Barber, Symphony in One Movement

The American composer Samuel Barber had a reputation as a romantic. His development was guided by two admirers of Brahms – his uncle Sydney Homer who was also a composer, and his teacher at Curtis, Rosario Scalero. Scalero was also interested in the Italian masters of the Renaissance and Baroque and this is reflected in a teaching method that gave much emphasis to counterpoint. However, Barber’s upbringing alone is not enough to explain his eschewal of the prevailing modernist approach of his time. When commenting on Sibelius, who was the most notable figure of the time to avoid the modern musical language, Aaron Copland said “his [Sibelius’s] music does not grapple with the problems of our own world” and those who followed him were “composers who feel lost in the mazes of the contemporary idiom.” Whilst these comments may seem harsh, they nevertheless reflect a mentality that Barber and Sibelius shared in their dislike for cities. Barber himself asserted in 1935 that “Skyscrapers, subways, and train lights play no part in the music I write” and it follows logically that extreme dissonances played no part in his music either, at least until a change of style during the Second World War that eventually saw him adopting serial techniques in the Piano Sonata (1949).

The Symphony in One Movement (1936) is divided into four sections that have a quasi-sonata form relationship: the first section serves as an exposition of the three themes, the second section develops on the first theme but in diminution, the third section has the lyrical second theme in augmentation and the last section recapitulates all three themes in the form of a passacaglia with the first theme as the ground bass. While the passacaglia bears reference to Brahms’s fourth symphony, there are other traits that show similarity with Sibelius’s music but above all, the work shows Barber as a young composer who had little interest in the modern way of living and the modern way of writing in the years leading up to the Second World War.

July 2012