On 4 March 2011 a new work, Adam Schoenberg’s American Symphony, received its world premiere at the Lyric Theatre in Kansas City, USA. Commissioned by the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra, the 25-minute piece is cast in five movements, whose individual titles (including I: ‘Fanfare’, II: ‘White on Blue’, IV: ‘Prayer’ and V: ‘Stars, Stripes, and Celebration’) collectively evoke the sense of national identity engendered, according to the composer, by the 2008 American presidential election. For Schoenberg (born 1980), its conception shares a sense of healing mission with the ‘quintessential American symphony’, Copland’s Third; paralleling Copland’s perceived search for ‘beauty and peace’ in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the American Symphony ‘is about our collective ability to restore hope within ourselves and our neighbors, both here and around the world’.¹Particular stylistic homage is paid to Barber and Gershwin in the penultimate movement, which is explicitly dedicated ‘to those lost in 9/11, hurricane Katrina, and all victims of violence and war’.² Such national and global affinities are in turn accompanied by the desire to incorporate a recognisably contemporary idiom in the guise of electronic dance music, an influence which colours not only the work’s Finale, but also its central ‘Rondo’ movement.

The three initial performances given by the Kansas City Symphony under its music director, Michael Stern (two at their then home base in Missouri and the last on tour in Lawrence, Kansas), marked an important point of transition for the orchestra insofar as its subsequent 2011–12 season would be the first in its new home location, the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. Having occupied a series of temporary venues since its formation in 1982 (its predecessor, the Kansas City Philharmonic, was dissolved in 1982 in the year preceding its fiftieth anniversary), the orchestra now benefits from the use of a privately funded c. £220 million arts complex comprising a dedicated 1,600-seat concert hall and an 1,800-seat theatre, the latter of which also involves the orchestra in productions staged by the city’s Lyric Opera and the Kansas City Ballet. A raft of new commissions, along with an array of internationally established American soloists (Joshua Bell, Yo-Yo Ma, Emmanuel Ax, Joyce DiDonato and others), indicate a wish to project the mood of an extended gala occasion. But whereas the first half of the current season features symphonies in just two of its seven programmes (namely Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony and Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony), the second half is dominated by the genre, with three symphonies combined on a single pre-classical and classical programme (by J. C. Bach and J. M. Kraus preceding Haydn’s Symphony No. 101, ‘The Clock’) and the concluding concert bringing together Hovhaness’s Second Symphony, ‘Mysterious Mountain’, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

The longevity of the symphony as a transatlantic cultural import is further underscored by the 2011–12 programme of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, its centenary season. While devoted principally to the home ensemble, the occasion is being further commemorated by invited touring residencies from all six of the major American symphony orchestras (Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia). No specific symphonic cycle is included, nor does the season feature a new commission explicitly associated with the genre. Nonetheless, the symphonic tradition is represented by a more-or-less complete timeline reaching from Mozart’s ‘Haffner’ Symphony, K 385, through to John Harbison’s Fourth Symphony, composed in 2003. Limited canonical intention can perhaps be inferred from the presence of two separate performances of Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony (by the Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Welser-Möst and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra conducted by Osmo Vänskä). Moreover the launch of a short sequence devoted to ‘American Mavericks’ incorporating Henry Brant’s orchestral transcription of Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2, retitled ‘A Concord Symphony’, arguably assumes as much contextual significance from being paired with Copland’s Orchestral Variations, the composer’s transcription of his own Piano Variations, as it does from any direct association with Ives’s recognised symphonic corpus. As with the Kansas City season, however, an impression of cultural-historical commonality will be provided by a concluding performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – the latter chosen in preference to a work of distinctively American provenance, or even a Mahler symphony that might better reflect the orchestra’s recent successes in the field of sound recording.

Players, pieces to play and a place in which to play them; a tradition of creative continuity and innovation presenting the opportunity for civic celebration with the arrival of a suitable landmark anniversary. Articulated so simply, such fundamental considerations as underpin the survival of the symphony as a cultural form might appear all too parochial in scope compared with the boundless dynamism of internet-enabled digital transmission. And yet the multiple pressures bearing down on the modern orchestra – of continuing cultural pertinence, funding and the like – seem set to turn the perpetual anticipation of impending crisis into a concrete reality. Writing in 1986, J. Peter Burkholder was ready to categorise the predominantly retrospective nature of the repertoire according to an impasse conjoining ‘The Twentieth Century and the Orchestra as Museum’.³ In April 2011, the Philadelphia Orchestra board’s decision to file for bankruptcy seems to offer tangible proof of aesthetic and economic obsolescence at the highest level of institutional attainment. In large part, the majority vote was made with a view to avoiding the risk of potential liquidation, a move accompanied in May 2011 by the launch of a c. £110 million funding campaign. Yet one of the primary causes of the financial shortfall – the orchestra’s inability to meet its pension obligations to its players – gives evidence of a performing body potentially divided against itself and thereby at inevitable odds with the civilising precepts that constitute both the means and ends of its most enduring cultural legacy.

