Sibelius memorial

Today is a national holiday, "Midsummer Day," so virtually everything is closed. Even the busses and trams stopped running until 11 am today. Colleagues at the aesthetics conference said the traditional celebration involves retreating to country houses on the lakes to celebrate the longest day of the year. I don't know if that's where everybody went, but the city of Helsinki is deserted, except for tourists.

When the busses started up, I took the #24 northwest to see the Sibelius Memorial. Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) is the country's most famous composer. The memorial by Eila Hiltunen, consisting of 600 stainless-steel tubes, was completed in 1967, after four years of work.

Some think it is reminiscent of the slender white birch trees in the country. Others think it looks like the pipes of an organ (an instrument for which Sibelius never composed).

Reportedly, there was such an outcry over the design that a separate bust of Sibelius was commissioned and installed near the Memorial. I'm not sure this helps much.

I am reminded of the outcry over the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, which led to the installation of traditional statues of three soldiers adjacent to the much more powerful Memorial. Although the soldiers were of different races, they were all male, which led to another outcry - and the installation of statues representing female nurses who also died in Vietnam. Personally, I think these representational add-ons reflect a sad narrow-mindedness about the original works in both countries.

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