Is There Such a Thing as Northern Music?
p. 85-95
Résumés
Y a-t-il seulement une musique nordiste? Pour répondre à cette question, il est nécessaire de répondre à des interrogations plus spécifiques. Est-ce qu’une musique peut être appelée « nordiste » parce qu’elle est composée par quelqu’un du Nord? Peut-elle être qualifiée de « nordiste » parce qu’elle a été composée suivant les canons d’une école particulière? Existe-t-il une école de musique nordiste ? Comme nous le savons, beaucoup de gens associent le Nord, avec ou sans raison, aux concepts qui le définissent: le froid, le vent, la neige, la glace, la blancheur, la nuit, la solitude, la mélancolie, la distance, la privation, le silence, et puis la mort. Est-ce que la musique peut être considérée nordiste si elle est inspirée par l’une de ces réalités? Est-ce que les concepts que nous associons au Nord dans la musique, la littérature ou la peinture sont les mêmes que ceux que nous lui associons dans la science et la géographie? Dans un autre registre, nous questionnons si les réalités nordiques se manifestent elles-mêmes dans la musique dans les éléments qui la constituent véritablement, comme le rythme, le mode, le registre, le tempo ou la tonalité. Cet article propose alors quelques réponses à ces questions.
Is there such a thing as northern music? To answer this question, one must first answer several more specific questions. Can music be called northernsimply because it was composed by someone from the North? Can it be qualified as northern because it was composed following the canons of a particular school of music, insofar as a northern school of music actually exists? Is music that deals with northern themes northern music? As we know, many people associate the North, rightly or wrongly, with the concepts that define it, such as the cold, winter, snow, ice, whiteness, night, solitude, melancholy, distance, hardship, silence, and even death. Can music be considered northern if it is inspired by one of these realities? Are the concepts we associate with the North in music, literature and painting the same as those we associate with it in science and geography? On a more subtle level, one might also ask if northern realities manifest themselves in music through the elements that constitute its very essence, such as rhythm, mode, register, tempo and tonality. This article attempts to provide some answers to these questions.
Texte intégral
1In Val-David, a village some fifty miles north of Montréal, Canada, there is a mountain that is criss-crossed with trails lined with artworks, whose number grows every year. A renowned artist – painter and sculptor René Derouin – developed this concept of “in situ art”, and he has applied it by inviting artists from the three Americas, year after year, to install their work in this natural, outdoor museum.
2Derouin has called this art park “Precambrian Gardens” in reference not only to the symbiosis between the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, but also to the singular and surprising fertility of northern regions. The annual symposium held in the park in 1997 was based on the theme “the sound of places”. Since I had already given some thought1 to the relationship between music, the most ethereal of the arts, and geography, the most down to earth of the sciences, I began to wonder, during this stimulating event, whether there was such a thing as northern music. And in the process, I started to reflect on the meaning, and ultimately the relevance, of this expression.
3To answer the question of whether there is any such thing as “northern music”, one must first define this expression. In other words, one must first determine whether there are specific characteristics that make it possible to qualify music as “northern”. Although this may seem like a foolhardy exercise, it is reassuring to note that Glenn Gould, who was renowned not only for his piano performances but also for his interpretation of the meaning of music, reflected long and hard about what he called “The idea of the North”.
4The expression “northern music” has never actually been defined precisely, which comes as no surprise since the concept of the North is very relative. The North, although a region, is first and foremost a direction. Every place on the planet is located to the North of someplace else (except for the South Pole, of course). Gilles Vigneault, who can be considered Québec’s greatest singer-songwriter, expressed this reality in the title of the song “Le nord du nord” (literally, the North of the North), which clearly illustrates just how relative the concept of the North is.
