Schonberg on Sibelius

[Josquin des Prez]

Let us know when you do... 

Actually, i'm pretty sure Corey IS Sibelius. 

[Kullervo]

Let us know when you do... 

Considering that I've chosen a photo of him as my avatar, there is a slight chance I have.

In refutation of your view of him as a "belated romantic", let me direct you to a post I made earlier in this thread (though I doubt that even this will sway you — or that it's worth my time to respond to your Crusade for Modernism).

One of my favorite composers (and someone whom I think has made some of the best music of the postwar years), Per Nørgård was aware very early-on of the ingenious and subtly-radical structures Sibelius used in his music. From his site:

He studied all the scores and collected all the records he could of Sibelius' music, and discovered that the idea of metamorphosis, which plays such a central role in Holmboe's music, was already found in a fully developed form in Sibelius' oeuvre. The existence of several independent levels in the music, the shift between foreground and background, and even the idea of hierarchy itself - all this Nørgård found in Sibelius.

At that time these ideas, which for Nørgård were to reach far into his musical future, were more or less ignored or unrecognised, not only in Denmark, but even more in central European countries, where the name Sibelius stood for a hopelessly outdated nationalist romanticism.

When Nørgård had discovered this and thought it over, he wrote a letter to Sibelius setting out the ideas outlined above, and indeed also with the aim of assuring Sibelius that he was not alone with his musical visions, but that these would endure and be further developed.

Actually, i'm pretty sure Corey IS Sibelius. 

Just like you're both Josquin and Webern? 

[Dancing Divertimentian]

No I don't. I am not into politics, I am into the arts and the conservative smear on progressives is of no more interest to me than the progressive put-down of conservatives.

But YOU sure know how to smear!!!

The fact remains, though, Sibelius was a belated romantic at a time when romanticism was a spent force...

Bunk.

Shostakovich had little to offer save a synthetic rehash of the century preceding his appearance on this earth and what a pompous ass Penderecki must be to claim the imitative junk he has produced since his second symphony is more important than those marvels of good, clean, exciting, racy fun, the first two String Quartets and the Capriccio for oboe!

Smear, baby, smear!!!

[Kullervo]

Unadulterated nonsense. Please don't waste our time.

[Mark G. Simon]

But to go from there and claim Sibelius as a peer to Stravinsky and Schoenberg ...

Sibelius is easily a peer to Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

Some day, when you're a little older and have learned to think outside of the tiny little box you've cornered yourself into, you'll see there's more to music than who did what first, and that plotting numbers of dissonances against date of composition is a foolish way to evaluate music.

Sibelius is a difficult composer to understand. In terms of musical logic and continuity, no one else thinks the way he does. You've got to meet him on his terms.

[Josquin des Prez]

the invention of western Polyphony by Perotin

Perotin didn't invent polyphony. Just needed to address that point.

[Josquin des Prez]

Obviously to you, Sibelius seems difficult... 

Ho god, he's one of them. Vibrational fields can only be around the corner.

[Mark G. Simon]

Obviously to you, Sibelius seems difficult... 

Yeah, I only have a doctorate in composition and 25 years of experience as a professional musician. What could I possibly know?


He's clearly too difficult for you to understand.

[Kullervo]

Sibelius is easily a peer to Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

Some day, when you're a little older and have learned to think outside of the tiny little box you've cornered yourself into, you'll see there's more to music than who did what first, and that plotting numbers of dissonances against date of composition is a foolish way to evaluate music.

Sibelius is a difficult composer to understand. In terms of musical logic and continuity, no one else thinks the way he does. You've got to meet him on his terms.

Seconded.

[drogulus]

No I don't. I am not into politics, I am into the arts and the conservative smear on progressives is of no more interest to me than the progressive put-down of conservatives.  The fact remains, though, Sibelius was a belated romantic at a time when romanticism was a spent force, Shostakovich had little to offer save a synthetic rehash of the century preceding his appearance on this earth and what a pompous ass Penderecki must be to claim the imitative junk he has produced since his second symphony is more important than those marvels of good, clean, exciting, racy fun, the first two String Quartets and the Capriccio for oboe!


