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…
[…] line (acting as a locus of clarity) and texture (generalised disorder). Her Symphony No. 1, which i explored previously in this series, has as its starting point a pentatonic melody, though this is eventually lost and forgotten in the […]
Dear Chris and Simon….to add to this discussion about what a symphony is and my own reluctance to think of mine as such, I had numbered the symphonies after I could not find a name for No. 7….It was too complex, abstract, heavy…no name fit it, so that is the reason I decided on calling it a symphony. Then, soon afterwards, I wondered about my previous orchestral works and selected as symphonies those with several movements that had a serious content. The last one was No.7. About a year later, I had to send the scores for Nos. 1, 4 and 7 to Giselher Schubert for the cpo CD liner notes. He accepted them as symphonies and used Mahler’s as evidence. One can read his program notes for the CPO disc.
Incidentally, in the 2000 edition of “Musik Geschichte und Gegenwart” (MGG) the late German musicologist, Ludwig Finscher, editor of MGG, wrote the chapter on ‘The Symphony’ and discusses what a symphony is today.
I’m honoured to have you respond to my humble musings, Gloria! I’ll be interested to read what G. Schubert has to say about your symphonies (as they ultimately – and rightly – became); I’d also love to read Finscher’s thoughts about the nature of present-day symphonism, although I suspect my rudimentary German wouldn’t be equal to the task…
[…] focus this year’s 5:4 Lent Series on contemporary symphonies, where i explored three of hers (No. 1, No. 7 and No. 11), all of which had been performed at the 2018 Tectonics festival. It was while i […]
[…] i’ve discussed the history and mechanics of the piece in some detail when exploring it in my 2023 Lent Series (in a live performance also conducted by Volkov) so i won’t go over that again here. […]
Unlock with Patreon
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…
[…] line (acting as a locus of clarity) and texture (generalised disorder). Her Symphony No. 1, which i explored previously in this series, has as its starting point a pentatonic melody, though this is eventually lost and forgotten in the […]
Dear Chris and Simon….to add to this discussion about what a symphony is and my own reluctance to think of mine as such, I had numbered the symphonies after I could not find a name for No. 7….It was too complex, abstract, heavy…no name fit it, so that is the reason I decided on calling it a symphony. Then, soon afterwards, I wondered about my previous orchestral works and selected as symphonies those with several movements that had a serious content. The last one was No.7. About a year later, I had to send the scores for Nos. 1, 4 and 7 to Giselher Schubert for the cpo CD liner notes. He accepted them as symphonies and used Mahler’s as evidence. One can read his program notes for the CPO disc.
Incidentally, in the 2000 edition of “Musik Geschichte und Gegenwart” (MGG) the late German musicologist, Ludwig Finscher, editor of MGG, wrote the chapter on ‘The Symphony’ and discusses what a symphony is today.
I’m honoured to have you respond to my humble musings, Gloria! I’ll be interested to read what G. Schubert has to say about your symphonies (as they ultimately – and rightly – became); I’d also love to read Finscher’s thoughts about the nature of present-day symphonism, although I suspect my rudimentary German wouldn’t be equal to the task…
[…] focus this year’s 5:4 Lent Series on contemporary symphonies, where i explored three of hers (No. 1, No. 7 and No. 11), all of which had been performed at the 2018 Tectonics festival. It was while i […]
[…] i’ve discussed the history and mechanics of the piece in some detail when exploring it in my 2023 Lent Series (in a live performance also conducted by Volkov) so i won’t go over that again here. […]