Hi IRF
Your question is quite interesting and must admit have not thought about before -personally think y can see many symphonies are knitted together by a certain mood eg Vaughan Williams symphony 4 and 5 have prevailing mood running through both works one of  mainly violence and the other of serenity - mix say mov 1 of 2 of 4th with 3 and 4 of 5th would not really work- maybe this example is bit extreme and thinking about composer for example Haydn  think you could easily mix movements of different symphonies without even noticing any difference - after all writing 104 symphonies some achievement but must have been difficult for him to find something new to say

Offbeat,

Vaughan Williams again!

I'm a little worried about your examples there: yes, the 4th and 5th symphonies (and the 3rd as well, come to that) may have a common overall feeling, but the others are rather wider ranging: think of the London, the Antartica or the 8th, let alone the 6th (though since the movements there are audibly linked, slotting anything else in wouldn't really work). Works such as Shostakovich's 4th, where all three movements have material derived from a set of intervallic cells (also found in the symphonies of Panufnik) would lose all sense of logic with constituent parts "shipped-in" from other symphonies. The further away one moves from the classical period, the more likely it is that a composer is considering the symphony as more than the sum of its parts: the proliferation of symphonies in one movement surely bears witness to this.

There is also likely to be a greater difference in character between one composer's symphonies: over the last century or so the journey that each composer has made has become much longer and more varied. Conflating movements from different works that Stravinsky labelled as symphonies, for example, would create a very strange hybrid indeed, nor could any of the Tippett symphonies be mistaken in character for any of the others.

   

Yes that is roughly what we had in mind when writing about Mahler's "nine and a half identical symphonies" here: http://r3ok.myforum365.com/index.php?topic=373.msg62370#msg62370

This is one of the differences between a first-rater like Mozart and the others. Take for example his Fortieth Symphony. Apart from the key and the mood there is no explicit thematic relationship between the movements is there; but they do still very much go together.

Nevertheless composers evidently felt the need to bind movements even more strongly together, to make their work more organic, and began to use various means to that end:

1) thematic relationships and repetitions across movements - who started that?;
2) bridge passages between movements - was Beethoven's Fifth the first example? And the process culminated with Sibelius did it not?
3) any more?


We have been listening to Leonhardt's performance of the Bach Partitas, recommended by Mr. Iron - sorry, Madame Ena - and note that where a section is repeated Leonhardt always pulls some lever or switches keyboards - never having seen a harpsichord we do not know the exact mechanism - so as somehow to produce an entirely different tone quality. Perhaps this contrast was part of the original purpose of the repeat marks in many works, and perhaps since the piano began to be widely used the idea or intention behind the repeats - a great contrast of timbre - has been lost. We wonder that is to say whether the key factor was not timbre rather than proportion?

It doesn't look loopy to me. It's just that you've put your finger on what for me is exactly the point of the last movement of Sibelius 2!   

Brilliant 'elephant in the room' question, IRF. Thanks for getting the grey cells in an interesting tizz about it. (The answer to your final point is that if Rob Cowan said it was all right, I would hear it as all right )

One very minor aside. From a very modest bit of anecdotal evidence, I have a feeling that this business of 'movements' may be one of the features of classical music that people who might be about to dip a toe in find alien and excluding. "Everyone talking about 'that passage in the third movement' and everyone except me knowing how many times the music stops with apparent finality before they all know the thing is over. Why 'movement' anyway? I don't mind the silly penguin suits but what the hell's going on with this mystifying stop-start business? Why?"

It's largely a historical accident anyway, isn't it (and a 'Western' <holdsnose+ironyemoticon> historical accident as well, to put the boot in), with symphonies developing out of sequences of dances and then suites of dances with different 'movements'? (Er, mega-wild generalisation I know, I know.) A supplementary question might be, post the unfortunate events of 1908, why do 'classical' composers still do it? Are there any general 'immanent' reasons left (i.e. apart from very specific ones relating to individual works which emerge ab initio)?   

Yes, but I'm not sure I don't prefer Brendel's sense of proportion to Schubert's.  Although this repeats business reminds me of a really interesting observation of Edward T. Cone's: in simple binary forms (from which sonata form evolved of course), you have an 'A' section which starts in the tonic and ends - having modulated there - in the dominant; and a 'B' section which starts in the dominant and ends - having modulated back there, eventually - in the tonic. The practice of repeating both sections -

:A :: B :

- guarantees the maximum variety of relationships between the two key areas. T-D, D:T, (T-D), D:D, D-T, T:D, (D-T). Explains a lot about sonata form, that.

That moment cited by Ollie is for me the psychological centre of the whole movement. I've never understood how Brendel (who is of course a highly intelleigent and intellectually searching musician) thinks he's actually playing the piece when he does it that way. I wish I had more time to pour out some thoughts on the subject of this thread but I'm just about to leave for darkest Yorkshire... anyway, Schubert is a particularly pertinent case as far as movements belonging together is concerned (and the B flat sonata is a good example; another is the B flat Piano Trio whose original slow movement was discarded in favour of something quite different) - but with him it goes further than that: sometimes even within a movement there are such great contrasts that the music doesn't "hang together" in the way that for example Beethoven always does. Think of the slow movement of the String Quintet or the three late Klavierstücke D946. I think what Schubert is doing here is not so to speak suggesting that the elements of the music belong together but indeed asking the listener whether they do, that is to say implicitly questioning the whole basis of "coherence" in the forms of his time, and leaving the question open.

With regard to Mahler, it's not so much a case of movements "belonging together" or not, but of the conglomerate work achieving a state of "comprehensiveness" or "complementarity", I think. I've always had more sympathy with this way of doing things than with the cohesion of for example Sibelius. As Mahler said, a symphony should "embrace everything", although as time went on the sense of belonging between movements (in symphonies 8, 9 and 10) does increase too.

One thing that's interesting about the symphonies of Allan Pettersson is that he combines Mahlerian breadth and inclusiveness (several of the symphonies are over an hour long) with Sibelian transition (most of them are in a single movement).