so germanely on the subject of the symphony per se, nevertheless has some commonalities with the piece quoted in terms of its reference to the histgory of fugue, a form which has had its own input into the symphony de temps en temps:

The Art of the Fugue
Expanded version of a review of The Art of Fugue by Joseph Kerman
for the London Review of Books, 2006

Counterpoint, the art of combining two or more independent melodic lines, is the prime distinguishing feature of Western music. Music began with monody - unaccompanied melody - and with rhythmic patterns beaten out on sticks and drums. The majority of the world's folk music is monodic. Often percussion underlines the rhythm, and sometimes a drone is added, an unchanging note in the bass, which keeps the tune in touch with the earth as it makes its aerial flights: this is a feature of some of the most sophisticated non-Western musics, for instance Classical Indian. Indonesian music uses heterophony - different versions of the same melodic line sounding together. Imitation is occasionally found in other non-Western musics. But European counterpoint is something else altogether. Counterpoint is a conversation; it acknowledges the presence and participation of the other. Two independent voices may be played by the same musician, on a keyboard for instance, but they are more often given to two players, who must listen to each other. It is significant that counterpoint grew to maturity in Europe where the concept of democracy was born.

By no means all European music is predominantly contrapuntal; much of it is melody with harmony, and this kind of music has the widest popular appeal. Even a complex piece such as a Beethoven symphony will almost always have a main melodic line that you can sing or whistle your way through. But try whistling a Bach fugue. After the first few bars where the main subject is announced unaccompanied, the music divides into two parts, then three, then possibly four, or even five or six. The contrapuntal discourse is continued throughout the duration of the piece. How can you hear all these lines at once? Most of us probably don't. The experience of listening to a fugue is stimulating yet at the same time forbidding. This is the most intellectual music that has been devised. But it is also capable of expressing emotion on the highest level, and where intellect and emotion are in perfect balance, the result can be sublime. To give three supreme examples: the B minor fugue in Book 1 of Bach's '48', the six-part ricercare from the same composer's Musical Offering, and the opening fugue of Beethoven's C sharp minor Quartet, op.131.

In the preface to his new book on Bach's keyboard fugues, Joseph Kerman quotes Charles Rosen's perceptive comments:

"The 'pure' fugue, the meditative fugue, is basically a keyboard work for Bach ... Only the performer at the keyboard is in a position to appreciate the movement of the voices, their blending and their separation, their interaction and their contrasts. A fugue of Bach can be fully understood only by the one who plays it, not only heard but felt through the muscles and nerves." [p.xvii]

Rosen is surely right, and in the same way a string quartet is best understood by a player taking an active part in the instrumental conversation. Mere listeners, however, should not despair. It is possible, with practice, to learn to hear contrapuntal music, especially if you can read music and follow a score. Then you will see as well as hear how, for instance, in the first fugue of the '48' - one of the 16 fugues that Kerman analyses in some detail - the first seven notes of the subject are inverted - turned upside-down - in two overlapping sequences as the second voice comes in with the subject a fifth higher, as prescribed by the rules of fugue. This little piece of clever craftsmanship - one of many in the course of this fugue - is, on rehearing and in contemplation, much more than that; it becomes a mystery - the uncanny power of counterpoint to suggest the unfathomable.

Fugue developed out of canon or round, music making strict use of the device of imitation, and exhilarating to perform, as anyone who has sung Frère Jacques or London's Burning will know. Canon is a ubiquitous compositional resource: it can even be found in rock music - for instance the Beatles' 'She Said Se Said', and the fade-out endings of a number of Beach Boys' songs. Fugue is a freer form than canon, but there is a general scheme that most fugues adhere to. First, an exposition: the voices enter with the subject one by one, in a four-voice fugue in soprano, alto, tenor and bass registers (in any order). As the second voice enters the first voice continues with an accompanying 'countersubject', which must fit the subject whether it is played below it, or above. Additional countersubjects may be invented for further entries of the subject. Devising memorable countersubjects is a test of compositional prowess, one at which Bach especially excelled. A development follows where both themes appear in new keys (if it is a tonal fugue) and combinations. Then a return to the home key; finally a 'stretto' where the subject entries overlap, typically over a sustained note in the bass emphasizing the main tonality.

