Got close-up and personal with Malcolm Arnold's Symphony No. 7 this morning, through the excellent ear-phones bought by the Missus. It doesn't make for happy listening. Everything about it suggests it was written from a place of distress. When it isn't mournfully despairing it sounds frenetically despairing. Even the sudden interpolations of popular forms - the rag-time material in the first movement, the Irish march in the third - sound desperate somehow.
Therefore, it's disturbing to learn that each of the three movements was dedicated by the composer to one of his three children, and it adds to that sense of disturbance to discover that the son associated with the second movement was autistic. What must it have felt like to be one of the dedicatees and know that this was how your father saw you? (The music is so vividly expressive you can't help but see what it paints.)
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