BaL 28.01.17 - Sibelius: Tapiola Op. 112

[vinteuil]

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... all so interesting. Maclintick and Jayne Lee Wilson seem to have an approach to this music that is very different to how I relate to it. Theirs may of course be more Sibelian (or Siberian) - feeling deep emotional relationships with the natural world, and identifying them in the music. For me, none of this applies : I 'get' it as music, as great music - and that's it : I get no synaesthetic relationship to anything outside what it is as music.

Marvellous how so many musics can communicate in so many different ways to different hearers...

... by Switzerland ( Cuckoo clocks, anyone ?... )

[... the pedant in me has to remind the world that cuckoo clocks are Black Forest German - Orson Welles was wrong ]

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... all so interesting. Maclintick and Jayne Lee Wilson seem to have an approach to this music that is very different to how I relate to it. Theirs may of course be more Sibelian (or Siberian) - feeling deep emotional relationships with the natural world, and identifying them in the music. For me, none of this applies : I 'get' it as music, as great music - and that's it : I get no synaesthetic relationship to anything outside what it is as music.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

It's obvious that hearing the extra-Musical connotations is vastly important to the Musical experience for many listeners - but, for me, reading such comments is as bizarre as somebody referring to Austen's unexpected modulation to the flattened submediant between chapters five and six of Emma, or describing the steam rising from the tugboat in The Fighting Temeraire as being a Neapolitan Sixth. It's just not the way I hear Music (or read literature, or look at visual Art) - beyond me.

[Beef Oven!]

"I liked the bit at about quarter to eleven." - Erik Satie on Claude Debussy’s 'La Mer'

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

"I liked the bit at about quarter to eleven." - Erik Satie on Claude Debussy’s 'La Mer'

I once mischievously referred to a section of one of Messaien's synaesthetic works as "that smashing orange-y bit in the middle".

[Richard Tarleton]

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Maclintick and Jayne Lee Wilson seem to have an approach to this music that is very different to how I relate to it.

And to nature, and how I relate to that - speaking as one who spends as much time as possible immersed in it (I too have been following this thread with great interest). My approach - hard to describe, but not emotional, more analytical - walking in a strange forest for the first time, at home or abroad, my senses are on full alert compiling a sensory 3D map of my surroundings - sights and sounds, light and shade, bird songs and calls, smells - but it is what it is, I don't for the most part feel crossover with other sets of emotions. Certainly no synaesthetic relationship. I am no poet. I've walked in some of Europe's last bits of primaeval forest, walked many a high Alpine trail - I've had the classic Romantic, Turneresque, sublime experience of being drenched in a thunderstorm in the Alps at 8000 feet, but the overriding concerns at the time were physical, concern for survival and reaching the refuge. I think my approach to nature could be described as literal, rather than emotional.

Theirs may of course be more Sibelian (or Siberian) - feeling deep emotional relationships with the natural world, and identifying them in the music. For me, none of this applies : I 'get' it as music, as great music - and that's it : I get no synaesthetic relationship to anything outside what it is as music.

Marvellous how so many musics can communicate in so many different ways to different hearers...

I love Sibelius, but as great music - listening again to Tapiola yesterday I just heard the music. I certainly don't "see" cranes in Scene with Cranes - does anyone? It could be called anything. The violin concerto is on now**.... I've had this conversation with Pet before now, about Strauss's tone poems, and the extent to which it's essential to know the story....

**We've just been told Tovey described it as a polonaise for polar bears. Not heard that before

[Maclintick]

I think you're venturing into the realms of fantasy here, Jones - nobody has made this "comment" - least of all Sibelius.


Well - it's B minor (with a picardy third). And "Atonal modernism" wasn't at all in vogue in the 1920s - considered very "last decade" in the anti-German post-War world. If Sibelius felt he needed to make "a bit of a statement" in Tapiola, and if the critics were "vogue-obsessed", then such statements/obsessions were with/towards Neo-Classical Stravinsky, Hindemith, Les Six, Weill - none of whom were "quite done with" tonalities.

Duly corrected, FHG. Post amended to rectify the most egregious factual errors. "Russian Bear over the border" was a comment from an online entry, referencing border tensions between Finland & Russia during the 20th century, rather than a post on this board.

[vinteuil]

.