Kerman's book, which usefully includes a CD containing scores of all the fugues discussed and recordings of some of these played on piano, harpsichord, clavichord and organ by Davitt Moroney and Karen Rosenak, concentrates on analytical detail and does not attempt to put Bach in the wider context of fugal writing throughout musical history. He assumes a fair amount of prior knowledge, including understanding the vocabulary of harmony; but musically literate readers will find their appreciation of these fugues greatly enhanced by the insights that Kerman brings from a lifetime's study as he examines the music with scrupulous care, bar by bar. His prose is technical but never dry. Reading his commentary on the B major fugue from Book II of the '48', for instance, made me think anew about the way the subject rises, falls, and rises again to a higher note, and how this contour is mirrored in the progress of the fugue, so that the highest note reached, a B, which occurs three times but only on its third appearance is entrusted to the subject, feels there like the climax of great aspiration. It descends from this high point:

"With the greatest dignity and calm. With no harmonic undercutting and no tumble of faster notes ... The soprano response feels like a slow, deep bow ... touched with something like regret, though feelings are blurred by another suspended note ... Even as the fugue quietly gives up aspirations for the heights, it moots confident new possibilities, even now, for breadth."

Eloquently precise. Music like this attains such expressive perfection that I for one am reduced to bathos in attempting to describe my reactions to it. Kerman is undaunted. He concludes his book by asking himself what he has tried to do, questioning the very practice of writing about music, and gently justifying it: 'Talk mediates, differentiates, elucidates, and consoles; we use words, however imprecisely, to talk about love and death because talk, it seems, we must. We also use and surely must use words to talk about music.' [p.147]

The art of fugue had only been practised for a hundred years or so when Bach brought it to perfection, an achievement insufficiently appreciated by his contemporaries, some of whom thought the whole thing out of date. The new classical style which swept through Europe in the mid-18th century, and whose first practitioners included Bach's sons, was one centered more on accompanied melody than polyphony. But fugue did not die out with Bach; there was soon to be a revival of interest, and in fact there has been virtually no major composer since Bach who has not written at least one notable example of a fugue. There are exceptions: Chopin's forms admitted Bachian counterpoint, but not the fugue, which must have seemed alien to his Romantic, poetic sensibility. (It had not appeared so to his more Classically-oriented contemporaries Mendelssohn and Schumann; Schumann's sparkling fugal conclusion to his Piano Quintet, for instance, comes as a delightful bonne bouche.) Chopin was the most modern, least antiquarian of all the early Romantics: adapting the sonata was the furthest he was prepared to go in accommodating himself to the recent past; otherwise he transformed contemporary dance idioms (such as the mazurka) or invented new forms (such as the Ballade), in which the fantastic flowers of his melodies could find space to open and bloom. Wagner, in some ways the inheritor of Chopin's erotically-charged Romanticism, learned the art of fugue from Theodor Weinlig, a successor to Bach as Cantor of St Thomas's, Leipzig, and there is a fugue in the finale of the symphony he wrote when he was twenty. His mastery of Bachian counterpoint in Die Meistersinger is flawless, above all in the wonderful fugato ensemble at the end of Act Two; but, as with Chopin, there was no place for a full-blown fugue in his mature music. Nor in Sibelius, who nonetheless showed sufficient mastery of counterpoint - and in particular the Palestrinean counterpoint of the openings of his Sixth and Seventh Symphonies - to demonstrate that he too could have written an interestingly individual fugue had he chosen to do so. Even Debussy, who was primarily a harmonist, might at least have begun to think about fugue if he had lived to experience the neo-classical revival of the 1920s and been able to pursue the more linear style he was developing in his last chamber sonatas.

