John Dalmas, for whom no American symphony is great, says:

>I think you would have to search the European experience out of which the
>great symphonies emerged.  Except for the Civil War experience (certainly,
>an anomaly in our ethos), Americans have had it too easy.  We are an
>optimistic nation.  Life has been too comfortable for too many of us.

I cannot instill admiration where there is none but the assumptions
underpinning the judgment that there are no great American symphonies can
certainly be questioned.  If one grants that great symphonies were written
in Europe between 1815 and 1914 (all of Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms,
Dvorak, Bruckner, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, as well as late Beethoven and
Schubert, for instance), Europe was peaceful, secure and increasingly
prosperous, with the exception of a couple of brief wars lasting a few
weeks and the revolutionary upheavals and suppressions in 1830, 1848-1852
and 1870-1871.  In America during the same period, when I would agree no
great American symphonies were written, the Civil War lasted for years,
there was frontier insecurity and deprivation, and the country was divided
over slavery and its aftermath.  Life was not comfortable.

The American symphonies that some of us would consider great were written,
first in the Aftermath of the Great War, in which many American, as well
as Europeans, died, between the wars, and after World War II, in which
conflict many more Americans died alongside Europeans, and during a
prolonged period of economic depression and misery.  During the same
period, how many great European symphonies were written, in Germany, the
home of the "core repertoire," particularly? (More in Russia, France or
England, I would say.) I have no wish to play a numbers game, but the
conditions for great creativity are greatly varied among composers, and
have been produced under conditions of peace and prosperity and well as
under conditions of stress and deprivation.  It is hazardous to generalize
on that.

Another assumption is that optimism cannot produce greatness.  This one
is more interesting though I disagree with it.  It does tend to explain
why Dalmas might not RECOGNIZE as great the tremendous upbeat exuberance,
tinged only by a sense of poignancy in the Adagietto, of Shapero's
symphony, for instance.

>Furthermore the best genius and talent we have produced has always gone
>for the quick buck.  Why? Because the buck was always there to be had,
>right now!

This is surely false with respect to countless composers of huge talent,
but since John Dalmas does not acknowledge there to be any great American
symphonists, it is rather difficult to give an example he could accept

Jim Tobin