Bernard Chasan responds to me:

>>...the symphony - a genre many Europeans considered dead by that time
>>(note that Bartok never wrote one)
>
>But Schoenberg wrote two wonderful chamber symphonies (yes, that
>Schoenberg) and Stravinsky got into the game, even if you don't count
>Symphony of the Psalms.

For an interesting discussion on why the Schoenberg and Stravinsky pieces
aren't really symphonies, see Robert Simpson's introduction to The
Symphony: Elgar to the Present Day.  The Schoenberg chamber symphonies
are marvelous music, but they bear as much resemblance to even Mahler as
a platypus to a duck.  As far as Stravinsky's symphonies are concerned,
he didn't write a mature symphony until the Symphony of Psalms - a
masterpiece, but a hybrid - and the Symphony in C and the Symphony in Three
Movements come, interestingly enough, after the Harris and the Thompson.
One could make a very strong case for the Americans taking Stravinsky's
influence in the Twenties neoclassical works and in turn influencing him in
those two pieces.

>But I suppose that the "real"  symphonists (Nielsen, Sibelius,
>Shostakovich, Vaughn Williams, Elgar, Holmboe, and others I have forgotten
>or don't know about) are considered to be relatively conservative- an
>opinion which is not relevant to the quality of the work they turned out.

I agree completely.

>But why precisely was the symphony considered dead by anybody? Various
>authorities also have declared the novel to be dead at various times. It
>lives.

Well, I suspect it has to do with the speed of changing key centers in a
lot of modern music.  Since the Classical and Romantic symphony define
themselves through changing key centers, this imposes on the writer the
requirement of either staying on key or finding some other structural
principle.  One also notes around the turn of the century a certain
weariness with classical forms - the sense that they've been played out.
This comes from all over the spectrum - conservative to wildman.  Ernest
Newman - excepting only Sibelius (possibly because he didn't know Nielsen)
- certainly felt that way, and he was hardly a bomb-thrower.  George
Bernard Shaw certainly was a bomb thrower and felt that way as well.  It's
one of his reasons for trashing Brahms and Dvorak.  The formal ideal was
Wagner and especially the Siegfried-Idyl.

I agree with the basic point: a form can't die (because it never lives).
It lives only as embodied in specific works.  If the works aren't
particularly interesting, one might be tempted to locate the problem
in the abstract form, but this would be wrong.  Right now, although I can
certainly point to fine novelists currently writing, I really can't say
that the novel is as central to today's culture as it was for Victorian or
early Modern culture.  We don't have an iconic figure like Dickens, Eliot,
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Hardy, James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, or
Joyce.  I'm not saying this is good or bad, but it does seem to me the
case.

Steve Schwartz