Matthew Saunders’ Blog

I’m in the midst of a series of posts about my Symphony in G, “Doxology,” in the lead up to its premiere by the Lakeland Civic Orchestra on November 9, 2025 at 4pm. Information on that concert here. Additionally, I will be giving a pre-concert talk at 6:30pm on Thursday, November 6 at the Willoughby Hills Branch of the Willoughby-Eastlake Public Library. Pre-registration is encouraged, but not required, and all in attendance will receive a free ticket to the concert. I’m also planning to give a more in-depth talk at Lakeland Community College sometime the week before the concert, focusing more on the writing process and my approach to this form. Watch for details!

I had a lot to say about the influences on my Symphony in G, “Doxology” in my previous post, leading me to realize that it really needed to be two posts–I’ve been thinking about the genre of the symphony for a long time, and I have Ideas.

Phillip Glass: Low Symphony

I discovered this piece, my first encounter with Glass’ music, at Mediaplay, a big box record and video store that had a location on West Broad Street in Columbus across from the now-demolished Westland Mall. I think it was the first record store I had been to with listening stations, and I slipped on headphones to hear this music around 1993, when the first recording of the piece by Dennis Russell Davies and the Brooklyn Philharmonic was new. I think I probably borrowed the CD from the public library, but ended up returning to Mediaplay to buy it.

Later renamed as Glass’ Symphony No. 1, Low proved to be the first in an epic and, at the time, surprising love affair with the genre for its composer. The first of three symphonies “from the music of David Bowie and Brian Eno,” it gave me the idea that the symphonic form could rewrite and retell an existing piece of music. Glass was in his late 50s at the time, so I suppose I’ve beaten him to the punch, but of course, I didn’t take time to write Einstein on the Beach or collaborate with Twyla Tharp, either.

Low was very slick and cool, a meeting point aesthetically between Vangelis, Mannheim Steamroller, and the radio show Music From the Hearts of Space, and the kind of concert music that I was more specifically interested in.

In outsourcing a fair amount of his melodic work to Bowie and Eno, Glass was also able to focus on form and structure, which, in the end, I think has always been the focus of his minimalism. I’m not a minimalist myself, but like anyone of my generation, I can’t help but be influenced by it. The “maximalist minimalism” implied by much of Glass’ work draws in the listener who is accustomed to the world of popular and film music–including me–in a way that many concert hall composers might consider: consonance, clarity of form, tunefulness, and rhythmic energy are not pandering or retrogressive.

I also just have always liked this piece: it’s striking, and energetic in the way that was really appealing to a high school composer who loved marching band and jazz ensemble and rock’n’roll.

Witold Lutoslawski: Symphony No. 3

As an undergraduate at the University of Cincinnati, I spent a lot of time during my first two years ensconced in the listening lab in the Gorno Music Library, where the staff would pull your selection and pipe it into headphones in a carrell. I remember having seen a list of orchestral excerpts for a flute audition that mentioned Lutoslawski’s Third, and added it to my list to check out. I didn’t really know anything about the composer, but I found the work in the online catalog (in those days, through an old green-text terminal) and got myself set up. From the first four notes–staccato, forte trumpets and trombones–I knew there was something to consider here. Across the hall, in the stacks, I was able to check out the score. It was my first experience with both the cutaway score layout and with Lutoslawski’s controlled aleatory.

To me, the notation was strikingly intuitive. I’ve used the cutaway score design only once: in my work It Is Enough for clarinet quartet and eight trombones, which is in many ways inspired by Lutoslawski’s approach. I’ve always considered It Is Enough to be a successful experiment. Composed during my graduate studies at Ohio State with Jan Radzynski, I was anticipating my work later with electronic music and wanted to think outside the grid of staves and barlines of the full score. The cutaway score is difficult to create, though, in my chosen notation program, Sibelius (although, not so much difficult as time-consuming). It requires lots of staff type changes and close attention to subverting the details of layout that Sibelius is carefully programmed to make easier for a traditional score.

It Is Enough also makes use of the controlled aleatory technique, which I’ve always liked, but again, have only used infrequently. I love the idea that some textures are complex enough that a little chaos is baked in, and trying to hardwire them is in a sense futile. There’s a trust for the musicians that should exist between composer and performer that the technique requires be made explicit–that things will happen when they make sense, and this isn’t always predictable in a rigid sort of way.

I think the main reason I didn’t pursue this language more fully is that there is a certain impracticality to it: it requires a confidence on the part of the performer that, in my work with student and community musicians, isn’t always available. I should perhaps return to it and trust my musicians with more.

The second movement of my symphony uses more non-conventional sounds than the rest of the work, including a passage of controlled aleatory in the strings: just two gestures, but I think a significant moment. In his Third Symphony, Lutoslawksi uses the technique liberally, but certainly not exclusively, and to great effect, and in combination with unmeasured stretches.

There is also a philosophical gauntlet thrown down here. Lutoslawski’s Second Symphony is a sprawling work for chorus and orchestra, so large and complex that the score is in separate volumes for the two required conductors. The composer seems to have changed his mind about this: while the Third lasts a half hour, Lutoslawski makes clear that it is meant to be a unified whole. He is not the first to attempt the one-movement symphony, but he states in his liner note that the four-movement plan–he singles out Brahms specifically–is too much for the mind to bear in a single sitting; that a single movement with a single meaning is in some way superior to four movements with four meanings. I don’t know that I would take this as an absolute, or even that I would agree with his interpretation of Brahms and musical (or other) meaning, but it does support my thinking that part of the symphonic concept is that the entire work needs to hold together in some way: more integrated than a suite.

