Carl nielsen is one of the most playful, life-affirming, and awkward voices in twentieth-century music. His work resists easy stylistic categorisation or containment, yet its melodic richness and harmonic vitality are immediately appealing and engaging. Nielsen's symphonies, concertos, and operas are an increasingly prominent feature of the international repertoire, and his songs remain perennially popular at home in Denmark. But his work has only rarely attracted sustained critical attention within the musicological community. The reasons for this relative critical neglect are complex. Access to primary source material has previously been limited to Danish-speaking scholars, although strenuous efforts have been made (by the Carl Nielsen Edition, for example) to disseminate research more widely. With the completion of the Edition in March 2009, it is possible for the first time to perform and analyse Carl Nielsen's work from reliable, scholarly editions, with accompanying notes and editorial addenda. A more serious obstacle to full critical appreciation of his work, however, perhaps lies in a wider unwillingness to engage with music which lies outside the mainstream modernist canon. Nielsen's perceived peripheralised position, as a Nordic composer working on the historical and stylistic cusp of a full-blown continental musical modernism, has reinforced his marginalisation from much writing on twentieth-century European music. Though many scholars have sought to dismantle such received models of historical musical development, and stress the contested, multivalent nature of musical modernisms (in their plurality), such fixed patterns of geographical thought remain remarkably resistant to change.