After the completion of the Fourth Symphony, Sibelius stood at the edge of an abyss. Should he continue further along the path of the Fourth which had stood at the brink of atonality.
In the Fourth, Sibelius had stripped the music down to its barest essentials and was dangerously close to their being 'no next work'.
During a visit to Sibelius after the second world war, impresario Walter Legge talked about the Fourth. He put it to Sibelius, 'Why after the Fourth he had never continued in the same vein, because the Fifth Symphony is a much more extrovert work, much less harmonically complicated, and Sibelius said: 'yes, beyond that lies madness'. Its a strange thing that I had also asked Richard Strauss a similar question, why after Elektra he never reverted to that style, and his words were almost the same, 'Beyond that lies chaos'.
Any thoughts on two great composers, standing at the edge of the abyss?.--kullervopete.

This reminded me of Bartók, he was heavily influenced by Strauss in the beginning of his career as a serious composer, it can clearly be heard in the 1st string quartet (1908) but even more in his only opera, Bluebeard's castle (1913). But though Bartók went into the abyss (as can easily be heard in the Miraculus Mandarin, piano concerto 1 & 2, and the later string quartets) he didn't exactly become atonal, but many great atonal composers as Ligeti have stated him as a main influence), he went other path.
Bartók was a devoted Straussian, he spent time and energy promoting the composer in Hungary, he transcriped Strauss's tone poem 'Ein Heldenleben' for piano for that matter (Bartók was an achieved professional pianist at the time, and performed it several times), and helped preparing the premiere of Also Sprach Zarathustra in Budapest.
Around that time he started collecting peasant music, and slowly the influence of the peasant music replaced that of Strauss. When Elektra was premiered in Hungary he descriped it as a 'great disappointment' in a critique. He seems not to have gone through the 'Elektra-gate' into the abyss, and as can be heard in his latest work there seems to be alot of light and clarity in the abyss, at least the abyss Bartók went into.

With the advantage of retrospect and perspective, today we can add to Sibelius' quote, or perhaps alter it in this way to better reflect the developments of the 20th Century:

Beyond that lies either madness, or artificiality.

With this idea, I am referring directly to the 12-tone/serialist school. I find this imposition of serially organized structural concepts to be ultimately artificial and self-serving, something that creates the music, not something that is created by the music. Sibelius was very conscious of the idea that the material (themes, motives) should create the form, not the other way around.

As kullervopete suggests, the 4th Symphony is music stripped down to its essentials, truncated and compressed forms, total focus on motivic growth creating the forms which are naturally experienced through the course of the piece. So beyond this... either impose artificial structures on the music, or try to delve even deeper and darker... where the motives not only create the structure of the work, but where the intervals within motives create a new harmonic language, disregarding the traditional foundations of harmony. That is madness.

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I hadn't read Saturnus' reply before posting.

This idea of Atonality being the Abyss is interesting, but pure atonality has a large dose of freedom that comes with it as well. Purely atonal compositions (excluding serialist music here) combine sounds for the pure sound that they create and do not necessarily bind themselves to any organizing principles, hence the potential freedom. The "Abysmal" element of these types of compositions is that they often leave the listener with no familiar point of reference through which to experience the music.

But to re-iterate my first point, I don't think Sibelius was referring to the simple abandonment of tonality with his reference to madness. I think he sensed that the next step would be the development of a new harmonic organizational principle that is spawned from the motives themselves, a daunting task indeed.

I thought the foundations of harmony were mathematical, not traditional? Am I wrong?

By "traditional" i mean the tonal harmonic system of the Classical-Romantic tradition.

The classical harmony-system is a system based on mathematics. But why is it madness to base a harmonic system on proportions between frequencies other than 5/4 (major third), 6/5 (minor third)?

I know that is what Schoenberg intended, but his failure lies in using the piano and the TET-12 tuning to do that, it is not madness but stupidity, or lack of education. The piano is tuned in a so called TET-12 system, which simplifies and imitates the major-minor scales, and the proportions derived from TET-12 are not too distorted, as long as used on the classical harmonic system. But if we try to use proportions such as 11/8 (a diminished fifth flattened down a quart-tone) or 7/4 (rather flat (-31 cents) minor seventh, still sometimes used by orchestras, and spontaneously sung by most a capella choirs), then they simply aren't accessible on a piano or by someone using TET-12 (all woodwinds are basically tuned in TET-12, but players can easily bend the tone up and down).

The point I'm trying to make is that it has never been adequately tested to go further in other system than the classical-romantic. It would take more complex instruments (for an example a piano with 53 notes in an octave) and more complex notation. A string quartet can of course use all proportions, but a more detailed notation has to be invented.

