That’s spooky timing – I’d just this last week returned to Coates’s music (including this work) after a gap of something like four years!
The word ‘symphony’ originally implied a “sonic agreement”, though later in the West this became generalised to “sounding together”. In both of those senses, as well as the way the symphony evolved as a form, Coates’ Symphony No. 1 is very convincingly worthy of the name…From a structural symphonic perspective, there’s a theme which transforms and is, in a behavioural sense, developed, and there could hardly be a more clear underlying harmonic scheme, progressing from a pentatonic starting point, emphasising semitones and thirds, to the fifths and fourths of conventional tunings.
I watched a video interview with Coates once in which she admitted that she’d initially shied away from naming several of what became her early symphonies as such (this one, for example, was called simply Music on Open Strings to start with), but then struck up a correspondence with a musicologist who offered to take them away and analyse them for their “symphony-ness”. This he duly did, and after much hemming and hawing his conclusion was that they were indeed symphonies. In light of this academic endorsement, Coates then gave said works the names/numbers they bear today.
Yes, she mentioned that to me; the musicologist was Giselher Schubert, who wrote the liner notes for the first of her two CPO discs. It’s a very curious thing, getting someone else to assess such a thing – but then the “symphony-ness” of any work, whether it’s actually called that or not, is debatable anyway. i always think of Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau as a symphony but he was content to call it a “fantasy”. As i wrote, this is one of the things that keeps pulling me back to symphonies, and what makes them what they are…
Yes, the whole “when is a symphony not a symphony?” debate was evidently already sufficiently well-established by Zemlinsky’s time for Mahler to have exploited it in a (failed) bid to outsmart the (nevertheless obviously nonsensical/superstitious) “Curse of Nine”. Incidentally, I’m one of those people who aren’t convinced that Das Lied is a symphony, whereas the Symphonic Fantasy of Mahler’s one-time “what-is-a-symphony-for?”adversary, Sibelius, definitely is one in my mind (and in Sibelius’s too, ultimately – he of course ended up numbering it his 7th). So that ever-fascinating existential debate at the heart of symphonism not only has a long pedigree, but clearly ain’t going away anytime soon…
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That’s spooky timing – I’d just this last week returned to Coates’s music (including this work) after a gap of something like four years!
I watched a video interview with Coates once in which she admitted that she’d initially shied away from naming several of what became her early symphonies as such (this one, for example, was called simply Music on Open Strings to start with), but then struck up a correspondence with a musicologist who offered to take them away and analyse them for their “symphony-ness”. This he duly did, and after much hemming and hawing his conclusion was that they were indeed symphonies. In light of this academic endorsement, Coates then gave said works the names/numbers they bear today.
Yes, she mentioned that to me; the musicologist was Giselher Schubert, who wrote the liner notes for the first of her two CPO discs. It’s a very curious thing, getting someone else to assess such a thing – but then the “symphony-ness” of any work, whether it’s actually called that or not, is debatable anyway. i always think of Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau as a symphony but he was content to call it a “fantasy”. As i wrote, this is one of the things that keeps pulling me back to symphonies, and what makes them what they are…
Yes, the whole “when is a symphony not a symphony?” debate was evidently already sufficiently well-established by Zemlinsky’s time for Mahler to have exploited it in a (failed) bid to outsmart the (nevertheless obviously nonsensical/superstitious) “Curse of Nine”. Incidentally, I’m one of those people who aren’t convinced that Das Lied is a symphony, whereas the Symphonic Fantasy of Mahler’s one-time “what-is-a-symphony-for?” adversary, Sibelius, definitely is one in my mind (and in Sibelius’s too, ultimately – he of course ended up numbering it his 7th). So that ever-fascinating existential debate at the heart of symphonism not only has a long pedigree, but clearly ain’t going away anytime soon…