5For the purposes of this article, I will refer to the North as the area to the north of the ecumene, or permanently inhabited part, of Canada–that is, as the area stretching from the country’s temperate zones to the Far North, or the North Pole, if you will. Indeed, at the planetary level, the expression northern countries refers to those nations situated between the temperate regions and the pole, namely, Canada, the Scandinavian countries and Russia. Once again, the northern character of these countries varies widely. Therefore, in referring to that which makes the North the North, it is a good idea to use the word nordicity, a word created by the geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin and now recognized internationally. It would thus be more appropriate to frame the question I asked at the beginning of this article as follows: Is there a relationship between music and nordicity? Or, How is nordicity reflected in music? These questions in turn lead to other questions. For example: How does music composed by musicians from northern countries differ from other music? Does the North inspire music that is different from that inspired by the South? What do musicians associate the North with?
6The reason for asking these questions is that they might reveal the identifying features of certain types of music. Ultimately, they might also help to identify attitudes that certain geographical environments are likely to generate in the vast realm of artistic expression. Music, painting and literature meet and mingle in an often meaningful manner in this process. In a way, my goal here is to contribute to developing an interdisciplinary approach to the idea so dear to René Derouin: art in nature; nature in art.
7Several different avenues can be explored to answer the above questions. For instance, one might reflect on whether music can be qualified as northern simply because it is composed by someone from the North. Or if music is northern because it is composed following the canons of a particular school of music, insofar as a northern school of music actually exists. Or if music that deals with northern themes is northern music. As we know, many people associate the North, rightly or wrongly, with the concepts that define it, such as the cold, winter, snow, ice, whiteness, night, solitude, melancholy, distance, hardship, silence, and even death. Can music be considered northern if it is inspired by one of these realities? Are the concepts we associate with the North in music, literature and painting the same as those we associate with it in science and geography? On a more subtle level, one might also ask if northern realities manifest themselves in music through the elements that constitute its very essence, such as rhythm, mode, register, tempo and tonality.
8The music literature reveals that the expression northern music generally means “music composed by musicians from Nordic countries”, who often comprise only Scandinavian composers. This is the case of the excellent book Nordic art music by Frederick Key Smith, which presents a skilful analysis of works by Scandinavian composers, but without ever referring to the North, the concept of the North or phenomena specific to northern environments.
9Obviously, the fact that a musician was born or lived in a northern country does not automatically lend a northern character to his or her music. no one will argue with this fact, especially since the history of music teaches us that composers from the North have often looked to the South for the inspiration they perhaps deemed necessary, as it complemented that which they derived from their own more uniform, more difficult environment. Russian composers clearly illustrate this attraction to the South. Glinka, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev looked to Italy for inspiration, while Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Rubinstein, Sviridov, Shchedrin and many others looked to Spain. Borodin, for his part, was inspired by Central Asia, while Ippolitov-Ivanov drew inspiration from the Caucasus.
10From a formal standpoint, composers from the North have also looked to the South to learn about composition techniques. Inevitably, this has “denorthernized” the music of northern countries, which originally was very closely linked to local folklore. Until the rapid development of European music in the post-Romantic period, musicians from the North wanted the form of their compositions to reflect the canons of “good music” from continental Europe, especially Germany. For example, Scandinavia looked to Germany for this purpose, while Germany, like Russia, looked to Italy.
11I will now provide an example that clearly illustrates this trend, especially since it involves not only music but painting, as well as Germany, Russia and Italy. The Swiss-German artist Arnold Böcklin expressed his dreamlike visions through a symbolism that highlighted Italy, where, the artist said, death was sweeter than in the northern land of Germany. His famous painting The Isle of the Dead (of which there are at least five versions) shows Death dressed in white standing in a boat heading, on still black water, toward a cave on a rocky island studded with tall cypress trees. This painting prompted Marguerite Yourcenar to say, in her collection of essays En pèlerin et en étranger: “Böcklin’s Italy, a sun-drenched Germany, was the dream of a northern mind. Atop the Fiesole hills, Böcklin no doubt loved this wild river that consoled him for the Rhine”. [Translation]
12Böcklin’s famous painting was a source of inspiration for several musicians, including Sergei Rachmaninoff and Max Reger. Note that both the Russian and German composer tailored their compositions to the northern character of this painting inspired by Italy. Rachmaninoff, in his Isle of the Dead, used a special device for this purpose: a rarely employed tempo, 5/4 time, whose irregular beat creates a certain malaise while evoking the gentle swaying of a boat sailing across a calm sea. Through the atmosphere it creates, Rachmaninoff’s work reflects the context of Nordic legends–legends that were also an endless source of inspiration for Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. In The Swan of Tuonela, for example, Sibelius evoked the black bird that guarded the entrance to a river from which no one returned. The bird could have been floating on the same body of water as that which surrounded Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead.