     

    I don't know why you think some composers represent spent forces. It's really up to the composers to use whatever combination of old and new they want, and to make it new in their own way. Sibelius doesn't sound like any 19th century composer, does he? Nor does he sound like any of his contemporaries, though some of those have been deeply influenced by him. So, Sibelius is original and influential.

In 1984, the great American avant-garde composer Morton Feldman gave a lecture at the relentlessly up-to-date Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, Germany. "The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives," Feldman said on that occasion. "The people who you think are conservative might really be radical." And then he began to hum the Sibelius Fifth.

     That's from The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross. So it's best to see these pigeonholes as temporary slots, if you need them at all. You may want to sort things out differently after giving it more thought. I don't think Feldman is right so much as usefully shaking up preconceptions. Maybe you don't know what you think you know. 

[Josquin des Prez]

Sibelius, difficult !  What a joke !!  One guesses Comic stips require efforts of concentration, from you dimwits !!!

Now he's being condescending, how cute. There are many layers of understanding and Sibelius is most definitely difficult to comprehend from an ontological point of view. Today we live in a world where science rules supreme, and understanding is applied only to the manipulation of information, to what can be seen and tested in the physical world. But there is another level of intelligence which deals with the world that cannot be seen, the world of concepts and ideas, there world of knowledge, which has nothing to do with the raw memorization of factoids and information. It is from this realm that all creativity springs forth, and what we call genius is merely the manifestation of truth, of real knowledge, which the creative artist or philosopher has mastered after navigating in the unseen.

Many people today are trapped in a purely scientific, materialistic mode of thinking, and most tend to scoff at the concept of genius, because it cannot be proven in a test lab you see, it can only be understood. Because they reject what can only be grasped in abstraction, then the creative artist shifts from the unseen to the physical world, the world of raw technique and the literal interpretation of specific artific values, often manipulated through simple means of semantics. But this is a false art, which is why modernism has been very unsuccessful and will plunge into oblivion once our civilization collapses from a complete lack of any form of conceptual guidance (or eventual adoption of foreign conceptual constructs), which is how all civilizations die.

Thus, to anyone who hasn't eschewed their ability to think in abstractions, it will be clear that Sibelius, like Mozart or Beethoven before him, are much more significant composers then Boulez, irregardless of the inherent simplicity in their manipulations of the physical musical parameters of their compositions in respect to the latter.

[Mark G. Simon]

Now he's being condescending, how cute.

Yeah, it shows how simple-minded these modernist bullies are. They boil everything down to simple equations:
Dissonant = complex = difficult = good.
Consonant = simple = easy = bad.

With these simple guidelines you can pass judgments on any music without having to think too hard, or even listen.

[Josquin des Prez]

Influence is irrelevant.

Doesn't this statement simply invalidate your entire argument? Sibelius was not an innovator, he was an original. The difference is usually lost on smaller minds.

[Mark G. Simon]

Most curious. Our two-toned friend can't seem to detect the irony of

The steady resort to personal attack and smear by this site's Sibelius crowd

on the one hand, and:

fans of Sibelius are indeed low-quality people, who settle for Sibelius out of incapacity to grasp Boulez and even Bartok, who compensate for their inability to come up with coherent arguments with heavy barrages of insult and smear, and who deal with their envy of the more creative figures of the XXth Century with cretinous as well as false and mendacious claims for their anti-hero, such as that he is the true innovator. 

The XXth Century did not last that long: 1917-1989.  Maybe was that not enough time for the dullards to penetrate it...

Sir, you have given us nothing but personal attack and smear. Must half your sentences your write always contradict the other half?

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

I think I'm going to listen to Répons and Tapiola tonight, two wonderful works.

[drogulus]

The steady resort to personal attack and smear by this site's Sibelius crowd authorizes me to state the obvious, namely, that fans of Sibelius are indeed low-quality people, who settle for Sibelius out of incapacity to grasp Boulez and even Bartok, who compensate for their inability to come up with coherent arguments with heavy barrages of insult and smear, and who deal with their envy of the more creative figures of the XXth Century with cretinous as well as false and mendacious claims for their anti-hero, such as that he is the true innovator.  

