Feature

Cold, Hard Listening:
Sibelius and the 
Refreshment of Hearing 
George Grella, Jr. 

Sibelius, in a cliched way, would seem an obvious choice for hot summer days, an icy Nordic breeze offering aural air-conditioning. But that's not what I sought in his work during the summer season. Like Haydn, what pleases me about the Finn is the clarity of expression, which "cleans out the ears" as a teacher of mine once said, and unclutters the mind. So, I listened to a lot of Sibelius, especially the re-issue of the consistently fine symphonic cycle of Herbert Blomstedt leading the San Francisco Symphony. The symphonies are glorious music, each different than the others, but each one unmistakably the work of the same composer, an indication that, as an artist, Sibelius thought for himself, and stayed true to his own inclinations, instincts, and methods.

Which is why I find it puzzling that he is described as a musical conservative, specifically one reacting to the extravagances of late Romantic chromaticism. This strikes me as completely, obviously wrong, which the mere act of listening can confirm. It also strikes me as tellingly indicative of the inability of "critical thinking" to offer any meaningful distinctions between differing aesthetic ideas. It seems a willful inability too, with a conscious effort to ignore what is most apparent, the music itself, and instead to grasp at some sort of defining label, declare one's mind made up, the work done, and move on (the parallel to contemporary American political life is evident).

What makes Sibelius conservative? That he wrote tonal music? So did Strauss, and was he a conservative? So did Schoenberg, for a time, and the music establishment regards him very differently. The case of Sibelius seems to me a fundamental replacement of actual ideas with rhetoric, a quick taxonomy of surface and a complete ignorance of substance. This also betrays a mishearing of his rhetoric and his language. One of Sibelius's most beautiful skills is the clarity of his sound and of his language, although clearly the substance of his ideas may be more opaque. I hear Sibelius as a composer who blends the freer sensations and structures of Romanticism with the rhetorical clarity of the Classical era; a unique synthesis, and one for which the aesthetic contrasts of conservative or revolutionary are meaningless.

Jean Sibelius.

Sibelius wrote two radical and extraordinary symphonies, the Fourth and the Seventh. In the Fourth, which is built on the slow rocking back and forth of a dissonant interval, nothing happens. Sounds do happen, brief gestures, dark-shaded harmonies, but the work is about stasis. There is no progress from one point to the next, from start to end, from one state to another, either musically or emotionally. There is no development. While the work does emerge from three movements of darkness and some harshness to a conclusion of light and some solace, there is no sense of a journey or a transformation. If Romantic music can generally be characterized as the experience of some protagonist, in this case the protagonist lies in bed all through the dark of night, in an anxious torpor, and then the sun comes up. The end. Is this conservative music? It's more Kafka than Trollope, if the distinction mattered at all. That the work is identifiably a symphony in four movements, that it has a tonal center that allows for both a resonant consonance and dissonance, says nothing about its aesthetic quality, its meaning. It is as timeless and placeless as the Bruckner Symphony 9 because it tells us only of the composer's intentions, not his inclinations.

His last symphony, the Seventh, is by contrast about nothing but constant movement and transformation (and, for me, one of the greatest works of music ever produced). Listening to this symphony is like watching mercury slide around on a piece of glass: just as one can begin to apprehend a definable shape, it slips into something else. The music is always changing into something, and when it does take a moment to mark a point in time--a cadence with an exceptional trombone solo that is merely the arpeggiation of a major chord--the restless harmonic motion keeps pushing the music into the next moment of time. While there are four rough sections comparable to those of standard symphonic form, the work is about nothing more than the transformation of all things, substance and ideas, through time; and while it finishes with a clear flourish, there is no sense that it actually ends. It's more like a stopwatch, merely marking the passage of time and helpless against it. What is aesthetically conservative about this?

Most works of music have clearly pronounced ideas about themselves, in that they begin, they demonstrate themselves for us, and then they end. The Sibelius Seventh is like overhearing a cosmos that has no regard for our existence. While music can be about itself, this work is not self-conscious. A perfect example of a self-conscious composer, in contrast, is Arnold Schoenberg, who is seen by the musical establishment as a revolutionary figure. The "classic" construct used to demonstrate opposing aesthetic ideas in music is that between contemporaries Schoenberg and Stravinsky, with the former cast as the brave revolutionary, misunderstood and under-appreciated, and the latter as the glib, flashy opportunist, eager to please the public, and unfairly considered as daring. In the Modern era, Schoenberg was the true Modernist and Stravinsky the charlatan (I find this frequently expressed by literary critics like Frederick Karl and Camille Paglia, whose ignorance of music is understandable, but this is also accepted thought within the musical establishment). But the sound, and the very words, of these two composers tell a different story. 

Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles, ca. 1948. (Photograph by Florence Homolka.)

Schoenberg's claim to radical fame is that he codified atonal music in his 12-tone method. This completely ignores the context of musical history, just as the idea that the contemporary political movement that is removing liberty from our laws is Conservative.  Schoenberg came of aesthetic age during late Romanticism; in fact he was an exemplar of it. But, he was essentially a conservative musician whose fundamental belief was in the primacy of German musical history and forms. He heard around him the inevitable destruction of harmony through an increasingly decadent chromaticism, in which he was a willing participant, and yet he wanted to preserve the forms and structures that had been so useful for the previous hundred years. For Schoenberg, the solution was to liberate pitch from the increasingly meaningless rules of harmony, i.e. chords, yet keep the notes themselves as subject to the strictures of formal structure as they had been previously. Revolutionary? This strikes me more like compassionate conservatism, a handy means by which to maintain and preserve institutional power while appearing to speak in a language that has the facade of being progressive. His atonal language sounds radical, but I think that is because while so many listen to the language of music, few actually study it and know what it says. And what Schoenberg was dedicated to preserving is indeed worth keeping, but on his own terms he sought a conservative goal. He is the man who stood athwart history and cried, "Stop!"

In contrast, Stravinsky gleefully kept moving forward. His Rite of Spring is misunderstood as a radical work, when it is really the most extreme expression of Romanticism, a last gasp of that aesthetic. Afterwards, like Picasso after Cubism, he needed to do something new, and embraced, and arguably founded, musical Modernism. The idea of Modernism was to derive the new from the old, and that is exactly what Stravinsky did in his Neo-Classical music, pioneering that style and language. He mined the structures and phrases of previous epochs, working backwards from Haydn to Pergolesi to Gabrielli, casting them through the aesthetics of Art Deco and Constructivism and his own Orthodox heritage and setting them into his own structures. While Schoenberg brought the old, intact, into the new era, Stravinsky remade the old into something new. The best examples of this, and his highest artistic achievements, were his collaborations with George Balanchine, who sought the same goals in dance. The ballets they produced together are not just masterpieces of Modernism, but deeply beautiful and pleasing to the eye and the ear. Stravinsky used every type of material that appealed to him, which also included the 12-tone system. Before his crystalline late serial works, he used the technique in sections of Agon, but dug deeper into the past than Schoenberg's horizon allowed, structuring the ballet with forms out of Renaissance and early Baroque music. The popular appeal of the composer's works may blind the intellectual snob to their actual worth, but both the idea and the achievement are radical and liberating. Stravinsky used all of the past and contemporary ideas as well to liberate the present of music, to make innovation possible. If we are to believe in the possibility of aesthetic progress, then he deserves all our praise, while Schoenberg deserves our respect. 

Igor Stravinsky. (George Grantham Bain Collection.)

The qualities of this music, what these works are about, speak for themselves, but they require us to listen. They were also, even the most timeless pieces, made at some point along the line of musical tradition, at the end of a long line of previous ideas. The surface sound of Schoenberg may seem avant-garde, that of Stravinsky staid, but ears that hear how history led to their work give a story to their language. And to Sibelius as well, especially to Sibelius. To hear Sibelius is to hear a composer who, as much as the rest, belongs at a point in the musical tradition, and at that point he made his own path, with works that do not fit into easy categories. Like a voter refusing to be typecast merely through one issue, Sibelius gives us complex ideas and questions that don't necessarily have one correct answer, if they have any answers at all. I have difficulty grasping why the misunderstanding of these composers is so pervasive. Intuitively, my ears tell me the truth, but perhaps I've been able to remove the impediments between my ears and my mind. That seems to me only natural: aesthetic confusion requires will and effort, a deliberate working against what the senses accumulate. But how does one become inclined to make that effort? I don't understand it, although it's apparent all around. And this is just a more specialized example of the incoherency of contemporary aesthetic and political labels, where those who seek to erase the past and destroy the present, leaving only power, are known as "conservative," while opposing those goals makes one "liberal." These are self-proclaimed terms, but they are also agreeable to the arbiters of such discussions, who are critics of some kind. These critics obviously fail the public in their inability to call a spade a spade, and since they cannot themselves understand a figure like Sibelius, they cannot present such ideas, no matter how valuable, to the public. If the goals of these critics had anything to do with beauty and humanity, perhaps there would be some hope for us all. Although I can't say that there is.