Over the course of his first three symphonies, Davies explores the same system of minor thirds and tritones that governs the first movement of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. While the symphonies of this "triptych" may be related to each other by this key scheme (F-Ab-B-D), they represent different compositional and aesthetic concerns of Davies. His first two symphonies, evoking respectively landscape and seascape, draw upon the aesthetics and ideals of other composers, including Sibelius, Beethoven, and Debussy. For the First Symphony, the scherzo of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony served as a model. For the more formally strict Second Symphony, Davies draws upon the harmonic and stylistic idiom of Debussy's La Mer. In each of the four movements of his Third Symphony, Davies articulates the same architectural outline, in which he borrows Renaissance spatial concepts and proportions and reworks them abstractly in time. The finale of this symphony, as with the slow final movement of the First Symphony, represents a response to the Mahler symphonic tradition.

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: David Oliver