Nature Of The Symphony

This paper tries to explore Sibelius'musical composing characteristics in the realm of symphony by analyzing his Symphony No.4 in A minor, which is a musical work with typical Sibelius'view of esthetics and composition.In the late 19th and the early 20th Century there was a composer named Sibelius, who was called"Beethoven of the 20th Century", in a Northern European country, Finland. His musical composition almost covers all the domains of musical subjects among which symphony composition is extremely spiritual. His works of symphony are rich in content: the themes are sometimes grieving and sometimes bold and unconstrained; the harmonies are full of passion and tension; and so forth. These arouse our great interest in symphony.Sibelius'symphony composition indicates diversified tendency, characterized by its vivid romantic musical style and the composing principle coming from classical view of esthetics. Simultaneously it is influenced by the simplification esthetics prevailing in the early 20th century. These all help to make his musical works present the characteristics of concise, unitive and full of logic.This paper mainly consists of two sections:I. The author gives a brief introduction to Sibelius and his seven compositions of symphony.II. In this section, the author thoroughly dissertates Sibelius'musical composing characteristics through the analysis of his Symphony No.4 in A minor. The author conducted the research in different aspects of symphony structure, theme, instrumentation and harmony, etc., summarizing the individual, particular and creative style of symphony composition showed in the course of composing his seven works of symphony.The author hopes to explore Sibelius'musical composing characteristics in the course of symphony composition by analyzing his Symphonies and also to conduct an elementary probe on the musical style and composition characteristics of Northern European national music school in the late 19th and the early 20th Century.