Canonical Danger:

How Standard Repertoire Undermines the Orchestra

Jeff Martin

One feature of the modern orchestra that we take for granted is the performance canon, a limited selection of compositions by a relatively small number of composers, primarily from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Another well-known fact (but not a feature) about orchestras is the severe financial straits that have bedeviled organizations in the United States and Europe for the past several decades. There are a variety of reasons for the existence of the canon and unhealthy budgets, not all of which are related to each other. One correlation, though, is that insistence on performing standard repertoire seems to undercut the financial viability of the orchestra. Many composers will tell you that the solution to this problem is to play more contemporary music. This is not the only answer, however. In addition to performing more contemporary repertoire, orchestras could also play music from the past that is not as familiar. Hubert Parry, a nineteenth century British composer whose music exhibits a characteristic Late Romantic sonic world, is an excellent case study for this possibility. The exclusion of Parry’s symphonies from the orchestral repertoire curtails audiences’ awareness of the musical past, undermines the future relevance of the orchestra, and deprives everyone of a wonderful sonic experience.

In order to understand why it is necessary to find solutions for orchestras to flourish in the future, we should begin by noting some alarming trends. First of all, a lower percentage of the adult population is attending orchestral concerts today than in the past: between 1982 and 2012, the percentage decreased by 4.2%,[1] while the US population grew 35% from 1980 to 2010.[2] At the same time as this audience decline, orchestras have been expanding their seasons and playing more concerts. And costs are increasing: the lowest pay for orchestral musicians has risen faster than the pay of both unionized and non-unionized workers between 1987 and 2003. Economic recessions tend to reduce the size of audiences, and when it is time for budget cuts, music education is a prime target for legislatures. Music education, it turns out, helps to increase orchestral audience numbers.[3] All of these factors combine to sketch an ominous portrait for the future. And unfortunately, one of the most obvious solutions, higher government funding, has not proven to reliably solve the financial problems of orchestras.[4]

The financial woes of many major American and European symphony orchestras are well known. However, orchestras have another major problem – the canon. Most classical musicians and listeners have been taught for many years that the canon contains only the best music by the greatest composers of the past. They reason that we should only perform good music; therefore, it simply makes sense that if you search the New York Philharmonic’s performance database, you will find 3,523 program matches for the keyword “Beethoven.” Similarly, it is completely reasonable that when we search for C. Hubert H. Parry, a composer who is much less known than his predecessor Ludwig, we find only five program matches. As it turns out, the Philharmonic has only performed Parry three times, and none of these are performances of one of his five symphonies (that’s one more symphony than either Brahms or Schumann, both of whom wrote four). Parry has not fared much better in his native England – the Proms Performance Archive says that he has been “featured in 149 events,” but seventy of these performances were of Jerusalem, a patriotic song written during the Great War. The Proms has only programmed one of his symphonies – the fifth, in 2010 and 2018.

Parry’s Third Symphony features a well written scherzo, in keeping with established nineteenth-century symphonic practice. This music would not sound out of place in a major concert hall today, but instead it is almost never performed.

Unfortunately, the idea of a canon containing only the best music is a myth. A study of Parry’s symphonies reveals that they are quite well written – all of them are available in recordings on Spotify, so you can hear them for yourself. Parry was not merely well-versed in the conventions of sonata form; he also found creative ways to undermine it in his music. If you know anything about Parry, this should hardly be surprising; he was one of the first musicologist-composers, holding the prestigious chair of Heather Professor of Music at Oxford. The authors of Sonata Theory, a modern theory of Classical- and Romantic-era sonata form based on the work of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, among others, suggest that composers implement “surprising or innovative departure[s] from the constellation of habitual practices, …presumably in order to generate an enhanced or astonishing poetic effect.”[5] Haydn, for example, is well-known for writing musical jokes into sonata form. Parry was not a trickster like Haydn; despite this, he also added individuality to his work by bucking convention. His Fourth Symphony, for example, ends with a succession of hammer-blow chords, pauses, then plays a gesture that would be at home at the opening of a movement.

