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Jean Sibelius defied tradition; indeed his harmonic vocabulary is in the direct line from Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert. It is because he has never deviated from the strait path that he is truly original and will remain so when the 12-tone apostles have become mere commonplaces. Sibelius first achieved fame as a “popular” composer. Finlandia became a hymn tune, and Valse Triste was at one time played almost nightly by every restaurant band. Nowadays, Finlandia and Valse Triste are nearly forgotten and the symphonies obtain ever more adherents. Nevertheless, one must always remember that it was the same man, with the same outlook and the same mind, who wrote both Finlandia and the Fourth Symphony. Sibelius has his head and his heart in heaven, but his feet firmly planted on the ground. There is a popular element in all great music, and the music of Sibelius is no exception.

This chapter presents a selection of Grainger's comments about music and musicians. It begins with a discussion of the expressive potential of music, and music's inability to address more than one issue or emotion at a time, unlike other art forms. Music can, however, provide the spirit of a situation in a way other arts cannot. Other writings include Grainger's summary upon his year in Europe (1923) and his views on different national responses to music. The chapter includes many vignettes of various musicians' views of one another: Balfour Gardiner on Vaughan Williams, Imogen Holst, and Arnold Bax; Grieg and Grainger in their approach to folk music. “Nordic” composers such as Jean Sibelius, Carl Nielsen, and Vaughan Williams disappointed Grainger. These recollections include his pleasure at being introduced to Stravinsky by Sir Thomas Beecham, and a concluding description of Grainger's tensions with his one-time piano teacher, Ferruccio Busoni.

The aim of this chapter is to consider Sibelius as a popular historical narrative, discussing it in relation to the mechanisms of historical explanation as well as the mode of argument and address used in the film. As reference points I shall discuss certain other Nordic biopics made during the last few years. Biopic seems to be one of the prominent genres in Scandinavia in the 2000s. Monica Z (2013), for example, has been a huge success in Sweden, and Kon-Tiki (2012) – on the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl – broke into international markets and became a Norwegian Academy Award nominee. As a genre, biopic seems to be both culturally specific and universal at the same time. While addressing a predominantly national audience, Sibelius also shares many, if not most, of the generic characteristics analysed by George F. Custen (1992) in his classic study of the genre, even if Custen is talking about Hollywood films. And indeed, Hollywood has also produced countless biopics about non-Americans, including Scandinavians like the author Hans Christian Andersen (1952) or the composer Edvard Grieg (Song of Norway, 1970).

Each of these canonical composers experienced their unique creativity as both the cause of and the cure for an individual “later-life crisis” (to match Elliott Jaques “mid-life crisis”). That each could and did emerge from this crisis is evidence of the power of the role of creativity in allowing them—in radically different ways—to adapt their self-fashionings in times of stress. To contextualize this adaptation, the chapter places them into a larger context of some of their peers—Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), Hans Werner Henze (1926–2012), Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912–1990), Jean Sibelius (1865–1957), and Ethel Smyth (1858–1944). Their diverse late-life stories highlight both the shared vicissitudes of aging and the individual power of creativity as a way to meet them, as well as the changing demands (made by oneself and others) that come with long artistic careers. Returning to the four central aging composers to conclude, the chapter asks whether their final operas could constitute Vollendungsopern, that is, summing-up works of completion that act as aesthetic final chapters in their self-constructed life narratives.

Liszt's Mountain Symphony is considered as a key example of his new form in the mid-nineteenth century, the “symphonic poem” accompanied by a literary “program.” It mediates, for a lay public, the experience of musical “greatness” as a manifestation of conflicting voices: that of mankind on the one hand and nature on the other. A consideration of the cultural politics of variously admitting and denying “programmaticism” and of the administering of idealist aesthetics as a dominant discourse of music criticism leads to a consideration of Debussy's music of nature and the sea and a discussion of Sibelius as a symphonist whose investment in idealism was in constant tension with his ability to speak directly to a mass audience.

This chapter begins with a discussion on all the ways to notate music other than in European staff notation and the ways in which music can be written for many Western styles. Tablature, Nashville Numbers, time unit box system (TUBS), and MIDI notation, lyric sheets, chord charts, and rap flow charts are explored. The chapter then briefly explores the free industry-standard notation software Finale, Sibelius, and Dorico, followed by a section delving into free and cloud-based software for schools like Noteflight and Flat.io and an explanation of some more non-conventional notation softwares such as HookPad and 1Chart. A table is inserted to give an overview of the software discussed in this chapter.

