ABSTRACT
That Shostakovich wrote ‘symphonies’ demonstrates his engagement with a pre-established model, an archetype of large-scale orchestral music. As seen in Chapter 4, the fifteen works considered in this book are ‘symphonies’ in more than name, as they contain processes and patterns that have a long association with the symphonic tradition. Shostakovich’s works comfortably fall within the Beethovenian-Mahlerian model in particular. However, the symphony is not a fixed archetype,2 and Shostakovich’s symphonies reflect that flexibility through the variety of styles and forms that the composer employs. A similar situation emerges when considering the formal organization of individual movements. On one hand, distinctive archetypes clearly recur; on the other, there is significant diversity in the way they are handled. A dialectic therefore emerges between form as external archetype – a pre-defined architecture – and form as internal process – reliant upon and growing out of specific content.
