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..the word symphony can be applied to all kinds of structures -Leonard Bernstein



The moment you have time to intellectualize your perceptions, established certainties will begin to crumble, and the "other side" of any controversy will beckon appealingly. The inevitable result is that one's liberalism becomes stretched to the point of absurdity. It is a Hamlet-like torture to be truly liberal; everything becomes susceptible to contradictory interpretations; bias is impossible, opinion wobbly, and immortal words out of the question.
It is in this context that I have been thinking all year about music, especially about the present crisis in composition and its possible consequences in the near future. What has happened to symphonic forms? Are symphonies a thing of the past? What will become of the symphony orchestra? Is tonality dead forever? Is the international community of composers really, deeply, ready to accept that death? If so, will the music-loving public concur? Are the new staggering complexities of music vital to it, or do they simply constitute pretty Papiermusic?

Having mulled over these questions for a year or more, with openmindedness ad absurdum, I naturally cannot provide a single answer. Or, to be more accurate, I can provide far too many answers, all of them possibly true. For each question there are two answers, roughly corresponding to yes and no, and attended by innumerable variations.

For example: are symphonies a thing of the past? No, obviously they are still being written in substantial quantity. But yes, equally obviously, in the sense that the classical concept of a symphony-depending as it does on a bifocal tonal axis, which itself depends on the existence of tonality-is a thing of the past.


Does that mean that symphonies can no longer be created? No. In a loose sense the word symphony can be applied to all kinds of structures. On the other hand, yes. In a strict sense the decline of the symphony can perceptibly be dated back to the beginning of our century.
Then, if the symphony as a form is all but over, what will happen to our orchestras? Will they become museums of the past, with conductors as curators who hang up the old masterpieces with solicitude as to position and lighting? Yes, inevitably, since our orchestras were created specifically to perform those masterpieces. But also no; there can conceivably be any number of new forms of composition that could gradually and subtly change the shape and content of our orchestras. No, yes; no, yes; yes, no. What is really true?
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