Modal techniques in Sibelius’s op. 114

Abstract

Sibelius found a source of inspiration in the modality embedded in folk music.
His encounter with the singing of Pedri Shemeikka caused a veritable burst of
compositions based either on folk melodies, or more often on melodies of his own
making composed in the spirit of the music of Karealian singers and kantele
players; the melodic style of Finnish-Karelian folk music can be found everywhere
in his music. In addition to influencing melodic organization, modality pervades
Sibelius’s way of harmonizing his melodies. Sibelius invented some peculiar
harmonization procedures, sometimes mode-specific. The paper illustrates several
of these procedures in the Five Sketches for piano, op. 114, which belong to the
pieces where the composer developed a musical language in which the traditional
major-minor tonality is intermingled with the modes and new strategies of modal
organization.