Sibelius Studies (review)

Sibelius Studies. Edited by Timothy L. Jackson and Veijo Murtomäki. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. [xx, 397 p. ISBN 0-521-62416-9. $74.95.]

Like its companions in Cambridge University Press's continuing series of composer-based collections, the present volume offers a wide array of approaches to the life and music of Jean Sibelius. The most widely recognized Finnish composer of his era, Sibelius has generated tremendous interest among composers, musicologists, and performers in recent decades. Numerous new publications reflect this renaissance of scholarship, including The Sibelius Companion, edited by Glenda Dawn Goss (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996); Guy Rickards, Jean Sibelius (London: Phaidon Press, 1997); and Glenda Dawn Goss, Jean Sibelius: A Guide to Research (New York: Garland, 1998). The volume under review complements these works and is a valuable contribution to the literature on the Finnish legend and his music.

The book's twelve essays range considerably in the level of their accessibility. Those in the first section, "Reception History and Aesthetics," are the most approachable for the general reader. Eero Tarasti's "An Essay in Post-colonial Analysis: Sibelius as an Icon of the Finns and Others" surveys the Sibelius cult through the author's own theory of existential semiotics, detailing the rise of Sibelius as a Finnish icon and idol. Robert Layton's "From Kajanus to Karajan: Sibelius on Record" chronicles the recorded legacy of the composer. In "Sibelius the Progressive," Tim Howell focuses on Tapiola as a means of demonstrating forward-looking aspects of Sibelius's craft, namely the development of a multilevel music from a single idea, repeated passages that are presented in different contexts to different aesthetic ends, repetition patterns, a uniformity of pitch relationships, the articulation of linear and circular time and their intersections, and the notion of temporal variations.

The second and third sections of the volume, "Ideology and Structure" and "Analytical Studies of the Symphonies," present detailed discussions of Sibelius's music from a variety of perspectives. While frequently thick and challenging in their prose, the essays as a whole offer significant insight into Sibelius and his compositional technique. Considerable demands frequently are made upon the reader, however, as far as a comprehensible knowledge of current trends in theory and analysis is concerned. Readers should possess a thorough knowledge of Schenkerian theory and have ready access to scores of the works under discussion. These essays are not intended for the general reader but rather for a specialist audience who has time to really sit down and ponder the points presented by the authors.

Peter Franklin's "Kullervo's Problem--Kullervo's Story" is a postmodern reading of Kullervo that, perhaps more than any other essay in the book, requires a score due to multitudinous references to measure numbers and rehearsal letters. Depictions of sexuality, gender, narrativity, and allegory are addressed in the essay. Eija Kurki, in "Sibelius and the Theater: A Study of the Incidental Music for Symbolist Plays," and Veijo Murtomäki, in "Sibelius's Symphonic Ballad Skigsrået: Biographical and Programmatic Aspects of His Early Orchestral Music," provide discussions of some of the composer's lesser-known works. Timo Virtanen's "Pohjola's Daughter --'L'aventure d'un héros'" offers details on musical and extra-musical aspects of the work, linking it to the Finnish epic Kalevala and its legends of Luonnotar and Marjatta. Timothy L. Jackson's lengthy contribution (ninety-seven pages, nearly one-fourth of the total length of the book), "Observations on Crystallization and Entropy in the Music of Sibelius and Other Composers," contextualizes the Finnish composer's handling of symphonic form among his nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German contemporaries. It is as much a discourse on compositional process in Schumann, Brahms, and Bruckner as it is an essay on Sibelius. It is both far-reaching and probing and includes no fewer than thirty-one Schenkerian graphs.

Four chapters constitute the section on Sibelius's symphonies: "Meter in the Opening of the Second Symphony" by Tapio Kallio, "The Musical Language of...