The Seventh Symphony in particular invites a comparison less to sculpture, for which Sibelius maintained a lifelong enthusiasm, than to principles of modernist architecture that flourished after 1918 and were based explicitly on nature and the organic. So too does the far more static Tapiola, where music transforms one’s sense of space and perspective by breaking the listener’s sense of time as conventionally defined. The transparent and clear integration of the sound materials with their elaboration over extended duration—the link between form and function—is unitary, disciplined, elegant, evolutionary, directional, and strangely eloquent, entirely reminiscent of nature in a proto-minimalist manner.65
In Tapiola Sibelius makes clear the consequences of utilizing the visual and a conception of nature and the organic as alternative metaphors for musical logic. Having moved away from the long eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition of conceiving of music and language as interdependent, Sibelius at mid-career began functioning much like a modern architect and sculptor of sound, constructing new forms he thought evocative of nature. He recast the experience of space in time and derived his own vocabulary of design from the experience of space, time, and the sonic materials of construction. Sibelius’s inspiration may have come from the crisis of his age, his sense that, in an era defined by technological and scientific progress, the existential needs of his metaphorical clients—the modern listening audience—might require a new kind of instrumental music that reconnected them with the essence of nature.
Many of Sibelius’s closest friends and colleagues in Finland were painters and architects.66 Throughout his life he felt drawn to the visual experience. The mature Sibelius remarked, “When I consider how musical forms are established I frequently think of the ice-ferns which, according to eternal laws, the frost makes into the most beautiful patterns.”67 In his mid-twenties, he wrote his uncle Pehr about imagining a C-major chord upon which a first inversion D-flat-major chord was superimposed, generating three pairs of minor seconds. With irony and humor he spoke about the beginning of a “new musical age” in which “one imagines a city with several factories”—cotton, timber, and iron, each represented by a pitch or an interval.68 Where Strauss heard distinct tonalities while reading, Sibelius translated from sound to image and image to sound. More than one commentator has remarked that Tapiola suggests a frozen landscape.
Using architecture as a visual metaphor by which to understand musical form in Sibelius is justified by the frequency of references to an “architectural” aspect in his music, particularly the symphonies. In 1947, Gerald Abraham evoked the image of a cathedral in attempting to characterize form in late Sibelius. The metaphor of architecture has been expressed in terms of organic forms, cells, and even trees. Architecture has long been used as a theological image for inferring a rational, purposeful, and intentional beauty in nature. Abraham’s emphatic description of the Seventh Symphony as “organic” suggests that in Sibelius one might hear the teleological vision of the composer unfold in a manner analogous to the way nature, in its designs, reveals the design logic of a divine creator.69
This implicit spiritual but not narrative dimension suggests Bruckner, whose music made such an impression on Sibelius during his short period of study in Vienna.70 Bruckner transformed the spatial dimension of musical form, using regularity of pulse and the extended use of musical sequences. He generated a musical mirror of spiritual contemplation and celebration. These were appropriated and adapted by Sibelius to evoke, much in the spirit of Beethoven’s Pastoral, a musical articulation of the response to the natural world. In Sibelius’s case, a vast landscape marked by extremes of light and dark defined his idea of nature. The visual experience of nature untamed by humanity functioned as a vague program, offering existential awe, grand simplicity, and the terror of human insignificance. Sibelius appropriated Bruckner’s sense of how music evokes space in time, retaining Bruckner’s spiritual conceits as he transposed and compressed them.71 At the same time, Sibelius’s concentration of musical space led him beyond Bruckner.
Sibelius responded to the widespread sense of the inadequacy if not corruption of ordinary language in modernity by exploring the link between language (and therefore musical traditions rooted in language) and nature.72 This led him, intuitively, to ponder the natural priority of the visual over the linguistic, a subject of nineteenth-century speculation along lines first suggested by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.73 Among the most eloquent elaborators of this problem was Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the few thinkers and writers Nietzsche admired. For Emerson, nature remained the refuge from the shortcomings of modern civilization: “In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become an all transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.”74 At the core of truth, reason, language, and therefore art was nature. Sight—the visual—was the primary bridge between man and nature, not speech. For Emerson, as for Sibelius, the faculty of sight was fundamental in any effort to conjure up the inspiration of nature.
Meaning in music, as in all art, was contingent on nature, the source of the “symbolic” and “picturesque” foundations of language. “As this is the first language, so it is the last,” Emerson wrote. Once it rises “above the ground line of familiar facts,” a thought “clothes itself in images.” Visual images are the “vestment” of thought. The visual generates in language “perpetual allegories” whose imagery is “spontaneous.”75 Vision links truth to nature. To realize this connection between thought, human experience, and nature, a modern musical discourse of significance had to be independent of language yet still be one of ideas. The visual—sight—suggested an alternative logic, one closely allied with nature.
