8 was his final major compositional project, occupying him intermittently from the mid-1920s until around 1938, though he never published it. How much of the Eighth Symphony was completed is unknown; Sibelius repeatedly refused to release it for performance, though he continued to assert that he was working on it even after he had, according to later reports from his family, burned the score and associated material in 1945. The propriety of publicly performing music that Sibelius himself had rejected has also been questioned.