Featured Book: The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross (continued)

Copy at Case Memorial Library
Mr. Ross writes in Chapter 5, "Apparition from the Woods": "The [Sibelius] Fifth begins and ends in crystalline major-key tonality, but it is an unconventional and staggeringly original work. The schemata of sonata form dissolve before the listener's ears; in place of a methodical development of well-defined themes there is a gradual, incremental evolution of material through trancelike repetitions. The musicologist James Hepokoski, in a monograph on the symphony, calls it 'rotational form'; the principal ideas of the work come around again and again, each time transformed in ways both small and large. The themes really assume their true shape only at the end of the rotation — what Hepokoski calls the telos. … Music becomes a search for meaning within an open-ended structure — a microcosm of the spiritual life. At the beginning of the Fifth, the horns present a softly glowing theme, the first notes of which spell out a symmetrical, butterfly-like set of intervals. … Sibelius's key is heroic E-flat major, but the melody turns out to be a rather flighty thing, never quite touching the ground. …" (pp. 166-168).