Jean Sibelius and His World (The Bard Music Festival) Paperback – August 28, 2011

Ignore the above reviewer. Mainly because:"Daniel M. Grimley is university lecturer in music at the University of Oxford, tutorial fellow of Merton College, and senior lecturer in music at University College. He is the editor of "The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius" and the author of "Grieg and Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism"."B. R. Townsend writes a um, blog.To repeat, Mr. Grimley teaches at Oxford, and Mr. Townsend puts stuff on the internet.Anyway, unlike the estimable Mr. Townsend I know exactly what "expressionist aesthetics" and "gothic textural complexity" means in this context. So if you are someone who is at this level of theoretical understanding this is a very useful and thoughtful book. It's not musicology, and so what? It's not trying to be.Sibelius is one of the most iconic public figures of the 20th century, with a cultural influence and a fame as a composer that is unequalled in the last 100 years. Read Alex Ross' chapter on Sibelius in The Rest Is Noise for a sense of this, for instance. Anyway, If you are interested in this genius of a man in the context of the time he lived in, this is a very interesting and provocative book.

I write a music blog at The Music Salon, and I am about to embark on a series of posts discussing the music of Sibelius, who is a very interesting and probably under-rated composer. As I haven't done a lot of reading on Sibelius, I thought this collection of essays would be informative. Turns out, they are the opposite. Here is a sample of the writing:"Sibelius' butterfly metaphor fits the expressionist aesthetics of the fragility of individual utterance better than it does academic logic. This was combined with a readiness to deal with unlimited depths of sorrow and pain, and an naturalistic directness, alongside a gothic textural complexity."Yes, hundreds of pages of this kind of writing! What's wrong with it is, it uses terms like "expressionist aesthetics" that are crying out for both explanation and examples. What do you mean by "expressionist aesthetics"? Do you even understand those words? Can you find me examples, musical examples in Sibelius' music that would illustrate this? What do you mean by the "fragility of individual utterance"? Is there some way in which Sibelius' individual utterance is more fragile than mine? Or yours? And how would you show this? And how will you illustrate or demonstrate his "readiness to deal with unlimited depths of sorrow and pain"? Apart from mentioning his alcoholism, of course. And where, in the music, did you get this idea? I won't even ask what you could mean by "gothic textural complexity" but, if you can't show it to me in the music, I ain't interested!Apart from a paper on Sibelius' sketches, there are no musical examples whatsoever in the book. This is half-baked undergraduate drivel masquerading as scholarship. Don't these people have editors? Or teachers, for that matter? And this is published by Princeton University!!Talk about decline of scholarship...