The challenge goes beyond the notation and I believe beyond the actual tempering of the intonation itself. The challenge would be to create a harmonic system that:

1. exhibits an internal logic in terms of the ordering of harmonies based on chords built on different degrees of the central pitch. This can be imposed artificially as an abstract concept, but...
   
2. the system must communicate something beyond its own consistency, however clever. The Western tonal system communicates the tension, instability, and resolution of moving away and then returning to the tonic harmony. This process is a large part of what we identify as the "emotion that the music is communicating", or at least largely causes the emotional reaction we feel when listening to the music.

What I'm saying is that if one were to explore harmonic systems different than those based on the 3rds you mention (didn't Hindemith do something like this?), however internally consistent the system may be, it may not say anything to anybody. That is not necessarily a failing of the system, because it must compete with centuries of the established tonal language... but perhaps therein lies the madness, in the very attempt to take on such a task.
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Kullervopete, I know this thread started by focusing on the 4th Symphony, but I'm going to move it to the undernourished "Elements of Style" category. A shadow link will remain in the 3-4-5 category.

In 1904 Sibelius was reaching a crisis in his art. Should he continue along the path of the first two Symphonies, further expanding the National Romantic heritage or should he turn away from Russian and German romantism to what he called 'Pure cold water'.
In the Third Symphony, Sib had already slimmed away superfluous fat, but in number four he stripped the music to the bone, beyond which any further erosion would have placed him in a cadaverous world. Sibelius new that the symphony was not a technical problem, but that far more treacherous one, a human problem.
Sibelius himself described the fourth as a 'psychological Symphony', a work for the Freudian age.
Indeed Finnish Scholar, Erkki Salmenharra described the conclusion of the fourth thus, 'It was the psychoanalytical confession of the soul of a creative subject, and it could only be done once'. I have often thought that in the world of painting, Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' has a parallel with Sib four. Munch tells an interesting story of his inspiration for 'The Scream'. 'I was walking along a path with two friends, the sun was setting--suddenly the sky turned blood red. I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence, there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the City. My friends walked on, and I stood trembling with anxiety. I sensed an infinate scream passing through nature'.
At the time of the fourth symphony, Russian artist Kasimir Malevich was producing paintings that were limited to geometric shapes and a narrow range of colours. He believed in an extreme of reduction, the artists main theme being the internal movements of the artists personality. This was the world of the fourth symphony, at the brink of the abyss, and as I stated earlier dangerously close to there being no next work.
Sibelius was a master of form, but for Sib form was secondary, the content determined the form. Sibelius must have known that to continue along the path of the fourth Symphony could only result in an erosion of content, a slide into artificiality and ultimatly chaos.--kullervopete.

Kurkikohtaus wrote:

The Western tonal system communicates the tension, instability, and resolution of moving away and then returning to the tonic harmony. This process is a large part of what we identify as the "emotion that the music is communicating", or at least largely causes the emotional reaction we feel when listening to the music.

When tension is created, harmony derived from higher numbers in the harmonic series is used, to release that tension harmony based on lower numbers is used, as Schoenberg pointed out and reasoned thoroughly in his Theory of Harmony (I hope I don't sound like some teacher, I know you most likely know this, I'm just ensuring we are talking about the same thing). So there is a link between tension, emotion and the abstract concept of music.
According to Schoenberg's theory western music isn't exactly based on thirds, but on the 4th, 5th, 6th 7th & 9th overtone (and the proportions derivable from those numbers). Music started thousands of years ago with the 1st, 2nd and 3rd overtone, and progress can be achieved by incorporating the 11th, 13th & 17th overtone.

He intended to create more tension and introduce and exploit the new possibilities that derive from wider range of overtones. But as I pointed out in my last post, he failed because he used the wrong instruments. (the 11th overtone from C is f#'' -49 cents & the 13th ab'' +41 cents, so using piano or woodwind is highly irrelevant (interestingly the 11th, 13th &16th (c''') overtone form the italian augmented sixth chord, though I don't think any orchestra tunes him this way!)), but it is of course possible that both the theory AND the attempts to use it fail. But how can we sure unless we make an honest attempt. Schoenberg's most popular work is a string sextet (I'm refering to the Verklärte Nacht), and Berg's great hit is a violin concerto and an opera. Did the performers that championed these works, so successfully, intone according to the 'new' proportions? I would be eager to know.


