EDWARD GREEN 
COMPOSER, MUSIC EDUCATOR / NEW YORK CITY  
 
Sincerity in Music 
BY EDWARD GREEN
Part 2
   
"The glory of the possibilities of reality"--isn't that what Prokofiev's music shows? I think great praise of the world, expressed vibrantly and exultantly can be heard in this passage from the middle of the first movement: 

[Ex 7: Rehearsal letter H to rehearsal letter M, and fade.] 

Isn't the bustle and vitality of the world in that? 

Doesn't it have verve? And most astonishing of all is to realize that this music is a development of that tidy, orderly theme we heard earlier: 

[Ex 8: Bar before rehearsal letter D to eight bars after D] 

Power, Mr. Siegel said, is "the ability to change things." We have with us an exemplification of that idea. 

Part of the value of the Classical Symphony is its immediacy. In it depth is presented as sparkle. It convinces as it delights. But sadly the composer himself became unsure of his work. In a 1925 letter to Boris Asafiev, the Russian music critic to whom he had dedicated the symphony, Prokofiev, speaking also of Stravinsky, wrote this: 

    Everything which is imitative, like Pulcinella or my own Classical Symphony has less value. Unfortunately Stravinsky thinks otherwise.
What Prokofiev did not know is what Aesthetic Realism teaches: all value results from how well opposites have been made one. Whatever technique is employed, whatever style chosen, if in the music opposites are working together, then there is value and it is permanent. The Classical Symphony does this. It represents the sincerest purpose every person has--to like the world by seeing it as the aesthetic oneness of opposites. Had Prokofiev known this, he would have been a more confident critic of his own music. 

I would like to conclude my paper by playing the very end of the first movement of the Classical Symphony . I thank Sergei Prokofiev for writing music so rich in the meaning of power and grace. 

[Ex. 9: Rehearsal letter P to end] 
  

 
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