Sibelius developed a new modern approach to musical form as the result of visual thinking transposed into music. While Strauss stuck steadfastly to the medium of language, working against the modern corruption of language with music based on sophisticated literary sources, Sibelius located the “transparent eye-ball” in himself. Using what Emerson termed “simplicity,” the composer found the means to convert the truth-telling potential of the visual into sounding forms.76 The closest visual analogue to music in Sibelius’s lifetime was architecture.77
Music and Architecture:
Nature, Form, Modernity, and the Legacy of Schelling
The notion that architecture in modernity needed to connect to nature and the organic first appeared around 1900 in Finland and America. The particular challenges to the Finnish architects of Sibelius’s generation resembled those faced by Sibelius as a Finnish composer. His artist-architect contemporaries did not grow up in cities defined by many prior generations of urban growth. There had been no defining mid-nineteenth-century historicist architectural consensus marked by a transformative intervention as in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.78 In Finland in 1900, as in much of the United States, cities and industry were relative novelties. The answers to how one should design modern cities, how to build homes, factories, and public buildings, were inevitably different by virtue of real contrasts in landscape, population, and economics.
Given the relative absence of a visible built urban landscape, the architect in turn-of-the-century Finland and America might bypass patterns previously inscribed in older cities. Neither the young Sibelius nor his architect contemporaries in Finland were as overwhelmed as their German contemporaries by the tremendous momentum of European late nineteenth-century historicism. They were not heirs to the radical erasure of history. They had no cultural memory of the destruction of the old urban Vienna to make way for the Ringstrasse, or of Haussmann’s traumatic rebuilding of Paris. Nor was their situation comparable to that of Ödön Lechner, the leading Hungarian architect during Béla Bartók’s youth, who participated in the massive building ex
pansion in Pest and on both banks of the Danube in Budapest.79 Some Finnish architects, such as Lars Sonck (1870–1956), responded by developing their own version of historicism: a “national” romantic style whose hint of originality derived from the explicit evocation of a premodern national heritage.80
Sibelius’s aesthetic development as a modernist innovator parallels most closely the career of the most innovative Finnish architect of his generation, Eliel Saarinen (1873–1950). A towering figure in the history of modern architecture, he was a friend of the composer.81 Much like Sibelius, Saarinen solved the challenges of modern times by both borrowing freely from and bypassing the twentieth-century’s mainstream modernist confrontation with architectural historicism. Saarinen, like Sibelius, turned to the model of nature, whereas modernist architects in France, Germany, and Austro-Hungary, faced with an overwhelming historicism, took a radical rationalist turn. This led to the so-called International style most famously associated in the 1920s with the Bauhaus. Saarinen was as skeptical of this trend in architectural modernism as Sibelius was of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, or the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in Germany. Their reasons were similar.82
After flirting with a romantic invention of a historical Finnish national style, Saarinen turned to the idea of nature and the ideal of the organic. Form had to be based equally in nature and on the specific requirements of the historical moment. All designed spaces, from houses to cities, had to take into account modern engineering, materials, and patterns of life. But the logic and method of design and architecture had to be organic, reflecting and revealing nature. This recourse to nature and the organic by Saarinen (and Sibelius) coincided with the ideas and designs of another iconoclastic modernist, the quintessentially American Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959). Like Saarinen, Wright distanced himself from the dominant modernist strategy of a rigorous alignment between structure and function in the early twentieth century. Instead, Wright defined his own modernism as rooted in the natural and the organic. Sibelius’s popularity was at its height in America at the same time Frank Lloyd Wright’s influence and reputation were at their peak. Wright and Saarinen were deeply invested in music. Both used musical analogies to defend their ideas. Wright was particularly fond of Beethoven, with whom Sibelius, in his lifetime, would be frequently compared.83
The idea of architecture in music and music in architecture reflects an influential nineteenth-century philosophical tradition. Music and architecture invite comparison in terms of how humans mediate between nature, the objective external world, and their imagination and subjectivity. In both, the expression of the aesthetic as it affects the conduct of life seems to demand the creation of intentional forms and structures that abstract from the natural and organic experience of time and space. Music and architecture transcend mere representation and description, the mirroring of external reality. As art they exemplify the Platonic idea of form, suggesting abstraction and permanence.
The human capacity to distill and articulate imagined space parallels the way time is experienced and refashioned into music in artificial forms that suggest meaning and coherence. Neither a painting or a sculpture, nor a work of poetry or prose share this basic capacity of breaking free from evident correspondences to human experience. To be understood, both music and architecture demand to be experienced primarily as structures, not as narratives tied to the human capacity for language. They define the human sense of time and space, absent language. Music and architecture rely for coherence on small elements repeated along patterns augmented, elaborated, and miniaturized in the service of an overarching form. A self-contained structural logic in a given work provides detail with a context of relationships. In both art forms one can speak of a foreground (a façade) as well as layers of underlying structure (organization of space, footprint, elevation, foundation, mechanical systems).
