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