Defining the performing canon of the symphony at this particular historical juncture thus appears to be something of a hollow enterprise, at least at face value. Indeed a pragmatic if not altogether pessimistic appraisal might take it to operate predominantly within the niche circuit that circumscribes retirement-age entertainment consumption. True, marketing strategies are required to refresh the presiding logic of a familiar repertoire kept in a state of steady rotation. But in blunt terms, the attendant advertising copy, a few evocative catchwords aside, can be all but summed up in the clichéd competition tie-breaker formula of fifteen words or fewer, namely: Beethoven, Berlioz, Bruckner, Dvořák, Haydn, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Rachmaninov, Schubert, Schumann, Shostakovich, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky.

In Burkholder’s assessment, the shock of the new instigated by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Webern, Hindemith, Ives, Messiaen, Henze and others associated with the first and second waves of modernism was always mitigated by an underlying attitude of respect towards the extant repertoire. Far from bespeaking an anxiety of influence, finding a secure position in the works museum entailed negotiating a contradictory set of principles – principally ‘lasting value, links to tradition, individuality, and familiarity’ – without questioning the overriding ritual pretext of art-for-art’s-sake.⁴ If Burkholder stops short of equating modernist musical aesthetics with culture-industry means–ends economics, the implications for an analysis of the symphonic performing canon again seem heavily predetermined. While it is beyond the scope of the present chapter to address this issue in forensic detail, I shall at least aim to return to it tangentially. Some more exact positioning of the notion of canon construction is, however, required in the initial instance if the cultural impact of what orchestras have done and continue to do in the name of the symphony is to be better represented.

In Joseph Kerman’s well-known definition, a canon is ‘an enduring exemplary collection of books, buildings, or paintings authorized in some way for contemplation, admiration, interpretation, and determination of value’.⁵ For music, however, the correct term to apply is repertory, since whereas a canon ‘is an idea’, a repertory is ‘a program of action’,⁶ assembled not by critics, but by performers. Seeking to evaluate the canon debate from a musical perspective at the end of the 1990s, Mark Everist questioned whether any such sharp distinctions could be drawn either in relation to performative cultural praxis as conducted in the non-performing arts, or on behalf of music where professional identities are never so clearly delineated.⁷Dahlhaus’s further attempt to arbitrate between ‘the canon chosen and the canon chosen from’ also failed to exert sufficient interpretative leverage in Everist’s eyes.⁸Rather, the complex matrix of individual and institutional investments required an altogether thicker mode of accounting, a necessity met by Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s recognition of the ‘contingencies of value’.⁹

Adapting Herrnstein Smith’s reflection on the canon – the term ‘works’ is here substituted for the word ‘texts’ – thus begins to offer some additional conceptual traction, as follows:

Furthermore, as William Weber elaborated the theme within the same essay collection, approaches to the musical canon could be insightfully finessed by acknowledging the differing perspectives projected by three modes of musical canon formation variously dependent on scholarly, pedagogical and performance-based activity.¹¹ While each of these dimensions relies on a variable amalgam of conventions, circumstances and tastes, Weber identifies four key criteria that contribute to a sense of cohesive purpose; namely craft, repertory, criticism and ideology. And while all three facets have historically functioned as a source of authority in the service of taste formation, he suggests, ‘performance is ultimately the most significant and critical aspect of musical canon [since] . . . what emerged as the core of canonicity in musical life, beginning in the eighteenth century, was the public rendition of selected works’.¹² This said, simply performing works does not in and of itself establish them as part of a canon. On the contrary, Weber adds, ‘the musical culture has to assert that such an authority exists, and define it at least to some degree in systematic fashion’.¹³

With an enhanced picture of canonicity to hand, then, the mapping of any specific genre ought, at least within defined temporal and geographical limits, to be much more feasible. Even so, as Weber observes, repertoire study per se has still to be conducted in either exhaustive depth or breadth. The normative status of nineteenth-century canonic practices can, as Dahlhaus notes, enable the recognition of certain historical junctures at which institutional priorities were adjusted.¹⁴Thus the Leipzig Gewandhaus’s decision to perform Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony not at the beginning of its concerts given on 29 January and 5 February 1807, but in a position immediately following the intermission, marks a decisive shift in aesthetic appreciation that was repeated in similar fashion up to three times per season over several decades. Moreover, as Weber has argued, if it is possible uncritically to overstate the case for an active pursuit of the idea of absolute music based on actual performance records throughout the nineteenth century in its entirety, still the commitment to instrumental music fostered firstly by the London Philharmonic Society (from 1813) and later by the Vienna Philharmonic (through its subscription concerts beginning in 1860) provides palpable evidence of performing-canon formation in the making. Nevertheless, the prevailing impression, incompletely rendered as it is, does not amount to ‘a universally authorized play-list’ so much as ‘a set of interlocking canons’ affected in varying degrees ‘by performing resources, institutional characteristics, and social traditions’.¹⁵

