"The surrounding society has changed in many ways, but composership has not kept up." This early observation summarizes a starting point of my research. When beginning the process in 2015, I found my profession as a composer restrictive, institutional, old-fashioned and in many ways against my values in other areas of life. I also missed an active relationship between the composer and audience, so I felt curious about other art fields, especially performance and community art. I wanted to shift the focus from myself to exploring the profession more generally. I have to say that many aspects have improved since that situation; artistic research has brought meaning and reflection to my life.
This degree is an artistic doctoral degree, which consists of five artistic projects and a thesis. The main goal of my research is to actively expand the composer's agency using collaborative, dialogic ways of working and to consider how collective practices and sharing of authorship change the composer's individual position in the tradition of Western art music. All the compositional projects have taken place in different working groups or otherwise involved observing shared authorship. My knowledge interest is emancipatory, which means that I aim to achieve change within the institutional framework of art music.
I approach these research questions based on artistic activity and theoretical discussion. This research is not limited to music theoretical or composition technical questions; I try to understand composers’ agency more broadly as a social activity. I have explicitly defined my research as artistic research, which differentiates it from previous doctoral studies by the composers at the Sibelius Academy. I understand artistic research as the production of knowledge and skills through the means of artistic work and reflection (I’ll come back to this later).
The theoretical framework of the research refers to two discourses: I compare the practices of a contemporary composer and a socially engaged artist. The difference between these two professions seems significant, almost contradictory. With reference literature, I try to describe composers’ work in the most up-to-date way possible and to reflect on a change taking place in composers’ working conditions in modern society. On the other hand, I present the discussion of dialogic interaction in the field of art pedagogy and community art. I aim to allow these two discourses enrich each other.
My interest in the theories of community art started from the concept of dialogic aesthetics defined by Grant Kester in his book Conversation Pieces (2004), in which he analyzes participatory art projects based on dialogue with a community. According to him, a dialogue can be conducted not only through verbal conversation but also through aesthetic means of expression. Kester has created a new kind of aesthetic theory that breaks away from shocking goals of modernism and the avant-garde, shifting the focus to social interaction, where aesthetics primarily manifest in conversational relationships between an artist and their collaborators. In many situations, the socially engaged artist acts more like a facilitator than a creator.
In analyzing composers’ practices, I go into more detail about the aesthetic quality criteria at the core of composers’ work. I look at composing as a series of choices that appears as a social activity committed to tradition. However, this social nature of composing has been pushed aside, the values of autonomy aesthetics being primary. I consciously try to detach myself from the demands of autonomy aesthetics and modernism, and I look for a more holistic way of approaching music making and listening. When analyzing the factors influencing a composer's aesthetic choice, I use the concept of mediation (by Adorno) to describe the multidimensional compositional process – as work-specific and work-immanent, on one hand, and socially and historically mediated on the other (Paddison 2010).
To break out of the shackles of modernism, I use the means of fictional writing in chapter four in a dialogue on the sedimentation of musical material between a composer and an ethnographer:
“…for the last few years, I've been hammering that pile of stones, a sedimented clod, headlessly and indiscriminately. I've been trying to extract pieces from it that I could either throw away or melt into a new kind of magma – more equal and tolerant. I have borrowed from myself and stolen from others; I have replaced noteheads with pictures, words, movements, and national anthems. I have even put myself in the place of musical material— probably unsuccessfully—because in addition to the fact that the material we use has hardened into sediment-like rock, we composers also have another deeply buried fossil element – namely a work.”
With the help of this fast-paced dialogue, I lead the conversation toward new dialogical practices. So, what could "dialogue" and "dialogic" mean in the context of composing? I answer that question by clarifying the concepts related to intertextuality and co-composing. Actually, it can be thought that Western art music is fundamentally intertextual. Various kinds of music talk to each other in many ways, internally and externally. However, intertextuality normally occurs within the work of a single composer. When two or more composers compose the same work together, it is called co-composing. While composers share a common imagination, they also commit to common aesthetic choices in some way. They accept a common aesthetic world and the meaning of the work.
