August Concerts 2020

New week, new project! Was great to take four days off and just enjoy the Finnish archipelago! 😎🌸Now looking forward to be working on a new orchestra piece for the first time since over two years! Oh, and August is soon here with four super exciting concerts including my music!

•7.8.2020 World Premiere of my new 20 minute Quintet “Helene - Nuances from the Life of Helene Schjerfbeck” at the superb Kokonainen Festival

•9.8.2020 World Premiere of my new 20 minute song cycle “Framtidens skugga” for Monica Groop at her festival Pellinge Musikdagar Pellingin Musiikkipäivät

•25.8.2020 My 30 minute “Requiem for our Earth” for choir, tape, light and video projection will be performed at this years UNM Tampere 2020: Music Ecology Festival in Tampere, being one of the representatives for Finland

•29.8.2020 My first and second Piano Quintets “Minna - Pictures from the Life of Minna Canth” and “Aino - Emotions from the Life of Aino Sibelius” will be performed at Tallinn Music Week 2020 by the amazing group TampereRaw .

Fingers crossed that Covid19 doesn’t come and postpones all the fun once again!

Autumn 2015

January 5th 2016. After a hectic spring and summer 2016 I have tried to do some downshifting and this laid back autumn has been exactly what I needed! 

So what have I been up to? I decided to take a gap-year from Malmö Academy of Music, because I couldn’t cope anymore with studying two degrees in two countries (a bachelor of piano in Finland and Masters in composition in Sweden). So this autumn I have pursued  my piano pedagogue degree in Tampere University of Applied Sciences while living in Helsinki at my parents place (for saving on living costs) and working on my freelance composition work. This autumn I have been working on my orchestra piece Unborn (2012-2015) that will be premiered by Jyväskylä Sinfonia on the 13th of January 2016 and also composing a melodrama commissioned by John Storgårds for the festival Sång och musikfesten 2016 to be premiered on the 11th of June 2016 in Kokkola. 

In the beginning of the autumn I also produced one concert for the festival Ung Nordisk Musik together with my friend and composer Dante Thelestam. And in November I was 12 days in Malmö for taking part of and helping to organise the contemporary music festival “Connect 2015 - The Apocalypse” organised by the composition department of Malmö Academy of Music. So I have been more or less in one place the whole autumn, which has been a really nice and welcome change. More over I have begun to sleep about 8h per night, which has correlated with feeling better and being a bit less ill, but also is a part reason to less blog posts.

Hoping to write more about all the events in separate blog posts, so once again being positive (or maybe just unrealistic?) about being back soon with my next post!

University of Gothenburg - Academy of Music and Drama

Saturday the 8^th of March, international woman’s day. This morning I also googled up the Academy of Music and Drama, and noticed that they also had a contemporary music festival named “Sirenfestivalen” which began today! The first concert started at 3PM, but luckily I was early, because there was an unofficial “meet the composers” happening before the concert which apparently had begun at 2 PM, but at least I heard the last 20 minutes of it.

The concert was organized by the society “Levande musik”, which seems to work a bit similar to the Finnish organisation “Korvat Auki-Open Ears”, except that it is not national and only is active in Gothenburg. In the concert five composers, three of them master students at Gothenburg Academy and the other two were graduates from the Academy, were played by professionals, by the trio Tchirkov-Josel-Veale. The peculiar trio Tchirkov-Josel-Veale consists of: the oboe, played by Peter Veale (from New Zeland but now working in Germany), the guitarist Seth Josel (from New York, now living in Berlin) and the accordion player Sergej Tchirkov (from St.Petersburg and still working mainly in Russia). A few of the pieces in the concert were conducted by Gunno Palmquist.