The twentieth-century and predominantly post-Second World War remit of the present chapter is no less bound by the obligation to secure some kind of meaningful orientation on a cultural map that has long since become thoroughly global in scale. One point of departure might begin by fusing Dahlhaus’s sense of normativity with Weber’s assertion that the ideology of musical canon ‘was manipulated to social and political ends from its very start: the classical . . . tradition never had social autonomy’.¹⁶Totalitarian politics consequently presents a darker lens through which to observe shifting candidacies for canonical primacy. For instance, in Amy Nelson’s account of Soviet musical development in the early decades after 1917, the coincidence of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution with the centenary of Beethoven’s death gave renewed celebratory impetus to the promotion of Communist Russia as the composer’s ‘second motherland’.¹⁷Identified with the revolution from the first days of Soviet power, Beethoven, as Pauline Fairclough explains in Chapter 16, emblematised a timeless relevance grounded in the unmistakable expression of ‘revolutionary passion, courage, and brotherhood’.¹⁸ And the symphonies, in particular the Third, Fifth and Ninth, rendered the universalising message of heroism and freedom accessible to all especially palpable. Hence the Moscow Soviet’s conductorless orchestra, Persimfans, made a complete Beethoven cycle the recognised centrepiece of its 1926–7 concert season, with the Fifth Symphony intended as a specific tribute to the events of the October Revolution. Fascist cultural policy in Germany, conversely, while initially wedded to the idea of the symphony as a unifying national force, began to distance itself from the principle of music as an active political medium as early as 1936. As described by Karen Painter, Bruckner rather than Beethoven assumed the role of idealised figurehead, with broadcast performances of his symphonies, at least so far as incomplete records show, achieving parity with those of Beethoven in 1938 – the year in which plans for the Anschluss were assembled prior to their announcement in Linz on 13 March 1938.¹⁹

Christopher H. Gibbs’s exemplary tracing of the individual work biography attaching to Shostakovich’s ‘Leningrad’ Symphony during the period of its American reception, which spanned the summer of 1942 and the succeeding 1942–3 concert season, appears at first glance to offer a compelling case-study for the transition from one geopolitical world order to another.²⁰ Put simply, the early phase of native media and public interest which led to forty-six complete performances of the work among the five premier American orchestras and the NBC Orchestra in just seven months from July 1942 to January 1943 was followed by a period of studied neglect, such that the work appeared during only sixteen seasons in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia between 1948 and 2000. A question of cold-war distancing only relieved in the era of Perestroika? Possibly. And yet as John Henry Mueller’s early sociological appraisal intimated in 1951, there was plainly a contradiction to note in the fact that a symphony conceived under the rule of Communism should have become caught up in ‘the normal capitalistic competition’ that existed ‘between two national radio chains and the Eastern orchestras’.²¹ In short, it may be unjustifiably reductive to suppose that market forces, then as now, were in the paramount position to dictate what passed for canonic authority. After all, the performance of Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony given by the New York Philharmonic to mark the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks which took place on 11 September 2001 was given free of charge – and as a gesture recalling the same orchestra’s performance of the work as a televised tribute on 24 November 1963 following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nevertheless, the institution-specific status accorded to individual works or composer cycles at any point on the calendar is perhaps less revealing of the predilections exercised by particular taste communities than of a gradually advancing tendency towards economically sensitive homogenisation that has merely gathered speed post-1945.

