Symphony Edward Elgar, Gustav Mahler, Jean Sibelius, Carl Nielsen, Igor Stravinsky, Bohuslav Martinů, Roger Sessions, and Dmitri Shostakovich composed symphonies "extraordinary in scope, richness, originality, and urgency of expression" (Steinberg 1995, 404). One measure of the significance of a symphony is the degree to which it reflects conceptions of temporal form particular to the age in which it was created. Five composers from across the span of the 20th century who fulfil this measure are Sibelius, Stravinsky, Luciano Berio (in his Sinfonia, 1968–69), Elliott Carter (in his "Symphony of Three Orchestras", 1976), and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen (in "Symphony/Antiphony", 1980). Beginning in the
A London Symphony the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass – pass. The river passes – London passes, England passes. The symphony was composed from 1912 to 1913. It is dedicated to Vaughan Williams's friend and fellow composer George Butterworth (1885–1916) who was subsequently killed by a sniper on the Somme during World War I. It was Butterworth who had first encouraged Vaughan Williams to write a purely orchestral symphony. Vaughan Williams recorded that: We were talking together one day when he said in his gruff, abrupt manner: 'You know, you ought to write