This leads to an important question in my research – how communities are formed aesthetically. Do we (here) form an aesthetically united group of people? How does the contemporary music community try to define its aesthetic boundaries? In community art, aesthetic freedom is seen as a strength, and aesthetical questions are negotiated repeatedly, in contrast to the field of contemporary music, where the informal term “aesthetics” refers to each individual’s aesthetic preference. Herein lies the most essential difference between the practice of a composer and a socially engaged artist. However, I claim that by shifting a composer's practice toward more dialogical interaction, we could also hear the change in the result – in music. Opening a composer's aesthetic choice to the ethical area can be seen as a paradigmatic turn in the field of Western art music.
My thesis is divided into two parts. I have described the first half of the book, the theoretical part, and next, I will move on to practical side of the research. I present five artistic projects that are part of my doctoral degree. In the research, I examine these projects, particularly from the perspectives of collaboration and dialogical interaction.
OMAKUVA (Self Portrait) – video work:
I’ll start with a 19-minute experimental video work, Self Portrait, which I scripted, recorded, and edited. In the video, I appear with my own instrument – the oboe. The work has significantly influenced my thoughts on the possibilities of artistic research. During the work process, I played a game with the position of a researcher. I tried to access to the composer's knowledge using new methods – by means of video recording, in this case.
Self Portrait consists of four materials, which alternate with clear cuts. In the episodes called HUMORIST, the fictional characters, a composer and an oboist, discuss the hierarchy of their relationship. I play both roles at the same time so that the videos are superimposed on the same image.
In the IMPROVISATION scenes, I gropingly search for different physical ways of playing the oboe, where the primary starting point is not a sound or compositional phenomenon, but the musician's body. For example, when improvising, I tried to see how long I could play without breathing or what alternating between playing and singing is like.
The scenes called SHARED emphasize my personal intimate point of view – the performer's shame and fragility. Finally, there are four episodes called COMPOSITION. In those sections, I perform a "piece" that does not exist in a concert space. The video work doesn’t have a score, only a script.
The working method – recording myself and watching the video screen afterward – was a constant border crossing between private and public space, which I have not faced before in my compositional practice. My presence in the video alternates between documentary and fictional expression. I was a performer but not an actor. The result, a kind of documentary presentation about composing, introduces an unfinished process to the audience.
KYLMÄN MAAN KUNINGATAR (The Queen of the Cold Land) – radio opera:
The next work, a Kalevala-themed radio opera The Queen of the Cold Land, was commissioned by Finnish Broadcasting Company in honor of the 100th anniversary of Finland's independence. The special challenge for the artistic working group was how to fuse three traditions – Kalevala, opera and radiophonic writing – into one unified work. The recording method became a particularly clear characteristic of the radio opera genre. Most of the singers’ recordings were done in a recording studio on the top of the orchestral material, and voices were mixed to the foreground. Radiophonic narration was also emphasized in sound design; it helped to escape both the ideal of traditional opera recordings and the realism of dramatic scenes.
Very early on, I expressed my concern about the bond between the Kalevala epic and the Finnish opera tradition. For me, it was important that the audience would be aware of why we are rewriting Kalevala once again. According to Liisamaija Hautsalo (2018), themes taken from the Kalevala, the Bible and national history are perennial favourites for Finnish opera. "National events are (still) celebrated with opera," she writes. This national-romantic background of Finnish opera was one of my critical research targets during my composition work. Even though two main themes of the libretto were gender and naming of heroes, in the musical material, I would say that the main theme was nationalism, which manifests in numerous quotes from national anthems during the opera.
Let me play you an extract of the scene called “The Wedding.” In this scene, the Mistress walks with her Daughter through the church aisle. She has married off her Daughter to the Blacksmith, and she hopes to receive Sampo in return. At the altar, she discovers that Sampo is not what she had hoped for. The men take the Daughter away against her will. In this section, I use quotes from royal hymns and various wedding marches and songs.
HEINÄ (Grass) – multimedia performance:
Grass is a performance that includes sounds, the human voice, paintings, documentary video, speech and contemporary music played by bass clarinet. The project started in a workshop where playwright Pipsa Lonka presented me asemic poems written by the point of a blade of grass.