The only truly panoramic vantage-point from which to test this assumption would of necessity depend on the assembly of an almost unimaginably encyclopaedic database comprising records not just for live, but also for recorded symphonic performances. Building on the collaborative project begun between herself and her husband in the 1940s, Kate Hevner Mueller’s 1973 study of the concert repertoires accumulated by twenty-seven American symphony orchestras in their subscription seasons from 1842–3 to 1969–70 represents an admirable attempt at such an undertaking.²² In part an updating of John Henry Mueller’s 1951 anatomy of orchestral performance patterns, Kate Hevner Mueller’s survey bases its analytical aspect on the percentage of programme time accorded first of all to composers as named individuals, and secondarily as representatives of national origins. Additional consideration is also afforded to the part played by conductors in their roles as music directors. Hence with relatively modest variables in play, six putative ‘life cycles’ are advanced, which purport to show the relative positioning of composers, whether indeterminate, stable, increasing or decreasing, throughout the twentieth century to 1970. The fact that genre specificity is not a priority makes the interpretative element of the survey only partially informative for present purposes. Nonetheless, aside from a few evaluative biases (the ‘subtleties and excellencies’ of Mozart’s symphonies, for example, are contrasted favourably with the ‘overlong’, critically venerated symphonies of Mahler,²³ even though both are acknowledged as a key contribution to the rising fortunes of their respective creators), a few telling indicators do arise. Already Bruckner’s Fourth, Seventh and Ninth symphonies and the non-choral symphonies of Mahler (with the exception of the Ninth) are regarded as repertoire staples. Likewise Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, together with Prokofiev’s First and Fifth symphonies, are effectively recognised as ‘standard’ repertoire components. The symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms are shown to occupy an unchanging position as central pillars, albeit with Brahms’s Third Symphony being the least frequently performed of his four. Some mild surprises are nevertheless apparent: for instance a growing enthusiasm for Mozart’s symphonies is attributed to more frequent performances of the ‘Haffner’, K 395 and the ‘Prague’, K 504, as well as K 550 and the ‘Jupiter’, K 551; and twelve Haydn symphonies ranging from No. 12 in E to No. 91 in E flat were in fact given their first American performances only during the 1960s. A greater preference for the Second and Fourth symphonies of Schumann over and against the First and Third is taken in the context of a gradual decline in repertoire presence, while a continuing indeterminacy surrounds Dvořák, despite increasing representation of the Eighth and Ninth symphonies in particular during the 1960s. Performances of Sibelius’s Second Symphony and Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony oppose an overall curve of growth and decline understood to disclose a completed life cycle within the first seventy years of the twentieth century. Yet American-born and trained composers were not the obvious beneficiaries; only Ives’s ‘Holidays’ Symphony and Barber’s First Symphony are specifically identified as repertoire choices apart from Copland’s Third.

The printed database which John and Kate Mueller began to assemble and which is reprinted as Part II of the 1973 survey was collated largely by hand from programme booklet records (kept either by the orchestras themselves, or in a more piecemeal way in the collections of major public libraries). Almost four decades later, any similar undertaking finds itself equally handicapped by the lack of extensive digital archiving. Relying as it does on an ad hoc combination of internet resources and published monographs, the present commentary cannot pretend to the same level of pioneering authority embodied in the Muellers’ work. Nonetheless, by foregrounding a number of data sketches based on widely available source materials, it is hoped that a more complete impression of the associated prospects and pitfalls for symphonic repertoire interpretation after 1900 can be found. Beginning with a capsule tour d’horizon spanning five continents over a four-year period (2010–13), then, a contemporary snapshot can be obtained of professional orchestras working as concert-giving institutions in Argentina (the Buenos Aires Philharmonic during 2012), Australia (the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2011), China (the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra during its 2010–11 season), Egypt (the Cairo Symphony Orchestra during its 2010–11 season), Iceland (the Iceland Symphony Orchestra during its 2011–12 season), Japan (the NHK Symphony Orchestra during its 2011–12 season) and the United Kingdom (the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in 2012–13).²⁴ At the coarsest level, it is possible to identify a sense of centre and periphery based on frequency of occurrence: thus Beethoven’s Eroica, Fifth and Ninth symphonies assume a familiar pre-eminence through their appearance in four individual orchestral seasons, yet are in fact eclipsed numerically by Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, which will eventually have been performed in five. More enlightening is the presence of just a single symphony cycle – of Beethoven, in Iceland. The strongest response to the Mahler anniversaries across 2010 and 2011 in fact took place in Shanghai, with performances of the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Tenth symphonies (the last in the completion by Rudolf Barshai). Only one new commission bearing the title ‘symphony’ appears – Stuart Greenbaum’s Second, ‘Double Planet’, premiered in Melbourne. However, the sense of an increasingly cinema-led programming agenda that might be implied by the inclusion of Howard Shore’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ Symphony in Iceland is variously offset by performances of symphonies by Bernstein (No. 1), Casella (No. 2) and Tippett (No. 1) by the NHK orchestra. More significant still, perhaps, is the inclusion of a programme combining Britten’s Cello Symphony and Elgar’s First Symphony in Buenos Aires. In the light of unresolved tensions surrounding sovereignty of the disputed Falkland Islands, it might at least be tentatively supposed that the symphony still has some form of harmonising cultural role to play.