The quality of Parry’s work is not the only strike against this myth. It turns out that the canon did not always exist – in the eighteenth century, contemporary music was performed most often. It was hardly unusual that Johann Sebastian Bach’s music lurked in somewhat of a dustbin for some time after his death – many other composers like Buxtehude and Schütz met a similar fate. However, in the mid-nineteenth century, orchestral repertoire in the European continent began to ossify. By the time of Brahms, new composers had to fight their way into a performance canon that prominently featured the symphonies of Beethoven, among others. It is no accident that paranoia prevented Brahms from releasing his first symphony until he was in his forties. By 1910, the door to the orchestral stage was mostly closed to new composers;[6] Schoenberg’s embrace of atonality had essentially nothing to do with it. Even if you got one work into the repertoire, there was no guarantee that you would have future renown – Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations is still frequently performed today, but how often do you hear one of his symphonies? The canon left behind many composers who were frequently performed in their time – Antonio Salieri and Louis Spohr come to mind. Worse, Salieri has suffered the extra indignity of being falsely accused of poisoning Mozart in the popular film Amadeus. Hubert Parry, it turns out, suffered the additional disadvantage of living in Great Britain, where the canonization process had begun earlier, and where native composers were held in low esteem. His obituary in The Musical Times noted that “as a fact the present generation can know almost nothing of his music, for even in the not very remote past several of his more important works which were produced at one or other of the provincial Festivals [sic] never came to a hearing in London, or if they were heard once here, suffered the fate of most British music and were never repeated.”[7] Parry never had a chance to prove the worth of his music for future generations; he was simply ignored.

Most people who hear classical music are blissfully unaware of the deleterious effect of the canon on musical history. They do not know what they are missing. Neither did I, for many years, until I became bored listening to Brahms again and again. Confining our listening to a narrow selection of music leads us to think that what we hear is all there is. We don’t wonder where Beethoven got his ideas; we assume, perhaps, that they came through divine revelation. In case you didn’t know, Beethoven’s piano sonatas were influenced by Clementi, but Beethoven gets the credit because modern listeners tend not to know of Clementi. And Bach’s concertos were influenced by Vivaldi, who was rediscovered in the twentieth century. Vivaldi’s reappearance should have warned the musical public that something was wrong – how much other good music lay buried in history? But orchestras and audiences, addicted to the “da-da-da-dum” of Beethoven’s Fifth, paid little attention. Circling back to Parry, his Third Symphony has a vigorous scherzo and an intensely beautiful closing theme and variations movement, but most people have never heard of it. Instead, orchestras almost mindlessly perform “Freude, schöner Götterfunken” again and again. How can you truly appreciate Beethoven or any other duly canonized composer if their music is all that you hear?

Program for a concert held in London in 1826. In Britain, the canon had an early start – you can already see familiar names here, but there are also composers on this program who have since been forgotten. Andreas Romberg, the last composer on this program, was a famous violinist in his time – you can listen to the first movement of one of his violin concertos here below. You are highly unlikely to hear his music at a concert by any major orchestra today.

At the time of this concert, Mozart had been dead for nearly a century. A concert featuring only the music of a long-dead composer would have been unusual in Mozart’s time (except perhaps in Britain, where Handel had been massively popular).

Of course, it is hardly worth agonizing over narrow-minded concert programs if orchestras cannot afford to produce music that is less known to the public. It is well known among orchestra managements that playing Beethoven fills more seats in the concert hall.[8] Clearly an abrupt replacement of the canon is unlikely to go well unless wealthy benefactors are willing to underwrite much more of major orchestra budgets than they already do, at least for some period of time. However, there is no reason that Beethoven and Parry could not be performed on the same concert – why not do a double-symphony program and play Parry’s Third and Beethoven’s Seventh together, for example? Or a Rheinberger organ concerto could be paired with Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony. The big-name composer can fill the seats, and the less-known composer can educate the audience. In time, classical music patrons would become used to variety again and perhaps even demand it. As a contemporary composer, I would of course encourage orchestras to play many more contemporary works at the same time. If you cut performances of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Brahms, and Mahler in half, you could easily perform more unfamiliar music from the past, as well as more contemporary music like Unsuk Chin’s Violin Concerto or Pascal Dusapin’s Go. We don’t need every orchestra to recycle all of Beethoven’s nine symphonies within a period of only a few years. Beethoven is on YouTube. If you desperately need to hear his Second Symphony right now, well, it is only several clicks and keystrokes away.

This is an important step to take because orchestras need to do something to reverse the decline in audience participation and the rising budget shortfalls that have been mounting in the past decades. We already have known about Beethoven for the past two centuries – how can an orchestra grow their audience by playing him again and again? A recent study of the woes of modern orchestras observed that “performing new repertoire is necessary in order to increase audience members,” and noted that “other cultural presenters, such as theaters and museums, have embraced new works more successfully than [symphony orchestras].”[9] If museums can do it, so can the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Why not begin to speculate about the future? We can easily imagine Beethoven being played routinely in fifty years. But what about five hundred years? Will he still be played then? It would be a tragedy if he were to be completely forgotten, but it seems impossible to imagine that the current focus on a small set of eighteenth and nineteenth century composers is sustainable indefinitely. It likely won’t take a civilization-ending asteroid impact event to dethrone Beethoven from his iron grip on the orchestral repertoire.

