Symphonic Spectacles

Form, Identity, and Hybridity in the Early Twentieth Century

Oxford University Press—Release Date 23 May 2025. Pre-order at this link!

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Structure, Spectacle, Symphony

In the early twentieth century, a flurry of symphonic composers across the Western world were exploring what they perceived to be the limits of concert music. In the process, they created hybrid symphonic spectacles: works that would combine the symphony with a variety of related genres to innovate in the sphere of symphonic form and narrative. While expanding the size and dramatic potential of the genre, these composers moreover encoded aspects of their intersectional identity within their art. This chapter establishes a foundation for examining the groundbreaking symphonic works that form the focus of Symphonic Spectacles by critically examining contemporary approaches to three framing concepts: structure, spectacle, and the symphony.

Chapter 2. Genres, Systems, Networks: Intersections with Formal Analysis

This chapter examines the consequences of the hybrid compositional design that flourished in the early twentieth century. Drawing on the writings of music and literary scholars, the chapter develops the notion of form-as-genre, a conceptualization of musical forms as dynamic, rhetorical, and socially determined. Formal analysis can therefore be associated with genre systems and network analysis—systems allow for the mixture of genres and forms, whereas networks connect these genres to related issues of conception, reception, and sociocultural circumstance, integrating notions of identity and experience into music analytical interpretation. The chapter proposes a rhetorical approach to form, through which composers summoned extant formal procedures in incomplete or hybridized manners for their rhetorical effects, often resulting in much freer structures.

Chapter 3. Form, Drama, and Gender Politics in Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie

This chapter proposes a (mis)reading of Strauss’s tone poem Eine Alpensinfonie as a tragic music-drama centered on the demise of the heroic masculine protagonist. The fifteen-year conception of the symphony offers insight into the system of genres under consideration—although Strauss labeled the work a symphony, it originated as an (auto-)biographical sonata-form first-movement and coincides with a long period of composing music-dramas. Adapting models of narrative and virtual musical agency, the analysis examines a masculine persona whose journey into the alpine mountains is portrayed through idiosyncrasies associated with the large-scale form. The orchestra employs spectacular sonic imagery, by which the feminine natural events overwhelm the hiker persona in two non-sonata moments: the introduction-coda frame and a climactic summit episode. The sexual politics of the work builds on the notion of gendered sonata-form themes, as examined in the writings of McClary, Cusick, Hepokoski, and Sayrs.

Chapter 4. Cyclic Form and Programmaticism in Beach’s “Gaelic” Symphony

This chapter examines procedures that position Amy Beach’s “Gaelic” Symphony as an instance of compositional self-advocacy. By employing cyclic form to construct a transsymphonic narrative, Beach associates the “Gaelic” Symphony with the tone poem genre. Formal anomalies span the symphony, principally as intrusive applications of fugato counterpoint and extended codas. The symphony includes folk music elements and her own programmatic conceptions that join with these formal innovations in order to position the work as a sufficiently intellectual and metaphysical pursuit, one that ultimately earned her a position as, in composer George Chadwick’s words to her, “one of the guys.” Archival evidence demonstrates the changing conception of the work that ultimately created the spectacular public statement of Beach’s first and only entry into the male space of the concert symphony.

Chapter 5. Imposed Sonata Form in “Black” from Ellington’s Black, Brown & Beige

Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown & Beige represents the composer’s most ambitious combination of big-band music with symphonic structure, conceived as a reflection on African American music history. The first part, “Black,” demonstrates the role that thematic variation and development played for Ellington in structuring a large-scale jazz composition. This chapter suggests how White listeners at the Carnegie Hall premiere could hear developmental and recapitulatory sonata-form rhetoric in “Light,” the third section of “Black.” Ellington manipulates the jazz ensemble through written-out solos, instrumental groupings, and tempo changes to create a sense of symphonic continuity and conclusion. The wide-ranging reception history of the work, as well as Ellington’s subsequent revisions, directs the analysis toward Ellington’s motivations for navigating what Anderson terms the “White space” of symphonic composition.

Chapter 6. The Symphonic Voice as Woman’s Work in Smyth’s The Prison

Ethel Smyth identifies The Prison as a symphonic work even as it employs many of the conventions of her most successful genre, operatic composition. The symphony afforded the women’s rights-minded Smyth an opportunity to transcend her own prior compositional idioms as well as the expectations of a woman composer in interwar England. Based on a literary work by her close personal friend Henry Brewster, The Prison reconstructs that text, infusing it with elements of Smyth’s own metaphysical ideas. The work signals the symphonic genre in its adaptation of symphonic movement forms, counterpoint, progressive tonality, and rotational form. Combining her consideration of symphonic thought with significant reimaginings of Brewster’s text, Smyth constructs a novel philosophical narrative that ends with the climactic union of Self and Soul.

Chapter 7. Repetition and Spectatorship in Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast

Conceived as a symphonic cantata, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (the first work in the trilogy The Song of Hiawatha, op. 30) fuses the cantata’s traditional alternation of stylized numbers with an overarching sonata-rondo structural layout. The text, adapted from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, depicts Indigenous hardship in America; yet, Coleridge-Taylor’s African-Anglican identity refracts that original story, enabling it to speak to a variety of intersecting communities. Over the course of the cantata, the reprise of a three-part opening sequence serves as a rotational signal, announcing new numbers or transitional passages. By examining the repetition structure along the lines of a multidimensional sonata-rondo, the interpretive frame shifts our focus toward the very act of spectatorship. The cantata offers a unique example of turn-of-the-century symphonic experimentation, the reception of a racialized composer and his navigation of White spaces, and the hybridization of formal models in service of expressive ends.

Chapter 8. Multidimensionality in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony

This chapter analyzes the archetype of Germanic spectacle, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. After its premiere in the Muiskfesthall in Munich, the work earned the moniker “Symphony of a Thousand” for its enormous orchestral and choral requirements. The architectonics at work in Part 2 of the Eighth Symphony (which depicts the final scene of Goethe’s Faust) comprise a rich network of interacting genres, combining the thematic development of the sonata with the sequential organization of the oratorio and the narrative elements of music-drama. Various aspects of Mahler’s identity—his gender, nationality, and religious disposition—play out in the large-scale narrative dynamics of the Symphony, dynamics that reflect an overarching story of nonattainment. Multiple dimensions of sonata formal function underpin the work’s hybrid structure, which synthesizes concepts addressed across the earlier case studies.

Appendix: Catalogue of Published Rehearsal Numbers