y the most magistral theorist
of the day. The fact that he could write at the head of his treatise on
harmony, "What I have here set down I have learned from my pupils,"
independently proves him a great teacher. It is probable that his later
music, the music of his puzzling "third period," will shortly come to be
considered as simply a part of his unique course of instruction.

Sibelius

Others have brought the North into houses, and there transmuted it to
music. And their art is dependent on the shelter, and removed from it,
dwindles. But Sibelius has written music innocent of roof and inclosure,
music proper indeed to the vasty open, the Finnish heaven under which it
grew. And could we but carry it out into the northern day, we would find
it undiminished, vivid with all its life. For it is blood-brother to the
wind and the silence, to the lowering cliffs and the spray, to the harsh
crying of sea-birds and the breath of the fog, and, set amid them, would
wax, and take new strength from the strengths of its kin.

Air blows through the music of Sibelius, quickens even the slightest of
his compositions. There are certain of his songs, certain of his
orchestral sketches, that would be virtueless enough were it not for the
windy freshness that pervades them. Out of all his works, even out of
the most commonplace, there proceeds a far and resonant space. Songs
like "To the Evening," "Call," "Autumn Sundown," whatever their ultimate
musical value, seem actually informed by the northern evening, seem to
include within their very substance the watery tints of the sky, the
naive fragrance of forests and meadows, the tintinnabulation drifting
through the still air of sunset. It is as though Sibelius were so
sensible to the quality of his native earth that he knows precisely in
what black and massive chords of the piano, say, lie the silence of
rocks and clouds, precisely what manner of resistance between chant and
piano can make human song ring as in the open. But it is in his
orchestral works, for he is determined an orchestral writer, that he has
fixed it most successfully. There has been no composer, not Brahms in
his German forest, nor Rameau amid the poplars of his silver France, not
Borodin on his steppes, nor Moussorgsky in his snow-covered fields under
the threatening skies, whose music gives back the colors and forms and
odors of his native land more persistently. The orchestral compositions
of Sibelius seem to