David Matthews at 60: Visions of reality

Musical Times, Spring 2003 by Hyde, Thomas

In the dark time winds down to a central section, another of the long passionate string melodies first explored in September music. The remainder of the work is a series of slower `meditations' often taking on the character of a funeral march. Harmonically the second half of the score tends to be built on rich static chords and pedal notes, which balance the structure after the energetic first half. The work's coda (bearing a key-- signature of D major) features a lighter and dancing motif on strings, suggesting the onset of spring.

While composing In the dark time, Matthews was also working on his Third Symphony In composing symphonies as well as symphonic poems, Matthews has looked to Sibelius's example:

The more romantic one's approach to composition - and I make no bones about acknowledging my own highly romantic temperament -- the more important it is to discover ways of objectifying one's emotions. Sibelius's progress from the opulent romantic nationalism of the First Symphony to the taut classical grandeur of the Seventh has been an exemplar for me, for I am also much concerned with traditional forms and their renewal.9

It is, perhaps, too crude and simplistic to argue that Matthews's five symphonies show the more 'classical' side to his personality, while the symphonic poems are more 'Romantic', but there are clear differences in the way he has approached these genres. One obvious factor is that for Matthews the symphonic poems will have their initial inspiration in an extra-musical element, often landscape. Seasonal change inspired In the dark time, and it was a spiritual landscape as depicted in a painting by Cecil Collins that provided both title and subject matter of The music of dawn (1990). In contrast, the symphonies have been abstract. Introducing the Fifth Symphony in 1999, Matthews commented that `when I write symphonies I really don't think of anything other than the music in them.10 Though both mediums are, of course, symphonic as far as Matthews is concerned (and he writes symphonic poems not tone-poems), the types of musical form employed are, nevertheless, very different. The symphonies are all concerned with the classical movement archetypes. Though the first three symphonies fused all into a one-movement form, there is still a sense that thematic material (and indeed pacing and mood) is being clearly defined as a scherzo, sonata-allegro or slow movement. The First Symphony (1976/78) placed the scherzo between sets of canonic variations in accelerating tempi and followed it with a slow movement evoking something of the spirit of a Mahler. The Second Symphony (1976-79) is a dazzlingly effective structure which progresses from an adagio through a sonata-allegro to a scherzo framed by an introduction that reappears in an enriched version as an epilogue. Twice the symphonic progress is interrupted by static percussion-only interludes, the second of which, in its 'hunted' scurrying motifs on glockenspiel, xylophone and vibraphone, has something of the flavour of the 'pursuit' music in Britten's Death in Venice.