The symphony, declared Paul Bekker in 1918, is by definition a “public genre”. But in the wake of the First World War and the revolutions and economic turbulence that it triggered, the potential “community building force” that Bekker identified in the symphony seems to have gone largely unnoticed as the genre itself fell into disregard among the younger generation of composers.
Things changed in the 1930s, however, when statistics suggest that the symphony experienced a revival across Europe and the West, apparently oblivious to the political divides that were emerging, whether in the USSR, Nazi Germany, or in the democracies of Britain, the ‘New Deal’ USA, France, Switzerland or Scandinavia. The increasing popularity of the radio also provided the means for this monumental genre to reach unprecedentedly broad audiences.
Symphonic production seems to have reached a peak around 1945, though the genre remained popular thereafter, even during the years when the radio stations and summer courses of post-War Europe seemed determined to uphold a post-Webernian aesthetic. The symphonies of the interwar years and the mid-20th century – their composition, dissemination and reception – have recently become a topic of scholarly interest (see Emily MacGregor and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to British Symphonies). But if the symphony remained a public genre, what publics did it now address? If it indeed possessed “community building” potential, what communities did it help to build or demarcate, and what technologies played a role in promoting it? And what role did the symphony play outside Europe and the USA – in Latin America, Africa and Australasia?
This Study Day is being held as a collaboration of the SNSF project “Helvetia through a Twelve-Note Lens” at the Bern Academy of the Arts (HKB) and the Unité de Musicologie of Geneva University.
Official languages of the Study Day: English and French.
Keynote speaker: Dr Ben Earle (University of Birmingham)