Jan Sibelius’s patriotic and stirring orchestral tone poem Finlandia was first performed in 1899 in Helsinki, at a time when Finland was an occupied territory of the Russian Empire.
Finlandia, which had to be performed under different names to avoid censorship, rapidly became the emerging nation’s unofficial national anthem, a focal point of feelings of identity and pride, which finally resulted in the creation of an independent Finland in 1919.
A Finnish cultural revolution
With a population of around 5.6 million (uncannily close to the 5.4 million of the Yorkshire region), this fiercely proud nation is now one of the most successful of European nations, despite the now terrifying threat of Putin’s Russia on its borders.
But Finland’s powerful sense of its own identity didn’t come from nowhere. Its roots lie deep in its language and literature, folk music and folklore, which had its most powerful and eloquent manifestation in the epic poem Kalevala (1849) written by the great Finnish poet and philologist Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884). The poem weaves together early medieval Finnish history, mythology, and legend with a powerful feeling of landscape and nature into a mighty poem which has helped to define the identity of all Finns, even those who have never read Kalevala.
By the late 19th century, when intellectuals in Finland were struggling to free Finland from Swedish and later Russian control, poetry, music, painting and even architecture became the driving force behind what was to be an unstoppable movement of national rediscovery and rebirth. A group of artists, writers, poets and musicians settled in villas on the shore of Lake Tuusula, an area close to Helsinki yet rich in inspiring natural beauty.
In 1896, Sibelius’s setting of extracts from Kalevala became one of his most powerful and forward-looking works, the Lemminkäinen Suite. Sadly, only one of its movements, ‘The Swan of Tuonela’, is regularly performed.
Music as a power to define and unite
Other nations owe much of their sense of nationhood to music. Giuseppe Verdi’s operas helped define and unite Italy as did, for good and for ill, Richard Wagner’s in Germany. Leoš Janáček helped create Czech identity, as did both Zoltán Kodály and Belá Bartók in Hungary.
Yet at this difficult and complex time of a loss of English identity, as the old post-imperial idea of Britain – without Ireland, Scotland and Wales – becomes increasingly irrelevant, how do we define England? For many people increasingly it is also about English regional identity, accepting that it was the rich mosaic of sub-kingdoms which, prior to the occupying Norman Conquest, formed a more federal idea of the English nation. Too often a deeply nostalgic version of southern England is presented in the media; gentle hills, thatched cottages and villages around greens being somehow quintessentially English. A long way from the tougher, more challenging landscapes of modern Cornwall, Cumbria, Northumberland, and even post-industrial Yorkshire.
Can music shape and create a regional as well as a national identity?
Edward Elgar’s music was inspired by Gloucestershire and the Malvern Hills. Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Wessex folk music themes interweave and penetrate much of his orchestral work, none more powerfully so than in the Tallis Fantasia or his deeply patriotic Fifth Symphony. Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes evoked the coast and seashore of East Anglia like no-one has before or since. Yet their Englishness is essentially that largely of the western or south-eastern English regions.
What about the hugely evocative and harsher landscape, history and heritage of the North of England, and Yorkshire in particular? Frederick Delius has his Northern Sketches, and the late Arthur Butterworth also has symphonic pieces inspired by the landscapes both of the Yorkshire Dales and Lake District.
Is there evidence of contemporary composers in any musical genre having the power to speak to the people in Yorkshire in the way that composers did in that so fertile, late-Romantic, nationalistic period, working with poets to help shape the modern world in which we live? Can music both shape a region and a nation?
The symphonies of the north
There is evidence that this just may in fact be about to happen. Yorkshire composer Ben Crick provided the glorious orchestral fanfares for RISE, the opening event of Bradford City of Culture 2025.
On 30 March in the Kings Hall in Ilkley, in what might be understood as a daring reinvention of the Sibelius tone poem, Crick will be presenting and conducting Soundscapes, three powerful music evocations of Yorkshire Dales landscapes: the moors, the caves, and the rivers (Crick is a keen walker and caver) all thematically linked. The orchestral score will be illustrated by large-screen images by Ben Crick and Richard Laurence. The concert – entitled Nature’s Symphony – will also include another work inspired by nature – Ludwig van Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.
A rousing win for Yorkshire pride
This summer, an even more significant event of music and words is to take place. It will be on Yorkshire Day, Friday 1 August, Yorkshire’s day of celebration, co-ordinated in a different Yorkshire town every year by the Yorkshire Society. This year it will also form, very appropriately, part of the first ever ‘ThriddingsFest’. This is being developed as a community-led Yorkshire version of the Welsh Eisteddfod.
On Yorkshire Day, Crick will join forces with Yorkshire poet, broadcaster, and raconteur, Ian MacMillan, the so-called ‘Bard of Barnsley’, to perform an astonishing celebration of Yorkshire’s energy and creativity – A Northern Score. This is an orchestral setting of 20 short poems by MacMillan about key Yorkshire folk, starting from Whitby poet Caedmon in the seventh century to boxing Olympian Nicola Adams, and including such varied and amazing people from Yorkshire as Richard III, Emily Brontë, Henry Moore, Winfred Holtby, Fred Trueman and Betty Boothroyd.
Music of renewal and revival
Crick’s thrilling score – which at its premiere in Skipton in November had the audience on its feet and cheering – is to be performed by another iconic piece of Yorkshire cultural history, the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra (YSO). Founded in Leeds in 1949 under the conductorship of Maurice Miles and later the renowned Norman del Mar, during the early 1950s the YSO championed British music, performing at the Royal Festival Hall and on national radio. But in 1955, funding – almost entirely from within the region – ran out and the orchestra was forced to disband.
Then in 2021, immediately after the disaster of Covid-19 which so harmed professional musicians in our region, it was revived by Crick together with Leeds concert promoter James Hudson and key supporters Ann and Clair Challenor-Chadwick. Recent performances have included the MozartRequiem Mass and a Yorkshire dialect version of Gioachino Rossini’s Barber of Seville [Ed: I saw this, and it was amazing!].
Lönnrot and Sibelius’s shoes are huge ones to fill for MacMillan, Crick and other Yorkshire poets, composers and performers. But what an exciting challenge, as we enter a period of potentially epoch-defining national and international change.
