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Marwan al-Shehhi

Marwan Yousef Mohamed Rashid Lekrab al-Shehhi (مروان يوسف محمد رشيد لكراب الشحي; 9 May 1978 –11 September 2001) was an Emirati terrorist hijacker from al-Qaeda who served as the hijacker-pilot of United Airlines Flight 175, crashing the Boeing 767 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center as part of the 11 September attacks in 2001. He was one of five hijackers aboard the aircraft and one of two Emiratis to take part in the attacks, the other being Fayez Banihammad, who helped him hijack the same plane.

Al-Shehhi was a student from the United Arab Emirates who moved to Germany in 1996 and soon became close friends with Mohamed Atta, Ziad Jarrah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, forming the Hamburg cell. Together, after pledging their lives to martyrdom, they became the leaders of the 11 September attacks. In late 1999, al-Shehhi, Atta, Jarrah, and bin al-Shibh traveled to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and met with Osama bin Laden who recruited the four Hamburg cell members for the attacks in the United States. He arrived in the United States in May 2000, one month before Atta. Atta, Al-Shehhi, and Jarrah had been trained as pilots in Florida at Huffman Aviation, receiving their commercial pilot licenses in December 2000 and January 2001 from the FAA.

Al-Shehhi spent his time making preparations for the attack itself, such as meeting with crucial planners abroad, assisting with the arrival of hijackers aboard the other flights, and travelling on surveillance flights determining details on how the hijacking would take place. On 9 September 2001, he traveled from Florida to Boston, where he stayed at the Milner Hotel until 11 September. After boarding United Airlines Flight 175 at Logan International Airport, al-Shehhi and 4 other hijackers waited 30 minutes into the flight to make their attack, which then allowed al-Shehhi to take over control as pilot, and at 9:03 a.m., 17 minutes after Mohamed Atta crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower, Al-Shehhi crashed the Boeing 767 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center between floors 77 to 85. At 23 years of age, he was the youngest hijacker-pilot to participate in the attacks. The impact of the Boeing 767 into the South Tower was seen live on television as it happened. At 9:59 a.m., after 56 minutes of burning, the 110-story skyscraper collapsed, killing hundreds of people, including around 900 office workers and first responders.

Early life
Al-Shehhi was born in Ras al-Khaimah, on 9 May 1978, in the United Arab Emirates, to an Emirati Muslim cleric who died in 1997 and an Egyptian mother. Described as a quiet and devout Muslim, details about al-Shehhi's life in the UAE, however, are difficult to acquire. He was a part of the Shihuh tribe through his father's side. According to an October 2001 article in The New York Times, "If residents of Mr. Shehhi's hometown had heard of him before now, they were certainly not telling strangers. Four hours spent in the community yielded no address and no one – policemen, firemen, pedestrians or local officials – who did anything more than shrug at the mention of his name."

His teacher in Germany, Gabriele Bock, recalls him as someone who seemed to be struggling to have plans for the future while studying there.

While in Germany, al-Shehhi enrolled in the University of Bonn after completing a German course. He left Germany in June 1997 to attend to problems at home although the university forbade him. In early 1998, al-Shehhi transferred to the Technical University of Hamburg. A poor student, al-Shehhi was directed by the Scholarship program administrators to repeat a semester of his studies back in Bonn beginning in August 1998. Al-Shehhi did not enroll back at Bonn until January 1999 and continued to struggle with his studies. By July 1999, Marwan returned to Hamburg to study shipbuilding.

It has been reported al-Shehhi also married in 1999, holding a belated celebration in January 2000, in an arranged marriage by his half-brother with a young woman named Fawzeya.

Radicalization
After moving to Hamburg in 1998, al-Shehhi helped form the Hamburg cell with Mohamed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. There, his views became more and more radical. They met three or four times a week to discuss anti-American feelings and plot possible attacks. When someone asked why he and Atta never laughed, al-Shehhi retorted, "How can you laugh when people are dying in Palestine?"

On 9 October 1999, Marwan al-Shehhi was filmed at Said Bahaji's wedding in Germany with other 9/11 hijackers including Ziad Jarrah.

In late 1999, al-Shehhi, Atta, Ziad Jarrah, Said Bahaji, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh decided to travel to Chechnya to fight against the Russians, but were convinced by Khalid al-Masri and Mohamedou Ould Slahi at the last minute to change their plans. They instead traveled to Afghanistan to meet with Osama bin Laden and trained for terrorist attacks. Immediately afterwards, Atta, al-Shehhi, and Jarrah reported their passports stolen, possibly to erase travel visas to Afghanistan. After their training, the hijackers began to attempt to hide their radicalism. al-Shehhi shaved his beard and seemed to his old friends like he had become less religious. After the attacks, a librarian in Hamburg reported that al-Shehhi boasted to her "There will be thousands of dead. You will think of me ... You will see, in America something is going to happen. There will be many people killed."

Flight education and preparation
Al-Shehhi was the first of the Hamburg group to leave for the United States. He arrived in Newark, New Jersey on 29 May 2000. Atta and Jarrah joined him the next month, and the three men began to search for flight schools. Al-Shehhi and Jarrah posed as body guards of Atta, who were also posing as a "Saudi Arabian royal family member" while the three of them took flying lessons in Venice, Florida. They logged hundreds of hours on a Boeing 727 flight simulator. They received their licenses by December 2000. Their expenses were paid for by Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. On either 26 or 27 December, Atta, Jarrah, and al-Shehhi abandoned a Piper Cherokee that had stalled on the runway of Miami International Airport. On 31 December, the trio went to the Opa-Locka Airport and practiced on a Boeing 727 simulator. Al-Shehhi began to take "surveillance flights" in the summer of 2001, watching the operations of flight crews and making final preparations.

August 2001
On 23 August, the Israeli Mossad reportedly gave al-Shehhi's name to the CIA as part of a list of 19 US residents they said were planning an attack in the near future. Only four of the names are known for certain, the other three being fellow 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi, Mohamed Atta, and Khalid al-Mihdhar. It is not known if the list had all 19 hijackers' names or if it only had as many names as there were hijackers by coincidence.

On 26 August, al-Shehhi signed into the Panther Motel in Deerfield Beach, Florida, paying US$500, saying he wanted to stay until 2 September, and listing a Mailboxes Etc. as his permanent address. His register entry indicated that he was driving a blue Chevrolet Malibu, assumed to be the one rented by Atta two weeks prior, and manager Richard Surma said that he bent rules to allow al-Shehhi to have another man as an overnight guest. On 28 August, al-Shehhi went to the Miami International Airport, accompanied by an unknown man, where he purchased his ticket for Flight 175.