    Heavy barrages of insult and smear? What are you talking about?

    Do you think it's not insulting to say people with different musical tastes are "low-quality people"?

    I take Feldman to be suggesting that it's more radical to buck the current trend than to follow it. It's arguable whether this could be used to suggest that Sibelius is really a "radical" in any meaningful sense, but my point is that it doesn't matter. You can be radical in what is ultimately an unimportant way, because few people hear the music, or want to hear it again. Or you can be innovative in a less radical way and have a considerable impact felt by a great many listeners as well as other composers. Influence is not just radical influence, or what radicals acknowledge as influence. I don't say this to disparage any radical composer. I just think that it distorts the whole fabric of musical history to make them all-important.

     OK, Mark, you got there first. This is what I get for trying to reply "thoughtfully" instead of squeezing out a speed post. 

[Mark G. Simon]

Incapacity to grasp the better part of XXth century music does make you especially vulnerable to it... 

1) I've seen no evidence of your understanding of any music of any century. I've looked through all of your posts here, and see nothing but cheap shots.

2) And you haven't taken the trouble to get to know what I understand of music. You think that because I value Sibelius highly, I must therefore be opposed to Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartók and Messiaen, when in fact they are among my favorite composers.

And by the way, please learn to spell: the phrase is "in synch" not "in sink".

[Josquin des Prez]

What a gross confusion of philisophy and art - and even worst than philosophy, moral philosophy; the two are quite different activities and require quite different kinds of faculties.  And if truth were a standard of genius then any lab reasearcher would be a genius as lab researchers have come up with plenty of information concerning such things as proteins that are real, and true.

It seems you didn't understand what i was getting at. I'm not surprised.

Debussy, Scriabin, Stravinsky unsuccessful?  What a joke!!!

They were successful in and of themselves but their work represents a dead end. Every composer that followed in their stead has not achieved as much as their predecessor, and it gets worst with each passing generation. This is an historical anomaly, and the problem must lie somewhere in the direction modernism has taken.

When our civilisation collapses everything will fall into oblivion, Josquin Des Prez as well as Boulez, Dante and Genet, Rembrandt and Picasso.

Not necessarily. When classical civilization collapsed a lot of their achievements were salvaged for posterity. Notice of course that not everything from classical Greece or Rome was preserved for future generations. This didn't occur by chance. 

First you claim modernism is excessively conceptual, then you say civilisation will fall over lack of conceptual guidance.  Make up your mind, buddy.

I never claimed that modernism is excessively conceptual, to the contrary, i stated that modern art is as far removed from the conceptual as you can get. This is how false movements like post-modernism are made possible in the first place. See, a concept, an idea, is understood only by means of elevated consciousness. It was Otto Weininger who best understood knowledge in terms of consciousness, the opposite of which is the henid, a state of non-consciousness in which ideas are understood only in a vague, pseudo-emotional sense. When people today say that classical music is "relaxing" or "soft", they are betraying a lack of true understanding, and it can be said that they are experiencing classical music in henid form. They can get a vague sense of what the music is about, but they cannot really understand it, for them the experience is vague and confused.

Thus, it can be said that Post-modernism is essentially a play with ideas and concepts which are purposely left in henid form, and thus it is said that their meaning is subjective and non-existent. 

First you blame modernism for supposed excesses of abstraction, here you claim those who do not give up on their faculty for abstraction will place Mozart above Boulez:  must half the sentences you write always contradict the other half?

Except there's nothing particular "abstract" about the music of Boulez. His works exist in a physical form which is perfectly measurable and quantifiable. Not so with say, Mozart. There is no simple measure for the greatness of Mozart. You can't say that his works are great because of his use of form, or his complex contrapuntal writing. Those things may contribute to the greatness of his works, or they may not. Sometimes you find moments in his music which are of the utmost simplicity, and yet, you'll be scratching your head in wonder trying to understand how any mere mortal could possibly write something so genial, so brilliant. That understanding is based on your ability to grasp abstractions. It cannot be learned by reading books, it cannot be learned by memorizing theories or techniques.

