The broad, serene melody that emerges near the end of Sibelius’s Finlandia sounds like a song the people of a country have always known. Yet its journey followed the opposite direction: it was written for orchestra and only later acquired words and a choral life. A work of art music became a collective symbol; a new melody began to be heard as heritage. [1] Within this transformation lies one of the most important questions in music history: how does sound acquire a national identity? A composer’s origins, a dance rhythm, the language of a song, and the audience’s emotional response can all contribute to the answer, though each does so in a different way. A work’s identity takes shape where composition meets what people recognize, expect, and remember through it. National Schools offer an especially revealing field in which to observe this encounter. Focusing on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe, their history shows how local traditions became materi...