In music and architecture, both discrete elements and the whole assume symbolic meaning as they are perceived and lived with over extended time. Time reveals form and can alter meaning and function, deepening the relative independence of music and architecture from history and linguistic usage. Yet despite their artificiality, both art forms influence subjective consciousness and even appear capable of reconciling subjectivity with objective reality. They inhabit public space and transcend the private and the individual. Both are fundamental aesthetic elements for the definition of community and the formation of social cohesion.
The locus classicus with regard to parallelisms between music and architecture is Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s Philosophy of Art, written between 1801 and 1804 and published in 1859.84 Schelling’s premise is that music, because it deals with sonority, is allied with the other arts that create form out of material nature. But music’s nature concerns time itself—the succession of sound in time. Its elements are “manifest” in the cosmos, making it the most elemental art form and the deepest source of human self-awareness. Music is therefore uniquely capable of unifying the real and ideal, the subjective and the objective. Through its form-giving capacity and its dependency on rhythm, music creates unity out of diversity, linking human experience with the universal, temporal basis of nature.85
Music’s dependence on one of the universe’s “real” dimensions—temporality—makes its truth-value independent of human subjectivity. Its fundamental formal logic is dependent on nature. However, its components—rhythm, harmony, and melody—are not derived directly from nature, making direct imitation impossible. Because of this duality—the underlying dependence of music on nature, through time, and its evident aesthetic artificiality and dependence on the human imagination and capacity to attribute meaning—music is “anorganic.”86 This strange word, coined by Schelling, suggests that music, as an art, has a reality beyond art forms based on language and visual mimesis because it transcends subjectivity without losing its link to nature.87 Music mirrors the structure of the cosmos beyond the framework of organic life in an objective ideal manner. The anorganic signals that music as an art form escapes from the impermanence of the organic and assumes infinitude. The logic of music suggests that the aesthetic can remain true beyond history, mortality, entropy, and the cycle of life.
As anorganic art, music, through its forms, takes up the task of “the informing of unity into multiplicity as such.” By making music, humans can unify fundamental objective reality with human experience. We lend ourselves symbolic meaning through an art that itself mirrors the identity between concept and object. Music, as “anorganic” human art, offers an “allegory of the organic.” The objectivity of nature and the ambitions of human subjectivity find infinite and unbounded opportunity in music. Music’s “closed” and self-contained artificiality, “comprehends forms still within chaos and without differentiation.” Music is “boundless” because it draws out of nature and the material “pure form” in sound, using rhythm, harmony, and melody.88
Schelling’s most famous phrase about music and architecture defines architecture as “solidified” or “frozen” music (erstarrte Musik).89 Architecture, like music, takes external reality—nature—and, through human form-giving, provides it with conceptual meaning. It transcends the mere subjective and quotidian by abstracting from human experience. Its ideal presence as art is “anorganic” through its reliance on forms compatible with nature. Architecture takes the plant organism as its model and through its form-giving anorganic character as art becomes understood symbolically. Although responsive to human needs, it must, as a fine art, always remain an “allegory of the organic.” If architecture corresponds to the “organic form in its perfection” it can express ideas, thereby bridging the real with the ideal. Architecture, like music, is contingent on a fundamental normative logic—temporality, succession, and causality—yet it is also free. Architecture’s autonomy, like music’s, rests on its dependence on form. Its functionality and contingency as a material object placed by humans into external reality within nature are transcended by its aesthetic potential as form. Archite
cture’s formal properties are comparable to harmony (proportion), rhythm (in the temporal experience of space), and melody (shape). These generate a subjective, aesthetic mirror, as in music, tied to the objective character and interrelationships of space and time.
Architecture is music frozen in time in that it gives aesthetic formal permanence to imaginary subjectivity in such a way as to alter the human experience in ways painting, poetry, and sculpture cannot. Architecture is lived with and alters the landscape. But music retains, inevitably, a philosophical and ethical priority. As Schelling argues, “Music, to which architecture corresponds among the various forms of the plastic arts, is freed from the requirement of portraying actual forms or figures, since it portrays the universe in the forms of the first and purest movement, separated from matter. Architecture, however, is a form of the plastic arts, and if it is music, then it is concrete music. It cannot portray the universe merely through form; it must portray it simultaneously in essence and form.”90
In Schelling’s system, music becomes a philosophical art form with an objective logic that defines form and structure. Its symbolic and emotional meaning—its utility as an expression of human subjectivity—is contingent on its fundamental character as non-arbitrary and derivative of the nature of time and sound.91 Like architecture, it is essential to human life but remains consistent with the truths inherent in nature. The architect provides human form-giving to materiality while the composer provides the same to sound and time; both are analogous expressions of human needs consistent with nature and its fundamental laws. As humans create art, extending the logic of nature yet liberating it through the free human aesthetic impulse, the sharp distinction between the organic and inorganic, or mechanistic, is transcended.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 39