A Symphonic Dream Team
I am not a musician or a musicologist. I did play clarinet and saxophone from third grade through college, though, and my junior year I roomed with a couple of classical music zealots whose affliction was contagious. I listen to a lot of classical music at home and on the radio. That’s sixty-plus years of listening, and that’s gotta be worth something.
Without being either a professional or a scholar, I still know that you can’t build a Frankenstein symphony from spare parts. A symphony is a single work, and its movements are part of a whole. Still, I do have favorite movements, movements I enjoy so much that I would listen to the whole symphony just because they are in it.
It may be telling that I prefer short stories to novels. I even have some favorite chapters, all at the beginning. Michener’s novels have great mythic first chapters, but I’ve never finished one of his books. Of course, there are shorter musical works, some of which are favorites. Some are “movements” in a sense — excerpts from suites such as Peer Gynt or A Midsummer’s Night Dream. I don’t know enough to say whether the incidental music to a play is meant to hold together as an organic work. The elements are apparently deemed sufficiently separable — Here comes the bride! — that one can hear them played on the radio as if they were written for that…