This seminar centers on one of the central and most value-laden genres in Western art music during the first quarter of the twentieth century: the symphony. It focuses on select works both by some of the genre's major practitioners (e.g., Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen) and by composers who approached the genre as "outsiders" (e.g., Elgar, Strauss, Rachmaninoff, Schoenberg) that, taken together, provide a representative image of the diverse strands of "symphonic modernism" between 1900 and 1925. Combining score study with readings of relevant recent music-theoretical and musicological literature, the seminar pursues a double goal. On the one hand, it seeks to explore analytical approaches to form, tonal organization, and hermeneutics in these works; on the other, it aims to situate them both in the broader cultural-historical context of early twentieth-century modernism and in relation to the nineteenth-century symphonic tradition.