Perfect Composer Wednesday

Wednesday April 23rd. What a long day it has been!

The day began with piano class at 9 with Risto Kyrö. But my right  hand was feeling quite sore once again (due to RSI), so we had a “left hand class”. I’m at the moment practising Moskovskys etude in g-minor, so there is anyway quite enough to do woth the left hand as well.

After that I had my last lesson of score reading before my final exam. My teacher Tero Lanu had copied an extract from Strauss opera “Der Rosekavalier”. This was about as difficult but much more boring than the Wagner extracts I have previously been given by Lanu.

At 13 o’clock we had a feedback session about the music theatre project Bus Number13. We were divided into groups (composers, musicians and actors) and each group was asked to make a list of what they had liked/learnt from the project and what could be improved. Mainly organization issues were requested to be improved, but everyone was very happy about the project in general.

Jarkko Pajunen (composer), Heidi-Annina Nikkilä (violin),
Andreas Heino (clarinet), Tiitus Ylipää (barytone) and
Alina Lehti (alto) at the feedback session of Bus Number 13. © Cecilia Damström

Auvo Vihro (director), Hannu Pohjannoro (coordinating professor),
Anna-Maija Ihander (producer) and Matilda Seppälä (composer)
at the feedback session of Bus Number 13. © Cecilia Damström

This was followed by a lunch break and then had just enough time to listen once through to Lutoslawskis 3rd Symphony from youtube.

At 16 o’clock we had the second part of the percussion seminar held by percussion professor  Harri Lehtinen. During this seminar he mainly talked about the marimba and the vibraphone. I discovered that the marimba has a very nice sound when you play it with your fingers (so with no mallets), but it’s a very quiet sound and can possibly only be used in solo or chamber music (in occasions where the music is performed in small venues).

There after I rushed to listen to the choir Näsin Ääni practise my songs for my upcoming concert. After choir practise (at 20 o’clock) I headed of the composition studio for composing my orchestral piece which should be finished by the end of this year, because it is required for graduation! At about 23.30 Matilda came to the composition studio (because the main building of the conservatory had closed) and together we listened to Lutoslawskis third symphony, with which I have now totally fallen in love! After that I let over the studio to Matilda (who has an urging deadline for the composition summer course “Sävellyspaja”) and went home for getting some well deserved sleep after this 15 hour day at school.

Chamber choir Näsin Ääni practicing my pieces, conducted by Markus Yli-Jokipii.
© Cecilia Damström

Conducting Class and Aarni Pennanen’s Recital

Wednesday the 16th of April. The day began with a really interesting seminar about percussions, held by our percussion teacher Harri Lehtinen. The thing that actually was most inspiring about the whole lecture was how super enthusiastic Lehtinen is about his own instrument. He thinks we composers should have a course about the history of all the percussion instruments, because two or three seminars isn’t enough for anything he said. This total commitment and enthusiasm is quite contagious, which is great!

After the seminar I headed of to Pirkanmaan musiikkiopisto for a second day of conducting lessons with Ari Rasilainen. This time I conducted my arrangement of my own piece “Kallare” (from my song cycle Dagbok). It has a lot of changing bar measures , so I find it hard to conduct (especially to also make music of it and not only be a metronome).

Once again Rasilainen began with a very accurate comment: “Now you are only hanging along on a ride while you actually at least should be the driver of the ride!” Well, I agreed with him but I had a hard time getting on that ride anyway, as also all the musicians were still sight-reading, so after two takes Rasilainen said “This piece seems good, can I please conduct it once? I want to know what it’s supposed to sound like.” So then he simply conducted it and concluded “Yes, very nice piece, you write very interesting music! Do you mind if Dae Myeong Park also conducts the piece?” which I of course didn’t mind at all. Also Park sight-read the piece perfectly and it was fun following once again from the side what other conductors pick out from my music.

The rest of the afternoon has gone past very quickly. I had to go and get my vegetable bag from Runsaudensarvi, then I went and listened to the chamber choir Näsin Äänis rehearsal of my pieces for my concert 14.5. I couldn’t though stay the whole rehearsal, because at 19.00 I wanted to go to a concert. I had once again a hard time choosing which concert to go to, because I had three alternatives: the string quartet “Uusi Helsinki Kvartetti” concert (who are quartet in residence at TAMK and also teach us chamber music), the concert of TAMK’s pianists or Aarni Pennanen’s recital. I chose the last one of these, because I knew how important it was for Aarni that his friends came to his concert.

