In the midst of his early compositional career, Sibelius expressed an acute awareness of the crisis in tonality when he declared that ‘our modern tonality is shaky’. In his only public lecture, entitled ‘Some Viewpoints Concerning Folk Music and Its Influence on the Musical Arts’ (1896), he proclaimed that art-music cannot be revived ‘by building […] a [new] tonal system – it must be found living within the folk tune’. This rare moment of theoretical explication came during Finland’s ‘national awakening’, when the Finnish-language mythology of The Kalevala, and the huge body of folksong that it was drawn from (runolaulu), were of inspiration to Sibelius and his contemporary Finns. According to the lecture, the tonal system of the oldest Finnish folksong ‘lacks both tonic and dominant’. Yet it was during his compositional education in Vienna and Berlin, where he studied traditional harmony and counterpoint in the early 1890s, that Sibelius rediscovered the musicality of the Finnish national epic.

Sibelius’s Op. 17 (1891–1904) collects together seven short songs written either side of his lecture, in Vienna, Helsinki, and between trips to Karelia to collect folk music. These songs are, therefore, a fitting focus for an exploration of his understanding of tonality and form in his early career. In his Finnish-language songs, drones and static Kopftons are suspended between the ‘non-functional parallel-moving chords’ (Veijo Murtomäki, 2010) that harmonize the gradually changing runo-inspired melodies. Using voice-leading analysis, this poster will argue that although Sibelius’s ‘early modernist’ approach to tonality was intimately bound up with the formation of a national and musical identity in Finland, his voice-leading and diatonic cadential syntax was as equally, and sometimes antithetically, informed by his Austro-Germanic education.