On Forest Paths: Aalto, Sibelius, and Tapiola
The common urge to relate the disparate, shared by Sibelius and Aalto, is especially apparent in their mature works. The two Finns draw unlike elements into a complex whole—small elements “grow” into complex entities where, for some, any loose sense of harmoniousness is absent. Critically, an idea of harmony rooted in the Greek word harmos is the essence of the composition, and these difficult joinings are often the most profound moments of their work. The precise form of that “joint,” or coming together of the disparate, is critical to the overall success of the whole—be it the rising and falling strings against a pedal bass, or a waving ceiling against rectilinear walls and floor. Indeed, these joinings often comprise extraordinary boundaries, junctions, and interfaces between compositional elements.
After 1925, Finland and the world waited for Sibelius to compose a path beyond Tapiola— in vain. It could be said that he was lost in Tapio’s realm, having found a fully integrated sound world in his final tone poem. Aalto’s 1939 pavilion demonstrates a moment when, in aesthetic and symbolic terms, he joined Sibelius in the forest domain. In 1900, Gallen-Kallela’s frescos had evoked a powerfully national romantic portrait of Finland’s mythological past. But in 1939, Aalto’s massive black and white photographs represented the contemporary reality of an industrialized, resource-based economy. Aalto’s expressive turn was crucial, both economically (through the projection of the natural and commercial abundance of the forest) and creatively (the pavilion interior demonstrated the germ of his maturing creative genre). Sibelius’s contribution was emotionally moving in a more traditional way: it was not Tapiola that wafted through the Finnish Pavilion, but a more modest piece, the Andante Festivo. Sibelius was called out of retirement twice to conduct performances of the Andante in Finland, both of which were broadcast in the United States—once by Olin Downes on New Year’s Day 1939, and again on 4 May the same year for the opening of the New York pavilion.81 By the time the pavilion opened, “American enthusiasm for Sibelius reached a peak.” Yet the choice of the Andante Festivo to accompany Aalto’s creative vision at the opening ceremony was probably not Sibelius’s own, and it arguably failed to do either Sibelius or Aalto justice.82 The work’s stirring patriotism meant that it had already been adopted for state occasions, and this added a more conventional formality to the proceedings. Had Tapiola been played instead, Finland would have offered a work as mystical and as disturbing as many found Aalto’s pavilion. But it might also have repelled listeners, instead of stirring their hearts, and tightened the purse strings of the free world at an acute time of crisis for the young nation-state.
Sibelius is reported to have maintained that “if you don’t create an artificial pedal for your orchestration there will be holes in it.” He explained that “the orchestra . . . is a huge and wonderful instrument that has got everything—except the pedal.” Without the artificial pedal, “some passages will sound ragged.”83 Sibelius’s “basic formula” of melodic decoration—his characteristic scalar figures and “circular motives” or melodic impulses—is invariably heard against such pedal points, creating a complex undulating wave or tapestry of sound. As James Hepokoski has argued, such pedal points can control large expanses of musical time and space, energetically underpinning the music’s teleological sense of cadential motion in counterpoint with the more localized tendency toward circular stasis.84 Like Aalto, Sibelius sought to ground such activity in the constant combination and development of smaller melodic gestures or ideas. Such “pedals” are apparent in virtually all of his work, and can be equated with the strong horizontal emphasis—the “base lines”—in Aalto’s work, or even the box in which the New York pavilion had to be conceived. This led to formal diversity in which the anchor element (Sibelius’s pedal or Aalto’s horizontal beam) acts as a “plane of analysis.”85
From Viipuri Library (1927–35) onward, Aalto explored the relationship between waving contours and straight lines as expressions of the diverse functions in buildings. The “pedal” for Aalto is a unifying, grounding edge, a rationale from which the tangential, expressive walls may grow. Indeed, it could be argued that the wall permits the undulating form of the waving wall to expand, like an anchor that grounds the building in order to avoid chaos or drift. The pedal is demonstrated most clearly in Baker House (1946–49), the House of Culture (1955–58), and the Neue Vahr Apartment Block (1958–62). Most of the cross-sections through Aalto’s buildings indicate his careful manipulation of their respective heights and depths. He used changes in floor levels to emphasize the distinct symbolic character of spaces within open plan areas. The section of the New York pavilion shows the use of different levels to distinguish different functions (see Figure 4)—a three-dimensional manipulation of space. In some instances Aalto used the pedal as a vertical as well as a horizontal anchor. Indeed, just as Aalto’s anchoring horizontality changes levels with the content (or function) of the space (the restaurant