Sibelius studies /

This collection of 12 scholarly essays on Sibelius and his music is the most recent of several to appear in the past few years—Glenda Goss's Jean Sibelius: A Guide to Research (CH, Apr'98) and The Sibelius Companion, ed. by Goss (CH, May'97), to name just two. This accelerated interest in Sibelius is due, in part, to access to new sources of information. The Sibelius Collection, donated in 1982 by the Sibelius family to the Helsinki University Library and containing over 10,000 manuscript pages, is fueling new research. In the present volume, three introductory articles explore the reception and recording history of Sibelius's music and his aesthetic position with regard to modernity. A second group of essays explores Sibelius's ideology and his compositional process. The concluding section presents detailed analytical studies of the Second, Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh symphonies. The volume includes 14 plates and a large number of musical examples. Sibelius Studies will interest scholars of 20th-century music in general and Sibelius in particular. Because of the technical complexity of the musical analyses, the book is recommended primarily to libraries supporting music research. W. Ross University of Virginia