September 11 attacks and death
At 5:01 a.m. on the morning of 11 September Al-Shehhi in Boston received a phone call from Flight 93 hijacker pilot Ziad Jarrah in Newark. The call would be the last time Jarrah and Al-Shehhi spoke and is believed by authorities to be the two confirming to one another that the attacks were ready to begin.

After arriving at Logan International Airport later that morning, al-Shehhi made a call to Mohamed Atta lasting from 6:52 to 6:55, who was elsewhere in the same airport as both American 11 and United 175 were to fly from Logan to Los Angeles International Airport. The call is believed to have served the same purpose as Al-Shehhi's earlier call to Jarrah.

Between 7:23 and 7:28, the five hijackers each boarded the plane, with Al-Shehhi taking his seat in 6C. The plane became airborne at 8:14, only to be hijacked 28 minutes after takeoff. The terrorists gained access to the cockpit through unknown means and murdered both pilots, allowing Al-Shehhi to assume control of the flight. Shortly after the hijacking, the plane came close to colliding with another aircraft in the vicinity, Delta Airlines Flight 2315. Approaching New York City, Al-Shehhi saw smoke and fire pouring southeast from the World Trade Center's North Tower after it was struck by Flight 11 at 8:46 a.m., and narrowly avoided a second mid-air collision with Midwest Express Flight 7. Flying at speeds of around 590 mph while carrying approximately 9,100 gallons (approximately 34,447 liters) of jet fuel, Al-Shehhi crashed the plane into the South Tower at 9:03:02 a.m. between floors 77 and 85, instantly killing himself and everyone else aboard the flight in addition to many more inside the South Tower. More than 600 people were on the wrong side of the impact zone when the plane struck, half of whom were killed instantaneously. Thus, the estimated 300 people still alive following the impact were left stranded in the upper floors of the catastrophically damaged skyscraper, now set ablaze and rapidly filling with smoke. Because all eyes were on the Twin Towers following the crash of Flight 11 seventeen minutes earlier, the impact of Flight 175 and the explosion that followed was seen by millions of people worldwide on live television, being filmed and photographed from numerous vantage points. Although the angle at which Al-Shehhi crashed did not sever all means of escape from the impact zone, most of the people who survived the crash were unable to use the single intact stairwell before the tower fell less than an hour later.

Al-Shehhi flew the plane faster and lower into the tower than Atta did, into the eastern half of the South Tower's southern facade close to the southeast corner, causing the tower's structural integrity to be compromised far more severely than the North Tower's. At 9:59 A.M. that morning,  the South Tower became the first tower to collapse, having stood for 56 minutes after the plane crash.

title: Marwan al-Shehhi


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Minuet

A minuet (also spelled menuet) is a social dance of French origin for two people, usually in time. The English word was adapted from the Italian minuetto and the French menuet.

The term also describes the musical form that accompanies the dance, which subsequently developed more fully, often with a longer musical form called the minuet and trio, and was much used as a movement in the early classical symphony.

Dance
The name may refer to the short steps, pas menus, taken in the dance, or else be derived from the branle à mener or amener, popular group dances in early 17th-century France. The minuet was traditionally said to have descended from the bransle de Poitou, though there is no evidence making a clear connection between these two dances. The earliest treatise to mention the possible connection of the name to the expression pas menus is Gottfried Taubert's Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister, published in Leipzig in 1717, but this source does not describe the steps as being particularly small or dainty. At the period when it was most fashionable it was controlled, ceremonious and graceful.

Rhythm and form

The name of this dance is also given to a musical composition written in the same time and rhythm, though when not accompanying an actual dance the pace was quicker. Stylistically refined minuets, apart from the social dance context, were introduced—to opera at first—by Jean-Baptiste Lully, who included no fewer than 92 of them in his theatrical works and in the late 17th century the minuet was adopted into the suite, such as some of the suites of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. Among Italian and some French composers the minuet was often considerably quicker and livelier and was sometimes written in or  time Because the tempo of a minuet was not standard, the tempo direction tempo di minuetto was ambiguous unless qualified by another direction, as it sometimes was.

Initially, before its adoption in contexts other than social dance, the minuet was usually in binary form, with two repeated sections of usually eight bars each. But the second section eventually expanded, resulting in a kind of ternary form. The second (or middle) minuet provided form of contrast by means of different key (although in many works, the second minuet stayed in the same key as the first minuet), orchestration, and thematic material. On a larger scale, two such minuets might be further combined, so that the first minuet was followed by a second one and then by a repetition of the first. The whole form might in any case be repeated as long as the dance lasted.

Minuet and trio
Around Lully's time it became a common practice to score this middle section for a trio (such as two oboes and a bassoon, as is common in Lully). As a result, this middle section came to be called the minuet's trio, even when no trace of such an orchestration remains. The overall structure is called rounded binary or minuet form:
 * {|class="wikitable"

After these developments by Lully, composers occasionally inserted a modified repetition of the first (A) section or a section that contrasted with both the A section and what was thereby rendered the third or C section, yielding the form A–A′–B–A or A–B–C–A, respectively; an example of the latter is the third movement of Mozart's Serenade No. 13 in G major, K. 525, popularly known under the title Eine kleine Nachtmusik.
 * A || B || A or A′
 * I (→ V) || V or I (or other closely related) || I
 * }
 * }

A livelier form of the minuet simultaneously developed into the scherzo (which was generally also coupled with a trio). This term came into existence approximately from Beethoven onwards, but the form itself can be traced back to Haydn.

The minuet and trio eventually became the standard third movement in the four-movement classical symphony, Johann Stamitz being the first to employ it thus with regularity.

An example of the true form of the minuet is to be found in Don Giovanni.

A famous example of a more recent instrumental work in minuet form is Ignacy Jan Paderewski's Minuet in G.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Minuet


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Talk:Minuet

Adapted from 1911 enc.
With an OCR error. 1/8 time would be stupid. Dictionary.com returns "A slow, stately pattern dance in 3/4 time for groups of couples, originating in 17th-century France."

the Oxford English Dictionary says "A slow, stately dance, in triple measure, for two dancers; derived from France in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and fashionable throughout the eighteenth." In other words, 3/4 since they didn't specify 3/8 or 3/16.

I thought that a minuet is in 6/8 time, but I haven't changed the entry in that regard. User:Wetman

 * You're part right - the most familiar type of minuet (at least in classical music) is in the French style - it's slow and sgo fuck a goat in 3/8 or sometimes 6/8 (you sometimes get these at the end of Italian overtures). I'll tweak the article a bit to reflect this. --Camembert

 * (Afterthought) - actually, I've feeling I've seen minuets by Rameau in 6/8 as well (which means maybe Lully wrote them that way also), but I could be imagining it. --Camembert

I need help
I need info on 'minuets' for my music project. does any one has any useful suggestions of what info i could use? Thanks! please help!