... and I have often "re-imagined", "re-heard" (as deliberate exercises) Beethoven's Pastoral as a sea-scape, and Vivaldi's Seasons in quite the 'wrong' order [and they still work... ] :

[Maclintick]

And to nature, and how I relate to that - speaking as one who spends as much time as possible immersed in it (I too have been following this thread with great interest). My approach - hard to describe, but not emotional, more analytical - walking in a strange forest for the first time, at home or abroad, my senses are on full alert compiling a sensory 3D map of my surroundings - sights and sounds, light and shade, bird songs and calls, smells - but it is what it is, I don't for the most part feel crossover with other sets of emotions. Certainly no synaesthetic relationship. I am no poet. I've walked in some of Europe's last bits of primaeval forest, walked many a high Alpine trail - I've had the classic Romantic, Turneresque, sublime experience of being drenched in a thunderstorm in the Alps at 8000 feet, but the overriding concerns at the time were physical, concern for survival and reaching the refuge. I think my approach to nature could be described as literal, rather than emotional.


I love Sibelius, but as great music - listening again to Tapiola yesterday I just heard the music. I certainly don't "see" cranes in Scene with Cranes - does anyone? It could be called anything. The violin concerto is on now**.... I've had this conversation with Pet before now, about Strauss's tone poems, and the extent to which it's essential to know the story....

**We've just been told Tovey described it as a polonaise for polar bears. Not heard that before

I'm a keen walker, too, and will often experience the (synaesthetic ?) phenomenon of some well-loved piece of music starting, unbidden, to play inside my head on the trail -- "Ging Heut Morgen Übers Feld" on Catbells, perhaps, or "Tintagel" welling-up as I survey a magnificent sea-vista from St Agnes Head, or on your own equally spectacular chough-haunted Pembrokeshire cliffs....

[visualnickmos]

It's obvious that hearing the extra-Musical connotations is vastly important to the Musical experience for many listeners - but, for me, reading such comments is as bizarre as somebody referring to Austen's unexpected modulation to the flattened submediant between chapters five and six of Emma, or describing the steam rising from the tugboat in The Fighting Temeraire as being a Neapolitan Sixth. It's just not the way I hear Music (or read literature, or look at visual Art) - beyond me.

Exactly! I have the same philosphy, here. Too much of "what it's suppose to represent.... blah, blah, blah...." Sometimes I'm sure that over-analysis of what one thinks it's supposed to be, rather than what it actually is, can kill it. It can actually take over from the pure 'musicality' of a piece. That's me done!

[Maclintick]

Exactly! I have the same philosphy, here. Too much of "what it's suppose to represent.... blah, blah, blah...." Sometimes I'm sure that over-analysis of what one thinks it's supposed to be, rather than what it actually is, can kill it. It can actually take over from the pure 'musicality' of a piece. That's me done!

I don't accept that registering an avowedly subjective reaction to a piece commits some sort of heresy against "pure" music -- whatever that is. I'm perfectly capable of enjoying the extraordinary musical structure Sibelius creates in Tapiola, without reference to the mood it may engender at specific moments -- the transparency & delicacy of 12-part string chords, violas con sordino & divisi in 4 parts, the snarling brass interjections, floating pedal-points high on the horns, the stygian chorales of low clarinets & bassoon, ghostly harmonics in the cellos & violas -- the miraculous creation of a new soundworld, with contrabassoon & bass clarinet the only additions to a Beethovenian orchestra.

Where I part company with Segerstam, whose interpretation has many fine qualities, especially apparent in the Helsinki string-playing, is that he ignores many of Sibelius's dynamic markings. Accents, in particular, & hairpin crescendi in the wind clearly marked in the score, often go for nothing.

[teamsaint]

I don't accept that registering an avowedly subjective reaction to a piece commits some sort of heresy against "pure" music -- whatever that is. I'm perfectly capable of enjoying the extraordinary musical structure Sibelius creates in Tapiola, without reference to the mood it may engender at specific moments -- the transparency & delicacy of 12-part string chords, violas con sordino & divisi in 4 parts, the snarling brass interjections, floating pedal-points high on the horns, the stygian chorales of low clarinets & bassoon, ghostly harmonics in the cellos & violas -- the miraculous creation of a new soundworld, with contrabassoon & bass clarinet the only additions to a Beethovenian orchestra.

That's surely the point, isn't it ?
We listen in different ways on different days, and hear different things each time.
Its not a problem to try a( possibly radically) different approach, especially where something about a work eludes us.

Imaginative art surely invites us to join in the creative process, and that brings more unpredictability. And we are usually/often trying to bring order from apparent artistic complexity or apparent chaos.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Indeed - my #93 was an expression/illustration/explanation of my bafflement when reading/encountering discussions of Music that "rely" on/are supported by detailed extra-Musical features; not of any feeling of "superiority" (I take that as read ). Humans are social animals: we need skills and strengths different from each other in order that the species can support each other as a community: vive les differences!