BTW, the subject of this thread is not Mozart vs Boulez, it's Sibelius vs Boulez.  The greatest composers are always on the same plane, Mozart and Boulez, Monteverdi and Stravinsky, etc.

Sibelius may not compare to the likes of Mozart, but neither does Boulez.

[Catison]

Perhaps this essay Apparition in the Woods by Alex Ross, already quoted above, can shed some light on the debate.  Even if you don't like Sibelius, Ross does a good job of shedding light on this unconventional composer.  (This essay was expanded into a chapter for The Rest Is Noise.)

Here is an apt excerpt:

"I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien," Rachmaninoff wrote in 1939. "I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me. . . . I cannot cast out my musical gods in a moment and bend the knee to new ones." Sibelius felt the same pang of loss. "Not everyone can be an innovating genius," he wrote in his diary. "As a personality and as an apparition from the woods you will have your small, modest place."

And yet the so-called "regional" composers left an imposing body of work, which is integral to the century as a whole. Their music may lack the vanguard credentials of Schoenberg's or Stravinsky's, at least on the sonic surface, but Nielsen, in his 1925 book "Living Music," makes a good counter-argument: "The simplest is the hardest, the universal the most lasting, the straightest the strongest, like the pillars that support the dome." And, precisely because these composers communicated general feelings of mourning for a pre-technological past, or, more simply, a yearning for vanished youth, they remained acutely relevant for a broad public.

Mainstream audiences often lag behind the intellectual classes in appreciating the more adventurous composers, but sometimes they are quicker to perceive the value of music that the politicians of style fail to comprehend. In 1952, Nicolas Slonimsky put together a delightful book,"Lexicon of Musical Invective," an anthology of wrongheaded music criticism in which now canonical masterpieces are compared with feline caterwauling, barnyard noises, and so on. Slonimsky should also have written a "Lexicon of Musical Condescension," gathering high-minded essays in which now canonical masterpieces were dismissed as middlebrow, with a long section reserved for Sibelius.

Was Sibelius a radical, an innovator, or even a modern?  Other than some novel use of form, I doubt many would argue here.  But that is not the point.

The task for any composer is to find a unique, interesting voice.  Many of the modernist composers mistook finding a unique voice for finding a unique system, generating their voice.  But the system does not make the voice, as we can see in all the wonderful variety of serialist music from Schoenberg to Stravinsky to Copland.  Even the chance composers are not immune.  Cage, in his struggle to take himself out of the music, ends up sounding like Cage.  Feldman, like Feldman.  I don't mean to suggest that systems are bad, because for many composers it aided them in finding their niche, but I argue they are not required, even for good, 20th Century music.

Sibelius is an anachronism in the 20th Century because he didn't need a new system.  His system, an extension 19th Century tonal Romanticism, should have been dead, but he proved it still had enough life to provide him with the tools he needed.  There is simply no other figure in music history that sounds like Sibelius, and I cannot imagine life without his music.  But I also cannot imagine life without Boulez, Babbit, or Sessions.  These are all great composers, and it is a mistake to wall ourselves off from any of their music.

Sibelius had a voice all his own, and that is enough for me.  And now you can find that voice filtering through new composers, like Adams, Lindberg, and Saariaho.  What a wonderful world we live in.

[karlhenning]

Mainstream audiences often lag behind the intellectual classes in appreciating the more adventurous composers, but sometimes they are quicker to perceive the value of music that the politicians of style fail to comprehend. In 1952, Nicolas Slonimsky put together a delightful book,"Lexicon of Musical Invective," an anthology of wrongheaded music criticism in which now canonical masterpieces are compared with feline caterwauling, barnyard noises, and so on. Slonimsky should also have written a "Lexicon of Musical Condescension," gathering high-minded essays in which now canonical masterpieces were dismissed as middlebrow, with a long section reserved for Sibelius.

Brilliantly apt, Brett.