13Jean Sibelius is acknowledged almost unanimously to be the northern composer par excellence. In 1990, the director and conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, with the prophetic name of Sergiu Comissiona, came up with the excellent idea of commissioning a series of works for the 125th anniversary of Sibelius’s birth. The response to this request was revealing in that Sibelius’s music conjured up images for many musicians of the real or imaginary landscapes that had inspired the composer. For instance, the Japanese composer Joji Yuasa wrote a symphonic poem entitled The Midnight Sun, underscoring the fact that Sibelius’s work is not only emblematic of northern music but deeply imbued with the character of the North.
14The Danish composer Poul Ruders also took part in the project to commemorate Sibelius’s work by composing a piece entitled Tundra, which is just as representative of northern geography as Yuasa’s poem. He explained his approach by saying, “I chose a component of Sibelius’s orchestral landscape – the clear, bare landscape of the tundra – and froze it, so to speak, in homage to him.” [Translation] British composer Wilfred Josephs, for his part, created a work entitled simply In the North. He drew his inspiration from a poem by Heinrich Heine, which in turn was inspired by the South, for it expresses the thoughts of a solitary tree dreaming about palm trees as, numbed with the cold, it clings to a rock surrounded by snow and ice.
15One could say yes to the question posed at the beginning of this article – Is there such a thing as northern music? – if one could identify a northern school of music in the same way that we can identify a French school, a German school and a Russian school. However, this has never been done. At the very most, one can find expressions that illustrate very subjectively how so-called “northern” music is perceived as a whole. For example, one critic referred to Sibelius’s “northern rhapsodism”, describing it as a manifestation of his “brooding sensibility”. Another critic described Brahms’s music as “interior, reclusive and northern”, while still another called it “sombre northern music”. Glinka, who is considered by many as the founder of Russian classical music (He is described as being to music what Pushkin was to the Russian language), said, “our melancholy Russian music is a daughter of the North.” [Translation] Lastly, another music critic stated, after listening to Perahia’s interpretation of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, that with this pianist, the concerto “lost its heavy northern sound to a more Mediterranean, less rigid, more free-flowing sound.” [Translation]
16There is nothing light or gay in any of these descriptions. However, is this sufficient to say that there is a northern or Russo-Scandinavian school that cultivates minor modes, sombre registers, slow rhythms and heavy harmonies? Probably not, even though some of these characteristics are actually found in many works by composers from northern regions; and even though the national anthems of countries like Norway, Sweden, Finland, Ireland and the Baltic states, all of which are northern nations, were written in slower tempos than the anthems of countries in the South.
17It can be concluded, therefore, that there is no school of music specific to northern countries that can be held up as proof of the existence of northern music. It is no doubt easier to simply consider music northern if it is inspired by northern realities. This means that we are talking about something beyond the field of pure, formal, abstract music. Franz Liszt coined the expression program music, which is now an established term in musical vocabulary, to designate a type of music inspired by phenomena, events or people and in which these elements are used to build a program that serves as a key, so to speak, to understanding the composer’s message. This is a marvellous subject for geographers, as geographical realities are most likely to inspire, consciously or unconsciously, composers who are sensitive to their environment.
