Repetition and variation in a Finnish music-related discourse: A case study

1 Introduction

Repetition and variation are two core elements of both musical composition and rhetorical argumentation strategies, thus it appears to be a perfectly obvious approach to investigate the use of these principles in a music-related discourse. However, some keywords used in the title of this essay need to be scrutinised before doing so. First, it is necessary to distinguish between different instances of repetition. What is examined here is not ‘exact repetition’ (refer to the essays by Finkbeiner and Freywald 2018 for a broad investigation), but ‘repetition in discourse’ (e.g. Mammadov, Mammadov, and Rasulova 2019). Because ‘discourse’ is here understood as a series of written utterances over a fairly long time span, my essay focuses its investigation on repetition and variation across, not within texts. Repetition could be seen as one of the simplest and most effective tools to both strengthen a claim and to create cohesion (ibid., 5–8 for a concise survey of the main functions of repetition).

The principle of variation – not to be confused with change, diversion, or contrast – encompasses the strategy of reaching similar goals in a more sophisticated way, by saying the same in other words. (The plural, words, is used on purpose here: as the examples will show, most of the variations do include monolexematic lexical variation as analysed in the study by Geeraerts, Grondelaers, and Bakema 1994, but are by no means limited to that.) Yet it should be stated that repetition and variation are not regarded as opposing concepts, but rather as different states in a continuum, as both contain traces of each other within themselves. Every repetition (besides lexical clones) carries a variation, however minimal – even a literal self-quotation may be regarded as a variation of the original quote due to different contexts and circumstances. Variation, on the other hand, can only be identified as such if it carries a certain similarity to the original, which requires repeating at least some elements, however hidden or fragmented they might be.

In light of the claim that even the possibility of repetition as such can be philosophically questioned (Deleuze 1992, 17), it might seem tempting to omit the term ‘repetition’ altogether and rather to use a scale of variability instead, skirting the critical question where and how exactly to distinguish between the one and the other. Instead, a pragmatic understanding of the concepts will be applied here, understanding ‘repetition’ as replication of a semantic content using identical lexical units with, at the most, morphological or minor syntactical changes and ‘variation’ as replication of a semantic content using different lexical units. What distinguishes a discourse linguistics approach from repetition analysis within relatively small textual units (such as e.g. Musté, Stuart, and Botella 2015 have done when comparing linguistic choices between repetition and variation in brand slogans) is the focus on the resumption of elements after something else has been said – in musical terms, on reprise (Schmalzriedt 1979 gives an exhaustive account on the term and its history).

Discourse linguistics, in its search for patterns that would establish texts as parts of a series and thus form the pivotal prerequisite of discourse, has underlined the significance of repetition: “Textualisation is always serial when the transfer of patterns, or the transmission of content and formal textual properties, generates new texts. We can call this the principle of reproduction. Every individual text must be viewed against such a background of reproduction, it is always in the field of tension between uniqueness and repeated multiplicity, every historical text is part of a series. This is already a law in the case of individual linguistic signs, since only what is repeated is a sign” (Warnke 2002, 133 [all translations in this essay are mine]).

There is no shortage of viable definitions of discourse. For this essay, the one developed by Critical Discourse Analysis should be applicable, according to which discourse is “a cluster of context-dependent semiotic practices that are situated within specific fields of social action, socially constituted and socially constitutive, related to a macro topic, linked to the argumentation about validity claims such as truth and normative validity, involving several actors who have different points of view” (Wodak and Reisigl 2009, 89). As music can be regarded as a ‘semiotic practice’, the definition above might even apply to an analysis of discourse within music. My approach, though, is confined strictly to analysing language. It is not using “the language of words to discuss the language of music” (Blacking 1982, 15 [my italics]), but the language of words to discuss the language about music. Musical discourses in this sense have only rarely been subject to systematic research (recent approaches are e.g. Pavlovová 2010, 2013 and Aleshinskaya 2013; Brandstätter 1990 contains certain discourse-analytical elements). While certain general principles of discourse analysis might be transferable, it is necessary to state that an elaborate theoretical framework for the linguistic analysis of music-related discourses, which takes the idiosyncrasies of utterances on artworks into account, does not yet exist. This essay thus attempts to outline one possible procedure to explore a part of a widely uncharted region of the map of discourses.

