Performing Robert Ashley’s The Wolfman at Ostrava Days. Photo by Martin Poplar.
PERFORMing activities
In the field of performing I work as an instrumentalist, music director and composer. I have performed extensively in Finland as well as in China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Iran, Ireland, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden and the USA.
I experiment with instruments and look for new sounds, using cello, voice, analog and digital synthesizers, no-input mixer and various computer interfaces. I am interested in ambiguous characteristics of physical mechanisms of sound production, using friction and pressure to create multiphonics, overtones and subharmonics. I use electronic devices to infuse my music with unpredictable elements.
I work as the music director of UMUU Orchestra, the resident ensemble of Tulkinnanvaraista, and on occasion lead and conduct other groups. Here musical directing is in direct contact with the dramaturgy of the event that I have wanted to develop towards a communal platform for sharing and discussing artistic expression in society today. Actions I have taken to further this cause have been the removal of the green room, a shared lighting for all participants and a direct visual and physical contact that is rehearsed simultaneously with the music.
As a composer I examine a personal and subjective relationship between instrument and its user. I explore strategies of notation and the overlapping areas of composition and improvisation. I have created acoustic and electroacoustic instrumental and vocal works, electronic music, site-specific installations and performances and intermedia art with video. My primary interests are an immersive physicality in the act of playing and singing as well as the interplay between order and chaos in processes of performance and perception. More than 20 works of mine have been recorded in studio or in concert for YLE Radio and TV.
VIBRATION, RESONANCE AND TUNING
Alvin Lucier speaks of “decomposing” as a removing of obstacles between the acoustic properties of sound and its observations. In reassessing our definition of metaphysical and physical, a concretist poetic substance is revealed. When directing and performing works such as Love Song and I am sitting in a room I have worked on the notion of the performers’ subjective virtuosity fading away and merging into the collective ritual.
My point of approach to Giacinto Scelsi’s music in general and the solo cello work Trilogy – The three ages of Man in particular has been to approach the elusive center of sound, from which the attributes of pitch, dynamics and articulation stem. I examine Scelsi’s fascination of the concept in Hindu philosophy, anahata, according to which the prime mover of all existence is sound in its latent state.
I have been interested in the theory and practise of just intonation in the musics by Horatiu Radulescu, Marc Sabat, Ezra Sims, James Tenney and La Monte Young. In works such as Glissade and AEDM in memoriam I have refined my understanding and hearing of base frequencies and their overtones, differential tones and audible beatings.
This practise of tuning has influenced my thinking of music as a way to deeply connect with the surrounding reality. In order to hear and sense accurately we have to fully engage with the unique conditions at hand, letting go of the narrative of past and future. Searching for a restful, non-beating unison, seems akin to looking for the latent universal force anahata that inspired Scelsi and his music.
MOBILE FORM AND INSTALLATION
I have been inspired by art with site- and/or time-specific elements, such as the mobile sculptures of Alexander Calder and the environmental art of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
Performing Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Adieu is part of a project to conduct all of the composer’s wind quintets. Earlier, Zeitmaße was presented as a series of pop-up performances in public places in central Helsinki.
In 2019 I directed a large-scale project in which 15 musicians immersed in John White’s algorithmic “machine” music in three concerts. Cello and Tuba Machine was played as a three-hour sound installation at Forum Box gallery.
Maununneva: a site-specific installation in Helsinki, 2014. Photo by Pasi Rauhala
John Zorn’s postmodern game piece Cobra embraces of a multitude of sonic expressions from “a wide variety of musicians whose personalities are more important than the instruments they play”, in Zorn’s wording. I view the work as rigorous composition that creates a particular, radical, always different soundscape. My conducting is influenced by observing the composer at work as well as having had an opportunity to perform Cobra with him.
My installation Maununneva was a part of Tapahtumisen tunne, a year-long series of performances conceived by Erkki Soininen in 2014. It incorporated three channels of audio playback, inspired by writings of Gertrude Stein, as well as environmental sounds and percussion instruments for passers-by to play.
An experimental approach to Terry Riley’s seminal In C was tried out in 2014 with a group of 14 students of Sibelius Academy. The work was played without the ubiquitous “pulse” in an attempt to more profoundly embody the rhythmic and harmonic content of the materials. This was facilitated by alternating work on Riley’s score with sessions on tai chi, Alexander technique and deep listening.