above the ground floor exhibition area in the pavilion, looking across the full height space toward the inclining wooden wall), so Sibelius’s pedal mechanism is rarely rooted on a single pitch. The function of the pedal remains constant whatever the change in its position relative to the activity around it. In other words, it is an element of stasis in relation to which other activity is dynamic. For example, in the Seventh Symphony, between rehearsal letters H and I, the brass presents a pulsating pedal that is tonally ambi va-lent but “firm” (rooted) in its dissonance (see Example 1). In Tapiola there are long passages of undulating strings “weaving their magic”86 above the long pedal bass line that changes pitch (for example, between rehearsal letters K and L), the “land of shadows” between the perpetual oppositions of tonality, form, and structure.87
Aalto’s work is frequently characterized by spaces that expand and contract, whether or not they are “waving.” Changes in the floor level (the anchor or pedal in an architectural section) are often calculated in response to a shift in another level of the form, creating a kind of syncopation. In his library design at Viipuri, for instance, Aalto manipulated the roofline in accordance with the lighting requirements for the shelving and reading spaces below. In other words, the differentiation of the spatial functions is articulated both at roof and at floor level; a diminution or expansion of the resultant space between the two levels serves to create and manipulate the existing spatial tension. Sibelius’s music is similarly characterized by musical passages that grow and compress, often at an extremely fast tempo. In some instances this occurs through the use of contrary motion (analogous to Aalto’s syncopated floor levels), or the simultaneous rising and falling, crossing of instrumental lines over a stabilizing, grounding pedal in the bass. In the Allegro at the end of Tapiola (measure 513; see Tomi Mäkelä’s discussion of this passage, Example 5, in his essay in this volume), a hectic oscillating motion begins in the strings, from which a crescendo rises in the brass at letter Q, attempting to establish an anchoring pedal episode. There is no immediate resolution, however, and the strings continue in a fantasy-like frenzy: the famous storm sequence with which the tone poem concludes. Here they are again challenged by an extended pedal: after finally being anchored in measure 564, they are yoked back into a long falling passage, after which the whole of the orchestra’s power is discharged by a new pedal leading to rehearsal letter R.
Example 1. Sibelius, Seventh Symphony, from rehearsal letter H.
At an intuitive level, therefore, both the pavilion and Tapiola became experiences of mediation: the phenomenological evocation of a space (in architecture or music) within which one may access a personal (inner) reality or gain an externalized representation of Finland and its modern forest industry. In this way, both Aalto’s Finnish Pavilion and Sibelius’s tone poem can be understood as “transitional objects” through which the inner life of an individual and their outer world can be simultaneously related: “Those damned realities which make up our work,” as Aalto put it.88 Here is an example of Aalto
’s penchant for connecting the practical with the personal—something that he had honed during his many episodes of personal collapse in which (he intimates) he learned the importance of “humanism” (the presence of psycho-social elements) in the built environment.89 This capacity to trigger the inner world of the individual and thus allow aspects of the self to bleed into the experience of the outer place adds to the richness of the architectural experience, and of Sibelius’s greatest music. In New York, one of Aalto’s greatest achievements was to use this imagery of the forest, with all its practical and symbolic associations, to speak not only to the Finns but also to humanity as a diverse whole.90
Journeys End
In the 1900 Paris pavilion, Finland had sought to create a “window open to Europe,” drawing on an established set of cultural agendas from the center to the northern periphery. But in New York in 1939, Aalto was happy to be offered a windowless edifice in which the Finnish Pavilion could dwell, generating its own, unique forest geometries. It is interesting to ask why Aalto’s creative “idea” needed to be “scientifically” based, and not simply justified in its own creative, metaphorical terms. Just as the pedal binds the raging undulating strings in Tapiola, so, in a way, the pavilion could “hold” itself “together.” The “box” in which the undulation occurs gives structure to the experience. Aalto believed form and content should be indivisibly melded together in the minds of architects,91 and in this case the melding was deeply rooted in the use of wood—the material (from mater) that best meets the human need for “primary comfort.”92 It is at this level that Aalto challenges the limited rationalism of architectural modernism, suggesting that such functionalism must be “enlarged to cover even the psychological field.”93 In the New York pavilion he addressed this architectural imperative directly with a “disquieting,” “threatening” forested interior that leans in toward visitors, engulfing them, somehow, in the hinterlands of their own minds.
