Viewing Rubbra's involvement with the symphony as a lifelong journey, one might wonder where there was for him to go after the peak achieved in the Fifth and Sixth. In neither work had he ‘entirely solved the finale problem’ (to use a cliché favoured by commentators aiming to keep their elders and betters in their place); he had found, rather, his own more reflective way to round off a major work, and that would be his cue for action when he again reached the later stages of a symphony. One might for that matter have wondered where there was for Beethoven to go after the same number of symphonies – and go Rubbra certainly would, for a tireless composer never rests on his laurels: to such a man, writing music is too natural an activity ever to cease, and life and death for their part present constant new problems demanding fresh thought. As he said in a BBC talk on The Symphony, ‘it is this very questioning at every step that moulds one's own idiom’.

Rubbra's mind continued to run on the symphony, another following only two years after the Sixth, during which time he wrote seven other works, some very brief, some of medium length, such as the Ode to the Queen (Op. 83) commissioned by the BBC for the Coronation celebrations, or two further recorder works, the Fantasia on a Theme of Machaut and Cantata Pastorale.