Recapitulation of Spring 2014

Spring 2014 has been absolutely the most crazy and amazing spring so far in my composer career. Well, already if you consider that I have written 104 blog posts about what happened from the end of February until the beginning of June (so approximately during three month time), I guess that gives you some kind of picture HOW much has been going on… But in case you don’t have time to read all 104 blog posts, I will summarize last spring in one post, partly for my own sake.

So in January I broke up after four years in a relationship, which contributed to my decision to apply for masters in Sweden. I also participated in Vocal Espoo’s choral composition competition.

In February I got to know that both I and also our composer association Tampering had been given grants by the Finnish cultural trust foundation, which was great news!

In February my piece “Expressionen” was performed in Helsinki to a enthusiastic audience.

In March I travelled Tampere-Helsinki-Stockholm-Malmö-Copenhagen-Gothenburg-Stockholm-Helsinki-Tampere for entrance exams at three universities in Sweden (and one day sightseeing in Copenhagen), and got full points in the entrance exam at Malmö.

On the 14th of March I also made my Canadian début with my piece Loco for solo viola, which according to my friend, Canadian composer Paolo Griffin, wasreceived with standing ovations.

In the middle of March I also started writing this blog, A Composers Diary!

In the end of March I both produced and played my own piece Piano Delirium in the “Korvat Auki Tampere” concert in Pietiläsali, in the main library Metso in Tampere.

In April the music theatre production Buss Number 13 including 5 of my pieces, had three performances (and one pre-premiere) at the Tampere Hall, and the last performance was part of the contemporary music festival Tampere Biennale 2014. More over my pieces got a great review in the local newspaper Aamulehti.

In April I also participated in a conducting course, in which I conducted the orchestrated version of my own song cycle Dagbok, and the piece was premiered at the final concert of the course.

In the rest of April I worked as a producer for my own concert. I put together an orchestra, handed out 800 flyers in front of the Tampere Hall, contacted the radio station and two newspapers (which all three made interviews with me about the up coming concert, which was great for getting audience!) and led many of the rehearsals.

Suomen Työväen Musiikkiliitto offered me a publishing contract for my choral piece Kielikurssi for children's’ choir this spring and it will come out next winter!

On the 14th of May I had myfirst composers recital, with over 200 people in the audience and a good review in the daily newspaper Aamulehti. It included premieres of my choral works Visheten and Min Gud.

Moreover in May my piano solo piece Psychedelic was premiered at the composers concert in Tampere and my solo viola piece Loco was performed at the RRR!! Festival in Helsinki.


In addition to all above named I also have written my thesis and defended it, AND written a 10 minute piece for symphony orchestra (while sleeping 2 night on the floor of my school) and have passed my final exams for becoming a composer.

Finally my choral works El jardín de las morenas and Credo have been premiered at the VocalEspoo choral festival, have been awarded third and joint second prize and have been broadcast by the National Finnish Radio Company Yle.

I think I can call it a day. Or a spring, that is to say.

Living 36 hours in the Composition Studio!

Tuesday the 27th of May. All I can say is: I MADE IT! I managed to finish and hand in my 10 min orchestra piece Unborn!!! And I feel like every juice of energy that I ever had in me has been squeezed tightly tightly out, ever so thoroughly…

Title page of my piece Unborn for symphony orchestra.

So what happened after the 14h party? On Sunday 25th of May, after sleeping for 6 hours I got up again at 16 o’clock, ate lunch, went to evening mass then went home, picked up a blanket, food and everything I needed for composing and headed of to the composition studio. I arrived at about 20.30 o’clock and started composing. I had been invited to a party, I had even brought a dress in case I could make it there as well, but now the earnesty of the situation was catching in on me: I HAVE to get everything done within this month so that I can graduate next month, and I HAVE to graduate next month in case I want to begin with my masters at the Academy of Music in Malmö in September 2014! There will come several parties, but to graduate I have to do NOW! So I didn’t go anywhere else except for eating and toiled in the next 36 hours!

I composed the first night until from 20:30 until 5 AM, then spread out my blanket on the floor and slept for 2 hours. At 7 AM I had my alarm ringing again and composed until lunch. I had quite a long (2h) lunch break, then I continued composing all afternoon and night until 4 AM. The second night I slept 3 hours, again on the blanket on the floor. At 7 AM again my alarm rang, and I was still quite worried, I had only got 8:30 minutes so I had to write an other 3-4 minutes before the deadline at 14 o’clock. So I wrote and wrote, and decided to cut out some of the ostinato in the strings, and make a 10 minute piece in stead of a 12 minute piece. At 11 AM I finally was ready! I knew there were typos and mistakes and missing slurs, but at this point I have to say I didn’t care anymore. (There wasn’t any orchestra hungrily waiting for my piece anyway…)

So for comparison; here is a pic of the original drawings of my piece, dated 21.5.
© Cecilia Damström

And here is a pic of the score of the same part of the piece.
(See the glissandos and French horn cluster?)
© Cecilia Damström

So after 36 hours in the composition studio I was finally free to leave. It was very ironical, it was like if the time of the year had changed while I was those 36 hours in the studio. I had arrived in a summer dress and sandals, it had been +26°C, and now it was suddenly +10°C and hailing! I walked home on shaky legs (both of tiredness and cold, wearing sandals while it’s hailing isn’t my sport…), showered and changed to some warmer clothes, headed to the main building for printing the score and having lunch, and then headed off for the final hour of doom, my composition class with Hannu Pohjannoro.

