The Snowshoed Sibelius

[Mirror Image]

I actually agree with both sides of this debate.  My favourite "for example" is Grieg's Peer Gynt "Morning Mood" which folk like to imagine epitomises a Norwegian Fjord.  Whereas in fact in the Ibsen play the scene is set in the Desert.  So a case where we have "learnt" an association where none existed.  Not that that devalues people who really do "see" a fjord or enjoy the music more imagining a fjord but it is easy to fall into a sort of sign-post/shortcut musical imagery - film music relies on the listener/viewer knowing such and such a phrase portrays menace/love/heroics.....

But what I "see" in the music isn't up for debate. Music is an abstract form of expression. I hardly ever actually hear what the composer intended. Like in Stravinsky's Le sacre, for example, doesn't conjure up ritualistic dances for me just like Une barque sur l'océan from Ravel's Miroirs doesn't exactly sound like a "boat on the ocean". Let people hear what they want to and the fact that they're listening in the first-place is all that matters.

[Brian]

But what I "see" in the music isn't up for debate. Music is an abstract form of expression. I hardly ever actually hear what the composer intended. Like in Stravinsky's Le sacre, for example, doesn't conjure up ritualistic dances for me just like Une barque sur l'océan from Ravel's Miroirs doesn't exactly sound like a "boat on the ocean". Let people hear what they want to and the fact that they're listening in the first-place is all that matters.

Roasted Swan just agreed with you...

Not that that devalues people who really do "see" a fjord or enjoy the music more imagining a fjord

My mom falls on your side - I think I've recounted the anecdote before of the time we saw Tod und Verklärung and she said that knowing it was about death ruined it because it sounded like so many other things instead.

[Pohjolas Daughter]

My understanding is that the "London fog" of late 1800s England and Sherlock's time was a very real, but very different phenomenon - smog from all the pollution of Victorian-era industry.

A good reminder, Brian, of the effects of the Industrial Revolution.

PD

[Mirror Image]

Roasted Swan just agreed with you...

He said he agrees with both sides of 'the debate' --- whatever this debate is will be news to me. I simply reiterated how I felt. That's all.

[Madiel]

Part of my beef is that I don't think most people "hear" winter in Sibelius so much as they're told by everyone else that they ought to hear winter in Sibelius, and hey presto they do. The power of suggestion is well established, from understanding a computerised voice far better if you're told what it's saying to seeing the face of Jesus in a tortilla.

Sibelius is not the only composer to be faced with this kind of constant stereotyping. It can be hard to find a Shostakovich album that doesn't tell you to find absolutely everything to be secretly political. But it's like all stereotyping: it takes an element that's both somewhat true and really easy to digest and understand, and slathers it upon everything.

So my problem is not with people independently thinking that Sibelius sounds wintry. My problem is that I think we would get entirely different results if someone just heard Sibelius on their own, without constantly being told biographically that Sibelius is from Finland and, Finland being the home of Santa Claus and all, that Finnish music ought to sound wintry because we have such an incredibly limited knowledge of Finnish climate and geography that we have one, single mental image for the place.

And it's strange because we don't seem to invoke the same climate for Russian composers, to take a really obvious example. Maybe it's because there are enough well-known Russian composers that it would become tiresome to suggest quite so often that the snow-bound Russian landscape is the source of inspiration (beyond the times the composers actually said so). But Finland has one well-known composer, and that composer gets to be Santa Claus.

[staxomega]

From the first movement where he seems to take most of his time is in the beginning leading up to the tympanis bringing in that "spring is in bloom"

I am curious what images are conjured up for people in this specific part of the 6th symphony.

To me it sounds like life is returning, flowers are in bloom, birds are singing. So not winter itself.

[Mirror Image]

Part of my beef is that I don't think most people "hear" winter in Sibelius so much as they're told by everyone else that they ought to hear winter in Sibelius, and hey presto they do. The power of suggestion is well established, from understanding a computerised voice far better if you're told what it's saying to seeing the face of Jesus in a tortilla.