Help for music students
Given that this article is under "musical forms," I'd like to see more information useful to students in music classes who have been assigned the homework of writing a minuet and are wrestling with the form. I.e., |I  V||V  I| structure, etc. Maybe once I figure out what I'm doing, I'll work on something like that.

Minuet, from Star Trek
Once the Star Trek character has her own article, the paragraph in this article can be shortened to the bare minimum necessary for disambiguation. ShutterBugTrekker 19:41, 19 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Structure
While sort of rewriting this article, I decided to give it a chronological structure, rather than separating history and form as it was before. I'm not sure if this was a wise choice, so comments are welcome, I guess. EldKatt (Talk) 17:54, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Removed reference to Nintendo 64 song
Folks, I have again removed 24.242.31.37's reference to the Nintendo 64's song Minuet of the Forest. This tune was not even a minuet IIRC, was certainly not notable, and does not add any information to the article. Oscar 01:48, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Original Four?
Does anybody have a source other than this website http://www.streetswing.com/histmain/z3minuet.htm

That
 * Originally there were only four Minuets,
 * The Queen's Minuet or Le Minuet de la Reine,
 * Le Minuet de Dauphin,
 * Le Minuet d'Exaudet,
 * Le Minuet de la Cour - (still popular today in certain circles). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vonfraginoff (talk • contribs) 10:47, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Inline citations
User:Feline Hymnic has requested a discussion on this page of changes recently made to the inline citation style established for this article on 6 March 2009 in this edit. The reason given for altering the established citation style is that several non-conforming citations had recently been added, and now outnumbered the parenthetical inline citations already in place. This is contrary to Citing sources, which states specifically: "If an article already has citations, adopt the method in use or seek consensus on the talk page before changing it." It says nothing about "votes" accumulated by subsequent non-conforming citations. It appears to me in addition that Feline Hymnic may be confusing inline citations with footnotes. Once again referring to "WP:Citing sources": "Two styles of inline citation are commonly used on Wikipedia: clickable footnotes ( tags, as above) and parenthetical references. The latter would involve adding (Smith 2011, p. 1) in round brackets within the sentence, while the former would include the same citation in a footnote". I submit that there is no justification for changing the established reference style, and my correction should therefore be restored.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:01, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Lully and the Trio
Can cite the Grove article "Trio" for the Lully bit. 157.178.2.1 (talk) 18:42, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the suggestion, but I find no mention at all of the minuet (or of Lully's use of trio texture to alternate with the main section of dances) in the New Grove/2 article "Trio" article by McClymonds, et al. Are you possibly referring to an earlier edition of Grove?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:47, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Redirect and/or disambiguation please
I apologise, I have not yet learnt how to set up redirect and disambiguation. Why is one needed? Many composers did not use the term minuet, in my present short digital library I have minuetto, menuet, menuette, menuetto. If I search wikipedia for these I will be directed to pages on J.S. Bach, &c., but not to the page that tells me about the classical music form known in English as minuet. If I was looking at one of the wiki-pages on Bach, and saw menuette and did not know what that was, I would not at present be able to find out through wikipedia. Redirection and disambiguation would be a good thingBrunswicknic (talk) 11:32, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
 * To start with, let us be clear that "redirects" and "disambiguations" are more or less opposite categories. A disambiguation page lists two or more different senses for one and the same word. Set is a good example. What you are asking for are redirects, and I am a little puzzled that you mention minuetto, menuet, and menuetto, all three of which currently redirect to this article. "Menuette", on the other hand, is a much less-often encountered variant Fench spelling, and does not currently have a redirect. Perhaps it should. May I ask, in what way are you being redirected to "pages on J.S. Bach, &c."? When I type in any of these terms (except for the rare French variant), I am taken directly to this article. What happens in your case? In general, to learn about reditects and how to create them, see Redirect.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:43, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

External links modified (February 2018)
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title: Talk:Minuet


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John Dalton

John Dalton (5 or 6 September 1766 – 27 July 1844) was an English chemist, physicist and meteorologist. He introduced the atomic theory into chemistry. He also researched colour blindness; as a result, the umbrella term for red-green congenital colour blindness disorders is Daltonism in several languages.

Early life

John Dalton was born on 5 or 6 September 1766 into a Quaker family in Eaglesfield, near Cockermouth, in Cumberland, England. His father was a weaver. He received his early education from his father and from Quaker John Fletcher, who ran a private school in the nearby village of Pardshaw Hall. Dalton's family was too poor to support him for long and he began to earn his living, from the age of ten, in the service of wealthy local Quaker Elihu Robinson.

Early career
When he was 15, Dalton joined his older brother Jonathan in running a Quaker school in Kendal, Westmorland, about 45 mi from his home. Around the age of 23, Dalton may have considered studying law or medicine, but his relatives did not encourage him, perhaps because being a Dissenter, he was barred from attending English universities. He acquired much scientific knowledge from informal instruction by John Gough, a blind philosopher who was gifted in the sciences and arts. At 27, he was appointed teacher of mathematics and natural philosophy at the "Manchester Academy" in Manchester, a dissenting academy (the lineal predecessor, following a number of changes of location, of Harris Manchester College, Oxford). He remained for seven years, until the college's worsening financial situation led to his resignation. Dalton began a new career as a private tutor in the same two subjects.

Meteorology
Dalton's early life was influenced by a prominent Quaker, Elihu Robinson, a competent meteorologist and instrument maker, from Eaglesfield, Cumberland, who interested him in problems of mathematics and meteorology. During his years in Kendal, Dalton contributed solutions to problems and answered questions on various subjects in The Ladies' Diary and the Gentleman's Diary. In 1787 at age 21 he began his meteorological diary in which, during the succeeding 57 years, he entered more than 200,000 observations. He rediscovered George Hadley's theory of atmospheric circulation (now known as the Hadley cell) around this time. In 1793 Dalton's first publication, Meteorological Observations and Essays, contained the seeds of several of his later discoveries but despite the originality of his treatment, little attention was paid to them by other scholars. A second work by Dalton, Elements of English Grammar (or A new system of grammatical instruction: for the use of schools and academies), was published in 1801.

Measuring mountains
After leaving the Lake District, Dalton returned annually to spend his holidays studying meteorology, something which involved a lot of hill-walking. Until the advent of aeroplanes and weather balloons, the only way to make measurements of temperature and humidity at altitude was to climb a mountain. Dalton estimated the height using a barometer. The Ordnance Survey did not publish maps for the Lake District until the 1860s. Before then, Dalton was one of the few authorities on the heights of the region's mountains. He was often accompanied by Jonathan Otley, who also made a study of the heights of the local peaks, using Dalton's figures as a comparison to check his work. Otley published his information in his map of 1818. Otley became both an assistant and a friend to Dalton.