It is telling that Aalto’s New York pavilion was not widely reported in Finland, and only later did the Finns recognize that Aalto’s architectural gestures were intended to serve as signifiers of themselves, their experiences, and their place in the world. In many senses, what Aalto created in the pavilion, like Sibelius in Tapiola, was a spatial drama of universal relevance and appeal: a complex set of gestures that spoke to many strata of the human condition, and not merely the physical experience of dwelling in Finland’s northern climate. Although the pavilion seemed to be waving, desperately, to the free world, Finland itself was largely oblivious to its gesture. It was nonetheless an effective piece of political propaganda. Moments before his retreat from active war service, Aalto’s pavilion threw down a gauntlet to international modernism, offering a significant conjunction of creativity and personal vulnerability. Similarly, by presenting a multileveled representation of contemporary Finland in the late 1930s, rooted in aspects of the forest culture past and present, collective and personal, conscious and unconscious, Aalto sought to yoke Finnish culture both backwards to the heart of the woods and forward to the heart of the twentieth century. Thus, on his nation’s urgent behalf, Aalto waved to the wider world before retreating to a Stockholm hotel to escape the war, just as Sibelius, a decade earlier, had remained trapped in the silence of Tapiola’s wake. Tapiola, not the Andante Festivo, would have been the most appropriate accompaniment to Aalto’s pavilion—and a mirror of Aalto’s own deep affiliation with nature. But perhaps Tapiola would have been too risky, too disturbing a symbiotic cry from the deep—and the romantic air of Andante Festivo was more effective in moving sympathetic citizens to donate their money and support to Finland’s cause. Yet the profound psycho-spiritual resonances between Aalto and Sibelius’s work acknowledges a deeper level of existence—however difficult or disturbing such journeys may become.
NOTES
This paper is dedicated to the memory of two friends and mentors, Dr. Antony Storr and Prof. Sir Colin St. John Wilson.
1. Glenda Dawn Goss quotes Karl Flodin’s description of how Sibelius’s music conveyed “the peaceful, profound, serious, and melancholy splendors of Finnish nature and the national epic,” going on to cite contemporary reviews in which observers saw “Finlanders who literally shook with musical power, and thereby roused the entire audience. . . . The soul of Finland was palpable.” Goss, Sibelius: A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 284–85.
2. See Salme Sarajas-Korte, “Visual Arts at the Turn of the Century: From Paris to the Backwoods of Karelia,” in Suomen tekijät: Finland Creators, ed. Kerttu Karvonen-Kannas and Kirsi Kaisla (Punkaharju: Taidekeskus Retrietti, 1992), 53–83; see also Erik Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, vol. 1, 1865–1905, trans. Robert Layton (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), chaps. 6–10; and Aimo Reitala, From Folklore to Applied Arts: Aspects of Finnish Culture (Lahti: University of Helsinki, 1993), 72–73.
3. In Juhani Pallasmaa, ed., Hvitträsk: The Home as a Work of Art (Helsinki: Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1987), 124.
4. Goss, Sibelius, 35–37.
5. See Riitta Nikula, Architecture and Landscape: The Building of Finland (Helsinki: Otava, 1993), 87–93.
6. Sarajas-Korte, “Visual Arts,” 62. See also Paula Suhonen, “A City and the Call of the Wilds,” in Karvonen-Kannas, Finland Creators, 21–51; and Pekka Korvenmaa, “Forest and Metropolis,” in Finland Creators, 123–49.
7. Vilhelm Helander and Simo Rista, Modern Architecture in Finland (Helsinki: Kirjayhtymä, 1993; repr. 1987), 17
8. Kerstin Smeds, “The Image of Finland at the World Exhibitions 1990–1992,” in The Finland Pavilions, ed. Peter B. McKeith and Kerstin Smeds (Helsinki: Kustannus Oy City, 1992), 20.
