Sibelius Symphony 8 excerpts??????

[Doug McDonald]

Has anyone noticed this?

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Is+this+the+sound+of+Sibeliuss+lost+Eighth+Symphony/1135269867060

which (near bottom, "video") has a link which purports to be 3 minutes of excerpts
from the 8th Symphony of Sibelius. They sound promising.

Doug McDonald

[Curlytop]

Doug McDonald set the following eddies spiralling through the space-time
continuum:

I've got my doubts. Untitled sketches that lead nowhere could just as soon
be discarded fragments that would not make it into the finished work, be
that Symphony No. 8 or any other.

Taking up a couple of lines from the article:

> One page does admittedly bear the words “Sinfonia VIII commincio”,
> suggesting the beginning of the work, but the reverse of the sheet
> of music paper contains nothing more than a sketch for a few bars
> of orchestral music.
A discarded fragment, the reverse of which was put to use as a hopelessly
optimistic title page.

> Another page contains drafts for the Seventh Symphony and
> the cryptic “VIII” attached to a particular fragment of melody.
I see this as shorthand for "This won't fit anywhere in the Seventh
Symphony - leave it for if/when I write the Eighth".

Why are we so obsessed with what might have been written and then scrapped
during the long "silence of Järvenpää" yet nobody wonders what might have
been written and scrapped during the contemporary "silence of New York" of
Charles Ives. Both Sibelius and Ives wrote no new major works during this
time, but did manage some revising of earlier compositions.

Indeed Ives' "Universe Symphony" and "Emerson Concerto" (named after Ralph
Waldo rather than Keith of course) are extant to a far greater extent than
Sibelius' 8th - if indeed anything of the latter is extant at all.
Shouldn't the fragments of the two Ives works be promoted first?
--
ξ: ) Proud to be curly

Interchange the alphabetic letter groups to reply

[Curlytop]

Doug McDonald set the following eddies spiralling through the space-time
continuum:

Update: I have now followed up the video link and listened to the three
fragments. Here are my immediate impressions:

Only the first piece really seems to be something new, yet it is not so
dissonant as the article would suggest, simply two melodic lines (horns on
the one hand, upper woodwinds on the other) moving against each other.

The second fragment, the one that lasts just a few seconds, seems to be a
discarded line from a piece in "The Tempest".

The third fragment initially suggested a much earlier period in Sibelius'
career, the pizzicato strings immediately suggesting the slow movement of
the 2nd. symphony. I was thinking to myself that it would not be out of
place if interpolated into this movement...

...then a thought struck me - was Sibelius writing in something of
a "pastoral" vein, aiming for a symphony to dedicate to Ralph Vaughan
Williams in return for RVW dedicating his own 5th symphony to
Sibelius "without his permission"? The first and third fragments would seem
to back up this idea. Opinions anybody?

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jan 15, 12:10 pm, Curlytop <pvstownsend.zyx....@ntlworld.com>
wrote:

> Doug McDonald set the following eddies spiralling through the space-time
> continuum:
>
> > Has anyone noticed this?
>

> http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Is+this+the+sound+of+Sibeliuss+lost+...

Both works have received considerable attention from the Ives
community. The Emerson Concerto is on a Naxos disk (I don't remember
whether it's our former own D. G. Porter's edition), and at least
chunks of Universe are also.

(D. G. was supposed to be at a major Juilliard event some years ago,
which presented most of the orchestral works, when I chatted with some
of the other biggies, and they told me he had fallen ill. It was about
that time that he ceased posting here.)