Sibelius is not the only composer to be faced with this kind of constant stereotyping. It can be hard to find a Shostakovich album that doesn't tell you to find absolutely everything to be secretly political. But it's like all stereotyping: it takes an element that's both somewhat true and really easy to digest and understand, and slathers it upon everything.

So my problem is not with people independently thinking that Sibelius sounds wintry. My problem is that I think we would get entirely different results if someone just heard Sibelius on their own, without constantly being told biographically that Sibelius is from Finland and, Finland being the home of Santa Claus and all, that Finnish music ought to sound wintry because we have such an incredibly limited knowledge of Finnish climate and geography that we have one, single mental image for the place.

And it's strange because we don't seem to invoke the same climate for Russian composers, to take a really obvious example. Maybe it's because there are enough well-known Russian composers that it would become tiresome to suggest quite so often that the snow-bound Russian landscape is the source of inspiration (beyond the times the composers actually said so). But Finland has one well-known composer, and that composer gets to be Santa Claus.

I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill here, Madiel. If someone said they thought his Violin Concerto sounded like it evokes a bat screeching in a cave somewhere along the Andes Mountains, would this have any effect on what you hear in the music? As I said, at least people are listening to the music and that's all that matters. Isn't listening the most important thing? Our impressions are of a personal subjective nature and, honestly, should never be up for debate. You're not going to tell me how to listen to music just like I'm not going to tell you that you're an idiot because you hear something in the music that I don't hear. But let's move on...

[Karl Henning]

Man, I thought I was the only one to hear that screeching Andean bat!

[Mirror Image]

Man, I thought I was the only one to hear that screeching Andean bat!

[Madiel]

I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill here, Madiel. If someone said they thought his Violin Concerto sounded like it evokes a bat screeching in a cave somewhere along the Andes Mountains, would this have any effect on what you hear in the music?

Depends on whether it was repeated in the liner notes of the next 30 recordings of the Violin Concerto by various writers who were too lazy or unoriginal to come up with their own notions.

[Mirror Image]

Depends on whether it was repeated in the liner notes of the next 30 recordings of the Violin Concerto by various writers who were too lazy or unoriginal to come up with their own notions.

Okay, then a simple solution would be not to read the liner notes, listen to the piece(s) and formulate your own opinion of the music.

[Karl Henning]

Okay, then a simple solution would be not to read the liner notes, listen to the piece(s) and formulate your own opinion of the music.

Like reading a book, skipping the Foreword.

[Brian]

Part of my beef is that I don't think most people "hear" winter in Sibelius so much as they're told by everyone else that they ought to hear winter in Sibelius, and hey presto they do. The power of suggestion is well established, from understanding a computerised voice far better if you're told what it's saying to seeing the face of Jesus in a tortilla.

Sibelius is not the only composer to be faced with this kind of constant stereotyping. It can be hard to find a Shostakovich album that doesn't tell you to find absolutely everything to be secretly political. But it's like all stereotyping: it takes an element that's both somewhat true and really easy to digest and understand, and slathers it upon everything.

So my problem is not with people independently thinking that Sibelius sounds wintry. My problem is that I think we would get entirely different results if someone just heard Sibelius on their own, without constantly being told biographically that Sibelius is from Finland and, Finland being the home of Santa Claus and all, that Finnish music ought to sound wintry because we have such an incredibly limited knowledge of Finnish climate and geography that we have one, single mental image for the place.

And it's strange because we don't seem to invoke the same climate for Russian composers, to take a really obvious example. Maybe it's because there are enough well-known Russian composers that it would become tiresome to suggest quite so often that the snow-bound Russian landscape is the source of inspiration (beyond the times the composers actually said so). But Finland has one well-known composer, and that composer gets to be Santa Claus.

