Bert Bailey wrote:

>I'm curious to learn about your acquaintance with his music, if any.  What
>I've read tells me that his symphonies 1, 3 and 4 are his best, and that
>his use of percussion increased in the later ones.  I'd say Hartmann gained
>big-time from taking that direction -- though afaik he remained in the
>tonal camp.  Would you say Gerhard goes *way* out with his use of 12-tone
>techniques? How would you compare the PC and HC with those symphonies, in
>terms of the tonal/modernist categories laid out above?

Not sure if this question was open for anyone to answer...

My first exposure to his music was a suite from his ballet, Alegrias.
It clearly displayed his Catalan origins.  Gerhard studied for a short
time with Granados, but the major teacher was Pedrell.  I then encountered
a suite from his ballet Don Quixote, also in his early style, followed by
the First and then the Third Symphonies.

While his early works like the ballets and his unnumbered Symphony, a
homage to his teacher Pedrell, are more accessible, I find them less
convincing than his mature works.

My first hearing of the Third Symphony, for orchestra and tape, was in
the Prausnitz recording.  This recording remains my favorite.  While I
usually find the combination of electronically generated sound and acoustic
instruments to be problematic, to my ears, this symphony is one of the most
profoundly moving works in the literature.  It is not an easy listen, but
over the years, it has never failed to impress me.

Over the years I have collected recordings of just about everything of
his that I could track down.  His music can be a significant challenge for
even the most sophisticated listener, but I have found it worth the effort.
I find great power, nobility and a rhythmic intensity in his music that
speaks of a great talent.

Writing this note, I took a look at the Gerhard article in Groves V.
Susan Bradshaw wrote: "From the First Symphony it becomes ever less
possible to extract a single line or rhythmic figure as the essence of a
particular passage: the whole cannot be understood other than as the sum
of its many equal parts.  As a result of this all-embracing unity, his
music evolved a new means of propulsion, marking the tension or relaxation
of its progress by the density or clarity of its textures; by passages of
crowded eventfulness set against those whose events are so distanced that
time seems to stand still; by moments of insistent rhythmic activity that
dissolve into overlapping layers of unarticulated vibrations."

I find the music of Gerhard to have more in common with the music of
Varese than with the music of Schoenberg.

Karl