In his ‘Preface’ to this important publication, editor Brian Hart explains that A. Peter Brown (1943–2003), who conceived and in large part wrote the monumental multi-volume series, The Symphonic Repertoire, intended a volume that would cover the symphony after 1930 with contributions by multiple authors. However, after Brown’s early death, a decision was made to devote a separate fifth volume to the symphony in the Americas from its beginnings and later to publish another volume that would survey the European symphony after 1930. One wonders if the series might require yet another volume that would address the African, Asian and Oceanian symphony.

This fifth volume contains an excellent ‘Introduction to the Symphonic Repertoire of the United States and Latin America’ by Hart (worth reading if nothing else) and separate chapters devoted to ‘The First Generation of Symphonists in the United States’ by Douglas W. Shadle; ‘The Second New England School and Their Contemporaries’ by E. Douglas Bomberger; ‘The Symphonic Works of Charles Ives’ by J. Peter Burkholder; ‘From 1920 to 1950 in the United States: The Symphony in a World Upended’ by Susan Key, with Drew Massey; ‘Forgotten Modernisms: The Symphony in the United States from 1950 to 1970’ by Katherine Baber (with assistance from Hart); ‘The Symphony in South America’ by Carol A. Hess; ‘The Symphony in Mexico, Central America, and the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean’, also by Hess; and ‘The Symphony in the United States since 1970’, by Matthew Mugmon.

Whereas some of these authors restricted themselves to symphonies, others considered orchestral works more generally, while Hess took the broadest approach, covering an even wider repertoire, including a brief discussion of mission music in colonial Mexico. Faced in particular with a superabundance of scores, Key/Massey, Baber, Hess and Mugmon focused on repertoire considered most significant, with ‘brief mentions’ of many other composers and works noted in appendices or tables (p. viii).

The volume gives fair coverage to émigré composers, from Anthony Philip Heinrich to Karel Husa, including Bloch, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Martinů and Milhaud, although one wonders whether the symphonies of Ernest Toch and Ernst Krenek deserve more than ‘brief mentions’. Similarly, I imagine that some would want to make a case for discussing, among the native-born Americans, Harold Shapero’s Symphony for Classical Orchestra – cited by Alan Rich as ‘the greatest American symphony’– or the symphonies of Easley Blackwood Jr. or Ned Rorem or any number of other favourites (p. 458).Footnote ¹ Confronting so many recent symphonies, Mugmon had the most challenging job in this respect. Although his choices seem reasonable enough, one questions his decision not to discuss the work of composers who wrote only one symphony, as in the case of Pulitzer Prize winners Shulamit Ran, Joseph Schwanter, Michael Torke and Steven Stucky; the same criterion would yield a history of the French symphony that gives short shrift to Bizet, Franck, Dukas and Messiaen.

The most glaring omission concerns the absence of a chapter devoted to Canadian composers, an exclusion defended by Hart by stating – along the lines of Mugmon – that Canada’s most prominent composers largely wrote only one or two symphonies, although this admittedly includes so distinguished a work as Harry Somers’s First Symphony (1953). Canadian readers especially are not likely to look upon this lacuna favourably, but Hart, who is nothing if not the most punctilious and conscientious of editors, provides an exhaustive list of Canadian symphonies that includes a wealth of information about scores and recordings.

One might also question dedicating a whole chapter to the symphonic works of Charles Ives, notwithstanding Hart’s argument that ‘the singularity, complexity, and significance’ of these works justify as much (p. vii). Certainly, devoting a single chapter to Ives in histories of American music has long precedence, but at 133 pages, this virtual book within a book might be a little de trop, especially considering that the volume might otherwise have allowed some space to such contemporaneous symphonists as Henry Hadley, Edward Burlingame Hill, Daniel Gregory Mason and John Alden Carpenter, all of whom receive just a ‘brief mention’ in the following chapter. On the other hand, one can hardly begrudge so major an Ives scholar as Peter Burkholder the opportunity to publish so definitive account of this prominent repertoire.

All the authors adopt analytical symbols taken from Jan LaRue’s Guidelines for Style Analysis, which gives the diverse chapters some unity, as do the tables that list a particular composer’s symphonic output, with information about instrumentation, premieres, publications and sometimes more; the table for Alan Hovhaness’s 67 symphonies (!) runs to no fewer than 18 pages, leaving the symphonic oeuvre of Villa-Lobos, Henry Cowell and Philip Glass in the dust.Footnote ² The book also offers detailed technical analyses of selected symphonies, accompanied by beautifully reproduced musical examples. And each chapter concludes with a bibliographic overview, notes and a bibliography.

Overall, however, the chapters differ, sometimes widely, in approach. Topics variously covered include composers’ lives, critical editions, reception history, contemporary criticism, recordings, conductors, patrons and orchestras. Generally speaking, more information about recordings would be welcome, although Hart provides in his introduction a nine-page selected list of commercial recordings of American symphonies. Yet another table by Hart documents the enormous role (one that hardly can be exaggerated) that Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony played in the history of the American symphony by listing all the American and Latin-American symphonies played by Koussevitzky and commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation.

Periodically, too much is made, in my opinion, of what Hart in his introduction calls ‘the “Great American Symphony” albatross’ (p. 3). As an occasional journalistic shibboleth, this phrase, as far as I can tell, was never taken very seriously by either composers or the general public. Witness, for example, the title of a 1954 piece by Leonard Bernstein, ‘Whatever Happened to the Great American Symphony?’, a bit of a lark in which the author’s alter ego in the form of a Broadway producer essentially argues that symphonies should be left to the Germans.Footnote ³ What follows is some commentary about individual chapters:

Douglas Shadle offers, besides authoritative discussions of the symphonic works of Heinrich, George Frederick Bristow, William Henry Fry and Louis Moreau Gottschalk, an overview of the growth of the symphony orchestra in the US in the early nineteenth century, including some information about such pioneering symphonists as Charles Hommann and Leopold Meignen, two of Heinrich’s contemporaries. This otherwise sober essay concludes with the fanciful notion that later American composers ‘did little to promote earlier American composers’ and ‘consistently downplayed the importance’ of the composers discussed in this chapter ‘in order to boost their own reputations as innovators and true musical patriots’, and that although Copland and Bernstein (the only composers mentioned in this context) likely ‘knew few if any of the most colorful pieces described in this chapter … [i]f they did, they cleverly chose to ignore it, to the detriment of the legacy of the earliest American symphonic repertoire’ (p. 116). Singling out Copland and Bernstein has special irony in that few composers – along with Howard Hanson – did as much for both deceased and living American and Latin-American composers as they. Copland wrote appreciatively of a number American composers from William Billings, Stephen Foster and Gottschalk to George Whitefield Chadwick, Henry F. Gilbert, Charles Griffes and Ives; he programmed Ives and Charles Martin Loeffler at the Yaddo Festival, and conducted the music of Gottschalk, Ives, Carl Ruggles and Griffes with various orchestras, not to mention the extensive support he gave living American and Latin-American composers younger or slightly older in age.Footnote ⁴ And notwithstanding Bernstein’s comment at a 1958 Young People’s Concert about the nineteenth century being the ‘kindergarten period of American music’, as cited by Hart (p. 36), the composer similarly spoke respectfully of Chadwick, MacDowell, Gilbert and Ives and led the New York Philharmonic in their music as well as that of Arthur Foote and Ruggles (again not to mention Bernstein’s performances of numerous American and Latin-American composers younger than Ruggles but older than himself).Footnote ⁵

Douglas Bomberger’s discussion of the fin-de-siècle symphonic scene homes in on the work of John Knowles Paine, Chadwick, Amy Beach, George Templeton Strong and MacDowell, although the closest the last-named ever came to writing a symphony seems to have been his two orchestral suites which, the author writes, have only ‘tenuous’ connections to the symphonic genre (p. 167). Bomberger offers helpful thumbnail sketches of the composers under consideration and makes good use of period reviews, including two Dresden critiques of Paine’s Second Symphony. In conclusion he finds much of the music covered here laudably inspired, well-crafted and worthy of performance today, but he admits nonetheless that ‘[i]t remained for the new century … to produce American symphonic works that truly transcended the German tradition’ (p. 167).

