Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination: Politics, Identity, and the Sound of 1933 by Emily MacGregor (review)

Reviewed by: Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination: Politics, Identity, and the Sound of 1933 by Emily MacGregor Matthew Mugmon Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination: Politics, Identity, and the Sound of 1933. By Emily MacGregor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023. xv, 269 p. , ISBN 9781009172783 (hardcover), 110; ISBN 9781009187572 (ebook), 110. Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. In the mid-1960s, Leonard Bernstein wondered if symphonies were, by that time, "a thing of the past" ("Bernstein: What I Thought. . . , " New York Times, 24 October 1965). And he provided a characteristically ambivalent answer. "The classical concept of a symphony, " which relied on tonality, "is a thing of the past, " he wrote, and so "in a strict sense the decline of the symphony can perceivably be dated back to the beginning of our twentieth century. " At the same time, symphonies "are still being written in substantial quantity" and "in a loose sense the word 'symphony' can be applied to all kinds of structures. " Even though symphonies of various shapes and sizes (including Bernstein's own) have appeared in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Bernstein's questioning of the genre's viability suggests that any new symphonies may be judged by how successfully they carry on the genre's weighty tradition. Emily MacGregor, in her impressive study Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination: Politics, Identity, and the Sound of 1933, offers a powerful alternative to such an attitude toward the genre. While scholars have considered individual symphonic works of the twentieth century from various critical angles, End Page 672 MacGregor tackles the genre as a whole head on, doing so with the innovative approach of focusing on a group of seemingly unrelated symphonies at one specific, highly charged moment: the year 1933, marked most significantly in the geopolitical sphere by Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany. Rather than asking—as it is tempting to do— if and how the symphony as a monolithic genre has stood up to its legacy as a monumental form of expression, MacGregor explores the rich local and transnational contexts of the genesis and reception of individual but strikingly connected symphonic works from during and around 1933 by Kurt Weill, Hans Pfitzner, Roy Harris, Aaron Cop-land, Arthur Honegger, and Florence Price. In developing a detailed portrait of the genesis and reception of these works and looking beyond any idea of a "decline" that may be rooted in a German-dominated idealistic v ision of the genre, MacGregor makes a cogent argument for the value of the recent symphony as a subject of serious musicological inquiry. She views the symphony not as a genre whose aesthetic value in the twentieth century needs to be rescued or illuminated, but rather as a lens through which to understand how composers, their colleagues, and their audiences, in different times and places, negotiated their complex relationships with a changing society, particularly in terms of the tension between the individual and the collective—a tension that plays an important role in the genre itself. And far from providing a survey of symphonies composed in and around 1933, or using them to paint a larger musical portrait of the year 1933, MacGregor treats these six symphonies as case studies in the symphonic genre's own relationship with senses both of individualism and of "space"; the latter term can be understood in a geographical sense (as in German expansionism during the 1930s, or the sweeping US West) and a conceptual sense (private and public realms in society, for instance). In the book's first chapter, MacGregor contends briefly, by way of introduction to the project as a whole, with Kurt Weill's Symphony no. 2, a work to which she returns in the conclusion. In this introduction, MacGregor considers the premiere in Amsterdam in 1934, and she makes the important point that the work's initial reception, where "critics' problems with the work, " including their skepticism that the work was truly symphonic, "had less to do with 'purely' musical aspects, and more to do with Weill and whether he, as a Jewish, socialist, supposedly popular theatre composer belonged in the reified space of the concert hall" (p. 40). This contextual approach sets up chapter 2. . .