Founded in 1781 and 1842 respectively, the Leipzig Gewandhaus and New York Philharmonic orchestras possess extended archival records from which to assess the trajectory of the symphony.²⁵ Tracing a timeline marked out in decade-length intervals beginning with the 1910–11 season gives a fair sense of developing programming philosophies as they arose from the nineteenth-century pattern of mixed, often vocally dominated repertoire selections. In the case of the New York Philharmonic, the first thing likely to catch the statistician’s eye is the sheer number of concerts mounted, at least until the 1950–1 season. It is only at this point, indeed, that the applied chronological filter coincides with the familiar framework of three contrasting genre pieces, albeit typically with the longest placed last irrespective of repertoire status. The role of conductors such as Mitropoulos, Monteux, Szell and Bernstein is notable in this context. For their predecessors (including Mahler, Damrosch, Toscanini and Barbirolli), selective historical archaeology exposes a repertoire most strongly dependent on the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn (the Fourth), Schumann and Tchaikovsky. Stanford’s Third Symphony (1910–11), Hadley’s First Symphony (1920–1), Wagenaar’s Third (1940–1) and Thompson’s Second (1940–1) all surface by virtue of a single performance through to the beginning of the Second World War and at no time subsequently. Less obviously anticipated patterns discernible after 1945 include the relatively limited programming space allotted to Mahler, Nielsen and Sibelius – all three prominent recording priorities for Leonard Bernstein in his time as music director. Of notable post-war European symphonic composers, just Henze (Ninth Symphony, 2000–1) is represented; by comparison American composers fare only slightly more favourably, with William Schuman’s Third and Ninth symphonies being performed to commemorate his 70th birthday (1980–1), and Bernstein’s First, ‘Jeremiah’, marking his death in 1990 and the succeeding tenth anniversary in 2000.

Programming by the Leipzig Gewandhaus throughout the twentieth century shows a partially divergent bias if the same parameters are applied. With fewer concerts given per season, Beethoven, Bruckner and Tchaikovsky are the most frequently represented, a complete Beethoven cycle being given for the bicentenary celebration of his birth (1970–1) directed by Peter Maag, Erich Bergel, Arvid Jansons, Norman del Mar, Lothar Seyfarth and Herbert Blomdstedt. (The Fourth and Fifth symphonies were performed on 15 December 1970 in a guest performance by Yevgeny Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic.) Aside from the single performances granted to Draeseke’s Sinfonia tragica (directed by Arthur Nikisch) and Weingartner’s Third Symphony (conducted by the composer) in 1910–11, the specific context established for a prominent symphonic work is interestingly disclosed by the sequence of pieces beginning with W. F. Bach’s Sinfonia in D minor and progressing through Waelrant, Senfl and Hassler to a performance of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony conducted by Bruno Walter (1930–1). While it would be premature to assume an incipient nationalist impulse, the programme presence of Pfitzner’s C major Symphony and Pepping’s First Symphony (both 1940–1), succeeded in the post-war era by performances of the Second symphonies of both Khrennikov (1950–1) and Khatchaturian (1960–1) offers some evidence of changing artistic affinities during the years of National-Socialist and Communist control. No stark reorientation becomes apparent if the pre-unification programming of 1980–1 is compared with its counterpart from thirty years later. Instead, a sequence of performances of Mozart’s early and late symphonies running throughout 1980–1 is counterbalanced by a complete Mahler cycle presented between 17 and 29 May 2011, the former nonetheless given exclusively by the Gewandhaus Orchestra rather than as part of an international festival opened and closed by the resident ensemble as was the case in 2011.

Orchestral touring continues to function as a significant mode of cultural transmission, albeit without the same aura of calendar-defying odyssey that it may once have possessed. That the New York Philharmonic under Josef Stransky and Henry Hadley undertook a nationwide tour extending to Canada in their 1920–1 season is not immediately remarkable; that it should have lasted for more than two months and included approximately fifty concert venues is. If a rudimentary comparison is made with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s touring programme for 2011–12, then the picture of repertoire not only deriving from the subscription season, but also embedding each orchestra in something like a grand classical and Romantic tradition is hard to miss. Both orchestras might legitimately be perceived as representing global pre-eminence in their respective eras. But the performances of Dvořák’s ‘New World’ and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that sustained the New York Philharmonic are only marginally different from those of Brahms’s Second and Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ (under Myung-Whun Chung) with which the Concertgebouw will tour to Beijing.

Amateur orchestras, even as they aspire to match the standards of professional performers, are of course less constrained by either tradition or salary-related obligations. Programming ambition is especially apparent in the archive of the Kensington Symphony Orchestra, whose 1991–2 season inclusion of Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette and Bruckner’s Ninth symphonies is paralleled by Vaughan Williams’s Sixth, Walton’s Second and Maxwell Davies’ Fifth, together with Siblelius’s Seventh and Shostakovich’s Ninth in their season for 2011–12.²⁶ Less well placed to take advantage of conservatoire student participation away from the English capital, Nottingham’s two amateur orchestras, the Symphony and Philharmonic, are to an extent less adventurous, yet still able to present Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony (the Nottingham Symphony Orchestra in 2011–12) and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (the Nottingham Philharmonic also in 2011–12) in programmes comparable to those current in the professional domain.²⁷ Acting locally while thinking globally has of course become far more prominent in the wake of social media projects such as the 2008 conception of a YouTube Symphony Orchestra, auditioned through internet-posted video files. Partnered with established professional orchestras around the world, the ensemble has so far intersected with the symphonic genre in two ways: first, in the Google/YouTube commissioning of a new work from Tan Dun, his Internet Symphony No. 1,Eroica; and second, through the Scherzo of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and the Finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, which were respectively used to open and close the orchestra’s initial public concert performance, which took place at Carnegie Hall, New York, on 15 April 2009 under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. To date, the artistic returns from this event and its successor, held in Sydney during March 2011, have ostensibly been somewhat modest. Even so, YouTube’s claim of 50 million viewings linked to its dedicated channels for the orchestra suggest that the institution’s cultural allure is far from exhausted.

