Konsert 6.2.2024 kl. 18.30 fritt inträde på Arbetets vänner Annegatan 26. Öppet för alla aveiter och ”potentiella aveiter” d.v.s. aveiter och aveiters bekanta och andra som är intresserade av föreningens verksamhet! Samma konsert kommer att framföras den 10.2.2024 i Musikhuset i Helsingfors.
Sebastian Silén (Photo by Alexander Bogdalov)
Introduktion
Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957): Från Five pieces, Op. 81 (1915 – 1918):
- Mazurka
- Waltz
- Menuetto
Jean Sibelius: From Six Morceaux, Op. 79 (1915 – 1917, rev: 1917/18):
- Tempo di Menuetto
- Danse caractéristique
Danmark:
Nils Gade (1817 – 1890): Folk Dance No. 3 (in Nordic character), Op. 62, No. 3 (1887):
- Allegro moderato, ma vivace
Fini Henriques (1867 – 1940):
- Nordisk Dans
- Hexendansen (Witches Dance)
Paus
Sverige:
Tor Aulin (1866 – 1914):
- Midsommardans (Nordic Dance) (1906)
Julius and Amanda Röntgen (1855 – 1932, 1853 – 1894): Från Schwedische Weisen und Tänze, Op. 6, No. 4 and No. 6 (1882/1887):
- No. 4 Allegro
- No. 6 Allegro
Norge:
Edvard Grieg (1843 – 1907): Norwegian Dance No. 2, Op. 35, No. 2 (1880) (arr. Hans Sitt):
- Allegretto tranquillo e grazioso
Johan Halvorsen (1864 – 1935): Norwegian Dances No. 1 and 2 (1897):
- Allegro con brio
- Allegretto
Finland:
Jean Sibelius: 5 Dance Champetre, Op. 106 (1924/1926):
- Largamente assai
- Alla polacca
- Tempo moderato
- Tempo di Menuetto
- Poco moderato
Sebastian Silén, violin Satu Elijärvi, piano
Kort bakgrund till konserten av Sebastian Silén
Konserten analyserar hur Sibelius danser passar in i det nordiska musiklandskapet. Detta sker genom att framföra verk av Sibelius för violin och piano parallellt med andra nordiska tonsättare. I programmet ingår ett antal i Finland rätt okända nordiska violin- och pianostycken.
Konserten är en del av ett doktorsarbete på Sibeliusakademin varför bakgrundsmaterialet är på engelska. För intresserade finns den relativt långa engelskspråkiga presentationen nedan.
Engelskspråkig bakgrund till konserten av Sebastian Silén
Jean Sibelius and Nordic Dances
My artistic doctoral work explores how Jean Sibelius’s works for violin and piano fit into the Nordic musical landscape. I approach this research question as a violinist and musician through a combination of artistic and scholarly work. This concert focuses on dances, which during the nineteenth and early twentieth century were one of the most popular forms of music for violin.
The reason for my interest in dances specifically is that Sibelius during his lifetime published a total of 34 pieces for violin and piano which are divided into 11 opuses. Of these 34 pieces, fourteen refer to dances in their titles. Dances therefore constitute over 40% of Sibelius’s production for violin and piano.
For this reason, it is integral to my artistic research to explore to what extent Sibelius’s approach to dances for violin and piano show similarities with, and in what ways they differ from dances for violin and piano by other Nordic composers. To explore this question, this concert will present dances by Jean Sibelius alongside dances by Nils Gade, Fini Henriques, Amanda Röntgen-Maier, Tor Aulin, Edvard Grieg, and Johan Halvorsen.
The historical context
Dances have been an integral part of music for millennia, but many of the dances most commonly found in classical music can trace its roots back to the baroque or renaissance. The legacy of the baroque dances can be seen in tonight’s concert program as the menuetto (or minuet in English) was one of the most popular baroque dances. But while baroque music found its way into the Danish and the Swedish courts, there was another tradition and another set of dances which came to play an even bigger role in forming Nordic music. That tradition can be found within the Nordic folk music.
Current scholarship suggests that the Nordic folk music tradition can trace its roots to Polish dances which became popular among both musicians and audiences. However, the influence was not geographically restricted, and based on the earliest manuscripts, the influences came both from Polish- and German-speaking areas. 1 It has also been noted that that Polish, German, Slovakian, and Hungarian music collections from the seventeenth and eighteenth century can be surprisingly similar to Swedish collections from the same centuries. 2
These melodies which nowadays are strongly associated with Nordic folk music can be traced back to renaissance dances from the sixteenth century. These dances gradually became known as polonäs, polska, pols, and springlek. 3 In this context Nordic folk music primarily refers to music from the Scandinavian peninsula. Finland is in some ways a more complicated case, which I will describe separately. This obviously does not mean that there was no earlier music in the Nordic countries – the earliest Nordic song can be found on a parchment from around 1300 – but Polish music came to be integrated to the point of it becoming ubiquitous. In Sweden these dances gradually became commonly known as ”polskas”, which uses the identical spelling as the plural form of the Swedish word for ”Polish”. In earlier collections these polskas were often described as polonaises. 4 What is notable, is that the Nordic folk tradition provided a foundation and a tonal language for the first Nordic works of classical music which were identified to possess unique Nordic characteristics. The earliest reference to the “Nordic tone” was a review after a performance of Nils Gade’s Echoes of Ossian in Leipzig in 1842. Robert Schumann was among the German critics who enthusiastically praised Gade’s work. 5
Gade’s knowledge and use of the Nordic folk idiom was no accident. He had studied with Andreas Peter Berggren (1801–1880) who spent his life collecting folk melodies all over the world. Berggren published his work in eleven large volumes called Folk Sange og Melodier between the years 1842 and 1871. While it may be obvious, it is still worth highlighting that the musical elements which were most strongly linked to the Nordic countries predates Gade’s composition and finds its roots in the folk tradition. Gade did in
other words not invent a Nordic style all on his own but found a unique musical voice by applying elements found in Nordic folk music.