THEATRE IN MUSIC, MUSIC IN THEATRE
The prominence of ritualistic and choreographic elements in musical performance establish a strong connection with the theatrical arts. The responses sound creates in an act of listening are inherently dramatic as well.
Since 2016 I work on John Cage’s Song Books, Concert for piano and orchestra and WBAI as a collage consisting of musical, visual and choreographic materials. In addition to various technical considerations, the challenge of the performer is to resist the urge to infuse meaning into the seemingly discrete components and surrender to the flow of activities. My interpretation is based on the study of the scientific and philosophical concepts of entropy and interpenetration as well as the thinking of Henry Thoreau and Erik Satie.
Time with people, an experimental opera by Tim Parkinson, was staged at Kallio New Music Days in January 2019. During a two-week rehearsal process I worked with students of Theatre Academy and other enthusiasts, acting as both music director and dramaturge. The focus was on learning how to direct our control of everyday actions towards making interesting sounds, without interfering with their inherent sonic potential.
Also at the 2019 instalment of KNMD I staged Frederic Rzewski’s Les moutons de Panurge as an anarchistic get-together for participants of all ages. Children of the Viidakkorumpu Kindergarten in Espoo attended an experimental music workshop and then performed together with professional musicians of the UMUU Ensemble.
In January 2018 I directed a group of 20 performers in A subversive evening with works by Fluxus artists such as George Brecht, Nam June Paik and Emmett Williams as well as commenting works by Robert Ashley, Gavin Bryars and Galina Ustvolskaya. During the intermission Dick Higgins’ Danger Music #17 was performed.
Performing Nam June Paik’s One for violin solo at Kallio New Music Days. Photo: Laura Lahtinen
SCULPTURAL AND ARCHITECTURAL GESTURES
My Zen for Bow (2012) consists of a continuous two-note chord, during which the speed of bowing is slowed down towards infinitesimal. As in the well-known paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, a point of stopping can not be reached. The title refers to Nam June Paik’s “Zen for head”, which in turn was an interpretation of La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 No.10: “Draw a straight line and follow it”.
Song for G (2012) is an exploration of the unstable wolf-tone of the cello. Wulfie (2014) is an extended six-channel tape piece using the same material.
In Iannis Xenakis’ music I have focused on its “romantic” aspects: a strong will for expression and a desire to overcome the challenges of friction and resistance in an athletic manner. My interest in the interplay between architectural and musical gestures has led to using Kannelmäki Church as a performance venue. The shape of the roof of the building is based on similar hyperbolic paraboloids as the Phillips Pavilion at Expo ‘58, designed by Le Corbusier and Xenakis.
In October 2020 I directed a production of James Tenney’s Postal Pieces, a collection of eleven systemic works that elaborate on the idea of self-similar processes in which the conception, performance and perception of an event closely resemble one another. An important concept is the “swell” gesture that I observe as a macroscopic iteration of pulsation.
In April 2022 I directed seven clarinet students from Sibelius Academy in Horatiu Radulescu’s Inner Time 2, a forceful work in which the players act as sonic filters of a “sound plasma” that consists of 42 overtones of a fundamental tone.
TRANSITORY STATES IN LISTENING
I agree with Luigi Nono’s view that advanced artistic means should be used to further a wide-spread and compassionate dialogue that can include politics, philosophy, mythology and religion. I’ve been drawn to the use of fragments and silences in Fragmente–Stille, an Diotima and hay que caminar… soñando: they are dream-like transitory states, full of alertness, ambiguity and desire.
A similar dramatic mode of listening and a heightened sense of perception is called for in the music of Morton Feldman, where the focus is consistently on surface and material rather than structure and content. This is equally true in early works such as Projection 1 where the performer moves from one seemingly isolated and static sound event to the next as well as in the repetitive but constantly changing patterns in later works such as Patterns in a Chromatic Field.
In Alvin Lucier’s Tapper string instrumentalists simultaneously probe the resonant characteristics of their instruments and that of the surrounding space. At the established connection between performer and space an expansion of the idea of instrument occurs.
Pauline Oliveros’ sonic meditations such as Heart Chant and Tuning Meditation allow this kind of probing to be shared by performers and listeners alike.