18The themes dealt with by program music are legion, and the North definitely has a place of honour among them. It would be tedious to list even briefly all the works that deal with the North, but some are so imbued with a northern flavour that they are worth mentioning. Cantus Arcticus by the prolific contemporary Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara does not only evoke the marshes and lakes of the amphibious land of Finland, but incorporates carefully selected bird songs. Does this nature in art not mirror the concept of art in nature that René Derouin expressed with his symposium based on the theme “the sound of places”?
19The North is represented as a region in a number of compositions: the works of Rautavaara, Symphonia Antarctica by Vaughan Williams, the symphonic poem Tundra by Poul Ruders, the poem Arctic Ocean by Swedish composer Gösta Nystroem, Karelian Rhapsody by Finnish composer Uuno Klami, Alaskan Overture by the American Robert Barclay, and Earth and the Great Weather: A Sonic Geography of the Arctic by John Luther Adams, a work whose title reveals the composer’s geographical bias.
20Some composers have also been inspired by specific locations. For example, Iceland’s national musician, Jon Leifs, composed a monumental, if not extravagant work to express in music the eruption of his country’s emblematic volcano, Mount Hekla. Requiring a large orchestra, a double choir, an organ, over 20 percussionists, sirens, and even a cannon, his symphonic poem is no doubt the most tonitruant piece in the entire repertoire of music. Danish composer Carl Nielsen composed a more peaceful work entitled An Imaginary Journey to the Faroe Islands, drawing inspiration from an isolated group of small islands with more subdued volcanic activity, situated in the North Atlantic between Norway and Iceland. And French composer Marius Constant wrote a symphonic poem in a much more reserved, even intimist style about a slow, languorous sunrise in Hameenlinna, a small town north of Helsinki. He dedicated this piece to the memory of Sibelius, who was born in that town.
21Even more specific references to typically northern phenomena can be found in compositions like Joji Yuasa’s The Midnight Sun. This Japanese composer explained that this work, which he wrote as a tribute to Sibelius, was intended to evoke not only the polar day, a northern phenomenon par excellence because of its cosmic nature, but also the power of knowledge symbolized by the long hours of sunlight. Not surprisingly, many of the phenomena associated with the North are also associated with emotions and feelings that the language of music delights in expressing in its own special way. Therefore, in the context of the North, distance is sometimes associated with solitude; the cold with calm; snow with serenity; and winter darkness with death.
22Is northern music cold music? In the vocabulary of music, the expression cold music refers especially to compositions that lack emotion, sensitivity or colour. The works of Erik Satie come to mind here, as do those of several Soviet composers in the pay of ideological censors. However, cold music is not necessarily northern – far from it. To express this reality in geographical and scientific terms, one might refer to the system of “polar values” developed by Louis-Edmond Hamelin to establish the index of nordicity of different places around the world. The cold is just one of the ten criteria used to establish this index.
23Winter is no doubt an essentially northern reality because it lasts so long in the North. Indeed, attitudes to winter vary from one latitude to another. For Prokofiev, in his Winter Bonfire for choir and orchestra, and for Sibelius, in his Night Ride and Sunrise and several other works, winter is a time of festivities and merrymaking. Winter is accepted more than simply endured. In southern lands where snowfalls are rare, snow is often seen as a mantle of sadness that hopefully will be short-lived. This more negative attitude is reflected in one of the preludes of Debussy, Footsteps in the Snow, where the composer clearly evoked the halting, careful gait of a solitary walker. Northern nations celebrate winter and snow with carnivals. Even if this is partly to offset the negative effects of the dormant season, it is somewhat paradoxical that winter is associated with gaiety in the North and melancholy in the South.
24In music, winter has often been presented as part of a comparison of the seasons. However, such comparisons are not always convincing when it comes to the music’s ability to truly mirror the characteristics of each season of the year. Many composers have embarked on this enterprise, the classic example being of course Vivaldi, whose Four Seasons is certainly the most widely known piece of program music.