But I think Schoenberg wanted too much too fast. It took hundreds of years to achieve the 5th & 6th overtone (the third was considered a dissonant integral until late middle ages), and in classical harmony the 7th & 9th are very unstable. So I agree, it is madness. But I believe that music will eventually evolve this way, but slowly like it has always done, the new proportions little by little gaining meaning by the work of men who put their true feelings and soul into the music.

The body of your argument makes sense to me, but I have a gut feeling, albeit based solely on my personal, subjective point of view, that the language of harmony in the terms that you state (the incoorporation of more overtones into an intelligible structure) will not develop further.

The serialist school that Schoenberg spawned implemented an artifical structure on the elements of composition and ultimately failed to communicate anything at all to a wider audience. The counter-reaction to this was the hyper-diatonicism of the minimalist school and pseudo-minimalist/mystic composers such as Gorecki and Pärt, who look even further to the past to find their basic language.

But I simply cannot imagine what revolution would have to take place for a new and more complex harmonic system, based on higher overtones, to take center stage in a near or distant future, especially when considering the ultimate failure of the 20th Century to produce anything new and lasting in terms of a widely accepted harmonic language.

Quote:

I have a gut feeling, albeit based solely on my personal, subjective point of view, that the language of harmony in the terms that you state (the incoorporation of more overtones into an intelligible structure) will not develop further.

It is the objective of the 'true' artist ('true artist' sounds very arrogant, but I couldn't find any other word) to eliminate that gut feeling. I'm sure that medieval monks that had known nothing but gregorian chant and organum had similar feelings when they heard the first polyphony, but thanks to the great artistry of the Notre Dame school polyphony became accepted. The pope almost banned renaissance polyphony in the 16th century, but the art of Palestrina convinced the pope that polyphony could be heavenly indeed. Music history is full of examples of how a new concept alone isn't enough.
I believe that a part of the definition of 'good art', is an art that successfully introduces new ideas or unites older ideas in one, without giving the audience doubts. It's art because you can't imagine it before you hear it! When I was listening to the Sibelius symphony cycle for the first time I tried to imagine how the next would be like, it was impossible, the 2nd was the least surprise. And when I heard the 4th I realized that Sibelius is much more than yet another romantic symphonic-master, something greater than Mahler was going on.
And, as I stated in my previous post, I don't believe there will be any 'revolution'. Because making 'good art' is simply so extremely hard and demands so much work, knowledge, experience, honesty and skill that some real 'revolution' is physically impossible, except maybe revolutions that go back to simplicity, like the classical revolution, and the minimalist revolution.

I agree with you that the 20th century has failed in many aspects, it's like the Hellenistic period in sculpture, no real aesthetic progress has been achieved despite countless efforts. There are exceptions though, I think the expansion of rhythmical language, made by Bartók, Stravinsky and others, has been successful.
When I think of it, I don't truly like any 20th century music except the folk-inspired (Bartók, Villa-Lobos) and the neoclassical, and Sibelius of course.

Sibelius once confided that he had been one of the first to get hold of Schoenbergs works for himself, 'I bought them on Busoni's advice, to learn something. But I learned nothing'.
Sibs secretary Santeri Levas once asked if he had ever felt like introducing quarter-tones into his music, Sib anwered at once, 'no, never. that is forever being made-and forgotten in next to no time'.
This is what depressed Sibelius with much modern music, 'They've built a huge shipyard-but where is the ship'.
I am not convinced that the fifth Symphony is in any real sense a retreat from the Fourth, The gulf between the two symphonies is perhaps not as great as is sometimes thought.
To quote Osmo Vanska, 'Its often said that there is a great leap from the Fourth Symphony to the Fifth, but if you listen to the original version it is not such a big step, especially if you consider the use of dissonance at the end of the first movement and Finale'.
For me, Sibelius leaped across the abyss, emerging at the other side in bright sunlit uplands.--kullervopete.

kullervopete wrote:

Sibs secretary Santeri Levas once asked if he had ever felt like introducing quarter notes into his music.

Do you mean quarter-tones?

kullervopete wrote:

'I bought [Schoenberg pieces] on Busoni's advice, to learn something. But I learned nothing'.

I will go out on a limb here and generalize in the most superficial way imaginable, but nevertheless the following statement sums up my view of the entire twelve-tone and serialist movement:

Anybody, given rudimentary university-level training, can write a serialist work and defend/justify its content. Furthermore, to the average listener, the Quality of one such composer or work will be indistinguishable from another. The grounds for distinction will be in the technical stuff of the piece, not necessarily in the listening experience. To me, this is therefore not art, it is a technical abstraction that does not allow for a normal and understandable distinction between quality and crap.

Yes you are right--quarter-tones, so I have done a quick edit.--kullervopete.