When that happens, we will have gained much. This article has tended to focus on Parry; his symphonies are beautiful and well worth our time to hear. All of them have been superbly recorded by the London Philharmonic and are available on Spotify. There are vigorous scherzos, beautiful slow movements, and the Third Symphony even ends with an intense theme and variations, written not long after Brahms’s Fourth Symphony premiered with a chaconne at the end. But orchestras should not limit their exploration to Parry alone. Stanford’s symphonies are also worth performing, as are the symphonies of Spohr and Reger’s variations. The contemporary push to recognize underrepresented female and BIPOC composers from the past has also turned up much beautiful music that needs to be heard. Amy Beach, Florence Price, and Joseph Boulogne tend to draw much of the attention at this time, but there are also less-known composers such as Dora Pejačević, who has a large-scale symphony as well. Obtaining scores for some of these composers can be hard, but Parry’s second, third, and fifth symphonies can be found as free PDFs online as of this writing.

Expanding the repertoire will not be easy for orchestras at first. But even though it may take effort and patience, the reward is worth the investment. In the case of Parry, orchestras will discover that his symphonies have “a sustained power [that] does not expend itself in a single outburst,” and melody that “is never sickly or mawkish,”[10] as a writer observed several years after Parry’s death. We will likely not be struck with the Parry virus on first listening, unlike Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which assails audiences with a catchy, unusual four-note motive at its opening. But not all music needs to plumb the extremes of compositional imagination. What is true of Parry is true of many other composers that have been left by the wayside: appreciation may come slowly, but in time it becomes clear that the music deserves it. If orchestras can make the choice to diversify their repertoire and throw out the stagnation of the past one hundred fifty years, we should hardly be surprised if new audiences begin to fill the concert halls again. And in time, perhaps all of us will understand why there is no modern Beethoven: it is because Beethoven was not the only composer of his time worth hearing.

Notes

[1] Jeffrey Pompe and Lawrence Tamburri, “Fiddling in a Vortex: Have American Orchestras Squandered Their Supremacy on the American Cultural Scene?” The Journal of Arts

Management, Law, and Society 46:2 (2016), 66.

[2] U.S. Population 1950-2021, Distributed by Macrotrends LLC, Accessed April 2021: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/population.

[3] Pompe and Tamburri, 65-66.

[4] Arne Herman, “Pragmatized Aesthetics: The Impact of Legitimacy Pressures in Symphony Orchestras,” The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 49:2 (2019), 136-137.

[5] James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata, New York: Oxford University Press,

2006, 11.

[6] William Weber, “Consequences of Canon: The Institutionalization of Enmity between Contemporary and Classical Music,” Common Knowledge 9:1 (Winter 2003), 79.

[7] Robin H. Legge, “Charles Hubert Hastings Parry. Born: February 27, 1848. Died: October 7, 1918,” The Musical Times 59:909 (November 1, 1918), 490.

[8] Herman, 142.

[9] Pompe and Tamburri, 67.

[10] R. O. Morris, “Hubert Parry,” Music & Letters 1:2 (April 1920), 97.

Bibliography

Hepokoski, James, and Warren Darcy. Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Herman, Arne. “Pragmatized Aesthetics: The Impact of Legitimacy Pressures in Symphony Orchestras.” The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 49:2 (2019), 136-150.

Legge, Robin H. “Charles Hubert Hastings Parry. Born: February 27, 1848. Died: October 7, 1918.” The Musical Times 59:909 (November 1, 1918), 489-491.

Leon Levy Digital Archives. Distributed by the New York Philharmonic. Accessed February 2021: https://archives.nyphil.org/#program.

Morris, R. O. “Hubert Parry.” Music & Letters 1:2 (April 1920), 94-103.

Pompe, Jeffrey, and Lawrence Tamburri. “Fiddling in a Vortex: Have American Orchestras Squandered Their Supremacy on the American Cultural Scene?” The Journal of Arts

Management, Law, and Society 46:2 (2016), 63-72.

Proms Performance Archive. Distributed by the BBC. Accessed February 2021:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3SsklRvCSPvfHr13wgz6HCJ/proms-performance-archive.

U.S. Population 1950-2021. Distributed by Macrotrends LLC. Accessed April 2021: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/population.

Weber, William. “Consequences of Canon: The Institutionalization of Enmity between Contemporary and Classical Music.” Common Knowledge 9:1 (Winter 2003), 78-99.

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