The Sixth International Jean Sibelius Conference will take place in at Verkatehdas in Hämeenlinna, Finland, from 4th to 8th December 2015.
The conference will gather eminent scholars from all over the world with a wide variety of presentations on many different aspects of Sibelius’s life and music.
The presentations, which will take place in two parallel sessions throughout, will be as follows:
- James Hepokoski: Early Sibelius, Primitivist-Modernism, ‘News of War’
- Les Black: Dorian Departure
- Aare Tool: Jean Sibelius and the Modes of Limited Transposition
- Benedict Taylor: Monotonality and Scalar Modulation in Sibelius’s Tapiola
- Philip Ross Bullock: Sibelius Reception in Britain, 1901–1939: Centre Periphery in the Musical Construction of the North
- Laura Gray: The Tipping Point and the Rise of the Sibelius Cult in England
- Helena Tyrväinen: Sibelius and the French Press in the 1920s: Initiatives, Mediators and Interpretations
- Edward Clark: Sibelius and contemporary composers
- Martti Laitinen: Why Kajanus went to St Petersburg
- Vesa Kurkela and Olli Heikkinen: Sibelius as popular composer: Music by Sibelius in Kajanus’s popular concerts
- Vesa Sirén: (topic to be determined)
- Kaarina Kilpiö: Soundtrack for ‘The New Military Branch’. Jean Sibelius’s music in Finnish propaganda films during World War II
- Charris Efthimiou: On the instrumentation of bass and melody line in Jean Sibelius’s early symphonic poems (1892–1894)
- Pekka Helasvuo: The formation of the mode of expression of dynamic and articulation markings in the notation of Jean Sibelius
- Juhani Alesaro: Analyzing Sibelius’s Satz
- Barry Wiener: Dahlhaus’s Paradigm and Sibelius Reception
- Ferruccio Tammaro: War-Symphonies and Peace-Symphonies: Sibelius’s Fifth
- Antonin Servière: Reflecting Sibelius’s Legacy in Today’s Composer’s Mind
- Nors S. Josephson: Sibelius at the Crossroads: Old Paths Leading To New Creative Departures in His Second Symphony (1901–1902)
- Sakari Ylivuori: From a Bon vivant to a War Hero – The Narrative Structure of Sandels (Op. 28)
- Lauri Suurpää: Unconfirmed Pastoral and Denial of Threat in the Slow Movement of Sibelius’s First Symphony
- Olli Väisälä: Sibelius’s Revision of the First Movement of the Violin Concerto: Strengthening Tonal Structure while Removing Tonal Clichés
- Kimmo Sarje: Sibelius and the Modern
- Ron Weidberg: Sibelius and Schoenberg
- Daniel Grimley: ‘I sing another song’: Sibelius, Hofmannsthal and the Subjectivities
of Jedermann - Ilkka Oramo: Sibelius’s Eighth Symphony – fact and fiction
- Marc Vignal: Sibelius and Mahler
- Jorma Daniel Lünenbürger: Jean Sibelius and the Cello
- Tuija Wicklund: Sibelius and Böcklin
- Anna Pulkkis: Sibelius’s Loulou Andantino – a Souvenir Composition with a Mystery
- Timo Virtanen: Sibelius’s Sketches for the Violin Concerto
- Gustav Djupsjöbacka: There are several ways of putting it
- Carola Finkel: The metamorphoses of Svartsjukans nätter
- Sanna Iitti: The Representation of Emotions in the songs Våren flyktar hastigt and Svarta rosor
- Leah Broad: Forests, Fires, and Factories: Sibelius and the Mechanical
- Eero Tarasti: How Sibelius Became Sibelius – Observations and Notes on the Emergence of His Style
- Tim Howell: Jean Sibelius: Progressive or Modernist?
- Tim Jackson: ‘The Company You Keep’: Recipients of the Honorary Doctorates from the 1936 Heidelberg Celebration – Sibelius and Those Honoured Alongside Him
- Mart Humal: Sibelius’s Incidental Music for The Tempest: Ariel’s Five Songs as a Cycle
- Veijo Murtomäki: Did Sibelius mean (some of) his miniature opuses to be taken as suites?
- Andrew Barnett: The BIS Sibelius Edition
- Benjamin T. Hilger: Sibelius’s Second Symphony Recordings – Tendencies of conducting within history
Among numerous live music performances that will take place during the conference is a concert by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu, featuring the winner of the Eleventh International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition. The works to be performed are Tapiola, the Violin Concerto and Symphony No. 2. To check ticket availability for the concert: click here.
On the organizing committee of the conference are Erkki Korhonen (chairman), Andrew Barnett, Anna Krohn, Veijo Murtomäki, Eero Tarasti and Timo Virtanen.
Impressive list of presentations at the Sixth International Sibelius Conference in Finland, December 4th to 8th, 2015. I am pleased to see a contribution by Andrew Barnett on the superb BIS Sibelius Edition. I also note that Professor Timothy Jackson, musicologist at the University of North Texas will present a paper ‘The company you keep’: Recipients of the Honorary Doctorates from the 1936 Heidelberg Celebration–Sibelius and Those Honoured Alongside Him. I hope that this will not be another claim of Sibelius’s links to the Third Reich. It must be remembered that Professor Jackson wrote a series of essays in 2010 in which he claimed that Sibelius was an active supporter of Nazism. This claim was in my opinion completely wrong.