25This work by Vivaldi owes its popularity not only to the elegant perfection of its composition but to the descriptive scenario the composer forced himself to follow in writing it, as shown by the many notes that pepper his manuscript and explain the meaning of each passage. Michel Chion has summarized Vivaldi’s surprisingly precise notes in his interesting book on symphonic poems and program music, Le poème symphonique et la musique à programme.
26Most composers who have dealt with the theme of the seasons have done so using a much less detailed program than Vivaldi. Glazunov, for example, evoked winter through four variations, Frost, Ice, Hail and Snow. Tchaïkovsky, for his part, broke his Seasons down into twelve scenes corresponding to the twelve months of the year. As a man of the North, Tchaïkovsky saw November as a time of festivities, a time when the troika reigned supreme. And January was a time when he, like Vivaldi, enjoyed warming himself by the hearth.
27Like all subjects that have inspired musical works, the seasons may simply serve as allegories. Polish composer Marta Ptaszynska wrote her Winter’s Tale for orchestra in the spirit of the paintings of Max Ernst, Tanguy and Giorgio de Chirico. The references to surrealism are conveyed by a collage of elements borrowed from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in order to evoke a landscape imagined by a subconscious which, according to some critics, reflects a northern influence. Winter, like the other seasons and like landscapes, must first be interiorized before it can be translated into music. It must become a feeling before it can become (or re-become) a sound. As Glenn Gould said, “The North is an idea”.
28Through a mysterious physical process, liquids turn into solids with the cold. Movement is immobilized, and time, like water, is suspended. In the introduction to the third movement of his Symphonia Antarctica, which bears the geographic title “Landscape”, Vaughan Williams has the narrator speak the following beautiful lines written by the English poet Samuel Coleridge:
Ye ice falls! Ye that from the mountain’s brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice
And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge
Motionless torrents! Silent cataracts!
29Many works by northern composers clearly illustrate this suspension of time through long melodic phrases and broad rhythms, so to speak. The process of freezing, like the cold, the ice and the snow, can thus be expressed in music.
30Naturally, we associate the North with whiteness. In the Far North, there is a time of year called whiteout when everything is so white that it is impossible to tell the difference between the earth and the sky. As on a painting by Malevitch, the horizon is a white line between the white sky and the white ground (where animals with white coats sometimes hide). Moreover, during the yearly cycle in the Far North, the white winter landscape alternates with white summer nights. This is one of the many paradoxes of the North, for when this part of the world is covered with snow and becomes the kingdom of whiteness, it is gradually plunged into the darkness of winter.
31Black and white… In a way, this is what characterizes polar regions, with their rocky outcrops here and there amidst vast expanses of snow and ice. The distinction, or even opposition, between “black and white”, on the one hand, and “colour”, on the other, is used in all spheres of everyday life, including music. Colour is a constant reference in music. Some composers have even assigned a specific colour to each note of the scale. However, references to colour in music take on their full meaning when they concern a composition as a whole—its diversity, originality and vibrancy. Music that lacks colour is uniform, static, almost silent. In this way, it reflects some of the characteristics of the North. Northern musicians are thus faced with the challenge of getting across the characteristics of their environment by using the “black-and-white mode”, while instilling in their music the power to evoke and suggest in an original, aesthetic manner. And many have managed to do so.
32Although the North is often associated with darkness in Nordic mythology, in reality, the polar day is just as long as the polar night. However, the alternation between day and night is almost annual in the North, compared to daily in the South. Some musicologists have established a relationship between this situation in the North and some of the formal characteristics of music from this part of the globe: extended melodies, long sustained notes, few contrasts, and gradual changes in volume. In fact, these features are typical of music written by many Scandinavian composers.
33When authors talk repeatedly about the “dark sensibility of Sibelius”, they are no doubt referring as much, if not more, to his personal temperament, which was said to be fundamentally melancholic, than they are to the way in which he immersed himself in the moods of the climate and landscapes around him. The best way to understand and especially feel the extraordinary symbiosis that existed between the music of this magnificent musician and his geographical environment is to visit the house where he spent the last fifty years of his long life. It sits on the shores of a lake surrounded by birch trees in Ainola, about thirty kilometres from Helsinki. The relationship between this man, his music and his country is obvious. It reflects the special feeling expressed by the hard-to-translate Swedish word stämning – a form of melancholy specific to northern environments and the Scandinavian character.
34The North is not an easy region and some musicians have tried to express this indisputable fact. Sibelius, for example, situated all of his legends in Pohjola, a harsh, faraway land where there lived a princess who would give her heart only to the man who could survive the many trials described in the epic Kalevala. The North has to be conquered, while the South gives itself away.
35The few examples I have discussed here suggest that if there is such a thing as northern music, it is music that borrows ways of being and feeling from the North and thus reflects the region’s essence and character through a process of resonance, as it were. Cold, snow, ice, whiteness, night, distance and silence are all realities that are naturally associated with the North and that some music has managed to evoke through composition techniques.
36The most interesting observation that can be made regarding the question of whether there is any such thing as northern music is no doubt the strange analogy that can be drawn, even with regard to music composition techniques, between the environment of the North and the building blocks of music, which include its themes, rhythms, modes, registers, tempi, tonalities and even interpretation.
37The long days and nights typical of polar environments are amply reflected in the slow drawn-out rhythm of music written by northern composers. In this regard, I have already mentioned the extended melodies associated with such music. The Midnight Sun written by the Japanese composer Yuasa in homage to Jean Sibelius plunges the listener from the outset into the long, slow pace of the polar day. Symphony No. 4 by American composer Henry Hadley comprises four movements based on the four points of the compass, the movement for the South being a lively scherzo in contrast to the movement for the North, which is slow and solemn. This is not surprising considering the rate at which the glaciers creep across the northern landscape and the stars wend their across the polar sky.
38The major mode, which is as bright as day, is less common in northern music than the minor mode–a more sombre mode better suited to the languor of long twilights and late dawns. Low registers, also described as “sombre”, are also more common in northern music than melodies composed in high registers. Even the way in which instrumentalists interpret northern music is said to have a particular northern flavour, which has been described with an array of adjectives such as heavy, ponderous, sombre, reserved and tormented. In short, the main characteristic that emerges from a review of northern music is that this music is in harmony with the physical, cultural, mythological and historical environment of northern regions.
39In conclusion, the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this article is yes, there is such a thing as northern music. It is a type of music born of the North, of its forests, tundra, floating ice, calm and raging seas, as well as of the melancholy and joy that flows from these elements and of the slow passage of time that, in its own way, sets the pace of life in wide open spaces. It is a type of music that touches the hearts and minds of musicians, who are sensitive not only to the inalterable power of the North but to the subtle clues that provide insights into its complexity, a bit like the veins of quartz which, through the ages, have penetrated fissures in the immutable Precambrian bedrock. From the heart of this bedrock to the heart of mankind runs a connection specific to the people and things of the North.
40A remarkable rapport has developed between this part of the world and the music composed by a host of musicians. This symbiosis is cleverly symbolized in a monument to Jean Sibelius in a park in Helsinki. Anchored in Precambrian rock, a sculpture of the composer’s face sits next to a cluster of long steel pipes installed by the sculptor Eila Hiltunen between birch trees and rocks. On days when the wind blows from the North, it rushes into the pipes, offering the composer a thrilling concert in which nature plays an instrument built by man.
41A replica of this monument to Sibelius has been placed in a courtyard surrounded by buildings that house the offices of UNESCO in Paris. But here, the sculpture is like a bird in a cage, with no wind to play it–a reflection perhaps of a tendency to associate northern music with a negative vocabulary unlikely to attract an audience. For my part, however, I hope the ideas I have presented here have kindled, if only slightly, a desire to discover the countless compositions that are a product of the North, or better still, of nordicity. For once you have discovered this music, your desire to hear it will mirror the title of Carl Nielsen’s symphony “The Inextinguishable”.
Auteur
Université de Laval – Canada henridorion@bell.net
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