2 Corpus and methodological framework

The principal methodological approach is based on a concept introduced into discourse analysis by Dietrich Busse. Busse observed that discourses are structured along fundamental features, often appearing in the form of oppositional constellations which he calls Grundfiguren:

Discursive basic figures [Diskursive Grundfiguren] […] determine an inner structure of the discourse, […] and form a grid that can itself become effective again as a basic structure of discourse-transcending epistemic contexts. Discursive basic figures […] themselves can, in turn, appear in different discourses at the same time; thus they contribute to interdiscursive relations, […] what has been studied with reference to the text level in text linguistics as intertextual relations. […] basic discursive figures have a history that is not necessarily […] limited to the period and occurrence of the present reference discourse. (Busse 1997, 20)

This case study is based on texts referring to one specific Finnish musical composition, Jean Sibelius’ (1865–1957) Symphony No. 4 in A minor, op. 63. The choice of specifically this piece is based on two features that grant it a prominent position in the cultural history of Finland: First, it can be considered a key work of Finnish art music or even a key text of Finnish culture (in the sense of a critically revised reading of the well-known concept of culture as text as, e.g., undertaken by Bassler et al. 2002). Second, the controversial debate about the piece that has especially dominated the early phase of the discourse on it in Finland promises to contain material that is of special interest for analysis under linguistic aspects. The symphony, which received its world premiere in Helsinki on 3 April 1911 (with a repetition [!] of the same programme on 5 April), soon earned a reputation as a turning point, both in the composer’s artistic and stylistic development and his relation towards the Finnish audience (e.g. Tawaststjerna 1989, 229). It was later identified as “the author’s only consistent realisation of early modernist musical thought” (Rydman 1963, 17), which also distinguished it from Sibelius’ earlier, national romantic works. Thus, allowing to link the composer to continental European up-to-date trends, it was also (partly for the same reason), the first major work of this established national composer of Finland that did receive more varied and sceptical reactions from the audience and the professional critics than the mostly unanimous acclaim with which his earlier works usually had been greeted.

The manually compiled corpus consists of altogether 428 concert reviews and articles in music journals – mostly retrieved through the digital Finnish newspaper corpus (Kielipankki 2022) – covering the timespan from 1911 to 2022, primarily in Finnish and, to a lesser extent, in Swedish. (Swedish was the dominant academic language in Finland until wide into the twentieth century and still is the second official language in Finland. Especially, the early phase of the whole Sibelius-related discourse is thus influenced to a certain extent by authors who wrote in Swedish).

While the background analysis also employed quantitative methods, here the argumentation will draw primarily upon a qualitative approach, as it is not the quantity of reappearances that is of pivotal interest but the concrete wording and the connections between the different instances of the Grundfiguren in the discourse. Jäger (2011, 113) has observed that core elements of a discourse are often established relatively fast and, consequently, suggests extracting a manageable ‘dossier’ from the entire corpus that can be subject to intense qualitative analysis (Jäger 2009, 196–200). In accordance with this approach, the analysis will focus on the early phase of the discourse and quote later examples mainly to show that the validity of the findings is not just limited to a specific historical phase.

From a viewpoint of text linguistics and text type analysis, concert reviews in daily papers and journal articles would be considered different text types to be analysed separately, as concert reviews represent ‘bivalent’ communication (Beile 1997, 34–8), while journal texts are written by experts and directed at an expert target group. However, during a considerable part of the timespan under observation here, there was no clear boundary separating scientific and non-scientific writing on music in Finland (Huttunen 2013, 35). Many productive concert reviewers had a training background in composition and/or musicology, and the corpus contains articles from daily newspapers that could well have met the contemporary requirements for a musicological publication in a specialised journal. It should also be noted that the objectivity of musicological writing in general is a problematic assumption, as interpretations of a musical work may be heavily coined by subjective viewpoints of the author, even as far as ‘not telling the truth’ (e.g. Dahlhaus 2017, 41–2). In view of this, neither should concert reviews be rejected as merely subjective utterances, nor should one take the scientific objectivity of a musicological text for granted. In view of these aspects, it seems appropriate, if not outrightly called for, to work with a heterogeneous corpus.

From the corpus, I extracted instances of two prominent features that were ascribed to the piece, namely difficulty and austerity. It goes without saying that these English concepts serve only as overall equivalents for a broad spectrum of Finnish expressions with different nuances of meaning. ‘Difficult’ in Finnish can be e.g. vaikea, hankala or kiperä, while ‘austere’ can be expressed by ankara, pelkistetty, or säästeliäs. With relational concepts like these, their respective oppositional features have to be imagined even if they are not explicitly mentioned – difficulty and austerity can only be determined in comparison to opposite concepts, e.g. simplicity and opulence (compare Busse 1997, 22–3, there on the ‘own’ implying the ‘other’). Both belong to the core of the (Finnish) discourse on the symphony – almost every text in the corpus contains a token of one of them or both: Instances of austerity appear in 243 texts in the corpus (56.8% of a total of 428), instances of difficulty in a very broad sense (including sophistication, mysteriousness, etc.) in 356 texts (83.2%), and in the narrow sense still in 86 texts (20%). It is safe to say that the perception of Sibelius’ Fourth as ‘an austere piece that is difficult to understand’ forms the backbone of the vast majority of every written utterance on the work in Finland.