Colour blindness
In 1794, shortly after his arrival in Manchester, Dalton was elected a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, the "Lit & Phil", and a few weeks later he communicated his first paper on "Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours", in which he postulated that shortage in colour perception was caused by discoloration of the liquid medium of the eyeball. As both he and his brother were colour blind, he recognised that the condition must be hereditary.

Although Dalton's theory was later disproven, his early research into colour vision deficiency was recognized after his lifetime. Examination of his preserved eyeball in 1995 demonstrated that Dalton had deuteranopia, a type of congenital red-green color blindness in which the gene for medium wavelength sensitive (green) photopsins is missing. Individuals with this form of colour blindness see every colour as mapped to blue, yellow or gray, or, as Dalton wrote in his seminal paper,

"That part of the image which others call red, appears to me little more than a shade, or defect of light; after that the orange, yellow and green seem one colour, which descends pretty uniformly from an intense to a rare yellow, making what I should call different shades of yellow."

Gas laws
In 1800, Dalton became secretary of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and in the following year he presented an important series of lectures, entitled "Experimental Essays" on the constitution of mixed gases; the pressure of steam and other vapours at different temperatures in a vacuum and in air; on evaporation; and on the thermal expansion of gases. The four essays, presented between 2 and 30 October 1801, were published in the Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester in 1802.

The second essay opens with the remark,

"There can scarcely be a doubt entertained respecting the reducibility of all elastic fluids of whatever kind, into liquids; and we ought not to despair of effecting it in low temperatures and by strong pressures exerted upon the unmixed gases further."

After describing experiments to ascertain the pressure of steam at various points between 0 and 100 C, Dalton concluded from observations of the vapour pressure of six different liquids, that the variation of vapour pressure for all liquids is equivalent, for the same variation of temperature, reckoning from vapour of any given pressure.

In the fourth essay he remarks,

"I see no sufficient reason why we may not conclude, that all elastic fluids under the same pressure expand equally by heat—and that for any given expansion of mercury, the corresponding expansion of air is proportionally something less, the higher the temperature. ... It seems, therefore, that general laws respecting the absolute quantity and the nature of heat, are more likely to be derived from elastic fluids than from other substances."

He enunciated Gay-Lussac's law, published in 1802 by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (Gay-Lussac credited the discovery to unpublished work from the 1780s by Jacques Charles). In the two or three years following the lectures, Dalton published several papers on similar topics. "On the Absorption of Gases by Water and other Liquids" (read as a lecture on 21 October 1803, first published in 1805) contained his law of partial pressures now known as Dalton's law.

Atomic theory
Arguably the most important of all Dalton's investigations are concerned with the atomic theory in chemistry. While his name is inseparably associated with this theory, the origin of Dalton's atomic theory is not fully understood. The theory may have been suggested to him either by researches on ethylene (olefiant gas) and methane (carburetted hydrogen) or by analysis of nitrous oxide (protoxide of azote) and nitrogen dioxide (deutoxide of azote), both views resting on the authority of Thomas Thomson.

From 1814 to 1819, Irish chemist William Higgins claimed that Dalton had plagiarised his ideas, but Higgins' theory did not address relative atomic mass. Recent evidence suggests that Dalton's development of thought may have been influenced by the ideas of another Irish chemist Bryan Higgins, who was William's uncle. Bryan believed that an atom was a heavy central particle surrounded by an atmosphere of caloric, the supposed substance of heat at the time. The size of the atom was determined by the diameter of the caloric atmosphere. Based on the evidence, Dalton was aware of Bryan's theory and adopted very similar ideas and language, but he never acknowledged Bryan's anticipation of his caloric model. However, the essential novelty of Dalton's atomic theory is that he provided a method of calculating relative atomic weights for the chemical elements, which provides the means for the assignment of molecular formulas for all chemical substances. Neither Bryan nor William Higgins did this, and Dalton's priority for that crucial innovation is uncontested.

A study of Dalton's laboratory notebooks, discovered in the rooms of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, concluded that so far from Dalton being led by his search for an explanation of the law of multiple proportions to the idea that chemical combination consists in the interaction of atoms of definite and characteristic weight, the idea of atoms arose in his mind as a purely physical concept, forced on him by study of the physical properties of the atmosphere and other gases. The first published indications of this idea are to be found at the end of his paper "On the Absorption of Gases by Water and other Liquids" already mentioned. There he says:

"Why does not water admit its bulk of every kind of gas alike? This question I have duly considered, and though I am not able to satisfy myself completely I am nearly persuaded that the circumstance depends on the weight and number of the ultimate particles of the several gases."

He then proposes relative weights for the atoms of a few elements, without going into further detail. However, a recent study of Dalton's laboratory notebook entries concludes he developed the chemical atomic theory in 1803 to reconcile Henry Cavendish’s and Antoine Lavoisier’s analytical data on the composition of nitric acid, not to explain the solubility of gases in water.

The main points of Dalton's atomic theory, as it eventually developed, are:
 * 1) Elements are made of extremely small particles called atoms.
 * 2) Atoms of a given element are identical in size, mass and other properties; atoms of different elements differ in size, mass and other properties.
 * 3) Atoms cannot be subdivided, created or destroyed.
 * 4) Atoms of different elements combine in simple whole-number ratios to form chemical compounds.
 * 5) In chemical reactions, atoms are combined, separated or rearranged.

In his first extended published discussion of the atomic theory (1808), Dalton proposed an additional (and controversial) "rule of greatest simplicity". This rule could not be independently confirmed, but some such assumption was necessary in order to propose formulas for a few simple molecules, upon which the calculation of atomic weights depended. This rule dictated that if the atoms of two different elements were known to form only a single compound, like hydrogen and oxygen forming water or hydrogen and nitrogen forming ammonia, the molecules of that compound shall be assumed to consist of one atom of each element. For elements that combined in multiple ratios, such as the then-known two oxides of carbon or the three oxides of nitrogen, their combinations were assumed to be the simplest ones possible. For example, if two such combinations are known, one must consist of an atom of each element, and the other must consist of one atom of one element and two atoms of the other.

This was merely an assumption, derived from faith in the simplicity of nature. No evidence was then available to scientists to deduce how many atoms of each element combine to form molecules. But this or some other such rule was absolutely necessary to any incipient theory, since one needed an assumed molecular formula in order to calculate relative atomic weights. Dalton's "rule of greatest simplicity" caused him to assume that the formula for water was OH and ammonia was NH, quite different from our modern understanding (H2O, NH3). On the other hand, his simplicity rule led him to propose the correct modern formulas for the two oxides of carbon (CO and CO2). Despite the uncertainty at the heart of Dalton's atomic theory, the principles of the theory survived.

