Symphony No.2/Metamorphoses—The Compositional Background

Extract

It was not until the early 1950's, when the ideas of the young Darmstadt composers (Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Nono, Maderna, Pousseur and others) began to seep across the channel, that Gerhard found himself indirectly influenced by the contemporary avant-garde: like them, he too came under the spell of numbers. Unlike the Darmstadt generation, however, Gerhard refused even temporarily to allow technical considerations to become the sine qua non for his music. Never afraid of appearing naive—and certainly not by then, in relation to composers half his age—he took a childlike pleasure in sifting through the debris of the post-war avant-garde explosion for such fragments of neo-serial technique as might be used to expand his own expressive horizons. Like Stravinsky (who came under the influence of Webern at an even later stage of his career), Gerhard was incapable of quasi-scientific musical experiment for its own sake; rather, his fascination with simple numerical relationships was to become inseparable from his concern for the proportional balance of harmonic rhythm as an essential means of defining structure.