Air blows through the music of Sibelius, quickens even the slightest of his compositions. There are certain of his songs, certain of his orchestral sketches, that would be virtueless enough were it not for the windy freshness that pervades them. Out of all his works, even out of the most commonplace, there proceeds a far and resonant space. Songs like "To the Evening," "Call," "Autumn Sundown," whatever their ultimate musical value, seem actually informed by the northern evening, seem to include within their very substance the watery tints of the sky, the naive fragrance of forests and meadows, the tintinnabulation drifting through the still air of sunset. It is as though Sibelius were so sensible to the quality of his native earth that he knows precisely in what black and massive chords of the piano, say, lie the silence of rocks and clouds, precisely what manner of resistance between chant and piano can make human song ring as in the open. But it is in his orchestral works, for he is determined an orchestral writer, that he has fixed it most successfully. There has been no composer, not Brahms in his German forest, nor Rameau amid the poplars of his silver France, not Borodin on his steppes, nor Moussorgsky in his snow-covered fields under the threatening skies, whose music gives back the colors and forms and odors of his native land more persistently. The orchestral compositions of Sibelius seem to have passed over black torrents and desolate moorlands, through pallid sunlight and grim primeval forests, and become drenched with them. The instrumentation is all wet grays and blacks, relieved only by bits of brightness wan and elusive as the northern summer, frostily green as the polar lights. The works are full of the gnawing of bassoons and the bleakness of the English horn, full of shattering trombones and screaming violins, full of the sinister rolling of drums, the menacing reverberation of cymbals, the icy glittering of harps. The musical ideas of those of the compositions that are finely realized recall the ruggedness and hardiness and starkness of things that persist in the Finnish winter. The rhythms seem to approach the wild, unnumbered rhythms of the forest and the wind and the nickering sunlight. Music has forever been a movement "up to nature," and Schoenberg's motto is but the precision of a motive that has governed all composers. But Sibelius has written music that seems to come as the very answer to the call, and to be the North indeed.