This is a common flaw among music critics - especially UK based ones - who rely heavily on national stereotypes in their reporting, sometimes with seriously harmful effects. It's not just that Finnish music is supposed to sound wintry and icy, either. Russian romantics are supposed to all be fiery and passionate and folksy; Italians are all supposed to be dramatic; French performers are all supposed to be sleek and smooth and soft-toned and witty; German performers are all supposed to take the music very seriously; most problematic, there was for a long time an assumption that Asian pianists and performers would all be technically perfect but emotionally unable to figure out the music.

I think we are getting past a lot of those dumb stereotypes, but it's still worth intentionally avoiding them in a lot of cases. Plus, if you avoid the cliches, you have to be a lot more useful with your descriptions, because you have to think about it!

[Karl Henning]

I certainly" heard winter" in the opening of the Sixth the first time I heard it (and without being told that it what I "should hear." By which, all I mean is that I myself have no problem with that.

[Madiel]

Okay, then a simple solution would be not to read the liner notes, listen to the piece(s) and formulate your own opinion of the music.

But it's too late. That's kind of my point. By the time anyone is as immersed in classical music as much as we all are, you've inevitably been bombarded with this stuff over and over unless you've been living some kind of hermit existence.

It's the same kind of floating cultural knowledge that leads to one person deciding a bit of Beethoven reminds him of Moonlight and then here we are 2 centuries later and the notion has stuck. I doubt that 'Screeching Bat' is going to catch on, but wintry associations are all over the place, starting with the covers of albums.

[DavidW]

Brian don't forget all modern brits are neoromantic!  Oh yes and the lazy critics that describe a composer as post [insert famous composer from same country] even if their styles are completely different!

So yeah I agree.

[Mirror Image]

Like reading a book, skipping the Foreword.

Indeed.

[Mirror Image]

But it's too late. That's kind of my point. By the time anyone is as immersed in classical music as much as we all are, you've inevitably been bombarded with this stuff over and over unless you've been living some kind of hermit existence.

It's the same kind of floating cultural knowledge that leads to one person deciding a bit of Beethoven reminds him of Moonlight and then here we are 2 centuries later and the notion has stuck. I doubt that 'Screeching Bat' is going to catch on, but wintry associations are all over the place, starting with the covers of albums.

I try not to read too much into what other people have wrote whether it be a critic or someone who has contributed an article to the latest Gramophone magazine issue. I think all of us are knowledgeable enough (or, at least, I am) in looking past the huffs and puffs of these people to formulate our own opinions. Why do people always think of Rachmaninov as 'melancholic' or 'deeply nostalgic' for his homeland when what he's really telling us has nothing to do with any of this? Why does Schoenberg get picked on so much and his music gets equated to nothing more than a complete madman who wrote "ugly music"? If people would use their ears and minds instead of relying on what other people say, then they might have something worthwhile to contribute of their own and this can go for all sorts of things.

[Madiel]

I try not to read too much into what other people have wrote whether it be a critic or someone who has contributed an article to the latest Gramophone magazine issue. I think all of us are knowledgeable enough (or, at least, I am) in looking past the huffs and puffs of these people to formulate our own opinions. Why do people always think of Rachmaninov as 'melancholic' or 'deeply nostalgic' for his homeland when what he's really telling us has nothing to do with any of this? Why does Schoenberg get picked on so much and his music gets equated to nothing more than a complete madman who wrote "ugly music"? If people would use their ears and minds instead of relying on what other people say, then they might have something worthwhile to contribute of their own and this can go for all sorts of things.

Well on that, Sir, we can agree.

If you'll excuse me, I'm responding to the news of Primephonic's demise and several other stressful circumstances by listening to Pearl Jam.

[Brian]

I certainly" heard winter" in the opening of the Sixth the first time I heard it (and without being told that it what I "should hear." By which, all I mean is that I myself have no problem with that.

I always think of a freshly fallen new snow when I hear the beginning of the Sixth.