Relative atomic weights
Dalton published his first table of relative atomic weights containing six elements (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulfur and phosphorus), relative to the weight of an atom of hydrogen conventionally taken as 1. Since these were only relative weights, they do not have a unit of weight attached to them. Dalton provided no indication in this paper how he had arrived at these numbers, but in his laboratory notebook, dated 6 September 1803, is a list in which he set out the relative weights of the atoms of a number of elements, derived from analysis of water, ammonia, carbon dioxide, etc. by chemists of the time.

The extension of this idea to substances in general necessarily led him to the law of multiple proportions, and the comparison with experiment brilliantly confirmed his deduction. In the paper "On the Proportion of the Several Gases in the Atmosphere", read by him in November 1802, the law of multiple proportions appears to be anticipated in the words:

"The elements of oxygen may combine with a certain portion of nitrous gas or with twice that portion, but with no intermediate quantity."

But there is reason to suspect that this sentence may have been added some time after the reading of the paper, which was not published until 1805.

Compounds were listed as binary, ternary, quaternary, etc. (molecules composed of two, three, four, etc. atoms) in the New System of Chemical Philosophy depending on the number of atoms a compound had in its simplest, empirical form.

Dalton hypothesised the structure of compounds can be represented in whole number ratios. So, one atom of element X combining with one atom of element Y is a binary compound. Furthermore, one atom of element X combining with two atoms of element Y or vice versa, is a ternary compound. Many of the first compounds listed in the New System of Chemical Philosophy correspond to modern views, although many others do not.

Dalton used his own symbols to visually represent the atomic structure of compounds. They were depicted in the New System of Chemical Philosophy, where he listed 21 elements and 17 simple molecules.

Other investigations
Dalton published papers on such diverse topics as rain and dew and the origin of springs (hydrosphere); on heat, the colour of the sky, steam and the reflection and refraction of light; and on the grammatical subjects of the auxiliary verbs and participles of the English language.

Experimental approach
As an investigator, Dalton was often content with rough and inaccurate instruments, even though better ones were obtainable. Sir Humphry Davy described him as "a very coarse experimenter", who "almost always found the results he required, trusting to his head rather than his hands." On the other hand, historians who have replicated some of his crucial experiments have confirmed Dalton's skill and precision.

In the preface to the second part of Volume I of his New System, he says he had so often been misled by taking for granted the results of others that he determined to write "as little as possible but what I can attest by my own experience", but this independence he carried so far that it sometimes resembled lack of receptivity. Thus he distrusted, and probably never fully accepted, Gay-Lussac's conclusions as to the combining volumes of gases.

He held unconventional views on chlorine. Even after its elementary character had been settled by Davy, he persisted in using the atomic weights he himself had adopted, even when they had been superseded by the more accurate determinations of other chemists.

He always objected to the chemical notation devised by Jöns Jacob Berzelius, although most thought that it was much simpler and more convenient than his own cumbersome system of circular symbols.

Other publications
For Rees's Cyclopædia Dalton contributed articles on Chemistry and Meteorology, but the topics are not known.

He contributed 117 Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester from 1817 until his death in 1844 while president of that organisation. Of these the earlier are the most important. In one of them, read in 1814, he explains the principles of volumetric analysis, in which he was one of the earliest researchers. In 1840 a paper on phosphates and arsenates, often regarded as a weaker work, was refused by the Royal Society, and he was so incensed that he published it himself. He took the same course soon afterwards with four other papers, two of which ("On the quantity of acids, bases and salts in different varieties of salts" and "On a new and easy method of analysing sugar") contain his discovery, regarded by him as second in importance only to atomic theory, that certain anhydrates, when dissolved in water, cause no increase in its volume, his inference being that the salt enters into the pores of the water.

Public life
Even before he had propounded the atomic theory, Dalton had attained a considerable scientific reputation. In 1803, he was chosen to give a series of lectures on natural philosophy at the Royal Institution in London, and he delivered another series of lectures there in 1809–1810. Some witnesses reported that he was deficient in the qualities that make an attractive lecturer, being harsh and indistinct in voice, ineffective in the treatment of his subject, and singularly wanting in the language and power of illustration.

In 1810, Sir Humphry Davy asked him to offer himself as a candidate for the fellowship of the Royal Society, but Dalton declined, possibly for financial reasons. In 1822 he was proposed without his knowledge, and on election paid the usual fee. Six years previously he had been made a corresponding member of the French Académie des Sciences, and in 1830 he was elected as one of its eight foreign associates in place of Davy. In 1833, Earl Grey's government conferred on him a pension of £150, raised in 1836 to £300 (equivalent to £ and £ in, respectively). Dalton was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1834.

A young James Prescott Joule, who later studied and published (1843) on the nature of heat and its relationship to mechanical work, was a pupil of Dalton in his last years.

Personal life
Dalton never married and had only a few close friends. As a Quaker, he lived a modest and unassuming personal life.

For the 26 years prior to his death, Dalton lived in a room in the home of the Rev W. Johns, a published botanist, and his wife, in George Street, Manchester. Dalton and Johns died in the same year (1844).

Dalton's daily round of laboratory work and tutoring in Manchester was broken only by annual excursions to the Lake District and occasional visits to London. In 1822 he paid a short visit to Paris, where he met many distinguished resident men of science. He attended several of the earlier meetings of the British Association at York, Oxford, Dublin and Bristol.

Disability and death
Dalton suffered a minor stroke in 1837, and a second in 1838 left him with a speech impairment, although he remained able to perform experiments. In May 1844 he had another stroke; on 26 July, while his hand was trembling, he recorded his last meteorological observation. On 27 July, in Manchester, Dalton fell from his bed and was found dead by his attendant.

Dalton was accorded a civic funeral with full honours. His body lay in state in Manchester Town Hall for four days and more than 40,000 people filed past his coffin. The funeral procession included representatives of the city's major civic, commercial, and scientific bodies. He was buried in Manchester in Ardwick Cemetery; the cemetery is now a playing field, but pictures of the original grave may be found in published materials.

