Richard Todd replies to me:

>>...the symphony - a genre many Europeans considered dead by that time
>>(note that Bartok never wrote one)
>
>Aside from the counterexamples others have provided, Robert Simpson and
>Humphrey Searle (sp?) wrote series of symphonies of considerable
>substance.

Sorry for the confusion I obviously generated.  I don't myself agree with
the attitude of others I reported.  However, the attitude did exist as a
matter of record from people all over the musical spectrum.  Furthermore,
I doubt that any symphonist today can claim a position central or key to
the culture, such as has been claimed for Mahler, Sibelius, Vaughan
Williams, Shostakovich, Piston, Harris, or Copland and such as that which
the American interwar symphonists attempted to build for themselves.  I'm
not sure of this, but I doubt many listeners today are actually looking for
such a figure or have such expectations from the symphony.

I do agree that Searle and Simpson are marvelous symphonists who have both
shown new ways of creating the form in a harmonically (or dodecaphonically)
expanded musical universe.  I'd add Roger Sessions, Shostakovich, Vaughan
Williams, Honegger, Hindemith, and a host of others.

Steve Schwartz