3 Instances of ‘difficulty’

The notion that Sibelius’ symphony seemed difficult to understand was established in reviews of the premiere by two influential critics of their days that set the tone for the following discourse and shall thus be quoted before analysing a series of examples. Fredrik Wasenius (under his pen name Bis) wrote in the leading Swedish newspaper of Helsinki:

Sinfonin n:o 4 upptager resten af programmet. Här gå Sibelius’ vägar mera svårförstådda. Han synes ha lämnat de klara, sinfoniska formerna och mera sagit an på tonmåleriets mera fritt bildade satser. [The Symphony No. 4 occupied the rest of the programme. Here Sibelius’ paths are more difficult to understand. He seems to have left behind the clear symphonic forms and to have turned to the more freely formed settings of tone painting.] (Wasenius 1911, 5)

The first longer review in Finnish was even more explicit:

Ja niin tuo loppumatonta puheen ainetta antanut 4:s sinfonia! Tuskin mistään säwelteoksesta on meillä niin paljon keskusteltu, wäitelty, selitetty ja arwailtu kuin Sibeliuksen uusimmasta sinfoniasta […]. Yksimielisiä oltiin waan siitä, että se on waikeatajuisin teos Sibeliuksen tähänastisessa tuotannossa. [And then this 4th Symphony, which gave us something to endlessly talk about! There is hardly a piece of music which amongst us has been so much discussed, wondered at, explained, and speculated about than Sibelius’ latest symphony […]. The only consensus was that it is the work in Sibelius’ output to date that is the most difficult to sense.] (Katila 1911, 5)

Wasenius identifies the difficulty of the work via comparison to the rest of the programme (which consisted of shorter pieces with descriptive titles and programmatic content). For Katila, in turn, it was rather the reaction of the audience towards the work that provided evidence of its difficulty. The lexemes used by both authors are similar, but upon closer inspection, they contain important differences. The Swedish svårförstådd ‘difficult to understand’ is rather direct, it can even refer to understanding in the physical–acoustical sense (SAOB s.v. svårförstådd). Finnish vaikeatajuisin, on the other hand, is a more complex construction. It is the superlative of vaikeatajuinen, which itself consists of two components: The adjective vaikea ‘difficult’ and the derivation -tajuinen, stemming from taju ‘sense, comprehension’ > ‘having to do with [sensual] comprehension’. Katila’s linguistic choice goes beyond ‘understanding’ in the intellectual sense of the concept, for which he could have used a derivation of käsittää ‘comprehend’ or ymmärtää ‘understand (cognitively)’. But he rather expresses the difficulty of becoming aware of the meaning and content of the work with (all) senses. This is backed by etymology; tajuta is connected to intuition, while ymmärtää goes back to the imagination of encircling something (SSA 1992, s.v. taju; ymmärtää).

A series of examples will show the persistence of the notion and some interesting contextual variations:

Example (1) uses vaikeatajuinen, analytically disassembled into its components. (2) and (4) place the work in the context of the other symphonies; as can be seen from (4), the notion of No. 4 being the most difficult remains unchanged also in comparison with the following ones. (2) and (8) are two of the rarer cases where strong epistemic modality is used: In (2), implicitly by use of the (here:) enforcing suffix -kin, in (8) with the certainty marker kieltämättä ‘undeniablyʼ as an explicit booster. (4) refers to the previous discourse with an impersonal evidentiality marker (on tunnustettu ʻhas been acknowledgedʼ), but also to the extension of the discourse in time (alunpitäen ʻfrom the beginningʼ). (3) employs hedged epistemic modality by using the potential mood (lienee ʻit might beʼ) and exceptionally refers only to the fourth movement, which is in many other reviews described as the most accessible one. (5) is one of several examples of Katila’s self-paraphrases. (6) is from a musical journal, underscoring that the notion of difficulty was not restricted to communication directed at a broader (layperson) audience. (4) and (9) contain complements in addition to vaikeatajuinen that are closely (arvoituksellinen ‘enigmatic’) or more remotely (syvällinen ‘profound’) semantically related. (7) is interesting for two reasons: First, because it implies the assumption that the piece might only be too complicated for one specific local audience, and second, because the difficulty notion is expressed in two different ways – by ymmärtää (referring to the conductors) and vaikeatajuinen (referring to the audience). This might partly be a simple avoidance of tautophony, but also hints at the semantic difference mentioned earlier, i.e. that the latter might imply intuitive, the former (professional) rational understanding: Where the average audience is at most expected to tajuta ʻgraspʼ the piece, conductors should ymmärtää ʻ[fully] understandʼ it.