Legacy

 * Much of Dalton's written work, collected by the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, was damaged during bombing on 24 December 1940. It prompted Isaac Asimov to say, "John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war". The damaged papers are in the John Rylands Library.
 * A bust of Dalton, by Chantrey, paid for by public subscription was placed in the entrance hall of the Royal Manchester Institution. Chantrey's large statue of Dalton, erected while Dalton was alive was placed in Manchester Town Hall in 1877. He "is probably the only scientist who got a statue in his lifetime".
 * The Manchester-based Swiss phrenologist and sculptor William Bally made a cast of the interior of Dalton's cranium and of a cyst therein, having arrived at the Manchester Royal Infirmary too late to make a cast of the head and face. A cast of the head was made, by a Mr Politi, whose arrival at the scene preceded that of Bally.
 * John Dalton Street connects Deansgate and Albert Square in the centre of Manchester.
 * The John Dalton building at Manchester Metropolitan University is occupied by the Faculty of Science and Engineering. Outside it stands William Theed's statue of Dalton, erected in Piccadilly in 1855, and moved there in 1966.
 * A blue plaque commemorates the site of his laboratory at 36 George Street in Manchester.
 * The University of Manchester established two Dalton Chemical Scholarships, two Dalton Mathematical Scholarships, and a Dalton Prize for Natural History. A hall of residence is named Dalton Hall.
 * The Dalton Medal has been awarded only twelve times by the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society.
 * The Dalton crater on the Moon was named after Dalton.
 * "Daltonism" is a lesser-known synonym of colour-blindness and, in some languages, variations on this have persisted in common usage: for example, 'daltonien' is the French adjectival equivalent of 'colour-blind', and 'daltónico'/'daltonica' is the Spanish and the Italian.
 * The inorganic section of the UK's Royal Society of Chemistry is named the Dalton Division, and the society's academic journal for inorganic chemistry is called Dalton Transactions.
 * In honour of Dalton's work, many chemists and biochemists use the unit of mass dalton (symbol Da), also known as the unified atomic mass unit, equal to 1/12 the mass of a neutral atom of carbon-12). The dalton is officially accepted for use with the SI.
 * Quaker schools have named buildings after Dalton: for example, a schoolhouse in the primary sector of Ackworth School, is called Dalton.
 * Dalton Township in southern Ontario was named after him. In 2001 the name was lost when the township was absorbed into the City of Kawartha Lakes but in 2002 the Dalton name was affixed to a new park, Dalton Digby Wildlands Provincial Park.
 * Asteroid (12292) Dalton was named after him.

Works

 * – Alembic Club reprint with some of Dalton's papers, along with some by William Hyde Wollaston and Thomas Thomson
 * Dalton, John (1893.) Foundations of the Molecular Theory. Edinburgh: William F. Clay, 1893. Retrieved 15 August 2022 – with essays by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Amedeo Avogadro
 * John Dalton Papers at John Rylands Library, Manchester.
 * Dalton, John (1808–1827). A New System of Chemical Philosophy (all images freely available for download in a variety of formats from Science History Institute Digital Collections at digital.sciencehistory.org).
 * Dalton, John (1794). Extraordinary Facts Relating to the Vision of Colours: With Observations. Science History Institute Digital Collections.
 * Dalton, John (1808–1827). A New System of Chemical Philosophy (all images freely available for download in a variety of formats from Science History Institute Digital Collections at digital.sciencehistory.org).
 * Dalton, John (1794). Extraordinary Facts Relating to the Vision of Colours: With Observations. Science History Institute Digital Collections.

title: John Dalton


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Talk:John Dalton

Article quality
Article is terribly written. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.137.223.202 (talk) 21:16, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

 * some of it is, sentences like "John Dalton was born September 6, 1766 in Eaglesfield, Cumberland and received his early education from his father and from John Fletcher, a teacher of the Quaker school at Cumberland, on whose retirement in 1778 he himself started teaching."
 * If he was a techer before, how come he became a teacher after retirement? fwed66 19:52, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

I think it means that it was Fletcher who retired, and that Dalton took his place, but your right, it is kind of a bad sentence, because it's too long. I'm not sure what it's supposed to say, though, so I won't change it myself. - 69.166.72.148 23:03, 12 October 2006

 * I think you all are doing a very great job on this project. - Sai21 22:20, 6 March 2007

Correct date of death
Dalton's date of death is stated as 1844. A line under Other Publications lists it as 1840.Dukesnyder1027 (talk) 17:20, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Physical science
First atomic model John Dalton 223.196.193.112 (talk) 10:35, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Statue?
Should could mention a statue in his honor in Manchester? 71.58.94.212 (talk) 03:21, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:John Dalton


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Symphony

A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, most often for orchestra. Although the term has had many meanings from its origins in the ancient Greek era, by the late 18th century the word had taken on the meaning common today: a work usually consisting of multiple distinct sections or movements, often four, with the first movement in sonata form. Symphonies are almost always scored for an orchestra consisting of a string section (violin, viola, cello, and double bass), brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments which altogether number about 30 to 100 musicians. Symphonies are notated in a musical score, which contains all the instrument parts. Orchestral musicians play from parts which contain just the notated music for their own instrument. Some symphonies also contain vocal parts (e.g., Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or Mahler's Second Symphony).

Etymology and origins
The word symphony is derived from the Greek word συμφωνία (symphōnía), meaning "agreement or concord of sound", "concert of vocal or instrumental music", from σύμφωνος (sýmphōnos), "harmonious". The word referred to a variety of different concepts before ultimately settling on its current meaning designating a musical form.

In late Greek and medieval theory, the word was used for consonance, as opposed to διαφωνία (diaphōnía), which was the word for "dissonance". In the Middle Ages and later, the Latin form symphonia was used to describe various instruments, especially those capable of producing more than one sound simultaneously. Isidore of Seville was the first to use the word symphonia as the name of a two-headed drum, and from c. 1155 to 1377 the French form symphonie was the name of the organistrum or hurdy-gurdy. In late medieval England, symphony was used in both of these senses, whereas by the 16th century it was equated with the dulcimer. In German, Symphonie was a generic term for spinets and virginals from the late 16th century to the 18th century.

In the sense of "sounding together", the word begins to appear in the titles of some works by 16th- and 17th-century composers including Giovanni Gabrieli's Sacrae symphoniae, and Symphoniae sacrae, liber secundus, published in 1597 and 1615, respectively; Adriano Banchieri's Eclesiastiche sinfonie, dette canzoni in aria francese, per sonare, et cantare, Op. 16, published in 1607; Lodovico Grossi da Viadana's Sinfonie musicali, Op. 18, published in 1610; and Heinrich Schütz's Symphoniae sacrae, Op. 6, and Symphoniarum sacrarum secunda pars, Op. 10, published in 1629 and 1647, respectively. Except for Viadana's collection, which contained purely instrumental and secular music, these were all collections of sacred vocal works, some with instrumental accompaniment.

