Except for one reason, it should be unnecessary at this time to have to break a lance for Sibelius. The one reason, however, is that the North American academic music community, by and large, has appeared to be reluctant to take Sibelius seriously. Perhaps the basis of this reluctance is suspicion: there must be “something wrong” with a composer whose music enjoys a considerable popular following and yet does not seem to belong to any mainstream twentieth-century modernism. The assumption lurking here, perhaps, is that its underlying compositional ideas must be naive. We may disregard this careless kind of polemic, however, and merely note that as critical attitudes change, a number of musicians have begun to study Sibelius's music in light of Schenker's approach which, of course, provides a means of studying the music and of considering the underlying compositional ideas very carefully indeed. To the extent that any analytical approach can presume to make judgments as to artistic value, surely a Schenkerian study can suggest how Sibelius, as a great composer, came from the tradition of the great masters and has become part of that tradition, having enriched it with his own individual voice.

Let us first consider some aspects of that individual voice, in terms of certain traditional compositional techniques which we recognize as adapted and modified by Sibelius.