The revival of the fugue after Bach gets properly under way with Haydn's finale fugues in the last two of his op.20 string quartets. Haydn may not have known Bach's fugues, but both Mozart and Beethoven revered Bach - and Handel - and both made transcriptions of fugues from the '48'. Mozart transcribed three for string trio to which he added preludes of his own; Beethoven made a string quartet version of the C sharp minor fugue from Book 1, whose influence can be heard in his own great C sharp minor fugue in the op.131 Quartet. Mozart's own fugues sometimes seem to want to outdo Bach in sheer cleverness, as in the Adagio and Fugue, K546, where the tense fugue subject drives relentlessly through the music, as insistently memorable in inversion as it is the right way up. In the finale of the 'Jupiter' Symphony, Mozart dazzles the listener as he nonchalantly shows off every contrapuntal trick in the book. Here is the spirit of Apollo: pure delight in the form. With Beethoven, for whom the fugue became more and more important as he ventured into new areas of artistic aspiration at the end of his life, Apollo is joined by Dionysus in the duality that Nietzsche thought essential to the highest art. Dionysus prevails in the most extraordinary fugue of all, the Grosse Fuge that Beethoven originally conceived as the finale of the B flat Quartet, op.130, but later detached to form a self-sufficient piece. As the opening Allegro charges along with manic exuberance, there is a feeling of exploring completely uncharted territory, like pioneers in the Australian outback. Huge vistas are glimpsed but are tantalizingly out of reach. The pace is relentless, the dynamics always forte. Then suddenly it stops, and a new fugue begins, slow and full of intense lyrical emotion. And then a third: a rough-edged, unbuttoned dance which sometimes loses all sense of key. So Beethoven has contrived to encompass all the elements of the symphony within the texture of the fugue. This music will always sound 'modern' because it is stretching the limits of the possible; it is still fiendishly difficult to play. No fugue since has ever been quite so adventurous on every level.

Many Romantic composers would have been wise to heed Schumann's warning: 'The emptiest head thinks it can hide its weakness behind a fugue; but a true fugue is the affair of a great master.' Liszt's fugues, for instance, tend to show up his deficiencies as a contrapuntist. His chromatic harmony sounds laboured, and he quickly runs out of steam. The whole philosophy of Romanticism, after all, was opposed to that of the baroque: the individual, revolutionary voice, whose natural expression was heightened melody, in contrast with the voice of the community still grounded in political stability and religion, and symbolised by polyphony. The majority of later 19th-century fugues are choral, and are descended from Handel rather than Bach, a routine part of the ubiquitous oratorio which was the pious Victorian counterpart to Wagner's unleashing of erotic feeling in his operas. Most of them are dutifully dull, but the best composers, such as Brahms in the German Requiem, or Elgar in The Dream of Gerontius, overcame pedantry with intellectual passion. The choral fugue that opens Berlioz's Grande Messe des Morts is compellingly unorthodox, the subject making a dramatic downward swoop on the words 'Requiem aeternam' while the countersubject sets the same words to a tremulous descending chromatic scale; at one point each entry of the subject surges in a tone higher than its predecessor, producing great cumulative power. Berlioz too found a fresh and colourful use for fugato to portray the brawling Montagues and Capulets at the start of his Roméo et Juliette. Mahler, as a student at the Vienna Conservatoire, neglected his counterpoint studies and failed his examination, and this seems to have spurred him on later to become an ardent student of Bach and eventually the most accomplished contrapuntist of all the Romantics. The influence of Bach may be heard as early as the Second Symphony, and is all-pervasive in the finale of the Fifth. It reaches its climax in the central double fugue in the first movement of the Eighth Symphony, where Mahler also almost matches the striving intensity of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.

The 19th-century vocal fugue reaches its apogee in the fugal finale of Verdi's Falstaff, the last operatic music he wrote. Verdi had already composed a remarkable and innovative fugue. 'a light hearted Grosse Fuge', as Julian Budden has described it, in his E minor String Quartet, his only mature piece of chamber music. In introducing the fugue to the operatic ensemble, he was bringing to fruition what Mozart had hinted at in the final ensemble of Don Giovanni. At the end of Falstaff all the characters assemble on stage to pronounce their verdict on life: 'Tutto nel mondo è burla'. It is a compositional triumph: a last summoning up of all Verdi's powers in an effusion of contrapuntal jest.