All my years of thinking about writing a symphony, I have always cast about for designs and methods of making it cohesive and orderly. In this case, I’ve fallen to some of the tried-and-true approaches that Lutoslawski eschews, but my desire for unity is partly due to Lutoslawski’s call to rein in ambition. Unlike Mahler, this symphony does not–cannot–try to contain the world.

Antonin Dvorak, Symphony No. 9

I first encountered this work in a serious way in my junior year of high school, when I wanted a recording of Sibelius’ Second Symphony (see below), and purchased a CD that contained Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducting both that work and Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Being a completist, and not having a lot of money for new CDs, I listened repeatedly to both pieces. While Sibelius always holds pride of place for me, I got to know the New World as well, and it certainly had an influence on my thinking. Dvorak’s use of orchestral color, of cyclic approaches, and of course his astounding melodic gifts were both inspiring and daunting. I’ve since heard the work in performance several times, although never played or conducted it (I played second trombone for Dvorak’s 8th in my one-term stint in the Ohio State University Symphony Orchestra, and I’ve conducted several of his Slavonic Dances with the Lakeland Civic Orchestra, along with some other of his works). It’s also been present in my teaching: when I taught middle school general music, I would spend an entire class period listening to the work, with a set of cue cards to help the students follow along; it’s also featured in my current music appreciation class, alongside Amy Beach’s Gaelic Symphony as we consider music and identity: two composers telling turn-of-the-century America what it’s music should sound like (with America resoundingly finding its own direction).

If my idea was to write an American symphony, or the Great American Symphony, Dvorak seems to point that direction (as a non-American, of course, he couldn’t do it himself). I don’t know exactly what might be “American” about my piece, except that it has no other possible identity. Most of these influences are not American, and I have spent much of my musical career thinking about non-American music, looking in from the outside, perhaps as Dvorak did as well.

Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 2

Now, to the piece that started it all. In 1992, I auditioned for the Ohio Music Educators Association South-Central Regional Orchestra and got in. I had played in our school orchestra the year before and enjoyed the experience, so a weekend of playing that music seemed fun. I got in. The rehearsals and concert were at Gahanna Lincoln High School, and the clinician was Dr. Emily Freeman Brown, orchestra director from Bowling Green State University. We played a number of pieces I still consider dear to me: a Dvorak Slavonic Dance, Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld Overture, Morton Gould’s American Salute, and the second movement of Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2. A (not-so) surprising number of these have made it onto Lakeland Civic Orchestra concerts over the last thirteen years (we will be playing the Gould again in April).

But our concert closer was the piece that really hit home: the last movement of Sibelius’ Second Symphony.

Flashing further back a year, when I took British Literature for a semester, I remember jumping ahead to the science fiction stories in our anthology, which included Arthur C. Clarke’s “History Lesson,” which mentioned “the score to Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony” among the artifacts left by a dying humanity to be found by future visitors to Earth. I didn’t know Sibelius’ music at all in 1991, but I imagined what it might be like.

A year later, in that one-weekend orchestra, I found out that my imagination had been satisfyingly close to reality, and I was intrigued and gratified.

We didn’t play the complete movement: we started at the recapitulation, which was enough for the limited rehearsal time and a suitable end to the concert, and more than enough to snare the attention of a trombonist in the process of discovering that classical music just might be the thing he chose to pursue for a long time. The chorale in the coda was my first first-hand experience with what the trombone could be to the rest of the orchestra, and I was hooked. When the cassette containing the recording of the concert arrived in the mail a few weeks later, I wore it out.

It was around this time that I began my semiweekly visits to the Upper Arlington Public Library to get four CDs of classical music at a time, but I didn’t think to look for Sibelius Second. It wasn’t until a few months later, in the desperate moments after a breakup (my first) that I thought to head to a record score and buy a recording for myself. I didn’t know what to pick up, or what the differences might be between different recordings, and knowing myself, I probably decided based on price: a re-release of Paul Paray’s 1959 recording of the piece on Mercury with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, paired with the recording that would become my introduction to Dvorak’s New World (see above). Hearing the whole piece–even the whole last movement–was a revelation. If the music had been on an LP, I would have worn it out over the next year.

For a couple of years, Sibelius’ Second was around: Peter Stafford Wilson led us in the whole piece on the last concert I played with the Columbus Symphony Youth Orchestra in 1994, and in the summer of 1995, I played the last movement again when I was at Brevard Music Center. I got to know the work more intimately then, but not being an orchestral trombonist (not for lack of trying), I didn’t come back to it. I don’t think I’ve actually ever heard it performed live, either. Maybe it has a “youth orchestra” stigma, or maybe audiences have tired of it, though I can’t imagine why.

I actually heard most of Sibelius’ Second today on the radio–I parked in the driveway for a moment to hear the end. It’s wonderfully familiar: I don’t listen to it often, but I think about it, and keep the score on my piano. From the repeated notes in the strings that begin the first movement, gradually becoming more complex and turning into a theme, through to the obsessive ostinato that bursts into triumph in the finale, this is a piece that couldn’t not be an influence on my own symphonic writing. Today in the car, I heard just how much Sibelius is in my solution to the symphony problem, and I’m not ashamed or sorry for it, because to me Sibelius’ various solutions to that problem will always have a certain rightness.

I leave my influences here, then. I could probably find others (Hanson’s Second? Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements) or dive into influences from other genres (Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra? Holst’s The Planets?). Fascinatingly, there are the notable omissions, Mahler, whom I have studied intensely, being right at the top of that list. I leave them for another consideration, though.