Aside from the ever-dominant Opéra, Parisian musical life came to be liberally enriched with orchestral performances during Debussy’s lifetime. Whilst one or two of the orchestras catered to the ‘pops’ end of public taste, others were important in premiering and promoting works by French composers. They also exhibit the tension and torn loyalties between French and German music, especially the music of Wagner. This chapter describes some of the music composed for orchestra during Debussy’s lifetime and shows how his orchestral works fit into this context. Debussy’s epoch-making orchestral music drew an extensive and sophisticated network of roots from the symphonic repertoire that dominated contemporary concert culture. As exemplified by the Faune, Nocturnes, and La Mer, the composer appealed to a wide range of eminently familiar generic, formal, topical, and rhetorical devices, synthesising, recombining, recontextualising, and reimagining them to suit his own aesthetic priorities

Song served as a primary generative force throughout Amy Beach’s prolific compositional career. Her three major pieces for orchestra alone-Bal Masqué (1893), the “Gaelic” Symphony (1896), and the Piano Concerto (1900)-are no exception. This chapter argues that Beach’s affinity for song not only shaped her approach to large-scale orchestral composition, but also facilitated positive responses to her works well beyond their premieres. Beach’s ultimate success with song-inspired orchestral composition reflected broader trends of the era overshadowed by experimental modernisms.

This chapter considers the work of a series of twentieth-century Welsh composers, including Daniel Jones, Grace Williams, William Mathias, Alun Hoddinott, Karl Jenkins and Rhian Samuel. It draws on their compositions and their writings about music to interrogate the question of whether musical qualities or characteristics that might be identified as distinctively Welsh can be discerned in their output. It explores the influence of Welsh landscapes, history and concepts, such as the notion of hiraeth (longing), on the ways in which they have drawn on or sought to reflect their homeland in their compositions. It reveals that while many of these composers were uneasy about identifying a distinctively Welsh school of composition, some level of engagement with their nationality or sense of Welshness was a common trait, albeit manifested in different ways. Several common themes emerge, including the importance of a sense of place and ideas about the past.

A study of Elliott Carter’s compositions for orchestra from the period 2002-2012. Included are individual analytical essays on Boston Concerto (2002), Three Illusions for Orchestra (2002-04), Réflexions (2004), Soundings (2005), and Instances (2012)