This leads to the question of whether it is possible to categorise these linguistic choices and to formulate a regularity to assess why Finnish authors repeatedly opted for vaikeatajuinen in favour of other expressions, by taking a closer look at the alternatives. A comparison with the use of two other possible monolexematic expressions, ymmärtää and käsittää, shows a clear pattern partially connected to this construction: Both are used most often in an affirmative way, claiming that either the symphony has reached more and more understanding among the audience, or that an insightful performance helped the audience to understand the work better:

The remarkably stronger käsittämätön ‘incomprehensible’ is, however, usually not connected to the work itself, but rather to the personality of the composer (arguably with a touch of totum pro parte metonymy):

In return, the expression hän on vaikeasti tajuttava/vaikeatajuinen ʻhe is difficult to senseʼ is rarely applied to persons. Adverbial constructions, such as vaikeasti ymmärrettävä ‘difficult to understand’ or vaikeasti lähestyttävä ‘difficult to approach’, appear much rarer in the corpus. One comparatively frequent type of related multi-word expression is similar to the one that we find in (1), i.e. the observation that the piece is difficult at first hearing, has to be listened to several times in order to be fully understood or even that only future audiences will be able to do so. But as the examples suggest, vaikeatajuinen remains by far the most prominent among the expressions that are used to describe the difficulty of the work: In 31 of the 86 texts in the corpus in which the work is described as ‘difficult to understand’ in the narrow sense (i.e. in 36% of the sub-group), this is expressed by vaikeatajuinen, while all close variations of the expression consisting of collocations of vaikea and instances of ‘understanding’ sum up to 28 (32.5%). (The remainder is allotted to ex negativo (‘not the easiest’, etc.) and more complex multi-word expressions). References to the alleged difficulty of the work do never fully disappear even as the symphony becomes widely known and thoroughly analysed. As (9) shows, even almost 100 years after the premiere, it is still being said (of an audience which by now must be widely familiar with the piece!) that ‘for many, it is the most enigmatic and difficult’ of Sibelius’ Symphonies.

Following the path of vaikeatajuinen through the unfolding discourse that gathered more and more material while the piece made its way into the concert repertoire, some observations can be made:

1. The derivational variations stem from the characteristics of Finnish morphology. But even though many morphological variations depend on verbal government and other grammatical rules, and thus are not directly subject to the respective authors’ choice, the chosen grammatical constructions themselves might also reflect earlier utterances.

2. The syntactic and grammatical patterns show several similarities; not surprisingly where authors reformulate their own earlier statements, but also in many other examples. (A thorough analysis of such constructional similarities had to be omitted here for lack of space.)

3. The lexeme appears most often in the superlative form in which Katila had introduced it. The comparative in (2) is only morphologically weaker; on a logical-semantic level, it contains the same information with slight hedging (Sibelius had written four symphonies at that time, of which the fourth is more difficult to understand than the previous three, hence it is the most difficult to understand). In (1), (4), and (8), elative constructions or other attenuations of the superlative are used; they could be regarded as hedging. In the examples above, the only clear exception from the superlative occurs in (7), where it would be semantically and grammatically inapplicable.

4. The surrounding construction is always impersonal, expressing personal detachment, but the collective source of evidentiality embedded in the reference to common knowledge strengthens the general claim and enforces the connection to the established discourse.

The Finnish language has available manifold options to encode impersonality and implicit or hidden subjectivity, not least in connection with epistemic judgments (e.g. Kangasniemi 1992, 126–9, 150–3). Expressions like on kieltämättä, monille, etc., imply that the authors themselves do not take an explicit personal stance concerning whether or not the symphony appears actually also difficult to understand for themselves while, at the same time, employing a face-saving hedging strategy of sympathising with listeners who may find the piece difficult. The impersonal construction can be traced back to Katila’s initial statement, which refers to the (entire) audience as the source of evidentiality for his difficulty assessment.

This group of findings points to the conclusion that a self-reproducing pattern has been established within the (Finnish) discourse and that not only the semantic content, but also much of the structure of said pattern stems from the earliest phase of the discourse, i.e. both the observation and the wording that Evert Katila used in his first extended review (Katila 1911). In a structural way, this pattern could be coded as the co-occurrence of any morphological variation of [vaikeatajuinen] with any marker of [impersonal]. Adapting the concept of an ‘interaction of words and constructions’, introduced by Stefanowitsch and Gries (2003), one might even speak of a ‘collostruction’ in a broader sense.