The programme at Aarni’s recital was:

Modest Mussorgsky: Gopak

Usko Meriläinen: Opusculum

Johannes Brahms: Sonata in A-major

I.               Allegro amabile

II.             Andante tranquillo

III.           Allegretto grazioso

Matilda Seppälä: Itus

Sergei Prokofiev: Sonata in f-minor

I.               Andante assai

II.             Allegro brusco

III.           Andante

IV.          Allegrissimo – Andante assai, come prima

Pianist Tina Kärblane, who teaches accompaniment at TAMK, accompanied Aarni. It was a really nice concert and Aarni is such a great violinist! In his recital he played my good friend Matilda Seppäläs piece Ictus. It has been performed both by Aarni (premiere) and Tatuarttu Ruponen, an other great violin student. Their versions of the piece are very different but I like both interpretation of the piece.

I don’t know why I never have fallen in love with Brahms, he simply hasn’t got that something for me. The sonata was once again really nice and all, but it was nothing to me compared to Prokofiev! Prokofievs sonata is such a wonderful piece of music! And in over all it was an absolutely fantastic concert! I also took some really great pictures today but can't find the memory card anymore, so I will upload the pics later in case I find them...!

Textural Piano Music

Wednesday the 9th of April. Today in the piano seminar the subject was textural music within piano music. I recommend to listen to all of the following composers (if you don’t know them already), for widening your own perspective of music.

Morton Feldman

Feldman is known for that his music is very quiet and that very small changes  happen within the music. He usually also uses only very few notes. Feldman is supposed to have said “I look for things I like and which I want to hear over and over again”. Today we listened to the piece Triadic melodies.

György Ligeti

The Hungarian composer Ligeti wasn’t a pianist (according to him self at least), but his Etudes for piano are very popular (in terms of contemporary music). Every etude bases on a pianistic idea and an rhythmical idea. The basic idea in many of Ligeti’s etudes is that he has two different rhythmical loops of different length, so slowly they grow more and more apart. What I found especially interesting was etude number three, where a few notes are hit silently, and then you play more or less only a cromatic scale, but of course the silently pushed keys don’t sound, so the rhythm turns out to sound quite complicated. What a cool idea!

Steve Reich

We looked at the work Piano phase for two pianos (or two marimbas). Although the piece only is two pages long, it lasts for about 20 minutes! The basic idea is very simple, although it is very hard to fulfil: the one pianist stays in tempo the whole time while the second pianist is supposed to do a very very slight accelerando so that he/she at a certain point is a sixteenth note ahead. As I said, very easy to understand but very hard to play.

Usko Meriläinen

This Finnish composer from Tampere didn’t compose with rows but instead thought of music in the same way as the painter Wassily Kandinsky thought of art: it consists of dots, lines and surfaces. He wanted to free himself from the abstract 12-tone music and therefore came up with this system. This is of course a thought that can be applied to most music at the end, and it is said that even Meriläinen grew tired of people the whole time trying to find “dots, lines and surfaces” in his music for the rest of his life, because he also developed new compositional techniques after having composed his Second Sonata for piano with this technique. In the seminar also the Fourth Sonata for piano was warmly recommended, especially the recording by Jaana Kärkkäinen.

Juhani Nuorvala

Former teacher at Tampere University of Applied Sciences (and now teacher at the Sibelius Academy) wrote in 1989 Five Bagatelles for piano which studies of overtones. This piece plays with the timbre of the piano, without that you have to go climbing inside the piano nor having to prepare the piano.

Philippe Manoury

This French composer wrote a Toccata for piano that is based on repetition. Also this piece of music plays with the timbre of the piano in a similar “simple” way as Nuorvala.

Roger Reynolds

This American composer, teaching at the University of California, San Diego, writes  extremely complex music. I have personally never heard any of his music performed, but my teachers told us that he at one time was performed rather frequently also in Finland at a time when he was “in”.

Beat Furrer

The Austrian composer and conductor of Swiss birth is nowadays teaching at Graz University of Music and Dramatic Arts. Here you can listen to his Phasma for solo piano.

Pedagogic Seminars

Thursday March 4th. This day began at 9 with a three-hour pedagogical forum about “corporate health and wellbeing” (in Finnish “työhyvinvointi”). This pedagogical seminar was exceptional because the whole staff, both teachers and office staff, had to attend this same seminar with us students, so Pyynikkisali was quite crowded today. As part of my thesis is about corporate health and wellbeing (työhyvintvointi) I found this topic rather interesting, although very much what was said was common knowledge. In these times of restricted economical means it was good that both the seminar holder as well as teachers and pupils talked and commented on how important it is that leading staff keep their other staff informed about what is going on and what the economical situation is, transparency helps keeping  up the team-spirit in these situations. Also the head of the music department was sitting in the seminar and at times looked slightly tense…

Other self evident things that were talked about was how important it is to greet people at work. There has been research done that when the boss stops saying good morning to you for a while, you most likely are the next one to be sacked. Moreover, if you don’t get a “good morning” from your colleagues, it means you aren’t noticed, and you start to feel unnoticed and unimportant. So such a trivial thing as greeting people in the morning is a surprisingly important factor for a good spirit at work and keeping up the work motivation. Self evident but a good to be reminded about (at least in Finland).