We focused on free writing, an activity that we did not try to influence. Rather, the influential factors were wind speed, wind direction, distance from the paper and the amount of ink. With this asemic writing, I suddenly found myself considering music notation. The writing looked like a graphical score. What is actually the origin of notation? How does it relate to writing? Even though I tested many solutions for notation, my detailed modernistic scores strongly contradict the premise of the project – that uncontrolled movement of grass. I tried to resolve the contradiction in many ways. I’ll show you one example of an unclear, fuzzy video notation that I used in couple of performances.
Pipsa and I did activities together without the boundaries of our original disciplines. We mixed different types of media and the logic of several art fields. In the text, I deal with philosopher Jacques Rancière's concept of the indisciplinary. “It is not only a matter of going besides the disciplines but of breaking them,” he describes (Museum of Education 2016). Artistic research offers one possibility for this kind of work that rejects the boundaries of institutions and art fields, where the artist does not settle into the traditional role as an artist. Artist-researcher Maiju Loukola (2017) proposes indisciplinary work as a kind of artistic research method that can be used to challenge prevailing norms and guidelines within the field. Loukola encourages intentional unorthodox quotations from other fields of art or science. This proposal opens unexplored ground in the field of contemporary music.
MIMESIS, METAPHOR, MODELLING:
Then we move on to the next project: Mimesis, Metaphor, Modelling was a composition concert in the spring 2022. The pianist at the concert was Mirka Viitala, and soprano Meeri Pulakka sang via video.
The performance consisted of six movements composed for keyboards, each of which was a kind of study on mimesis. This concept of mimesis encompasses a wide range of meanings, including various forms of imitation, representation, and mimicry. In ancient philosophy, mimesis referred to imitating or presenting reality through art. However, the meaning of the concept has changed over the centuries. In the 20th century, many philosophers viewed mimesis as a social activity related to interpersonal practices such as language learning. I set out to answer the question: What do I actually express when I compose? I wondered if expression could be one parameter alongside melody, rhythm, harmony, and timbre. I tried to compose a concert in which my expression changed in relation to the object being imitated. I imitated everything around me – nature, physical phenomena, other composers, and social structures. I forgot my own voice.
The performance drew ideas from the tradition of performance art. My goal was to present various musical phenomena to the public using performative and visual means. Instead of hiding the compositional thinking inside the score, I wanted to tell the audience how I compose and think. In many places, I used a script as a dramaturgical tool.
I'm going to play you a short passage of the performance from the scene called Experiment Lab: Listen to the Iceberg. Dramaturgically, the idea was to bring something to the concert hall, like a group of people or animals, that could represent the otherness that we don't usually meet in contemporary music concerts. We ended up asking children to join us. In the piece, 9-year-old Joel Malmberg played piano with Mirka Viitala and a group of children from West Helsinki Music College were also present. I am very grateful and proud of this musical moment.
You can listen to the exctract at 55:30: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtM1_iMLNDA
WAVE MOTION – PERSPECTIVES TO NATURE:
The fifth artistic project is called Wave Motion – Perspectives to Nature. It was composed for a string quartet and multimedia. Research association Suoni was looking for a composer as a collaborator for a social activist music research project, so I suggested to musicologist Juha Torvinen that we join forces and take advantage of the dialogic composition process planned for my artistic research, in which I was supposed to share authorship with another composer, Lauri Supponen. We organized a collaboration with the Kamus string quartet and Our Festival. In terms of research methods, this was the most successful. Working with Juha helped me to document and observe the material more systematically than in previous projects.
At the beginning, we set out to study the state of the Baltic Sea, especially its microplastic problem, but we ended up looking more generally at humans' relationships with nature. Juha wrote us weekly tasks, to which we reacted via musical and audiovisual demos.
Seven relationships to nature:
I will now introduce you to the process of completing this work through one of these seven relationships:
”According to the denialist, climate change is a great misunderstanding or a lie fed to us by politicians with the aim of narrowing individual freedom. It is also possible that it is just a strategy of big companies: by inventing climate change they bring new products to market. The denialist denies the opinion of the majority and experts if it conflicts with his or her own needs. The most radicals believe in international conspiracies that deliberately feed allegations of environmental problems.”
Lauri responded to this characterization with a video called Economic Growth. In the video, he repeatedly plays the same simple scale so that the trajectory of the bow gradually moves higher, finally rising above the tuning pegs. "In a way, the scale melts away like the chubby-headed, anthropomorphic dog," Lauri writes.