Remembering Busse’s idea that Grundfiguren also reflect the (pre-)history of a discourse, it can be observed that the use of vaikeatajuinen in collocation with music appears occasionally in the Finnish newspaper corpus already since the end of the nineteenth century. One of the earliest examples, with its collocation of difficulty and profundity, shows some similarities to (4):

(13) Brahms on vaikeatajuinen, sillä hänen säwelillä runoilemisensa on sywällistä ja mietiskelevää. [Brahms is difficult to understand, for his poetry in tones is deep and contemplative.] (J. F. 1897, 3).

The co-occurrence of the lexeme with Sibelius can occasionally be observed since the beginning of the twentieth century, and, at least once, the pattern described above appears already prior to the Fourth Symphony: “Sibeliuksen Sinfoniia [sic] N:o 2 D-duur oli ohjelman ensi osana. Hänen säveltuotteitensa yleisenä tunnusmerkkinä on tuo harvinainen omintakeisuus ja alkuperäisyys, josta syystä kuulee monenkin sanovan, että Sibeliuksen tuotteet ovat kauttaaltaan vaikeatajuisinta musiikkia. [Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 in D major was the first part of the programme. A common characteristic of his compositions is that rare individualism and originality, which is why one hears many people say that Sibelius’ products are throughout music most difficult to understand.]” (Wiipuri 1903, 3). The ‘collostruction’ of Sibelius + [vaikeatajuinen] + [impersonal] is thus older than the discourse on the 4th symphony, but it is only here where it, through persistent repetition, emerges into a characteristic discoursive pattern. With the appearance of this piece, the pattern becomes – not exclusively, but with a dominating frequency – linked to this specific work.

Asking the Foucaultian question – “how come that this utterance appeared and not another one instead” (Foucault 1969, 39) – we can collect possible reasons why the authors so prominently chose vaikeatajuinen to capture the difficulties in understanding the work. First of all, the simple fact has to be acknowledged that Evert Katila, one of the very few fully employed music critics in Finland around the turn of the century, was an influential writer, which might have motivated many less experienced colleagues to copy his wording because it seemed backed by authority through expertise – even more so as Katila repeated the notion it in some of his later reviews of the Fourth. The second factor is the semantic power of the lexeme, a concise monolexematic expression. Its framing encompasses the notion of ‘emotional understanding, sensing’, distinguishing it from a mere rational (expert) approach and thus especially directing itself at an audience not in command of such expertise, who could only rely on their sense (taju) if they wanted to grasp the piece. The derivations, which the Finnish morphology produces so smoothly, also show how the authors make use of the morphosemantical variative potential of the language.

A look at the broader cultural background reveals another, more complex but also maybe decisive factor. As mentioned earlier, vaikeatajuinen is a relational expression – it carries the implication that other music is easier to understand. Its antonym helppotajuinen, especially in the collocation helppotajuinen konsertti ‘easily understandable (popular) concert’, already appears frequently since the late 1870s. The term specifically indicated programmes that consisted of shorter, accessible pieces, but were written for full orchestra, so they should not be mixed up with Salonmusik (refer to Kurkela 2015 for an extended account of the function of those concerts as an educational project). Even on April 4, 1911, the day between the two concerts with Sibelius’ Fourth, the orchestra gave such a helppotajuinen konsertti where Robert Kajanus conducted some favourites of lighter Nordic orchestral music (including Sibelius’ Carelia ouverture). Thus, Katila’s choice of words also places Sibelius’ symphony in a context of specific cultural practices, where it must be understood beyond the simple meaning of ‘difficult’, and not necessarily within a predominantly negative framing. Of course, it first and foremost reflects the bafflement of an audience that was confronted with a musical language they could not possibly have been prepared for. (In 1911, even few professionals in Finland, much less the average concertgoer, had thorough first-hand knowledge of the continental modern music of that time, let alone the avant-garde in the strict sense like the Second Viennese School, so Sibelius’ symphony indeed might have been for many in the audience the most advanced music they had encountered so far.) But it also claims that this piece should by no means be confused with any of the lighter fare that Sibelius provided so generously.

