Jean Sibelius and the symphony that never was

One day, Sibelius carried a laundry basket filled with his manuscripts into the dining room at Ainola and began feeding the pages into the raging fire in the stove. Aino, who would recall the event after her husband’s death, could confirm the identity of only one of the pieces her husband burned—the early Karelia Suite—but it is now considered a certainty that the Eighth Symphony was destroyed as well. Afterward, a strange calm descended upon the composer. His mood lightened. He appeared strangely optimistic, no longer depressed, as if the fire had brought on some magnificent catharsis.

The gestation of the symphony may have been long and troubled, but Sibelius had, at various times, referred to his manuscript as “brilliant,” “a great work in the making,” a piece that would have been “the reckoning of [his] whole existence.” For so long, he had had but one desire: to finish the piece before drifting off “to the final silence.” Why, then, did Sibelius destroy such a highly anticipated and promising work? This remains one of the most perplexing questions in all of music history.

.. Sibelius was not, however, universally acclaimed. No less a leading light than Gustav Mahler called him a purveyor of Scandinavian kitsch

Mathematics meets music

Elkies addressed how much a piece of music needs to change before it is a different piece, rather than a variation on the original. He also talked about how much information remains when the redundancy of repeated themes in a piece is accounted for.

.. But his lecture ended with an impressive performance, from memory, of a piece made from a baroque-style repeating arpeggiation where the root of the chord changed from measure to measure based not on a conventional harmonic progression, but on the digits of π. The result was an intriguingly disorienting congress of order with randomness, evoking something like an inebriated Buxtehude.

.. Tymoczko’s objective, data-driven approach to musical practice seems to have the power to reveal other significant insights. His love and deep understanding of music was evident in the joy with which he shared his discovery of hidden canons (or rounds, as in “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”) in pieces by Bach and Marenzio.

.. As the Pythagoreans discovered, harmonious intervals in music are formed from frequencies that are the ratios of small whole numbers.

.. The highlight here was a recording of a barbershop quartet in which Wright discovered a subtle use of microtonics during a chord change. In shifting from one chord to another, three of the singers changed notes, while the fourth held on to his note across the chord change—or should have, based on the notes on paper. In practice, the sustained note shifted frequency by a small fraction of a semitone to maintain just intervals with the notes of the second chord.

These types of microtonal manipulations are part of what give barbershop quartet performances their intensely harmonious quality.