[jayne lee wilson]

With Tapiola, a listener can ignore the title, and the text Sibelius placed at the head of it, just as you can ignore the texts Elgar used to describe his Enigma Variations; and enjoy both on an abstract level, of course you can. Or your own response may veer off in any wildly imagistic direction. But in doing so you reduce your understanding on the simplest level of knowing something of the composers' inspiration and imagination - and how that feeds into the sounds themselves.

Would anyone, listening to the Çiurlionis or Debussy tone-poems called The Sea, truly hear them as “pure” or “abstract music”, failing to perceive the very motion of the water and the waves moving through them, in fact urging on the very music itself? Perhaps they would - but wouldn’t that be missing an essential part the work’s identity - of what makes it what it is?

Sibelius, Debussy or Çiurlionis could not have written these pieces without the experiences they, at the very least, reflect or relate to; this doesn't necessarily mean a literal visualising of a given God, forest or sea in creator or listener (yet it can be very localised in some cases) - it is an evocation, a response to how the natural world relates to human presence, activity and creativity - the human attempt to find meaning, “make sense” of it.

***

There is a set of stylistic features common to particular evocations of nature which run throughout musical history, music of storms, seas and rivers being among the most common (think of Smetana's Vltava, and then the prelude to Rheingold).
Or consider the 1st Movement of Roussel’s Symphony No.1 “Poem of the Forest”: there you find a very similar use of the orchestra to conjure up a winter gale to that found towards the end of Tapiola - a kind of musical archetype. (You’ll hear something alike-yet-different in Oceanides and in Bax’s November Woods).
Again, a listener can ignore, or fail to perceive, these things and listen to any given tone-poem as abstract music, or daydream her own unrelated accompanying fantasy; but she can’t deny the role they play - which seems to me very deep, even primal - in the works’ creation, their performance and perceived existence. These natural phenomena - sounds, sensations - speak to us and from us.

***

Imagine Sibelius as The Bard, an ancient oral poet singing about the God of The Forest….
Comes a herdsman..."Oh, I don't know what he's going on about... lovely voice though..."

[Beef Oven!]

With Tapiola, a listener can ignore the title, and the text Sibelius placed at the head of it, just as you can ignore the texts Elgar used to describe his Enigma Variations; and enjoy both on an abstract level, of course you can. Or your own response may veer off in any wildly imagistic direction. But in doing so you reduce your understanding on the simplest level of knowing something of the composers' inspiration and imagination - and how that feeds into the sounds themselves.

Would anyone, listening to the Çiurlionis or Debussy tone-poems called The Sea, truly hear them as “pure” or “abstract music”, failing to perceive the very motion of the water and the waves moving through them, in fact urging on the very music itself? Perhaps they would - but wouldn’t that be missing an essential part the work’s identity - of what makes it what it is?

Sibelius, Debussy or Çiurlionis could not have written these pieces without the experiences they, at the very least, reflect or relate to; this doesn't necessarily mean a literal visualising of a given God, forest or sea in creator or listener (yet in can be very localised in some cases) - it is an evocation, a response to how the natural world relates to human presence, activity and creativity - the human attempt to find meaning, “make sense” of it.

***

There is a set of stylistic features common to particular evocations of nature which run through musical history, music of storms, seas and rivers being among the most common (think of Vltava, and then the prelude to Rheingold).
Or consider the 1st Movement of Roussel’s Symphony No.1 “Poem of the Forest”: there you find a very similar use of the orchestra to conjure up a winter gale to that found towards the end of Tapiola - a kind of musical archetype. (You’ll hear something alike-yet-different in Oceanides and in Bax’s November Woods).
Again, a listener can ignore, or fail to perceive, these things and listen to any given tone-poem as abstract music, or daydream her own unrelated accompanying fantasy; but she can’t deny the role they play - which seems to me very deep, even primal - in the works’ creation, their performance and perceived existence. These natural phenomena - sounds, sensations - speak to us and from us.

***

Imagine Sibelius as The Bard, an ancient oral poet singing about the God of The Forest….
"Oh, I don't know what he's going on about... lovely voice though...

I played La Mer earlier and it was only a quasi-programmatic listen. But with Britten’s Sea Interludes, I find it impossible not to get soaked, chapped lips and frightened (I cannot get sea-sick no matter what).