Why this was so important to Katila and others is revealed when we take a look at a text by the German conductor and musicologist Georg Göhler that was published in 1908 and soon reprinted in Finnish (refer to the following sub-chapter for a more elaborate account). Göhler explicitly declared many of Sibelius’ smaller compositions as especially suitable for popular concerts and even recommended some of them to ambitious spa orchestras (Kurkapellen), while expressing concern about the composer devoting so much of his time to this kind of petty pieces (Göhler 1908, 266). This kind of greek gift appraisal might have produced a sourish smile on the faces of Finnish readers: Popular concerts, by all means – but Sibelius in a spa concert? So the insistence on the attribute vaikeatajuinen also serves to underline aesthetic sophistication. Even long after the cultural practice of the helppotajuinen konsertti had vanished in the mid-1920s, and the term helppotajuinen musiikki for ‘light music’ had been replaced by viihdemusiikki based on a survey among Finnish radio listeners in 1947 (Kolehmainen 2014, 152), its antonym remains in the discourse on Sibelius’ Fourth.

Yet, however unanimous the notion of difficulty might have been, there was a heckler in the audience who disturbed the consensus which Katila so confidently claimed: “Men var då symfonin så märkvärdigt obegriplig? Nej! Formen är, vid närmare studium, likväl klar och översiktlig, linjerna rena, den motiviska gestaltningen mästerlig och proportionen förträffligt avvägda. [But was the symphony so remarkably incomprehensible? No! Upon closer study, the form is clearly laid out, the lines pure, the motivic design masterful and the proportions exquisitely balanced.]” (Andersson 1911, 172–3). Andersson’s argumentation is backed by observations that can be reproduced by analysing the score, even though he bases his assumption on a leap of faith, for a detailed analysis of the thematic structure was only undertaken decades later (e.g. by Parmet 1955, 52–68 and Rydman 1963). It also seems logical that a work showing clarity in form and purity in lines should not be difficult to grasp. (Finnish reviewers, as could be seen in (17), rather chose the oxymoron that the work is difficult to understand despite its reduced workmanship, which leads to a second group of examples to be discussed in the following sub-chapter.) Though this dissenting vote carried quite some weight – Andersson was among the most competent and influential Finland‒Swedish music researchers of the time – it was rarely ever picked up and carried forward. The difficulty narrative soon became so overwhelming, in terms of numbers alone, that its discoursive power could not be seriously contested, and Andersson’s emphatic objection remained a minority report. This might lead to an important conclusion from the standpoint of discourse analysis as an analysis of power relations in communication processes: The fact that an assessment published in a leading journal by an influential and reputable author never managed to establish itself in the discourse illustrates how quantity and mass media coverage outweigh expertise. This might be a familiar phenomenon in other, e.g. political discourses, but as the example shows, communicative power plays a pivotal role in the shaping of an artwork’s image in a (bilingual) language community, too. It also hints at the assumption that Swedish, as the once dominating educated language in Finland, had lost much of its discoursive power.

4 Instances of ‘austerity’

A second notion that appears prominently since the first reviews of the work is the altogether austere character of the symphony. Differing from the first example, this semantic figure develops in a more varied way and initially takes shape from an ex negativo definition. Again, quotes from two of the earliest reviews which emphasise the difference between Sibelius’s style and the prevalent orchestral writing of the time, shall precede the analysis of later examples and be placed into a broader context. Katila writes: “Sibeliuksen 4:s sinfonia on sille täydellinen wastakohta. Se on musiikkia, josta on riisuttu kaikki ulkonaisen efektin tawoitteleminen, kaikki raaan luonnon wäkiwaltaisuus, kaikki koreilewaisuus ja satunnaisuus. [Sibelius’s Symphony No. 4 is the perfect opposite to this [scil. the superficial and boisterous music of the time]. It is music stripped of all outward effect, all the violence of raw nature, all ornamentation and randomness.]” (Katila 1911, 5).

Quite a similar wording is used by Otto Andersson, who invokes two continental-European composers notorious for the huge orchestras they employ and their brilliant instrumentation: “[…] att symfonin till det yttre bildar en fullständig motsatts till den utvecklade, med instrumentala massor verkande symfonimusik, som i Tyskland vunnit företrädare i en Mahler, en Strauss m. fl. [that the symphony is outwardly a complete antithesis to the developed symphonic music, working with instrumental masses, which in Germany has won representatives in a Mahler, a Strauss, and others.]” (Andersson 1911, 171).