Since I am interested in exploring if Sibelius’s dances show Nordic characteristics, I have primarily chosen dances by Nordic composers that either refer to the Nordic countries as a group or individually. Based on the Nordic dances performed in this concert, it seems apparent that the connection to the Nordic culture is most often achieved by using Nordic folk music as inspiration.
While it is convenient to refer to Nordic folk music as a single tradition, it can be noted that the reality on the ground shows great diversity. Despite a shared history, Nordic folk music differs widely from country to country and sometimes even from village to village. Melodies often evolved or changed as they traveled from one area to the next over the centuries. Berggreen described these national differences in the following way in 1842 in the foreword to his folk music collection:
The melodies, more than the texts, bear the impression of the individual character of the nation in which they originated. It seems to me that grace and a deep erotic feeling is more common in Swedish than in Danish melodies of which most have a quality of greater seriousness. In Norwegian melodies an idyllic cheerfulness prevails along with a feature of melancholy which is common in all Nordic songs.
When it comes to Finnish folk music the picture gets a little bit more complicated. Finland can pride itself with not just one, but two folk music traditions (actually three, but I will get to that later). One is an outgrowth of the Nordic folk tradition and shows some similarities with Swedish folk music. This form of folk music is often called pelimanni music, a word derived from the Swedish word Spelman, which can loosely be translated as fiddler (although the word is not tied exclusively to the violin).
A second tradition can trace its roots to the ancient Karelian tradition known as rune- singing. Rune-singing is strongly linked to the Kalevala and was of great interest to Sibelius as he developed his mature compositional style during the 1890s, which came to revolutionise Finnish music. Sibelius had a chance to hear the lamentations of Larin Paraske (1833–1904) in 1891 and travelled to Karelia on his honeymoon to learn more about this ancient tradition the following year. The topic was important enough to Sibelius, that he gave a trial lecture on the subject in his (unsuccessful) attempt to get appointed as Faltin’s successor as music teacher of the Imperial Alexander University of Finland (later renamed the University of Helsinki). 6
Glenda Goss has argued that Sibelius sources for inspiration may have been even wider as he was working on Kullervo (1892). 7 During the process Sibelius had access to at least two collections of folk songs. One was Emil Sivori´s Folk Songs of Mäntyharju, but the other one seems to have been a Russian collection. It seems likely that Russian characteristics in Sibelius’ music may not be a result of direct influence, but rather that the Karelian folk songs also served as an inspiration for Russian composers as well. 8
I want to highlight these complexities in order to make an observation. 9 It is tempting to imagine cultural origins as something simple, pure, and unspoiled that later became corrupted by outside influence, but culture does not come out of nothing. While we can choose an arbitrary point in time as the beginning of a historical narrative or a story, this starting point will inevitably be the middle or the end of another.
The point I am trying to make, is that both culture and history is complex and any attempt to organize them into neat categories is bound to be an oversimplification. The uniqueness of the Finnish language may have shielded it from outside influence but the parallels between for instance Norse mythology and the Kalevala suggests that the two cultures were not without interaction. 10
For the sake of completeness, it is worth acknowledging that there is another folk-music tradition in the Nordic countries which was not as strongly influenced by music from central Europe. That is the traditional Sámi music in the north of Scandinavia and Finland. The exoticism, both of the Sámi culture as well as the barren landscape caused composers to look for inspiration within this unique environment. To give one example, the Swedish composer and critic Peterson-Berger wrote his Third Symphony Same-Ätnam on melodies from Lapland in 1913–1915.
The interest in Sámi music also existed in Finland. Sibelius’ student Armas Launis (originally Lindberg) (1884–1959) travelled to Lapland to collect melodies in 1904. 11 Sibelius can therefore be assumed to have had some awareness of Sámi music, but it does not appear to have affected his compositional style in any obvious way. Launis composed an opera called Aslak Hetta in 1922, but the work was only premiered in 2004.
This development served a dual purpose. Locally it provided a sense of identity and often become strongly linked to a strive for independence. The existence of a unique local culture provided proof of distinction to surrounding peoples or nations. On a global level the influx of nationally derived music presented an expanding world of musical exoticism. While this exoticism often was treated with some combination of contempt and suspicion in the big cultural centres, it still greatly enriched the musical culture.
In Germany the Nordic exotism gained eminence. One reason for the German interest in the Nordic culture, was that it was thought that the Nordic countries had retained some of the purity that was getting lost in the increasingly Romantic German classical music.
Photo: As the young Jean Sibelius. Photo by Douglas Sivén From the documentary film ”Sibelius i Korpo”. https://areena.yle.fi/1-2425735
Källor:
1 (Gustafsson 2016, 812)
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 21
4 Ibid., 810 – 811
5 (Fjeldsøe and Groth 2019, 5)
6 (Oramo 1980)
7 (Goss 2009, 130)
8 (Bullock 2011, 36)
9 This point was made by Timothy Snyder in a lecture at Yale University, The Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 7. Rise of Muscovite Power. (2:20)
10 See for instance (Frog 2010) 11 (Pekkilä 2016, 11)