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Sounding North:
Music in Scandinavia 1865-1931
DANIEL GRIMLEY
[email protected]
Light and Nature: Neoromanticism
in Swedish orchestral music
•
Wilhelm Stenhammar (1872-1927)
• Symphony no. 2 in g minor, op. 34
(1915)
• Serenade for Orchestra, op. 31
(1914/1919)
•
Wilhelm Peterson-Berger (1867-1942)
• Symphony no. 3 in f minor, ‘Same-ätnam’
(1914-5)
•
Hugo Alfvén (1872-1960)
• En Skärgårdssägen [A Legend of the
Skerries], op. 20 (1905)
•
Kurt Atterberg (1887-1974)
• Symphony no. 6 in C, op. 31 (1927-8)
After Grieg: Folk (Re-)Lives
•
Percy Grainger (1882-1961)
• Scandinavian Suite (1902)
• ‘On nordic characteristics in music’ (1931)
•
Geirr Tveitt (1908-1981)
• Hundrad Hardingtonar (1951-4)
•
Johannes Skarperud, Spelemannsbladet, 1951:
Folk music is a true sapling of the Norwegian folk character. It is
Norwegian nature in its most changing moods, with its mountainous
country and sheltered valleys, wild waterfalls and still, dreamy fjords.
It is the whisper of wind through leaves and cowbells ringing in
mountain meadows and in home pastures that give melody to music.
Such a music can’t flourish in the city or on the plains. Echoes cannot
ring there, not the waterfalls exult. And the spirits that fiddle beneath
the waterfalls can’t teach young lads there.
The Political Sibelius?
•
Arnold Bax:
‘[Sibelius is] an arresting, formidable-looking fellow, born of dark rock and northern
forest.’
•
Cecil Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music (1924):
If I call Sibelius a primitive, I do not intend to suggest that his work is necessarily
crude, unfinished, or technically incompetent. All I mean to imply … is a type of
mind which works instinctively rather than consciously and intellectually; and, as the
instincts of a primitive race are keener and surer than those of civilized races, so the
resultant art has nothing to the clumsiness and uncertainty which we habitually
asociate with their workings.
•
Theodor Adorno, Glosse über Sibelius (1938):
[Sibelius] is the antithesis of a Stravinsky. But he has less talent. ... His followers do
not realise this. Their song hinges on the refrain: ‘it is all Nature, it is all Nature’.
The great Pan, yearning for ‘blood and soil’, swiftly present itself. The trivial
passes for the elemental, the unarticulated for the sound of unconscious creation.
•
Timothy L Jackson: Sibelius and the Third Reich
Defining Iceland Musically
• Jón Leifs (1899-1968)
• Peripheralisation
• Postcolonialism vs ultranationalism
• Iceland and the Third
Reich
• Music, Landscape and
Environment
• Sinfónía 1 (Söguhetjur),
op. 26 (1941/1950):
I. Skarphé∂inn (after
Njáls Saga)
Finland and ‘The Shadow of Sibelius’
• Inheritance and tradition
• Creative space
• Identity politics
• Resistance/emulation
• Leevi Madetoja (1887-1947)
• Symphony no. 2, op. 35 (1918)
• Toivo Kuula (1883-1918)
• Tuuti lastan Tuonelahan, op. 11/4 (1906)
• Aarre Merikanto (1893-1958)
• Largo misterioso (1930)
Shadows and Echoes:
Einojuhani Rautavaara
•
Born Helsinski, 1928, studied at
Sibelius Academy
•
Contemporaries: Joonas Kokkonen
(1921-1999); Aulis Salllinen (b. 1935)
•
1955, studies in New York and at
Tanglewood
•
1966-91 teaches at Sibelius Academy
•
Works:
• A Requiem in Our Time (1953)
• Cantus Arcticus (1972)
• Seventh Symphony, ‘Angel of Light’
(1994)
• Piano Sonata no. 2, ‘Fire Sermon’ (1970)
Sibelius and Contemporary Music
• Peter Maxwell Davies, Per Nørgård, John Adams, George
Benjamin, Thomas Adès
• Nørgård, Symphony no. 2 (1970)
• Sibelius and Spectralism
• Magnus Lindberg (1993):
His music has been deeply misunderstood. While his language was
far from modern, his thinking, as far as form and the treatment of
materials is concerned, was ahead of its time. ... His harmonies have
a resonant, almost spectral quality. You find an attention to sonority
in Sibelius’s works which is actually not so far removed from that
which would appear long after in the work of Grisey or Murail.
Danish Modern: Carl Nielsen Legacies
•
Knudåge Riisager (1897-1974)
• ‘Symfonien er død—musikken leve!’, Dansk Musiktidsskrift, 1940
•
Vagn Holmboe (1909-1996)
• Symphony no. 1 for chamber orchestra, op. 4 (1935)
•
Pelle Gudmundsen Holmgreen (b. 1932)
• Symfoni—Antiphony (1977)
•
Hans Abrahamsen (b. 1952)
• Tre Klaverstykker, Recomposed, 1990
I have always thought that our image of Nielsen has been a little too conservative. The Danish
musical world has used Nielsen as an exponent of resistance to contemporary music. In the
piano pieces I believe Nielsen is on his way towards a modernist idiom. His own musical language
is being broken down. One feels in the music that the composer does not know where he is
going. … Nielsen’s piano pieces encompass an old and a new world. The sound of these pieces
reminds me of Schoenberg’s pieces for small ensembles.The actual situation Nielsen was in
when he composed these pieces fascinates me.