Jay

“Above all, Sibelius's music concerns itself with the relationship between a melancholic yet ebullient mind and the wider world outside it; with the function of emotions, the imagination and the intellect in human life; with how art can survey, scrutinize and give meaning to the strangeness of existence.

“Frequently, therefore, not only do the abstract and the programmatic coalesce in Sibelius; the elemental - fire, earth, air, water - are also attached to the psychological. Nature painting in his music is never mere sonic landscaping but a penetrating examination of human mental processes, as well as insecurity and instability. The dark forests of Tapiola (1926) are the gloomy forests of the mind; the harsh, stark landscapes of the Fourth Symphony (1911) are soundscapes of spiritual, cerebral and ecological anguish; the erotic thrills and dangerous liaisons of Kullervo (1892), Lemminkäinen (1896), and the First Symphony (1899) serve as prophetic warnings not just about psychosexual licentiousness but environmental debauchery too.

“In his extraordinary symphonies and tone poems, Sibelius explores the stimulating forces and shadowy agencies lurking behind the locked doors of nature, the dense layers of myth and the misty windows of the soul. His is a captivating and increasingly pertinent musical mind we would do well to heed.”
― David Vernon, Sun Forest Lake: The Symphonies & Tone Poems of Jean Sibelius

“We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbour to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model of thinking man than the most primitive pigmy or the most vicious sadist.

Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near to us. This is why the experience of someone who has lived for days during which man was merely a thing in the eyes of man is non-human. We three were for the most part immune from it, and we owe each other mutual gratitude. This is why my friendship with Charles will prove lasting.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“The remote worship of a woman throned out of their reach plays a great part in men's lives, but in most cases the worshipper longs for some queenly recognition, some approving sign by which his soul's sovereign may cheer him without descending from her high place.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch