ABSTRACT
The ‘second age’ of the symphony was over by 1960. Although symphonic music had flourished when the prevailing style was neo-Classicism, that movement was declining by 1950 and passé by 1960 in Europe and America. Even Stravinsky had adopted serialism in his principal late works from the mid-1950s onwards. Symphonies were peripheral to the second phase of modernist revolution in music, beginning around 1945, that was exemplified by post-Webern serialism, electro-acoustic music and indeterminism. During the 1960s their numbers declined compared to previous decades and although symphonies by Shostakovich, Arnold, Simpson, Schuman and Piston continued to appear, they were considered conservative. Composers like Frankel and Searle demonstrated that serial construction could be compatible with symphonic music by using gradations of tension and relaxation, contrasting textures and speed in place of tonally determined structures. However, the retention of symphonic rhetoric seemed old-fashioned compared to the radical applications of serialism found in the music of Boulez, Stockhausen and Babbitt during the 1950s.