I can’t describe how proud and happy I was, despite the exhaustion, when I lay down the score of Unborn infront of Pohjannoro. He looked at the schore, listened to the midi of the Sibelius file and looked at the score again. I could see relief in his face, which made me very happy. After a long silence he finally said: “The piece works. There are still a few small things that should be corrected, but the piece in it’s entirety works. Congratulations on that. For being honest; I was very worried and wondered how on earth you would manage to get the piece ready on time, I didn’t think it was possible. But your choice to start over again (with the dialogue) was good, the new material you have worked much better than your previous material. Sometimes you just have to have the courage and throw everything away, even at a late stage, so it was good that you did that. Oh well, I guess this was it, this was our last lesson.”

This news struck me with surprise, I hadn’t even thought this far! But yes, it’s the end of May, of course this was my last lesson! But I told him I will be back, for private lessons, so this is not our last lesson. I will be back, as they say...

Vappu Eve

Wednesday April 30th, Vappu eve. First of May (Vappu in Finnish) is a National holiday, so the evening before (today) is maybe THE biggest party in Finland (Yes, bigger than New Years Eve or Independence Day, maybe because both of them happen to be in Winter when it’s freezing in Finland…)!

Anyway, my day began at 9 AM with my final exam in score reading. I had two hours time to learn this wonderful extract from Wagners Tristan and Isolde, I really enjoyed my two hours practising for the exam! After two hours my teacher Tero Lanu came and I played my Wagner once for him. Then he gave me a sight reading task: a non tonal piece in three voices of which one was a transposing clarinet and the other was a bassoon which occasionally changed to C-clef! It was an absolutely horrible sight reading task and I thought I did awfully! But Lanu said “Oh well, it was quite a hard task, and your Wagner was very good, so you get a 5/5 anyway.” So I am very happy!

After my exam I had lunch and then headed to Pyynikkisali to listen to the TEMA-quartet play Shostakovitch. This concert was a chamber music exam of my friend and viola player Marjukka Manners. Naturally I enjoyed the performance, because I LOVE Shostakovich!
After this I went home and had to take a nap, before I headed off to Tampere Hall. Both Vappu concerts (30.4 and 1.5) are completely sold out, so I came just in time when the concert ended and stood again by the door and handed out flyers to my upcoming composition concert on the 14th of May. Today it was a lot colder than the last time I was handing out flyers, and the audience today wasn’t quite as happy to get flyers as they were last Friday…
After the audience had left I went and sat for a while with my friends from the Tampere Phil on the terrace of Tampere Hall, but when the sun was gone it was so freezing that most of us hurried to the bar & restaurant Telakka. At 1 AM I was so tired and honestly had the intention of going home, but I called Matilda, who was at a house party, which happened to be located just on my way home, so I dropped by there for a couple of hours as well.

Found this inspiring phrases at Annikas place.
"Remember: Water the flowers, do the laundry,
save the world, bring aways the rubbish. Loesje"

KMH and home

Friday the 14th of March. Today was the last day of entrance exams, the interview for KMH in Stockholm. We were about 10 people who were invited for the entrance exams, and I heard they have about 2 places. I was not so worried about the interview today, as it is my last option of all my options in Sweden, and the other exams (in other cities) have gone quite well anyway… During the entrance exams I met Jesper Nielsen, Ole and Kerstin studying in Piteå, Bára Gísladóttir from Iceland and of course Oliver Bowers, whom I met the other day.

Today my good friend and former flatmate Mari Pakarinen also arrived for a day, to take part in the entrance exams for a masters in trumpet at KMH. Her exams went well and she was quite pleased with how it went. Afterwards we had a very nice afternoon in Stockholm together.

Interview for CoPeCo

Wednesday March 12th. Today I had the interview for the international master program Contemporary Performance and Composition (CoPeCo). The master program is a joint up masters, so if you get in you study one semester (6 month) in Tallinn (Eesti muusika- ja teatriakadeemia), one semester in Stockholm (at KMH), one semester in Lyon (The Lyon CNSMD) and a last semester in Hamburg (at Hochschule für Musik und Theater).

I was very excited about the program to begin with, until I found their curriculum. But then I noticed that the curriculum was filled with electronics (and improvisation), so I have been less keen on the programme lately (especially as Malmö was such a nice school, but it’s only my second option).