The program was:

Sebastian Ingvarsson (1989): The House is Black

Max Wainwright (1987): Six States

Axel Rudebeck (1978): Tyngd, lätthet, lätthet

Adam Skogvard (1980): Komposition nr.8

Esaias Järnegard (1983): Y

Because the opinion (at least my one) about music is formed by in which context you hear it, I always find it very hard to say anything about things I only have heard once. But what most strongly stayed in my mind was Max Wainwrights piece. He told me that he usually only writes for electronics and rarely for instruments nowadays, so this sounded like an electronic experiment of gliding sinus waves but on real instruments. At one point the oboist took out his mouthpiece from the oboe, took out a second mouthpiece and began blowing both the double reeds simultaneously. With the air pressure he managed to get rising and sinking sounds and effects while the accordion the whole time played a high accord almost in the same pitch. (Max told me he had originally planned it the other way, that the accordion was supposed to bend while the oboe stayed on one note, but it didn’t work at all so the musicians tried and suggested this solution, which sounded very similar to Max original idea.)

I happened to sit beside the man who had lead the discussion before the concert so I asked him if he happened to be the teacher at the Academy. And right I was, it was professor Ming Tsao. I introduced my self and told him that I’m a Finnish composer and he at once replied, “Yes I know, I just read your application the other day and we were all very impressed with it”. I asked Tsao if it would be possible for me to write an opera as a masters project, which he said should be fine. He said it is also possible to chose other projects, such as writing for the Stockholm Symphonic Wind Orchestra, for other orchestras etc, but that if I would want to have a whole opera performed it would be possible if I would look for my own musicians etc with help of the teachers. Tsao also introduced me to the professor of electronics Palle Dahlstedt.

Moreover I talked to the students Max Wainwright (who knew many of my Finnish composer friends once again through UNM) and Kajsa Magnarsson (who knew my composer friend Dante Thelestam from a summer course in Lithuania).

There are about 3-4 composition students in every year, and about 40% of them are women (although this concert happened to be very man dominated even though it was the international women’s day). The building of the Academy is very nice and has a friendly but pompous (in an artistic way) feeling about it. It actually reminds me a lot about Waldorf schools, because it had as good as no 90° angles, a lot of natural materials such as wood and stone and had big windows and with a lot of light coming in, and the building was located beside a green park. Funny to imagine that this might be my university next year…. Or Malmö, or Tallinn or Helsinki or Berlin!

Copenhagen

Thursday March 6th. This morning stared splendidly; when I walked in to the interview at 9AM professor Rolf Martinsson told me first thing “You wrote an excellent exam. You scored full points!” After that they asked me about my music, what I expect from the programme and also told me that Malmö Academy of Music has two orchestras that play the works of the composition students, which sounds really exciting!

After the 20 min interview I decided to visit my friend Sanni Määttä in Copenhagen for the day. She is a first year violin student at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, but we know each other from Tampere. I took the Östersunds train, only 30 minutes but 80 Swedish crowns, to Copenhagen and found the Music Academy quite easily by the metro station Forum.

The Royal Danish Academy of Music was quite a peculiar building, partly it seemed nice and pompous with a nice statue in front of it, but then again for instance the toilets looked really old and shabby, so I got a quite ambivalent feeling for the building. But I had lunch there as well, and the restaurant was nice. At lunch I met a composer from Singapore, an American composer called Marcus Lease, a Norwegian composer Martin Bauck (who knew many Finnish composers and friends of mine through UNM), a Norwegian trumpetist Birgitte and two Finnish cellists. So already from this lunch meeting it’s easy to conclude that the Royal Danish Academy of Music is a very international school.

I only had time to stay the afternoon. It was a pity because in the evening the contemporary festival Pulsar had it’s opening concert. Pulsar is a festival for contemporary music, where mainly new music by the students of the Royal Danish Academy of Music is performed. My friend Matilda Seppälä will be arriving on Saturday (8.3) to visit Sanni for a week, so I will ask her how the festival was.

In the evening I travelled via Malmö to Gothenburg for visiting my friend Elias Liebendörfer (singer/actor/waiter).

Sanni and me in Copenhagen