After the seminar I had lunch at the student restaurant (on Pyynikkitie 2 a full lunch (including salad and bread) only costs 1,66 euros if you have a valid student card!) and then headed to the main campus of TAMK, where we had our last pedagogy seminar for this year and where we all students had to have their group presentations. We had prepared a presentation about “the hidden curriculum” together with my classmates Lotta Harju and Anu Mattila. I find it such a interesting (and somewhat depressing) topic, so I want to write more about it in a separate blog post.

After the three-hour lecture I got my regular bag of organic vegetables from Runsaudensarvi. I’m subscribing the vegetable bag, and it comes every second week. I get a huge bag filled with a variety of regularly changing organic vegetables, fruits and salad for only 20 euros! They also sell organic nuts and other things for vegans, and you get a 5% discount of all normal prized things with a student card. After that I went home and made dinner, took a long nap and then headed back to the composition studio.

A peek of the last movement of the orchestrated version of my song cycle Dagbok.
Forgetting a nuance in one voice happens so easily when you have so much going on in the score!

I had to get the score as well as all the parts fixed today of the orchestrated version of Dagbok, as we have again got Pirkanmaa Pinna's conducting course during the weekend and on Sunday a concert where Dagbok will be performed! I thought it would be faster this time, as I already did the parts once and only had to correct them. And I guess I was right in a way… This time I was ready by 4 AM, so about 70 min earlier than last time….  Still, I have been fixing the parts etc for about 18 hours this week! But I think the nap in the afternoon was my saviour, this time I had no problems staying awake at least! And tomorrow I’m going to take a day off! So I’m going to sleep long! Yay!

Lecture about Suzuki and Montessori

Thursday March 20th. Today I had a seminar called “Teaching Music 2” that is part of my piano studies. We discussed different musical pedagogy methods that are used around the world.

The Suzuki pedagogy from Japan is a method to teach music to young children only through listening. In this method the parents role is emphasized even more than usual, and the parent should practise TOGETHER with the child. So that means also the parent has to learn the same instrument simultaneously as the child.

Nowadays you can study Suzuki pedagogy in Finland, it is a education divided into five steps. It is actually recommended that the teachers teaching Suzuki should be educated both as music teachers as well as in Suzuki pedagogy, but if you as a parent want to put your child into Suzuki school, you have to be quite exact in which particular Suzuki school you put your child, because there are many “Suzuki” teacher who have no idea about the method but just use the word “Suzuki” for getting more pupils.

The Montessori method emphasizes helping the child to “do things on it’s own” which interests it. Montessori pedagogy is more known for it’s schools and is not so emphasized on music (as for instance Suzuki pedagogy).

The lecture was very interesting and if you don’t know anything about the music pedagogy of Suzuki, Montessori, Kodaly or Orff, I recommend you to read about it! It’s interesting!

Experimental Piano Music

Wednesday the 19th of March. Today I had a regular day at school; Score-reading lesson at 11.30, lunch, correcting the orchestrated version of my song cycle Dagbok and an interesting seminar about experimental piano music.

The seminar about experimental piano music was held by Heini Kärkkäinen (professor of piano) and Hannu Pohjannoro (professor of composition). They discussed Henry Cowell, John Cage, Giuliano Belotti, Magnus Lindbergs Play One, Paavo Heininens three Preludes and Jukka Tiensuus Prélude non-mesuré.

Henry Cowell was in 1910 was one of the first to use the cluster. (Composition teacher Jouni Kaipainen added to this statement that clusters have of course been used since the 17th century now and then, but before only for making a “noice effect”, but Cowell was one of the first to use the cluster for the sake of it’s own, as a own sound. He also developed a new was of rhythmic notation, but it never got established.

About John Cage I learnt that the origin for why he first wrote for a prepared piano was actually pragmatical; he had a performance for some kind of orchestra on a small stage but where percussions didn’t fit in. So by preparing the upright piano that already was on stage, he could use it similarly as he would have used the percussion section. And then of course the professors talked about how Cage likes to use “almost anything” as “note material”, like for instance the star map of Australia.