Years ago, I used to bike this trail with my band director friends. There were no caches, that I knew of. But, lo and behold a few years later, I learned about geocaching. Voila, caches.
Now, years later, I have found several sets of caches along this bike trail. Now, they are mostly gone and Guardrail10 and I are replenishing them. He has a few series and I have a few series along the trail. This bunch is dedicated to Sibelius.
Sibelius
His music is steeped in the myths and the natural marvels of his homeland and helped articulate the struggle for Finnish independence, but it is his seven symphonies that confirmed his place as one of the most original symphonic composers since Beethoven
Few composers dominate their country’s music more completely than Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). His emergence as a composer of international stature in the first decades of the 20th century went hand in hand with Finland’s struggle for self-determination and independence. If, in the decades after his death, his music was dismissed as conservative, he is now accepted as one of the greatest and most original symphonic composers since Beethoven.
The music you might recognise
The short tone poem Finland Awakens, renamed Finlandia after its first performance in 1899, quickly became the symbol of the Finnish struggle for nationhood and remains Sibelius’s best-known work.
The hymn with which it ends has also served as the basis of a Christian hymn, Be Still, My Soul – you might have also spotted it on the soundtrack of Die Hard 2: Die Harder, directed by the Finn, Renny Harlin.
The intermezzo from the 1893 Karelia Suite was the signature tune for ITV’s current affairs programme This Week, which ran from from 1956 to 1978, while At the Castle Gates, from Sibelius’s incidental music to Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas and Mélisande, continues to introduce the BBC’s The Sky at Night, as it has since 1957. And, 1980s teenagers have Strawberry Switchblade’s hit Since Yesterday to thank for introducing them to the famous main theme of the finale of the Fifth Symphony.
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While the Fifth had already started to veer away from the sonata form, the Sixth, conducted by the composer at its premiere in February 1923, is even further removed from the traditional norms. Tawaststjerna comments that "the [finale's] structure follows no familiar pattern". Composed in the Dorian mode, it draws on some of the themes developed while Sibelius was working on the Fifth as well as from material intended for a lyrical violin concerto. Now taking a purified approach, Sibelius sought to offer "spring water" rather than cocktails, making use of lighter flutes and strings rather than the heavy brass of the Fifth.
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