Symphonic Spectacles Form, Identity, and Hybridity in the Early Twentieth Century

Symphonic music of the early twentieth century reflects the complex, cosmopolitan world it inhabited. In a time of waning empire, rising nationalism, and heightened sexual politics, composers in Germany, Britain, and America drew upon the compositional resources of tradition to create intensely personal symphonic spectacles. The hybrid symphonic works that flourished in this period mixed musical forms and genres freely, adapting compositional procedures for their rhetorical potential. Symphonic Spectacles investigates large-scale formal mixture in six case studies that juxtapose works of the Austro-German symphonic canon with lesser-studied pieces by a diverse array of composers, including Strauss, Beach, Ellington, and Mahler. Sam Reenan proposes a creative analytical framework rooted in the analogy between formal hybridity and intersectional identity, which affords new interpretive possibilities that integrate formal analysis with critical consideration of compositional design, reception history, and subjectivity.

Considering influential scholarship from the new Formenlehre, literary genre studies, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality, Reenan's analytical approach favors playfully creating new stories over gatekeeping bygone ones. This book combines manuscript evidence, composer commentary, historical and biographical details, and published music criticism, all factors which contribute to comprehensive formal interpretations. Symphonic Spectacles represents not only a collection of studies in hybrid symphonic form, but also a model for countercanonic means of knowledge production in the field of music analysis.

Sam Reenan is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Miami University (Oxford, OH, USA). His work examines issues of musical form, narrative, and reception history as they intersect with aspects of identity and cultural constructions of meaning.