Writing for The Guardian, Emily MacGregor of King’s College, London, celebrates the symphony, a musical form with “a tricksy ability to tread a line between repelling meaning – i.e., it’s pure music, not about anything except music – and attracting meaning like iron filings to a magnet. Not just any old meaning, though. Big and important meanings with philosophical grandeur, about self and society. . . .
“[A]t their best,” MacGregor writes, “symphonies might also remind us that we’re all in it together, and that democracy isn’t dead – what it means to ‘sound together’ but also to listen with hope for something unknown and beautiful.”
Letter V 