Peter Burkholder’s chapter represents a crowning achievement, with detailed analyses of Ives’s symphonic work. In the case of the second movement of the Fourth Symphony, he not only charts stylistic features and borrowed material, but, drawing on the work of Thomas M. Brodhead, corresponding references to Hawthorne’s story, ‘The Celestial Rail-Road’ (p. 234).Footnote ⁶ Thanks to his familiarity with popular American songs and hymns along with the European classical canon, Burkholder continues his well-known work of drawing connections between a wide range of music and Ives’s oeuvre; he mentions, too, the influence of Ives’s teachers, Dudley Buck and Horatio Parker, on at least some of the composer’s early church music (although whether any American concert composer left its mark on Ives’s other music remains unstated). Burkholder also includes an interesting discussion of the famously revised ending of the Second Symphony, arguing that Ives wanted the new final chord to sound briefly rather than held as in Leonard Bernstein’s performances. Given the large number of available recordings of Ives’s symphonic works, including realizations of the Universe Symphony, it would have been valuable had Burkholder expounded more on the performance and recording history of this repertoire.

At one point Burkholder raises an issue concerning the Second Symphony that relates to other Ives works as well, stating, ‘it is not necessary to recognize the specific popular melodies, hymn tunes, and passages from classical works in order to understand the symphony’. The author even cites an instance in which recognizing a phrase from the hymn ‘Materna’, as used in the symphony, can lead to a misunderstanding, as nowadays most listeners will associate the fragment with Katharine Lee Bates’s lyricization of the phrase, ‘And crown thy good with brotherhood’, rather than with the original, ‘In thee no sorrow may be found’ in her popular anthem ‘America the Beautiful’. ‘At the same time’, writes Burkholder, ‘the music may carry more meaning for listeners who do recognize the borrowed tunes and passages, know their contexts, and bring their associations to bear in interpreting the music’ (p. 212). As for Ives’s use of so-called minstrel songs, Burkholder’s assertion that the composer ‘seems to have regarded the songs not as racist or offensive but as expressions of Foster’s – and his own – sympathy for African Americans’, struck me as well-argued but a little pat and had me consulting William Austin’s ‘Susanna’, ‘Jeanie’ and ‘The Old Folks at Home’: The Songs of Stephen C. Foster from His Time to Ours for some further nuance and clarification.Footnote ⁷

Drawing on a draft by Drew Massey, Susan Key’s impressively researched chapter profiles 20 composers active in the period 1920 to 1950, dividing these composers into four clusters: composers who studied in France with Nadia Boulanger; composers associated with the American Academy in Rome; composers educated at home in the US; and émigré composers. The second grouping, consisting of Howard Hanson, Leo Sowerby, Samuel Barber and Randall Thompson, seems, however, a bit arbitrary, given that these composers, too, received their training in the US, like those figures in the third group. Barber, for instance, studied almost exclusively with Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute and (contrary to the received wisdom) Hanson never really studied with Respighi while in Rome, the Academy essentially serving as a residence for composers who had completed their educations.Footnote ⁸ (Roger Sessions, discussed in the following chapter because he composed the majority of his symphonies after 1950, also resided several years at the Academy during this period, but he, too, studied in the US.)

Considering that this chapter discusses works by Marc Blitzstein, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Walter Piston, Samuel Barber, Howard Hanson, Randall Thompson, Henry Cowell and William Grant Still, in addition to those by émigrés Bloch, Hindemith, Martinů, Milhaud and Stravinsky, the mid-century can rightly claim to have been a golden age for the American symphony. An informed ‘public musicologist’ for many years affiliated with the San Francisco Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic (p. 952), Key understandably finds it ‘puzzling and frustrating … to realize that two generations have passed with little or no critical attention to these works beyond scattered performances and historical publications’ (p. 450). Although this seems a problem confronting the symphony after Mahler and Sibelius generally – with Shostakovich a notable exception – it does seem that the American mid-century symphonic repertoire contains a treasure trove (beyond such relatively familiar items as the Copland Third, the Barber First, Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements and Hindemith’s Symphony in Bb for concert band) that would delight, move and intrigue an American public as much as an exhibition of art works by, say, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe or Alexander Calder. (That said, Meredith Willson of Music Man fame, cited in the ‘brief mentions’ section as having composed two symphonies, seems to have done well by turning his attention to Hollywood and Broadway.)