Baroque era
In the 17th century, for most of the Baroque era, the terms symphony and sinfonia were used for a range of different compositions, including instrumental pieces used in operas, sonatas and concertos—usually part of a larger work. The opera sinfonia, or Italian overture had, by the 18th century, a standard structure of three contrasting movements: fast, slow, fast and dance-like. It is this form that is often considered as the direct forerunner of the orchestral symphony. The terms "overture", "symphony" and "sinfonia" were widely regarded as interchangeable for much of the 18th century.

In the 17th century, pieces scored for large instrumental ensemble did not precisely designate which instruments were to play which parts, as is the practice from the 19th century to the current period. When composers from the 17th century wrote pieces, they expected that these works would be performed by whatever group of musicians were available. To give one example, whereas the bassline in a 19th-century work is scored for cellos, double basses and other specific instruments, in a 17th-century work, a basso continuo part for a sinfonia would not specify which instruments would play the part. A performance of the piece might be done with a basso continuo group as small as a single cello and harpsichord. However, if a bigger budget was available for a performance and a larger sound was required, a basso continuo group might include multiple chord-playing instruments (harpsichord, lute, etc.) and a range of bass instruments, including cello, double bass, bass viol or even a serpent, an early bass wind instrument.

Galant and classical eras
LaRue, Bonds, Walsh, and Wilson write in the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians that "the symphony was cultivated with extraordinary intensity" in the 18th century. It played a role in many areas of public life, including church services, but a particularly strong area of support for symphonic performances was the aristocracy. In Vienna, perhaps the most important location in Europe for the composition of symphonies, "literally hundreds of noble families supported musical establishments, generally dividing their time between Vienna and their ancestral estate [elsewhere in the Empire]". Since the normal size of the orchestra at the time was quite small, many of these courtly establishments were capable of performing symphonies. The young Joseph Haydn, taking up his first job as a music director in 1757 for the Morzin family, found that when the Morzin household was in Vienna, his own orchestra was only part of a lively and competitive musical scene, with multiple aristocrats sponsoring concerts with their own ensembles.

LaRue, Bonds, Walsh, and Wilson's article traces the gradual expansion of the symphonic orchestra through the 18th century. At first, symphonies were string symphonies, written in just four parts: first violin, second violin, viola, and bass (the bass line was taken by cello(s), double bass(es) playing the part an octave below, and perhaps also a bassoon). Occasionally the early symphonists even dispensed with the viola part, thus creating three-part symphonies. A basso continuo part including a bassoon together with a harpsichord or other chording instrument was also possible.

The first additions to this simple ensemble were a pair of horns, occasionally a pair of oboes, and then both horns and oboes together. Over the century, other instruments were added to the classical orchestra: flutes (sometimes replacing the oboes), separate parts for bassoons, clarinets, and trumpets and timpani. Works varied in their scoring concerning which of these additional instruments were to appear. The full-scale classical orchestra, deployed at the end of the century for the largest-scale symphonies, has the standard string ensemble mentioned above, pairs of winds (flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons), a pair of horns, and timpani. A keyboard continuo instrument (harpsichord or piano) remained an option.

The "Italian" style of symphony, often used as overture and entr'acte in opera houses, became a standard three-movement form: a fast movement, a slow movement, and another fast movement. Over the course of the 18th century it became the custom to write four-movement symphonies, along the lines described in the next paragraph. The three-movement symphony died out slowly; about half of Haydn's first thirty symphonies are in three movements; and for the young Mozart, the three-movement symphony was the norm, perhaps under the influence of his friend Johann Christian Bach. An outstanding late example of the three-movement Classical symphony is Mozart's Prague Symphony, from 1786.

The four-movement form that emerged from this evolution was as follows:

1. An opening sonata or allegro

2. A slow movement, such as andante

3. A minuet or scherzo with trio

4. An allegro, rondo, or sonata

Variations on this layout, like changing the order of the middle movements or adding a slow introduction to the first movement, were common. Haydn, Mozart and their contemporaries restricted their use of the four-movement form to orchestral or multi-instrument chamber music such as quartets, though since Beethoven solo sonatas are as often written in four as in three movements.

The composition of early symphonies was centred on Milan, Vienna, and Mannheim. The Milanese school centred around Giovanni Battista Sammartini and included Antonio Brioschi, Ferdinando Galimberti and Giovanni Battista Lampugnani. Early exponents of the form in Vienna included Georg Christoph Wagenseil, Wenzel Raimund Birck and Georg Matthias Monn, while later significant Viennese composers of symphonies included Johann Baptist Wanhal, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and Leopold Hofmann. The Mannheim school included Johann Stamitz.

The most important symphonists of the latter part of the 18th century are Haydn, who wrote at least 106 symphonies over the course of 36 years, and Mozart, with at least 47 symphonies in 24 years.

Romantic era
At the beginning of the 19th century, Beethoven elevated the symphony from an everyday genre produced in large quantities to a supreme form in which composers strove to reach the highest potential of music in just a few works. Beethoven began with two works directly emulating his models Mozart and Haydn, then seven more symphonies, starting with the Third Symphony ("Eroica") that expanded the scope and ambition of the genre. His Symphony No. 5 is perhaps the most famous symphony ever written; its transition from the emotionally stormy C minor opening movement to a triumphant major-key finale provided a model adopted by later symphonists such as Brahms and Mahler. His Symphony No. 6 is a programmatic work, featuring instrumental imitations of bird calls and a storm; and, unconventionally, a fifth movement (symphonies usually had at most four movements). His Symphony No. 9 includes parts for vocal soloists and choir in the last movement, making it a choral symphony.

Of the symphonies by Schubert, two are core repertory items and are frequently performed. Of the Eighth Symphony (1822), Schubert completed only the first two movements; this highly Romantic work is usually called by its nickname "The Unfinished". His last completed symphony, the Ninth (1826) is a massive work in the Classical idiom.

Of the early Romantics, Felix Mendelssohn (five symphonies, plus thirteen string symphonies) and Robert Schumann (four) continued to write symphonies in the classical mould, though using their own musical language. In contrast, Berlioz favored programmatic works, including his "dramatic symphony" Roméo et Juliette, the viola symphony Harold en Italie and the highly original Symphonie fantastique. The latter is also a programme work and has both a march and a waltz and five movements instead of the customary four. His fourth and last symphony, the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale (originally titled Symphonie militaire) was composed in 1840 for a 200-piece marching military band, to be performed out of doors, and is an early example of a band symphony. Berlioz later added optional string parts and a choral finale. In 1851, Richard Wagner declared that all of these post-Beethoven symphonies were no more than an epilogue, offering nothing substantially new. Indeed, after Schumann's last symphony, the "Rhenish" composed in 1850, for two decades the Lisztian symphonic poem appeared to have displaced the symphony as the leading form of large-scale instrumental music. However, Liszt also composed two programmatic choral symphonies during this time, Faust and Dante. If the symphony had otherwise been eclipsed, it was not long before it re-emerged in a "second age" in the 1870s and 1880s, with the symphonies by Bruckner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns, Borodin, Dvořák, and Franck—works which largely avoided the programmatic elements of Berlioz and Liszt and dominated the concert repertory for at least a century.

