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Sibelius was a composer of classical music, and "Sibelian" is an adjective meaning "resembling the music of Sibelius", i.e. high and noble sounding, slightly pompous with a bit of a sense of humour, hinting at great, emotional themes but somehow never really settling on any of them, always drifting and wibbling about and really letting rip until near the very end of the performance, if at all. He was notable for developing very traditional sounding themes in small 3 or 4 note cells and letting them expand organically in a very non-traditional way. What all this adds up to is music that sounds like the twiddly bits in between the interesting, pretty bits in Tchaikovsky all taken out and strung together. His stuff's very drifty and emotional, veering without much warning from bombastic to ethereal and back slowly, with minimal cues. It all flows beautifully but often leaves you the feeling that nothing in particular was *meant* by it other than the flowingness itself. He's most often compared to Wagner and Mahler, the other composers with "beautiful five minute sequences buried in hours of dullness" (not sure where that quote comes from).
Sibelius is also noted for having said: "Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic."
And also, I was going to write a novel (which I probably won't do now) about a bunch of AIs that lived in space and behaved a bit like the Spacing Guild in Dune, except not as nasty. They're all supposed to be very bright and made completely out of forcefields generated by machinery that's also made of forcefields, begun from matter and detaching themselves and floating off into space like soap-bubbles on the surface of space-time, all drifty and not terribly interested in anything. They're called Doormakers. They come in chapters like "The Glib Trip" and "The Senescent Contour" and one of the characters was to be "Sibelian Drift", and he was a 14,000 year old, dragonflyish mass of interlocking spacetime folds leaning on each other (which is bollocks, so let's pretend that what these beasts *really* are is something outside the spacetime manifold that these forcefields are being, um, projected into, propping them up) perpetually blue-shifting, 22 kilometers across and looking angular and beautiful. I've got pictures of him somewhere. He was a bit like Dr Manhattan with a dry sense of humour. He was from a Doormaker chapter called the "Sibelium" and they all looked a bit like him, big, glassy, angular and they all had names like "Sibelian Dawn" or "Sibelian Sky" and they were all terribly respectable and were among the most "blue-chip" of the chapters. They were up themselves, basically. They were a *lot* like Culture Minds, in fact they were so much like Culture Minds there didn't seem to be a great deal of point in writing anyhing about them, in the end.
And so, I've been using "Sibelian" as a username online for ages. It used to feel sort of appropriate. Mostly when I post online I just throw down what I think without any analysis with the feeling that I don't really know what I'm doing and I don't much care what anyone else thinks if it.
Hm. This may not be a good thing. |
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