9. Sarah Menin, “Aalto, Sibelius and Fragments from Forest Culture,” in Sibelius Forum: Proceedings from the Second International Jean Sibelius Conference, Helsinki, 25–29 November 1995, ed. Veijo Murtomäk, Kari Kilpeläinen, and Risto Väisenän (Helsinki: Sibelius Academy, 1998), 347–55; also Menin, “Fragments from the Forest: Aalto’s Requisitioning of Forest Place and Matter,” Journal of Architecture 6/3 (Autumn 2001): 279–305; and Menin, “‘Soap Bubbles Floating in the Air’: Why Jean Might Drink ‘Spring Water’ with Alvar Not ‘Cocktails’ with Eliel,” in Sibelius Forum II: Proceedings from the Third International Jean Sibelius Conference, 7–10 December 2000, ed. Matti Huttonen, Kari Kilpeläinen, and Veijo Murtomäki (Helsinki: Sibelius Academy, 2003), 8–14.
10. Smeds, “The Image of Finland,” 17.
11. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 1:223.
12. I. K. Inha, “Commentary,” in The Village Library Illustrated Magazine (1900), quoted in Riitta Nikula, Wood, Stone and Steel: Contours of Finnish Architecture (Keuruu: Otava, 2005), 100.
13. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 1:225.
14. Sibelius, letter to Aino dated 27 July 1900, quoted in Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 1:230.
15. In her analysis of Finnish-French musical relations at this time, Helena Tyrväinen suggests many Finnish events were more politically than culturally motivated; in “Sibelius at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900,” in Murtomäki, Sibelius Forum II, 114–28, quote at 124.
16. Gustaf Strengell and Sigurd Frosterus, “Arkkitehtuuri: taistelukirjoitus” (Architecture: A Challenge), in Abacus 3, ed. Asko Salokorpi and Maija Kärkkäinen (Helsinki: Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1983), 49–81. The article is a Finnish and English translation of the Swedish “Arkitektur: En stridskrift våra motståndare tillägnad” (Helsinki: Euterpas Förlag, 1904).
17. Strengel and Frosterus, “Arkkitehtuuri,” 59.
18. Ibid., 70.
19. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 1:98.
20. Sibelius in conversation with a German publisher, quoted in Cecil Gray, Sibelius (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 11. See also the opening lines of Erik Furuhjelm’s biography, translated in the Documents section of this volume.
21. Strengell and Frosterus, “Arkkitehtuuri,” 51.
22. Aleksis Kivi, “The Bear Hunt,” i
n Odes, ed. and trans. Keith Bosley (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 1994), 33.
23. See Sarah Menin, “‘Let Us Be Finns’: The Conquest of the Backwoods Front (The use of folkloric music and architecture by elite aesthetes in 1890s Finland in their search for Finnishness),” in Cultural Conquests 1500–2000, ed. Tim Kirk and Luda Klusakova (Prague: Karolinum, 2009), 121–32.
24. James Maude Richards, 800 Years of Finnish Architecture (London: David and Charles, 1978), 9.
25. Matti Klinge, Let Us Be Finns (Helsinki: Otava 1992), 143.
26. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, vol. 2, 1904–1914, trans. Robert Layton (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 67.
27. Sibelius, 20 May 1918, in Karl Ekman, Jean Sibelius: His Life and Personality (New York: Knopf, 1938), 154–55.
28. Anthony Storr, The Dynamics of Creation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 252.
29. Adrian Stokes, “Form in Art,” in New Directions in Psychoanalysis (London: Tavistock, 1955), 413–18
30. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 2:177.
31. Ibid., 2:262.
32. Tim Howell, Jean Sibelius: Progressive Techniques in Symphonies and Tone Poems (London: Garland, 1990), 74.
33. Sibelius, quoted in Bengt de Törne, Sibelius: A Close-Up (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 94.
34. Alvar Aalto, unpublished, undated article in Aalto Archive, Helsinki.
35. Aalto was accused of being a Bolshevik by conservative architects in Helsinki, and responded, rising and giving the individual who voiced this view “a box on the ear,” according to Aalto’s biographer, Göran Schildt, Alvar Aalto: The Decisive Years (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 87.
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