The conviction that ‘music is an adventure and not just an amenity’ was vividly realised by both Edward Clark and William Glock as architects of programme planning for the BBC.²⁸Appointed in 1924, Clark, together with his assistant Julian Herbage, oversaw the first decade of music-making by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which began in 1930. As sedimented history, the sequence of first broadcast performances and world premieres makes fascinating reading – in part for its long-since recognised counterpointing of modernism and traditionalism, but also as a testament to the diversity of symphonic scores being composed during the period. Bliss’s ‘Colour’ Symphony (1932), Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony (1935) and the complete version of Walton’s First Symphony (1935) are only the most established representatives of a British symphonism encompassing, for example, Granville Bantock (1936), George Lloyd (1935), Edmund Rubbra (1937) and Bernard van Dieren (1936). Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21 (1931), Shostakovich’s First Symphony (1932), Prokofiev’s Third Symphony (1934) and Schmidt’s Fourth Symphony (1938) were all given UK premieres during this time, as was William Grant Still’s ‘Afro-American’ Symphony (1936) and the ‘Dance’ Symphony Copland fashioned in 1930 from his then unpublished ballet, Grohg (1935).²⁹

Stravinsky’s acid verdict on the unthinking practice of ‘buying up surplus symphonies as the Government buys up surplus corn’ was plainly a caveat that Glock took to heart when compiling his 1963 Music Policy document for the BBC.³⁰ The desire to continue breaking down the divide between past and present was doubtless part of the same mission to balance enterprise and attractiveness that in 1966 brought an end to the practice of routinely including complete Beethoven and Brahms symphony cycles as part of the annual BBC Promenade Concerts season. By comparison, constructive changes to the nature of scheduling on the then BBC Music Programme implemented in 1965 made possible a complete cycle of all the Haydn symphonies at a time when they were not fully available on LP records. The further desire to plan the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s annual Royal Festival Hall concert series as a distinctive sequence of live events was particularly apparent in the fiftieth anniversary season (1980–1): Britten’s ‘Spring’ Symphony, the first symphonies of Gerhard and Tippett and Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony were variously distributed throughout individual programmes in which either a sense of historical derivation or period association could be clearly perceived.³¹

At its base, programme planning is understandably less concerned with posterity than the need to balance the perennial tensions obtaining between artistic purpose and economic viability. For Bramwell Tovey, the music director’s contribution is consequently that of a fiscally responsible curator: ‘a programmer of music that needs to include traditional, neglected and contemporary repertoire’.³² Deploring the antipathy towards repertoire renewal historically exhibited by conductors seeking career advance, Leon Botstein has in turn identified ‘masterpiece mania’, star-driven marketing and internationalist anonymity as further wrong turns in the quest to revivify the sense of a communally based concert life.³³ Just as the orchestra itself can only hope to survive through imaginative collaboration – as ‘an ensemble of possibilities’ in Pierre Boulez’s words³⁴ – so the music director, Botstein proposes, must display a flair for culturally literate, even cross-institutional thematic planning. Leonard Slatkin’s involvement in St Louis is taken as one measure of community-based success. And prior to his departure for Berlin, the eighteen-year association formed between Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra clearly represented another. In either case, the message is straightforward: that coherent, engaging and non-didactic approaches mark the best prospects if the public taste for classical music is to be successfully revitalised.

Though much has been written about Rattle’s time in Birmingham, the presence of the symphony as an aspect of repertoire has not, to the best of my knowledge, been foregrounded. The aspiration to create outstanding musical events shared by Rattle and the orchestra’s general manager and latterly chief executive, Ed Smith, was grounded in a readiness to integrate new music inspired primarily by Boulez’s preferred strategies for programming. Given that concert content was partly influenced by record-company interests, the most even-handed evaluation of Rattle’s tenure is supplied by records detailing the subscription concert series programmes that were given in Birmingham Town Hall and subsequently Symphony Hall (officially from 15 April 1991).³⁵ Altogether, only four complete in-season symphony cycles were presented: of Brahms (1987–8), Nielsen (1992–3) and Beethoven (twice: in 1995–6, the orchestra’s seventy-fifth anniversary; and in 1997–8, Rattle’s final season as music director). Major recording projects such as those involving Mahler and Sibelius were in fact prepared gradually over several seasons. And the most memorable themed concept, Towards the Millennium, launched in 1990 as an advancing annual celebration of each individual decade of the twentieth century, was distinctively sutured by the inclusion of the symphony as a living genre for every single stage prior to the 1990s – from Suk’s Asrael Symphony and Mahler’s Seventh Symphony representing the period 1900–10 to Lutosławski’s Third Symphony representing the 1980s. Few if any features of the accumulated worklist aside from the complete omission of Tchaikovsky and the presence of just a single Schumann symphony – the Second – seem aberrant. But what does still resonate powerfully is the sheer capacity to reconfigure established expectations with seemingly limitless initiative and an unfailingly sure creative instinct.