Sibelius scholars have usually identified the composer himself, or his close friend Axel Carpelan, as the primary source for that statement. Indeed, there is an obvious similarity to Sibelius’ famous letter to Rosa Newmarch dated 2 May 1911 – “Meine neue Sinfonie ist eine [!] vollständige Protest gegen die Composition heutzutage. Nichts – absolut nichts vom Cirkus. [My new symphony is a complete protest against today’s compositions. Nothing – absolutely nothing of the circus.]” (Sibelius 2011, 130) – and to an article by Carpelan in a Swedish newspaper: “I sin helhet betraktad är symfonien en protest mot den musikalske stilriktning, som f. n. är den dominerande, framst i symfoniens egentliga hemland, Tyskland […]. [All in all, the symphony is a protest against the musical style which those days is the dominating one, above all in the actual homeland of the symphony, Germany]” (Carpelan 1911, 7).

But apart from the fact that this interpretation contradicts the chronology of the sources, since both of these were written after Katila’s and Andersson’s articles, the common source for all these utterances might be found elsewhere: In his article on Sibelius in Der Kunstwart, Georg Göhler positions the Finn as a counterpart to the allegedly superficial orchestral writing in Germany of that time, which was epitomised, so Göhler, by Richard Strauss (Göhler 1908, 262). (It should be noted that Göhler’s criticism does not extend to Gustav Mahler. But between Göhler’s article and Sibelius’ Fourth, the premiere of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony took place which, due to its huge line-up, became notorious as Symphony of the Thousand, and Finnish papers quoted several negative reviews of that event.) Göhler’s text, the first extensive appreciation of Sibelius’s music by a professional, non-Finnish author in a cultural journal outside Finland, was soon translated, with only minor omissions, in Säveletär (Göhler 1909), the only Finnish music journal of the time. But even before that, the daily paper Uusi Suometar printed an extended summary culminating in the quotation “Sellainen Straussin antipodi, wastakohta, on Jean Sibelius. [Such an antipode of Strauss, an opposite, is Jean Sibelius]” (Uusi Suometar 1908, 4). The impact of Göhler’s essay can be measured by the fact that it has been regarded as a ‘key cultural text’ that contributed to the shaping of the Finnish national self-image (Rautaoja 2018, 2020). (Rautaoja refers to a slightly shortened reprint of the translation in the Kalevalaseuran vuosikirja (1926) because it was only brought to his attention by myself that the text was already completely translated to Finnish in 1909 (Rautaoja 2023, 67), but the core of his conclusions seems nevertheless applicable.)

The collocation that places Sibelius on the opposite of Strauss and Mahler (with their luxurious, if exaggerated style of orchestral writing), as one representation of the austerity Grundfigur, thus was coined prior to the reception history of the Fourth Symphony, and it did not originate in Finland. The full pattern appears in Finnish a year after the work’s premiere:

Later, stripped of the names Strauss and Mahler, it becomes a commonplace of criticism in the generalised way in which Sibelius himself used it in his letter to Newmarch:

In the impersonal construction, we find both the underlining of a commonplace and a hidden subjectivity, hence when Katila writes that the described moderation ‘has been noticed’, it needs to be remembered that he himself most prominently pointed out this characteristic: The repetitive structures in the discourse can’t be separated from the role of the discourse actors who belonged to a very small and thus even more influential group of experts, where self-quotation and self-paraphrase were frequent phenomena.

The ex negativo description of austerity establishes itself and remains in the discourse up to the present:

In (16), the wording of the pattern is abridged, connecting the protest (vastalause) directly to (Sibelius’) circus-comparison while omitting the criticism of contemporary music in general or specific composers. This way, the anonymised opposition, introduced into the public discourse by Katila, is even more generalised, separating it entirely from the Zeitkritik topos and transforming it into a timeless aesthetic principle. The timeline, covering exactly a century from Göhler’s initial text towards Sirén’s condensed and abstract version, is a very comprehensive example of how a Grundfigur is shaped and sanded through repetition and variation. The core – a complex realisation of the austerity image – remains unchanged, but the concrete expression reaches a maximum level of abstraction. This, on the other hand, ensures its survival: While the counterposition of Sibelius against Strauss could be dismissed as biased and dictated by a temporal aesthetic conflict, the abstract version (backed by Sibelius’s own words) is rather impregnable: No concertgoer in search of sublime art would outspokenly admit to prefer ‘contrived circus tricks’ to a profound piece of music.