In the 20th century the instrumental fugue made an impressive return. At the start of the century we find Bartók modelling the fugal first movement of his First String Quartet on Beethoven's op.131, and Schoenberg in his own First Quartet also taking up the challenge of Beethoven's late quartets - the first two composers to do so since Schubert and Mendelssohn made their tentative response; even Brahms had been daunted. Bartók went on to incorporate a fugue into the Allegro movement of his Third Quartet in a very Beethovenian way, and to write a measured fugue of masterful order and precision as the opening movement of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. The neo-classical movement after the First World War brought the fugue back into fashion. Busoni, who had already found his own way to an independent kind of neo-classicism, had in 1910 completed Bach's unfinished fugue from The Art of Fugue in his Fantasia Contrappuntistica, with masterly daring. Ives, another independent, working in isolation in New England, delighted in contrasting the wildest musical experiments with the orthodox harmony and counterpoint he had learned as a student at Yale. In his Fourth Symphony, he follows the polytonal second movement, probably the most revolutionary music he ever wrote, with a fugue based on the hymn From Greenland's Icy Mountains, whose orderly calm is only momentarily threatened by dissonance. Stravinsky, not a natural contrapuntist, absorbed himself in Bachian counterpoint in his neo-classical period and wrote an affecting, chromatic fugue in his Symphony of Psalms. Later in the 1930s he made an assiduous study of Beethoven's late fugues which bore fruit in the fugal finale of his Concerto for Two Pianos. Tippett, after studying at the Royal College of Music, decided to study Bachian fugue privately a few years later with R.O.Morris, an outstanding teacher of counterpoint. Tippett took the composition of fugue very seriously and it accorded with his belief at the time that a composer should go back to Beethoven to heal some of the wounds that modernism had inflicted. Several fine examples in Tippett's string quartets show evidence of Beethovenian labours. His friend and rival Britten had studied 16th-century counterpoint at the Royal College with John Ireland: it was one of the few disciplines he had not learned already from Frank Bridge. In his young maturity, Britten threw off several brilliant fugues with apparent ease; in particular the concluding fugue of the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra is an example of the kind of carefree cleverness for which, absurdly, he was criticised at the time. Hindemith's many fugues tend towards earnest academicism, in contrast to Shostakovich's fresh and expressive set of 24 Preludes and Fugues in all the keys, composed in 1950-1, a deliberate homage to Bach's '48' and a impeccable answer to the avant-garde of the time who were pronouncing that such things were no longer possible.

The nearest the fugue came to a modernist gesture was probably Ernst Toch's 1930 Fuga aus der Geographie. This is a four-part spoken fugue, whose rhythms follow the natural rhythms of the carefully-chosen words. The subject, given to the tenors and needing Savoy Opera dexterity to deliver, is:

    Ratibor! und der Fluss Mississippi und der Stadt Honolulu und der See Titicaca
    der Popocatopetl liegt nicht in Canada sondern in Mexico Mexico Mexico

... at which point the second voice comes in, and the standard fugal procedures are worked through. Toch's fugue has a distant cousin in the 'Sirens' chapter of Ulysses, where Joyce - who might have wished to be a composer rather than a novelist, had he been able - attempts to use some of the techniques of fugue in a striking display of sonorous prose. He sets out his thematic material in an introduction - 'Bronze by gold', etc. - and then develops it into rounded, musical sentences: 'Shrill, with deep laughter, after, gold after bronze, they urged each each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze, shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter.' There is an illusion of counterpoint in the juxtaposition of overheard conversation, snatches of songs, and onomatopoeic sounds. At the same period, musical modernism could initially accommodate the fugue (in Berg's Wozzeck for instance). Schoenberg wrote (in 1936): 'In its highest form . . . nothing would claim a place in a fugue unless it were derived, at least indirectly, from the theme', hinting at a connection with his 12-note method of composition; and indeed, 12-note fugues are quite feasible, though Schoenberg himself avoided them. It may be argued, however, that in denying the tonal basis on which the fugue had always relied, a great deal of its strength is lost. In turning against Schoenberg and the continuing emphasis on melody in his interpretation of the method, the post-war European avant-garde also renounced all traditional devices of counterpoint, rules of harmony, and regular rhythm, deeming them obsolete in their quest for a new-found language. Instead, Boulez and Stockhausen pursued the ideal of the sonic 'moment' in a floating world free from measured time. This most extreme phase of post-war modernism has long since passed, and the majority of composers nowadays are trying, in various ways, to reinstate what was temporarily discarded. Few composers today, however, are writing fugues, and it has to be asked if fugue can still make a valid contribution to contemporary musical language.