To have so long deferred any particular consideration of recording as a determining force in the canonisation of the symphony is perhaps an all- too-readily apparent admission of defeat. Commentators such as Lance W. Brunner and Robert Philip have already formulated authoritative accounts of the early history and performance-practice implications of recorded orchestral performance.³⁶ Yet still it is instructive to restate that the contemporary omni-availability of orchestral audio-visual material is actually just a century or so old, and that the path-breaking recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony made in the autumn of 1911 by the Odeon-Streichorchester and Eduard Künneke in Germany was the corollary of capitalist enterprise seeking to combat the monopoly of celebrity vocal artists enjoyed by American competition. Other familiar marketplace practices offsetting innovation with duplication and increased affordability were also quick to coalesce. Thus the availability of reduced-price releases from Aeolian on their Vocalion label (1923–6) overlapped with the release (by 1925) of complete Beethoven symphony cycles on both Parlophone and Deutsche Grammophon’s Polydor label, as well as the latter’s landmark recordings, under the direction of Oskar Fried, of Bruckner’s Seventh and Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ symphonies.

Attempting to compete with the extended historical legacy of volume-driven, low-risk standard repertoire saturation, many of today’s orchestras have sought to make a virtue of necessity by managing their own media opportunities autonomously. Own-label live concert CD and download releases, already a developing reality in the 1990s, continue to expand to fill the void left by major recording companies either unable or unwilling to commit the required financial resources needed for studio recording. Thus the LSO Live series, to take one notable example, now has available five complete symphony cycles (of Beethoven, Brahms, Elgar, Mahler and Sibelius) featuring conductors such as Colin Davis, Valery Gergiev and Bernard Haitink, in two cases (Haitink/Beethoven and Davis/Sibelius) revisiting repertoire they have already recorded as complete cycles at least once before. Audio-visual formatting on DVD continues to appear from the major companies, but also in a more recognisably didactic guise in the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra’s Keeping Score productions. Here the symphonic genre predominates, with examples from the Eroica to Ives’s ‘Holidays’ Symphony and Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony being discussed and illustrated by Michael Tilson Thomas in conjunction with a complete concert performance of each work. And if the sense of occasion associated with live concert attendance seems otherwise beyond reach due to limitations of time and distance, then the Berliner Philharmoniker’s web-based Digital Concert Hall is now capable of bridging the divide between event and either cinema or home-theatre listening. Live relays and an extensive archive of video recordings are available subject to subscription access of between 48 hours and a complete calendar year’s duration. Selection, at least at the time of writing, is by conductor, composer or soloist, but not by work; the intending public, it would seem, is not taken to seek membership on the pretext of piece specificity or generic preference.

For Ananay Aguilar, the constructed nature of the recorded live event conjured up around amalgamated assumptions of possession, spontaneity and focus remains, for all its artifice, an exemplar of Werktreue philosophy.³⁷Referring specifically to the LSO Live Mahler symphony cycle produced in 2007–8, she asserts that the stated 80/20 division between actual concert material and subsequent recorded patching, while open to question, is still predicated on the pursuit of a settled sonic image, and thus a fidelity to compositional intention. Writing almost seventy years earlier on the concept of the broadcast symphony (and returning appropriately to a text addressed at the very start of this volume), Theodor W. Adorno found no such affirmative thread in the prospect of technology-enabled democratisation.³⁸ Supposedly targeted at the opportunity for social betterment embodied in the American Midwestern farmer’s wife, the symphony variously reduced to atomised chamber proportions, disarticulated into a purely sequential medley and all but electrocuted as a hollow monochrome effigy could only foster a benighted state of false consciousness through the manipulative spectacle of individuals proving themselves, in Adorno’s words, ‘to be small cultural owners within big ownership culture’.³⁹

