Jean Sibelius was a composer who created himself - and then recreated
himself again.  As a young man he was intimately involved with Finnish
revolutionary politics - writing *Finlandia* as an explicit patriotic ode,
one explicit enough to be banned by the Russian authorities who occupied
Finland.  He composed a choral symphony based on Finnish epic poems, but
was born into a family that spoke Swedish - as many did in Finland, and
was trained in the German speaking world.

Many people view him as an anti-modern, certainly Olin Downes, his greatest
proponent thought so.  But Sibelius himself was a "Modern" as it was
understood at the time, a competitor and collegue of Gustav Mahler, an
ambivelant admirer and defender of Arnold Schoenberg - and a Modern.

What do I mean by this? Jean Sibelius noted that his contemporaries "served
up a variety of mixed cocktails, while I serve cold pure water." No more
modern, and neo-classical, statement could be made.  And it was made before
the term, and the movement, were particularly clear.  Jean Sibelius was a
trail blazing modern, because he ruthlessly distilled his language.

Consider that at the beginning of his symphonic career, symphonies were
"supposed" to be 4 movements.  Beethoven was barely granted the 6th as
an exception - Liszt and Berlioz being the major exceptions, with a few
3 movement works of Mozart being labelled examples of the Italian still
in force.  In otherwords a symphony was 4 movements as a basic plan,
with grace granted for a few geniuses.  Mahler's massive symphonies
and Sibelius' compressed ones were the works that altered that equation.
Instead, they did for the Symphony what Beethoven's late quartets implied
- demanded that the form of any work be determined by its own internal
logic, however many or few movements that required.

Bernard Shaw commented on the evolutionary radicalism in Sibelius thus:
"While it is hard to say which key his symphonies are in, we will soon find
ourselves humming them none the less." Other writers were less charitable,
writing reviews which were scathing in their denunciations of his musical
language.  "A Gloss on Sibelius" being perhaps the most famous.

- - -

What was the cause of this?

Music, to be interpreted as "language" needs to have a regular pattern
of sound/rhythm combinations which create the expectation of position -
position in the small and large scale.  There is music for beginnings,
and music for endings.  The "grammar" of a musical language consists of
the means by which composers tell musicians where they are.  Contrapunctal
devices, cadences, arcs, systematic use of instrumentation - all of these,
by 1900, were evolved into an extended, but catagorisable, grammar.
Schoenberg caught hell for using an "uncataloged dissonance" - so precise
was the dictionary of chords.

The tonal vocabulary - as Schenker was later to diagram - consisted of
expansions of a single phrase to full size.  A single phrase would have
material which left that phrase and returned to it - making it possible
to grasp the whole of a movement out of its basic thematic groups.  This
system of diagramming of sonatas, though it has been obsolete for a hundred
years, remains with us to this day.  Schenker's insight was in seeing how
all chordal material is either an extension of a single note, a semitonal
step or a move in a cadential progression, while different in form,
Schoenberg's catagorical method acheives the same results.

Sibelius turned this language on its head - he simply refused to use the
common sign posts - instead replacing them with a language based on pedal
points and their large scale relationship to a network of themes and
sub-themes.  This allowed him to dispense with many of the complexities of
the tonality of his day, while keeping the ability to range freely among
keys.

Modernism has always had two contending impulses, one is to ever more
intricate uses of the subtlties of an existing language, the other is the
reduction of ornament.  Often the two are found in the same work - Klimt's
painting for example both searches for ever more complex use of color
tropes, and the reduction of extraneous detail to mere pattern.  20th
century poetry is, likewise, a field where the prosodic relationships grew
more and more complex, while the diction grew ever more towards simplicity.

- - -

I submit that some of the basis for the language Sibelius evolved comes
from the use of repetition in his source poems - which repeat fragmentary
groups of words and phrases, and, rather than expanding, reassemble these
fragments.  The reason for this pattern in the source material is fairly
obvious - since the poems were spoken, they were built on an epitaph
system, which is the common mechanism for all large scale oral poetry
anywhere, stock rhythmic elements were combined and recombined to produce
larger elements, which, in turn, were combined and recombined.

This means of thinking stands in stark contrast to literate systems, which
use symbolic tropes.  Spoken poetry's urlinie is the sound combination,
and a sounds kinship to other sounds.  Written poetry, each symbol stands
in its relationship to other symbols.  Music, in Sibelius' time, was
a symbolic language, where a chord or dissonance "meant" something in
relation to other works.  Spoken works offer relationship of material, but
each sound "means" based on its position, with the denotation of words
often being subsidiary to their rhytmical value.  Thus heroes are given
descriptions which do not fit the person, but fit the metrical line.

- - -

Mahler, for all his scope, did not vary far from the symbolic tonal system
of expansion.  He did not abandon the structural function of chords, even
in his last, unfinished, symphony.  One can scan the four lines of a Mahler
symphony from the score.

Sibelius, by contrast, while he returns to the Beethovenian pattern of
instrumentation, often does not have discernable lines - instead there
is a pulsation between one and four thematic areas which expands and
contracts.  This expansion and contraction is the same in every symphony,
and shows no appreciable difference among the last 4 symphonies.

Stirling Newberry
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http://www.mp3.com/ssn