Before the final form of the work, we organized four audience workshops with Our Festival (unfortunately, remotely). For each workshop, we chose two relationships with nature, which we focused on in more detail. The discussions of the workshops were recorded as research material. After playing the video Economic Growth, we heard two descriptions from the participants, which we then crystallized into poetic verses. The first association was a story of “Sulkavan soutu” and wooden rowing boats there, while the second description dealt beautifully with the entire history of the world. This episode formed the final section of our performance. Somehow, the process describes the birth of an intermedial metaphor, in which the audience has had the opportunity to participate.
About the results of my research:
Even though many kinds of observations about collaboration and new working methods emerged in the artistic processes, I personally consider that chapter eleven of my thesis, where I deal with artistic research from composers’ perspectives, is the most important result. This chapter has been born alongside it, as a kind of byproduct.
In recent years, a lot has been written about artistic research. With the help of this extensive reference literature, I summarize some essential ideas about what separates traditional compositional work and artistic research from each other, and correspondingly, I explore the difference between art research and artistic research. I also reflect on the specificity of the knowledge produced by the composer. In my view, this knowledge should be public and shared, and it should be communicated more widely outside the composers’ communities, as well.
The most essential observation in this chapter is related to a composer's research position. Historically, composers have had a remarkable role in the tradition of Western art music, forming the skeleton of classical music history. In all concerts, musical works are attributed to their composers. Their works, which are criticized and analyzed, are the canon of classical music. In addition, many composers' private lives are made public: Their biographical information belongs to canonical narratives.
I thought about this question publicity last Friday when I heard about Kaija Saariaho's death. She tried to keep her illness private until the very last moment.
With the demands brought by canonization and autonomy aesthetics, we could say that the “composer's voice” can now only be heard in the aesthetic choices within musical work. Otherwise, in their lives they have to agree to the role described above: as public figures and subjects of musicological and historical research. In this position they don't have an active agency. All composers are supposed to accept and enjoy that role.
In artistic research, this position changes significantly. Composers do not need to examine music with the same means as external researchers. In general, we don't need to examine ourselves at all. In addition to a research question being internal to music, it can be more broadly related to making art, composition practices, the pedagogy of composing, music technology, social environments, or societal issues.
Researcher Esa Kirkkopelto brings another perspective alongside epistemological considerations to approach the special quality of artistic research, asking how artistic research could justify its existence as an institutional activity. According to Kirkkopello (2015), in addition to artistic research being done in institutions, it should also conduct research about institutions, take institutions as targets.This implies that composers could also examine surrounding institutions critically. To do so, we should emancipate and tear ourselves away from the rather impossible position at the heart of classical music. When executing artistic research, we are not the objects of research, but active participants.
I changed a lot during the process, and I learned a lot about dialogical and collaborative ways of working with other people – but whether I managed to influence the structures of art music remains to be seen.
References:
Hautsalo, Liisamaija. 2018. ”Gene Technology, Local Heroes and Pipe and Drain Renovations – Finland is Producing New Operas Like Never Before.” Finnish Music Quarterly June 22, 2018. Retrieved September 5, 2022. https://fmq.fi/articles/gene-technology-local-heroes-and-pipe-and-drain-renovations
Kester, Grant H. 2004. Conversation pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kirkkopelto, Esa. 2015. ”Artistic Research as Institutional Practice.” In From Arts College to University. Artistic Research Yearbook 2015, ed. Torbjörn Lind, 49–53. Stockholm: Swedish Research Council. Retrieved. June 5, 2022.
Loukola, Maiju. 2017. ”Eripuran tiloissa.” In Jacques Rancière ja erimielisyyden näyttämöt, ed. Anna Tuomikoski, 183–197. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto.
Museum of Education. 2016. Jacques Rancière's interview. Retrieved October 31, 2023. https://educationmuseum.wordpress.com/2016/05/15/jacques-ranciere-indisciplinarity/
Paddison, Max. 2010. ”Music and Social Relations: Towards a Theory of Mediation.” In Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, eds. Max Paddison & Irène Deliège, 259–277. Farnham: Ashgate.