Barber continued to receive numerous recognitions and awards for his work. In 1935, he was given the Prix de Rome, for being the most talented and promising music student at the time. With the award, he was granted two years of study at the American Academy in Rome, with full lodging and a regular stipend. In this new environment, Barber continued to flourish, winning a Pulitzer traveling scholarship, which provided him with an extended stay at the American Academy, where his fSymphony in One Movement was composed. His uncle, Sidney Homer, proudly observed Barber’s triumphs as he read stories in the local newspaper about his music being performed in America. Uncle and nephew continued to communicate regularly through letters, exchanging queries, comments, and criticisms about Barber’s new compositions. Correspondence between Mary Bok and Barber flourished. Barber wrote many songs on emotionally charged poems, which seem biographically pointed. During the summer, he and Menotti lived in a game warden’s cottage in St. Wolfgang, Austria; there he began work on the String Quartet in B minor, the second movement of which later became the famous Adagio for Strings. Both the symphony and the String Quartet were premiered at the American Academy.

This chapter describes Barber’s close relationship with Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. Barber would frequently visit the conductor in his home, most days ending with music. This friendship resulted in Toscanini requesting that Barber write a work for the newly formed NBC Symphony Orchestra. This was a rare privilege, as Toscanini in the past had ignored American composers. His broadcasts were received with much enthusiasm from audiences. Toscanini further advanced Barber’s career by bringing his music to Latin America, with Barber being the first American composer whose work reached those shores. For Toscanini, Barber composed Essay for Orchestra and arranged the second movement of his earlier string quartet as the Adagio for Strings, which brought him international fame and became, as it were, the national funeral music of the United States, associated with the deaths of such famous names as Albert Einstein, Franklin Roosevelt, and Grace Kelly and with the tragedy of September 11, 2001. The chapter also covers Barber’s unaccompanied choral works.

This chapter presents an overview of Sibelius’s early musical training, especially as a violinist. It highlights the life-long persistence of Sibelius’s violin training in his musical imagination. It introduces key questions that are pursued throughout the book: What is the labor of virtuosity? How are performing traditions formed over time? What are the cross-genre musical influences in Sibelius’s violin concerto? The discussion in this chapter unfolds in relation to philosophical discourses on beauty and statehood, as well as on the idea of the virtuoso’s political potential, which builds on nineteenth-century views on the redemptive potential of civic action and on military-heroic symbolism in performance.

In order to accommodate the growth of technology-based music classes in schools, institutions that educate music teachers–both prior to their service and during–must begin to implement structures for inclusion of TBMI in their curricula. In this chapter, I will examine some of the models of inclusion of TBMI in teacher education. I will do so with the understanding that teacher education in music is a constant work in progress, and that adding TBMI in already crowded curricula is a very difficult task. Students working toward music teacher certification typically take a course focused on the uses of technology. Music teacher education faculty members generally agree that it is necessary for the skills embedded in these classes to be developed. In addition, the accrediting bodies that enable teacher preparation programs to grant licensure credentials suggest inclusion of such a course. Courses in teacher preparation programs frequently address many of the standards delineated in the previous chapter, specifically the types of skills suggested by the TI:ME standards. An emphasis of some of these courses lies in the area of information management and communication. Students are often engaged–though sometimes unnecessarily so–in activities such as database creation and management, email communication, simple website development, and the uses of general education software. This is often the case when pre-service teachers are required to take courses in information technology or education departments of the university other than the music department in which the focus of the courses is general educational technology, devoid of a content area emphasis. Requiring these types of classes denies the existence of the critical intersections built into the TPACK model, which suggests that content, technology, and pedagogy influence each other. Music teacher educators should carefully consider whether such non-specific courses are advantageous for their students; perhaps there are better ways for future music teachers to gain proficiency with technologies that will be more meaningful for them in their careers.

This chapter explores the intersection of music and phenomenology as potentially fertile ground for the study of consciousness. Taking the philosophy of Edmund Husserl as a touchstone, and the Violin Concerto, Op. 47 of Jean Sibelius as a case study, the chapter considers how phenomenological concepts such as epoché, noesis, eidos, and the transcendental subject all find resonances within a formal analysis of this musical work. The chapter also juxtaposes Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and his critique of the ‘natural attitude’ against Daniel Dennett’s physicalist account of consciousness and Wilfrid Sellars’ concept of the ‘scientific image’. In negotiating a pathway between these positions, the chapter considers whether music—and its determination of an autonomous aesthetic sphere—may offer a productive alternative perspective to the often competing claims of philosophy and science in our understanding of consciousness.