My own answer would be yes, and I can point to several examples of contemporary fugue that, in my view, demonstrate its continuing vitality. Their composers will probably not become household names, but then I would hardly expect the art of fugue ever to be modish and popular when the art of serious contemporary music itself has become an unfashionable minority interest. Before I'm tempted to lament any further the reluctance of many to engage with the difficult and the complex in music today, despite its undiminished intrinsic power to move the emotions, I had better name my fuguists: first, the Scottish composer Alistair Hinton, who in the huge finale of his nearly three-hour String Quintet (1969-77), included a 20-minute fugue, or rather three continuous fugues, modelled on the Grosse Fuge and rivalling it in its scope and emotional intensity, if not quite achieving its transcendental vision. Hinton's first fugue, in similar dotted rhythms, has the fierce energy of Beethoven's opening fugue; his second fugue, in total contrast calm and sweet-toned and sounding like a piece from the Renaissance, begins and ends with a canon whose theme becomes a fugue subject in its central section; the third employs subjects and countersubjects from the first two fugues together with new themes of its own, and combines all together in the most learned (yet never pedantic) style, with the themes played backwards and in inversion, all the time gradually generating another volcanic eruption of Beethovenian energy. In the spirit of his friend Kaikhosru Sorabji, who wrote many gargantuan fugues in his still hardly known keyboard works, Hinton has continued to include large-scale fugues in his own pieces, including the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Grieg and Sequentia Claviensis, both for piano.

My second fugue composer is the Moravian, Pavel Novák, who has been working for the past 17 years on another vast project, a set of 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano based on the Old and New Testaments (twelve for each part). The second set is still to be completed; the first has so far only had one complete performance, by William Howard, for whom the work is being written. Novák has a radically unorthodox attitude to fugue: the first fugue, evoking the creation of heaven and earth, has only one voice, and no counterpoint; the sixth fugue is built on a one-note theme and employs only seven notes altogether. The music grows into greater complexity as the world grows with it. A fugue without counterpoint might seem a contradiction in terms, but Novák somehow contrives to give substance to his omissions. The background to his music is rich and firmly-rooted enough to enable him at times merely to sketch in the foreground. It is impossible to know yet what the cumulative effect of the whole work will be, but what he has composed so far constitutes one of the most impressive piano works of recent times.

Shostakovich's fugues had brought a new sense of spacious calm into the fugue: they are fugues for the unchanging landscape of Russia. The immense canon that opens Górecki's Third Symphony (if anyone has paid enough attention to this carelessly heard piece to notice that it is a canon), beginning in the double basses, growing to encompass the whole string section, and again receding, has the same sense of space and of gradual, unhurried movement, like a slow journey across some featureless plain. Canon is well suited to Górecki's pared-down musical language; fugue perhaps would be too active for him. In Howard Skempton's recent and remarkably beautiful string quartet, Tendrils, the texture is one of continuous canon. While the mood is one of sustained contemplation, there is much more contrast than in Górecki. Skempton's Shostakovich-like chromaticism keeps the music in a continuous state of mild tension, which the abrupt resolution into E flat at the end does not altogether dispel. Skempton may now be ready to write a contemplative fugue; he certainly doesn't think it impossible.

At this point I should declare an interest. I had used canonic devices in my own music for many years, but it was not until 1998 that I felt able to introduce a fugue, a contemplative one somewhat indebted to Beethoven, into my Eighth String Quartet. It seemed to work. The following year, at a concert in London, I heard my violinist friend Peter Sheppard Skærved play Bach's G minor solo Sonata, which contains an elaborate three-part fugue. I wondered if it was possible to write a four-part fugue for solo violin, something that as far as I knew no-one had attempted, for the obvious reason that four-part counterpoint on a violin is virtually impossible. I wrote a few bars and sent them to Peter, who to my surprise pronounced them playable. So I finished the piece, in a neo-Bachian E minor, and thought of it as a one-off technical exercise until Peter persuaded me to write more. I wrote another four-part fugue, in A minor but highly chromatic and almost atonal; then, over period of nine months, carried on writing them occasionally until I had 15, cast in the more practical keys. Only five of them are four-part fugues, and even in these there is little continuous four-part writing, which would be almost intolerable for the listener, let alone the player. There are two two-part fugues and the rest are in three parts. I amused myself with the kinds of games that fugal writing seems to encourage: my first two-part fugue has a ten-note theme derived from the keys of all the fugues in my series in the order they appear (major and minor counted as one) and it modulates in turn through all these keys before returning to its home C minor. One fugue was entirely pizzicato. Another was based on a blackbird's song. I was learning a new skill, like a painter learning how to etch. Because I hadn't been to a music college, I had never learned the art of fugue formally. Perhaps those who have to go through what at the time may seem merely an academic chore cannot associate it afterwards with living music. I'm grateful to have discovered the sheer pleasure of fugue by myself, without any prejudices.