So in the interview I was quite frank with them and told them that I have done a lot of programming but I’m not so in to it. And they were quite frank with me and told me that my ambition to write an opera for a masters project wasn’t very suitable for this program. So I felt a bit like if two people would have met who come really well along with each other, but the one openly sais he wants to be in a relationship/or get married and the other person doesn’t want a relationship/marriage.

In the interview I first had to do some improvisation. I was a bit surprised, I hadn’t read about it. So they asked me how I would like to improvise and I of course said “with piano”. And it actually went much better that I had expected it to go! In the interview we discussed my opera idea and how it could be suited for the masters program. I also spoke about my pieces Loco (for solo viola) and Expressionen (suite of miniatures for clarinet, cello and accordion). They also asked me if I would be prepared for the moving around Europe part on which I answered “I think that’s one of the best parts about the whole programme!”.  So now I just have to let fate decide what to do, if I get in or don’t get in to CoPeCo.

The Royal College of Music in Stockholm (KMH)

Tuesday March 11th. So yesterday and today I have had exams for The Royal College of Music in Stockholm. The exams were 4 hours both days and tomorrow I have my interview for the international CoPeCo programme and on Friday the interview for the normal masters programme at KMH. At the moment the school looks like absolutely nothing, because they have torn away the main building recently and are at the moment constructing a new building at the same place. So everything around the few buildings that are left is construction area.

Yesterday we hade a four hour test in counterpoint. We were all given an own room with a piano and desk, and we got five tasks; harmonic analysis, a Generalbass task, a task in modal counterpoint, to write the first sequence of a three or four voiced fugue (two themes were given to elect from), and a compositional task that you had to continue from a given bar (two different options were given to chose from here as well). I felt the time wasn’t enough for me and I had a really hard time with the imitative modal counterpoint task. But considering how little I have done similar tasks I was quite pleased.

Today I had a four-hour instrumentation test. I liked this test more than yesterdays one, maybe because I feel practising instrumentation is more useful than writing fugues or modal counterpoint, but this is just my opinion. We had again own rooms with a piano and desk and this time four tasks for the four hours: a general task where the range of different instruments where asked and writing out the sounding result of different transposing instruments, putting out articulation marks and bows on a solo piece (and choosing an instrument for the piece), reducing a orchestra score for piano and of course an orchestration task in which you could chose one piano piece out of three options (Brahms, Ravel or Schönberg). I actually was surprised my self how difficult I found the first range questions, but have to defend my self by the argument that I don’t usually write stuff for the lowest or highest notes of for instance wind instruments, because they don’t sound very good. Doing the partichelli also was much slower than I had expected, and with these first two tasks I spent two whole hours without noticing! But I only had time to make the first two bars of the partichelli… Then I began orchestrating Ravel, but also for that I hardly had any time. They had given us two whole pages of a Ravels piano piece, but I orchestrated the first 1,5 rows of the first page and then the first 2 rows of the second page. I chose to do a bit of both so that I could show a bit different types of orchestration. For the task with articulation I had hardly any time at all.

After the test I met an other boy who also is applying to the same programmes as I am, Oliver Bowers is his name. He is grown up in Sweden but he has a similar multicultural family background like me and he is at the moment living with his girlfriend (a violinist) in Estonia. He has done his bachelor in composition at Gothenburg University, so it was nice talking to him. He told me they have a great team spirit among the composers in Gothenburg and that he liked that especially much. They have a own “composition corridor” with computers for the composers. He also told me that one of the main professors, Ming Tsao whom I met last Saturday, only teaches about once a month in Gothenburg because he normally lives in Berlin. Oliver also told me a funny (and curious) fact that all composers at Gothenburg university except one are vegetarians! Fancy that!

Malmö Academy of Music

It is Wednesday the 5th of March. I am applying to Malmö Academy of Music for a master degree in composition and today was the first part of the entrance exam. It began with a group summoning at 9AM, where after we all were direct to an own room, with a piano in it. We had a total time of 8h to accomplish three written tasks. We were interrupted for 15 min for making an aural test (in contemporary analysis, this time we got to listen to Lutoslawski), but otherwise I sat in my room the whole day (with exception for when I went to buy more green tea).

I have to say I really enjoyed the test! I began with the third task, orchestration. It was scored for piano, but we were supposed to re-score it for 8-11 players. Then I did the free counterpoint task, which I enjoyed even more! There was one bar written ready for piano in three voices and about 12 empty bars, which I filled up with a four-voices quasi fugue. Last I did the first task, analysis, which I liked the least. I always find it hard to write texts containing self-evident things on paper, but as time was ending I forced my self to write two pages about the contemporary string quartet. I am very happy with how the exam went, but really exhausted after having to concentrate for 8 hours (after having slept for about 5h every night three nights in a row). But tomorrow there is only the interview, so I’m looking forward to that!