Over the course of the 19th century, composers continued to add to the size of the symphonic orchestra. Around the beginning of the century, a full-scale orchestra would consist of the string section plus pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, and lastly a set of timpani. This is, for instance, the scoring used in Beethoven's symphonies numbered 1, 2, 4, 7, and 8. Trombones, which had previously been confined to church and theater music, came to be added to the symphonic orchestra, notably in Beethoven's 5th, 6th, and 9th symphonies. The combination of bass drum, triangle, and cymbals (sometimes also: piccolo), which 18th-century composers employed as a coloristic effect in so-called "Turkish music", came to be increasingly used during the second half of the 19th century without any such connotations of genre. By the time of Mahler (see below), it was possible for a composer to write a symphony scored for "a veritable compendium of orchestral instruments". In addition to increasing in variety of instruments, 19th-century symphonies were gradually augmented with more string players and more wind parts, so that the orchestra grew substantially in sheer numbers, as concert halls likewise grew.

Late-Romantic, modernist and postmodernist eras
Towards the end of the 19th century, Gustav Mahler began writing long, large-scale symphonies that he continued composing into the early 20th century. His Third Symphony, completed in 1896, is one of the longest regularly performed symphonies at around 100 minutes in length for most performances. The Eighth Symphony was composed in 1906 and is nicknamed the "Symphony of a Thousand" because of the large number of voices required to perform the work.

The 20th century saw further diversification in the style and content of works that composers labeled symphonies. Some composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Carl Nielsen, continued to write in the traditional four-movement form, while other composers took different approaches: Jean Sibelius' Symphony No. 7, his last, is in one movement, Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony, in one movement, split into twenty-two parts, detailing an eleven hour hike through the mountains and Alan Hovhaness's Symphony No. 9, Saint Vartan—originally Op. 80, changed to Op. 180—composed in 1949–50, is in twenty-four.

A concern with unification of the traditional four-movement symphony into a single, subsuming formal conception had emerged in the late 19th century. This has been called a "two-dimensional symphonic form", and finds its key turning point in Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 (1909), which was followed in the 1920s by other notable single-movement German symphonies, including Kurt Weill's First Symphony (1921), Max Butting's Chamber Symphony, Op. 25 (1923), and Paul Dessau's 1926 Symphony.

Alongside this experimentation, other 20th-century symphonies deliberately attempted to evoke the 18th-century origins of the genre, in terms of form and even musical style, with prominent examples being Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 "Classical" of 1916–17 and the Symphony in C by Igor Stravinsky of 1938–40.

There remained, however, certain tendencies. Designating a work a "symphony" still implied a degree of sophistication and seriousness of purpose. The word sinfonietta came into use to designate a work that is shorter, of more modest aims, or "lighter" than a symphony, such as Sergei Prokofiev's Sinfonietta for orchestra.

In the first half of the century, composers including Edward Elgar, Gustav Mahler, Jean Sibelius, Carl Nielsen, Igor Stravinsky, Bohuslav Martinů, Roger Sessions, Sergei Prokofiev, Rued Langgaard and Dmitri Shostakovich composed symphonies "extraordinary in scope, richness, originality, and urgency of expression". 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 Jean Sibelius, Igor 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).

From the mid-20th century into the 21st there has been a resurgence of interest in the symphony with many postmodernist composers adding substantially to the canon, not least in the United Kingdom: Peter Maxwell Davies (10), Robin Holloway (1), David Matthews (9), James MacMillan (5), Peter Seabourne (5), and Philip Sawyers (3). British composer Derek Bourgeois has surpassed the number of symphonies written by Haydn, with 116 symphonies. The greatest number of symphonies to date has been composed by the Finn Leif Segerstam, whose list of works includes 352 symphonies.

Symphonies for concert band
Hector Berlioz originally wrote the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale for military band in 1840. Anton Reicha had composed his four-movement 'Commemoration' Symphony (also known as Musique pour célébrer le Mémorie des Grands Hommes qui se sont Illustrés au Service de la Nation Française) for large wind ensemble even earlier, in 1815, for ceremonies associated with the reburial of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette

After those early efforts, few symphonies were written for wind bands until the 20th century when more symphonies were written for concert band than in past centuries. Although examples exist from as early as 1932, the first such symphony of importance is Nikolai Myaskovsky's Symphony No. 19, Op. 46, composed in 1939. Some further examples are Paul Hindemith's Symphony in B-flat for Band, composed in 1951; Morton Gould's Symphony No. 4 "West Point", composed in 1952; Vincent Persichetti's Symphony No. 6, Op. 69, composed in 1956; Vittorio Giannini's Symphony No. 3, composed in 1958; Alan Hovhaness's Symphonies No. 4, Op. 165, No. 7, "Nanga Parvat", Op. 175, No. 14, "Ararat", Op. 194, and No. 23, "Ani", Op. 249, composed in 1958, 1959, 1961, and 1972 respectively; John Barnes Chance's Symphony No. 2, composed in 1972; Alfred Reed's 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th symphonies, composed in 1979, 1988, 1992, and 1994 respectively; eight of the ten numbered symphonies of David Maslanka; five symphonies to date by Julie Giroux (although she is currently working on a sixth ); Johan de Meij's Symphony No. 1 "The Lord of the Rings", composed in 1988, and his Symphony No. 2 "The Big Apple", composed in 1993; Yasuhide Ito's Symphony in Three Scenes 'La Vita', composed in 1998, which is his third symphony for wind band; John Corigliano's Symphony No. 3 'Circus Maximus, composed in 2004; Denis Levaillant's PachaMama Symphony, composed in 2014 and 2015, and James M. Stephenson's Symphony No. 2 which was premiered by the United States Marine Band ("The President's Own") and received both the National Band Association's William D. Revelli (2017) and the American Bandmasters Association's Sousa/Ostwald (2018) awards.

Other modern usages of "symphony"
In some forms of English, the word "symphony" is also used to refer to the orchestra, the large ensemble that often performs these works. The word "symphony" appears in the name of many orchestras, for example, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony, the Houston Symphony, or Miami's New World Symphony. For some orchestras, "(city name) Symphony" provides a shorter version of the full name; for instance, the OED gives "Vancouver Symphony" as a possible abbreviated form of Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. Additionally, in common usage, a person may say they are going out to hear a symphony perform, a reference to the orchestra and not the works on the program. These usages are not common in British English.

title: Symphony