The composers covered in Katherine Baber’s chapter, which engagingly discusses at length symphonies by Sessions, Paul Creston, William Schuman, Alan Hovhaness, David Diamond, Vincent Persichetti, Leonard Bernstein, Peter Mennin and the neglected Black composer Julia Perry, can be said to form an extension of this golden age, much as Glazunov, Scriabin and Rachmaninoff continued the tradition of Borodin, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff. The outlier of the group, of course, is Hovhaness, although Baber informs us that both Koussevitzky and Leopold Stokowski championed his work as they did many others during this period. Best known for his Symphony no. 2, ‘Mysterious Mountain’, Hovhaness himself, writes Baber, preferred his Symphony no. 19, ‘Vishnu’. As for the chapter’s other composers, the ubiquity of twelve-tone melodies – Baber dutifully provides a number of twelve-tone rows that served as the basis of many works – distanced audiences, raising the question of tensions between twelve-tone melody and the symphonic genre, not to mention public acceptance in general.

In so short a space, one can barely even roughly summarize Carol Hess’s two extraordinary chapters on the symphony in South America, Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean, especially as the mid-century seems to have been something of a golden age for the symphony in these many lands as well. Such an epic tale for the most part precludes the close analytical readings found in the other chapters, but this serves to make Hess’s two chapters a more accessible read. Virtually a textbook on Latin-American orchestral music, Hess devotes close attention only to the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos and the Mexican Carlos Chávez, both prolific symphonists, although the Argentinian Alberto Ginastera gets his due even with only two early, withdrawn symphonies to his name and the Mexican Silvestre Revueltas without having written a symphony at all.

Yet another scholarly tour de force, Matthew Mugmon’s chapter on the American symphony after 1970, which covers mostly living composers, stands out for its incorporation of information personally gained through contacts with Daniel Asia, Mason Bates, William Bolcom, John Corigliano, Mohammed Fairouz, Adolphus Hailstork, John Harbison, Alan Jay Kernis, Libby Larsen, Lowell Liebermann, Tobias Picker, George Walker, Wang Jie and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich; other composers profiled in this survey include Elliott Carter, Lou Harrison, George Rochberg, Philip Glass, Stephen Albert, John Adams, Christopher Rouse and Wynton Marsalis. Such activity indicates if nothing else that many of the most prominent American composers of the last 55 years have continued to write symphonies and that the death of the symphony sometimes announced in the 1960s was, to cite a famous quip about Mark Twain’s reported death, ‘greatly exaggerated’. Informed by his background as a Mahler scholar, Mugmon nicely complements his knowledge of the contemporary symphony with familiarity with both the American and European canon.

What one misses from this exhaustive and impressive volume is greater critical judgment and discrimination; faced with hundreds upon hundreds of symphonies one gets little sense of rankings among composers or rankings within a composer’s output. Plainly some American symphonies have stood the test of time better than others. Given the quantity of symphonies, such evaluation might be too much to expect from any one person, but more could have been made of more contemporary critiques (to the extent that these exist). One accordingly welcomes critical remarks as they do occur, such as Bomberger’s advocacy for Chadwick’s Sinfonietta as the work of that composer that ‘most deserves to be reassessed in the twenty-first century’ (p. 153); Burkholder’s allowing that Ives’s handling of the codas in the first and last movements of the First Symphony might be questioned (p. 199); Key’s opinion that ‘Piston’s symphonic achievement – in addition to his other orchestral and chamber pieces – urgently demands fuller exposure, with Symphonies 2, 4, and 6 being good places to start’ (p. 350); Hess’s mention of the ‘pictorial writing that verges on the overly explicit’ in Villa-Lobos’s Third Symphony (p. 691); and Baber’s lively mining of reviews and other commentary, such as Leonard Bernstein’s description of Diamond’s Fifth Symphony as ‘a work that revives one’s hope for the symphony form’ and Harold C. Schonberg’s assertion that the same composer’s Eighth Symphony contains ‘“[p]lenty of energy coupled to almost a total lack of charm or relaxation: neuroticism unreined”’ (p. 574).

But as Key points out, what’s needed are more performances, more criticism, more scholarship. Fortunately, this volume represents a big step in the right direction.