Even if counterpoint is presently neglected, it will not die out: it is too rich a resource. In his exemplary little book, Counterpoint, Edmund Rubbra, no mean practitioner himself of the art of fugue, wrote: 'The history of Western music is the history of the form-compelling power of counterpoint.' That is justification enough for its survival. Throughout Western music's history, composers who have possessed what Rubbra defined as 'an intuitive grasp of the essential spirit of fugue' have been able to renew this most intriguing and demanding of all contrapuntal forms, and there seems no valid reason why, if composers can learn to master it, the art of fugue should not continue to evolve in the future; in Rubbra's words, 'an evolution that never destroys the basic nature of the form'.

[Dundonnell]

However....I feel that I ought to point out that there is an Irish Music Downloads section containing music by Gerard (not Gerald) Victory, Brian Boydell, Seroise Bodley, Arthur Duff, Frederick May and John Kinsella's Sinfonietta whilst the same works  together with Kinsella's Symphony No.6 are also located in the British Music Broadcasts sections (as indeed are all the Stanford uploads).

This duplication seems to be  a source of probable confusion and it might be better to merge the two threads into one.?

Yes, I feel the same.
But I have quite another problem: I have always considered Williamson and Kelly as Englishmen and can hardly get used to the fact that they sit now comfortably in the Australian Music Folder? Wouldn't it be nice to copy them into Albion's BMB as well?
(Oh dear, I'll make it all worse...  )

I think that you will find that Albion has already moved Williamson at least into the British section

Now I am wondering about my possible Panufnik uploads

(Repeated apologies....this should be elsewhere )

[Jimfin]

Alan Howe, thanks for the Matthews essay: very illuminating, although I am speechless at his suggestion that there were no great romantic composers in the UK before Elgar! I suppose that was received wisdom for his generation and he's been unable to move past it. But generally a very interesting analysis, especially of influences.

[Alan Howe]

So you did, Alistair. Many apologies!
How about this for a provocative thought on my part?> Simpson would have said that any composer who doesn't fundamentally believe in tonality cannot write a symphony.
BTW: I've just listened again to Matthews 6 - magnificent!

[britishcomposer]

I think that you will find that Albion has already moved Williamson at least into the British section

Now I am wondering about my possible Panufnik uploads

(Repeated apologies....this should be elsewhere )

Oh, yes, I missed to notice Williamson!

(Well, now that your big project has endend we must somehow try to keep John busy...  )

[ahinton]

So you did, Alistair. Many apologies!
How about this for a provocative thought on my part?> Simpson would have said that any composer who doesn't fundamentally believe in tonality cannot write a symphony.
BTW: I've just listened again to Matthews 6 - magnificent!

Far be it from me to disagree with Robert Simpson of all people on a subject so close to him and of which he had so profound a knowledge born of very considerable first-hand experience - but I do nevertheless disagree with him about that! It seems to me to be an unusually dogmatic statement that probably means that it wouldn't have been possible forhim to do it without such a belief. In any case, what precisely might he have meant by a "belief" in tonality? I suspect that he probably meant a willingness on the composer#s part now to eschew tonality (a term which, in any event, represents as broad a church as churches get).

Matthews 6 - magnificent? Yes, unquestionably so! (and it doesn't have a tango in it like his 4th symphony and 8th and 12th quartets and other pieces - Strictly Come Daving and all that?)...