How to listen to a symphony

A symphony is the largest object in this art form: a hundred players, forty minutes to an hour, no words and no plot. It is easy to panic in front of one, because it appears to offer nothing to hold on to.

It offers a great deal. Nobody just tells you what.

Why four movements

The standard four-movement plan settled in Haydn's hands, and its logic is four kinds of time:

1. Fast — conflict, development, the longest movement. The argument of the whole work is stated here.
2. Slow — the lyric centre. If a symphony is going to make your eyes sting, this is usually where.
3. A dance — minuet or scherzo, in three, and short. This is a breath, letting the accumulated weight settle.
4. Fast — the close. It can be a celebration or an escape, but it has to reach a conclusion.

Once you know those four boxes you can locate yourself at any point in a live performance. If the slow movement has finished and something light in triple time has started, that is the third movement and you have a quarter of the piece left.

The plan is not a law. Beethoven's Fifth runs the third and fourth movements together without a break; Tchaikovsky's Pathétique puts the slow movement last and lets the symphony disappear rather than end; Sibelius's Seventh is a single movement. But you have to know the convention to hear the departure — and the departures are exactly where the composer most wants your attention.

What the first movement is doing

The first movement is usually in sonata form. You do not have to hold on to the term. Three actions are enough:

Exposition — two groups of material are put forward. The first tends to be forceful and square; the second tends to be gentler and more song-like. They are in different keys, so what you hear is two colours.

Development — those groups are taken apart, distorted, and pushed into remote keys. This is the least stable stretch of the piece, and it should feel like the music is looking for a way through.

Recapitulation — the material comes back, now all in the same key. That moment of return is one of the strongest effects in classical music — not because it is beautiful, but because you have waited eight minutes and finally arrived home.

You do not need to count any of this in the hall. You only need to notice, at some point, that this was here earlier and it is not quite the same. That is the recapitulation, and you have just heard sonata form.

What to actually listen for

Repetition and change. When a motif comes back, what is different? Louder, different instrument, stretched out? All of the craft lives in those differences.

The conversation between sections. Strings propose a phrase, woodwind take it, brass drop it. An orchestra is essentially four families of voices arguing about the same thing.

Silence. A general pause in a symphony is never a blank; it is punctuation. Beethoven in particular can hold an entire hall with one sudden stop.

Not the tune. This is the counter-intuitive one. The organising material of a symphony is often not a complete melody but a motif of three or four notes. The opening of the Fifth is not a tune, it is a rhythm. Hunting for something hummable is a reliable way to miss the structure.

Where to hear one in Shanghai

The main hall of the Shanghai Symphony Hall on Fuxing Middle Road is the best room this city has built for orchestral music — clean, with well-judged reverberation. The Shanghai Oriental Art Center and the Shanghai Concert Hall also programme orchestras regularly, and each has a different acoustic character worth trying.

See the orchestral concerts coming up →