But there also appear monolexematic wordings of the notion with a less complex background, easier to understand for the average Finnish listener of the time who wouldn’t have had the chance to know Mahler’s Eighth, or Strauss’s symphonic poems that regularly use more than twice the line-up of what Finnish composers of the day ever dared to employ:

The spectrum of expressions that can be derived from these examples could be arranged in ascending metaphoricity. On the one end are the neutral yksinkertainen ‘simple’ (17, 19) and suppea ‘concise’ (18). Koristelematon ‘inornate’ (20) also could be regarded as rather neutral in the sense of a conventional special language metaphor, a Fachmetapher (Beile 1997, 244–51) – ornaments are typical elements of music composition, so there is no novel metaphorical content here. Several metaphors are taken from an economical semantic field (köyhä ‘poor’ (21), säästeliäs ‘sparing’ (19)). Hillity ‘restrained’ (19) points to the idea that the composer restrained himself, and askeettimainen ‘ascetic’ (20) is an enhancement of this imagination. Karu ʻbarrenʼ (17), finally, is a scenic metaphor. The timeline of examples (17) to (21) shows that this semantic spectrum is already widely developed about five years after the premiere, and the self-reproduction continues to a point where a five-membered isotopic chain like the following can appear, which is constructed almost entirely of grammatical structures and lexical fillers from the earlier discourse:

Among the most frequently used lexemes, when it came to encoding the idiosnycrasy of Sibelius’ orchestral style, is karu. It is usually connected to the description of a barren scenery or unfertile land (SSA 1992, s.v. karu); the conceptual metaphor in the background being THE SYMPHONY IS A LANDSCAPE. As the connection between the character of Finland’s nature and Sibelius’s music was already an established topos at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that we find a sentence like the following early in the corpus:

Sibelius’ ascetic style is thus linked to Finland as a country, and through this to an important thread of the Finnishness discourse, the image of an agricultural society that endures the hardships of the Northern climate. Kannisto (2007, especially 202–11) calls this construction a ‘patriotic waste land discourse’, referring to typical examples from Finnish nineteenth-century literature where the love for the barren fatherland is expressed as in this line: “Niin kallis kuinka olla voit, vain pettua kun leiväks soit! [How dear you still can be, though only you gave bark for bread!]” (Runeberg 1867, 7). It is poetry like this, from which the famous pettuleipäsinfonia ʻbarkbread symphonyʼ epithet for Sibelius’ Fourth originates, that first appeared in Swedish as barkbrödsymfoni (Diktonius 1931, 128), but soon entered the discourse in its more prominent Finnish version.

As these examples have shown, some core elements of the discourse partly stem from a strata of time before the premiere of the symphony. This applies especially to the realisation of the austerity figure, when employed in connection to the Sibelius‒Strauss counterposition, that can be traced back to Göhler’s article from 1908 which was immediately received in Finland. Yet, in a way, even Göhler’s argumentation topos might be read as but another instance of a much older naturalness versus artificiality opposition (refer to Scharloth 2005 for a detailed elaboration). This is in accordance with the observation that discourse can have a pre-history, or, to put it the other way around, that specific discourses may appear as realisations of very basic frameworks similar to what Busse calls Grundfiguren.

5 Results

6 Discussion

My article outlined a possible approach for a multi-layer analysis of two threads within a complex discourse in the form of a case study on a narrowed yet representative corpus segment under one special aspect. The application to a music-related discourse offers a rather new field of usage for an established linguistic procedure: By extracting two Grundfiguren, and showing how they are repeated and varied as the discourse unfolds, the analysis revealed how concrete utterances in a musical discourse on a specific topic can be traced back to a framework of conceptualisations that is, to use Wodak and Reisigl’s wording again, intertextually constituted and related to social and cultural practices.

As such, this is not a surprising result. Most probably any analysis of the discourse on a seminal musical work with a long and intense reception history would yield similar findings – e.g. Stumpfʼs (1996, 252–60), or Thim-Mabreyʼs (2001, 289–314), comparisons of reviews on identical pieces – and intertextual thematic reiteration is intrinsic to discourse, as topical analysis approaches such as Wengeler (2003) have shown. However, the deeper layers of discourse cannot be generalised; they are idiosyncratic to the cultural background of the discourse community. The analysis of discourse in Finnish language on a Finnish piece of music – where it can be assumed that all utterances are directed at a limited linguistic and cultural community (Mauranen 1993, 41) – thus reveals a specific setting of typically Finnish discourse elements, linguistic structures, and strategies. But by no means does this claim that there are no non-Finnish influences. The example of the proposed contrast between Sibelius and continental composers of his time shows that essential elements in the discourse can be traced back to sources that originated earlier and elsewhere, not surprisingly in Germany. This is characteristic of Finland, a ‘receiver-country’ (Knudsen and Rothstein 1994, 204) that developed stable structures of art music only as late as the end of the nineteenth century, mainly based on German models (Kurkela and Rantanen 2017). However, which elements are absorbed, and how they are adapted, integrated into the discourse, and developed through repetitive variation, uncovers the specifics of the analysed segment which can be identified as a part of a larger and idiosyncratic cultural construction.