Listening to Beethoven as if it were Tchaikovsky while at the same time treating the symphony as a piece of domestic furniture would appear to be the irredeemable consequences of the culture industry’s ubiquitous presence in Adorno’s diagnosis, a thesis which Jürgen Habermas has further traced according to the historical shift from a culture-debating to a culture-consuming public sphere. In Habermas’s formulation, serious involvement with culture ‘produces facility while the consumption of mass culture leaves no lasting trace’.⁴⁰Charting the same trajectory in respect of the Western classical tradition, Leon Botstein and Edward Rothstein each recognise a concomitant progression in which active participation has been largely supplanted by passive appreciation, performing ability by listener familiarity, and a concept of musical literacy that was once socially and aesthetically formative by a contemporary illiteracy that is attuned almost exclusively to the pursuit of subjective gratification.⁴¹ Canon, if it persists at all, functions either as a nostalgic form of ritual observance, or as a bulwark against the possibility of creative renewal. And yet as Peter Franklin has argued, an alternative diagnosis is possible – one which takes the commonplace of symphonic ambition commodified in the service of the Hollywood soundtrack as the pretext for a reflexively empowered politics of reading.⁴² Admittedly this may exist at a minimal remove from the mode of distracted coercion that Adorno so abhorred in mass culture, as Franklin acknowledges. Nevertheless, the established nineteenth-century disposition to interpret the symphony in imagistic terms alongside the genre’s capacity to elicit transgressive – that is, openly emotive – subjective responses in the context of public audition together confirm an associative value system that not only enabled a more fully socialised experience of the medium than was ever permitted by musical absolutism, but also one that subsequently found a compelling grammatical fit in the multimedia genre of the Hollywood narrative film.

Attempting an ethnographic appraisal of the symphony concert’s ritual significance in 1987, Christopher Small proposed that the implicit faith in Western bourgeois self-fashioning it predominantly enshrined was increasingly doomed to extinction.⁴³ A symbol of alienated labour division, he argued, its capacity to evoke a wide range of human experience ultimately embracing the triumph and apotheosis of the human spirit was at the same time defined as much by the lived realities it chose to exclude – for example, the circumstances of deprivation, persecution, racial discrimination and dispossession that typically fall outside the material conditions enjoyed by the developed world’s middle classes. That the contemporary fate of symphonic canonicity might be somewhat more equivocal than Small supposed is nonetheless evinced by the differing cultural resonances emanating from two avowedly utopian projects inspired by the Western classical lineage, namely the Venezuelan El Sistema programme (begun in 1975) and the Seville-based West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (founded in 1999). The industrial advance that Small associates with symphonic institutions is certainly paralleled by the state exploitation of Venezuelan oil resources that has been used to fund José Antonio Abreu’s nationally integrated network of núcleos, responsible for delivering free, open-access music instruction. But far from confirming Small’s negative impression of Westernised Wunderkind conformity, Abreu’s express desire to facilitate a democratised plan of social action presently enables approximately 370,000 students, 70–90 per cent of whom are deemed to live in poverty,⁴⁴ to participate in a pyramidal concept that leads to palpably enhanced social and professional opportunities.

The concert and recording activity that this has engendered – by the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, and latterly the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra and Caracas Youth Symphony Orchestra – is predicated on exposure to music by Beethoven, Chávez, Estévez, Mahler, Orbón, Revueltas, Tchaikovsky and others that is encountered in progressively more complex versions as the participants advance in age. To the extent that recreative rather than creative priorities have so far determined the progress of El Sistema, it might be presumed that enabling colonisation is the guiding cultural impulse. And yet the conservatoire-level integration of indigenous musics and jazz is indicative of an eclectic educational strategy that is increasingly being extended to include drama and dance as part of an overarching Venezuelan National University of the Arts. For its part, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra operates in a context more openly riven by geopolitical discord. As Rachel Beckles Willson relates, however, the model of Jewish, Muslim and Christian cooperation that it is taken to represent comes far closer to an extension of Eurocentric idealised expectation than a symbolic solution to Middle-Eastern ideological conflict imagined and implemented from within.⁴⁵Focussing on performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony given by the orchestra in Seville and Madrid during August 2006, Beckles Willson observes a series of competing appropriations caught between Adalusian neglect of local music education at one extreme and a romanticising, orientalist attitude towards the escalating war between the Israeli defence forces and Hezbollah at the other. Beethoven, in short, was viewed as saving the players from themselves, their independent identities being emblematised as representatives of an ongoing Palestinian impasse. And hence it is no small irony in the present context to suppose, along with Beckles Willson, that the orchestra’s chosen repertoire might function in ‘a totalising, synthetic, teleological and monumental sphere’ that at the same time ‘tends towards another type of essentialism, namely an unmeasured sense of superiority in its own aesthetic autonomy’.⁴⁶

No convenient coda can be appended to the two examples set by El Sistema and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra other than to register the prevailing evaluative contingencies which overcode the rudimentary co-ordinates of repertoire assimilation and dissemination that together underpin the concept of a performing canon. For Christopher Small, an enlightened transformation of the blind observance encoded in the symphony-based concert, if it could be realised at all, would need to stem from an infinitely more involved and self-aware complex of relations among performers and listeners than had become the norm for the later twentieth century.⁴⁷ The extent to which the twenty-first century is capable of answering to this programme is beginning to become a little clearer: but whether it can continue to engender sufficient empathy and enthusiasm to secure a vital future must inevitably remain in the balance.