Score and parts for hire

A symphonic tradition was late in developing in this country (no great symphony was composed in the British Isles until Elgar's First in 1908), and perhaps this is why the symphony has flourished here during the past hundred years while in other countries - its native Germany and Austria in particular - it has more or less died out. Quite a number of British composers continue to write symphonies, though I realise I am something of an exception in having reached my Sixth. But I have always been obsessed with the form: my very first piece was a symphony, and I completed two others before my 'official' no.1. The symphony has always seemed to me the ideal vehicle for the "large-scale integration of contrasts" which Hans Keller defined as its essence. Because I am a tonal composer, one of the chief means of contrast, between stable and unstable harmony, is perhaps more readily accessible to me, as is the opportunity to use tonality dramatically - and the symphony is a dramatic form. It should be "active in all possible ways", as Robert Simpson demanded of it, and the drama must be kept in motion, never being allowed to flag, whether the pace is fast or slow. I enjoy using the traditional movement types of the Classical symphony, and trying to develop them. I have no wish to conceal my debt to the rich musical heritage of the past. When I was discovering music in my teens, two Sixth Symphonies meant a great deal to me. One was Mahler's - "the only Sixth, despite the Pastoral", as Alban Berg claimed, and the other was Vaughan Williams's. Both are great, tragic symphonies, and the former in particular has had an effect on my own Sixth. Vaughan Williams was integral to my Symphony in another, more fundamental way. Together with four other composers, I was commissioned by the 2004 Three Choirs Festival in to write a variation on a theme by Vaughan Williams to be performed in Gloucester Cathedral. John McCabe, who co-ordinated the project, chose the hymn 'Down Ampney'. The other composers involved were Judith Bingham, James Francis Brown and Robert Saxton. I wrote a short scherzo, which became the fourth variation of the piece. Joint compositions are unlikely to have much of a life after the first performance, and as soon as I started writing my scherzo, in September 2003, I began to think of how it might also find a home in a new symphony, which I planned to compose in my spare time, as no commission was immediately forthcoming. The 'Down Ampney' theme - a sequence of rising and falling scale fragments - seemed very suitable for symphonic working. In June 2004 I began a first movement, also based on the 'Down Ampney' material, and sketched the first 225 bars before I had to interrupt it to compose another piece. There things stayed, more or less, until April 2005 when my friend and neighbour David Cohen asked me if I would like to write a large-scale work to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the John S. Cohen Foundation which he set up in memory of his father. I suggested that this would be a good opportunity to complete my symphony, and he agreed to commission it. The piece was finally completed in March this year. I revised the original scherzo, extending it in two places and expanding the orchestra, and surrounded it with two 15-minute movements, to make a work that lasts in all around 35 minutes - my largest symphony so far. It is dedicated to David Cohen, most enlightened of patrons. The first movement begins with three ideas: an exploration by high and low strings of the first line of 'Down Ampney', in alternate minor and major modes, beginning in F; three chords, a harmonization of its first three notes (a rising scale), first on strings, then brass; and a triadic trumpet motif marked svegliato ('awakened'). These three ideas engender all the material for the rest of the movement. The overall shape derives from the variation of sonata form that Bruckner invented for the first movement of his Ninth Symphony, and w