Composers and colleagues: Mikko Heiniö

Question by Aulis Sallinen:

Colleague Mikko, you must have heard the joke that the most difficult part of a composer’s job is coming up with a memorable title for a piece. In vocal music, this issue is easily resolved with the aid of the poem or libretto. Generic terms describing the music itself, such as symphony, sonata, trio, adagio, etc., seem to be fading into the past. Is there a fear that the content of a piece will lack something if not boosted with an extra-musical description? Is this a growing trend? Do composers, like other artists, face increasing pressure to address societal issues in their work? Socialist Realism placed no value on l’art pour l’art. A similar outlook washed over our culture some 50 years ago. But is today’s struggle against climate change meaningless if a composer neglects to write a piece about it?

Response by Mikko Heiniö:

Giving a title to a composition is a truly fascinating topic. It is strange that I have not come across any academic studies on this, although I have read a number of online articles. A title always reveals something about the culture of its time, about the composition itself and about the composer (including their sense of humour, as with Trois Morceaux en forme de poire by Erik Satie (1903) – a work titled ‘three pieces in the shape of a pear’ that actually has seven movements).

We may make a rough division into generic and non-generic titles. According to a good custom but one that is more honoured in the breach than in the observance, non-generic titles are printed in italics but generic titles are not. Generic titles identify the piece as belonging to a specific category of compositions, while a non-generic title is individualist. And, as you noted, generic titles refer to the structure of the music itself, while non-generic titles often refer to the outside world.

A title is always an indication of how the piece should be understood. The listener should reasonably be able to expect that the title is as well thought out as the music. Some composers bristle at the idea at giving audiences verbal cues and prefer to give their works abstract titles. On the other hand, a composer wishing to give a piece a completely unique title should perhaps check the database of his or her copyright society beforehand to find out whether pieces with the same title already exist (they often do).

No doubt all composers have decided on some of their titles before writing the piece (in which case the title of course inspires and somehow guides the creative process) and on some after the fact. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes very difficult. The late Matti Rautio, writing small pedagogical pieces for the Aaron series of piano primers, reported that it only took one or two days to write such a piece but three days to come up with a title. A generic title would have been easy, but it would not have appealed to the target group, i.e. children.

Philosopher Jerrold Levinson opines that the title is such a constitutive and integral part of a work that if one changes the title, one changes the work. Krzysztof Penderecki once wrote an abstract, sonorist piece for string ensemble, and it was not until later that he titled it Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. This made the piece a sure-fire hit. A non-generic title that piques the curiosity of gatekeepers and listeners can rescue a piece from oblivion. On the other hand, if the composer is already famous, a generic title may be sufficient: a well-established symphonic composer is always expected to produce Symphony no. n+1.

The above example may prompt a cynical response. For myself, I have the naïve belief that composers – generally speaking – do not calculate what would be the optimum title to boost a composition to success. The creative process is certainly demanding enough as it is, so composers just do what they want and what they know. If they differ wildly from the mainstream of the day, critics describe them as ‘sincere’ (which is somewhat problematic, given that it implies that some other composers are insincere). While giving a title is of course easier than writing the piece itself, it is difficult to demonstrate whether any particular title is in fact calculated and insincere. Firstly, a composer may have a substantive reason for revising a title; and secondly, not all composers are verbally as gifted as they are musically.

Apart from ‘sincere’, another attribute that I would like to see allocated with some more restraint is ‘actuality’, in the sense of how a work relates to the artistic trends of its time. That is how is the term was used as recently as in the 1970s and 1980s. Paavo Heininen wrote in 1976: “The measure of the value of a composition is not its style – but it would be a miserable abdication of critical self-reflection to claim that everything written in this year unreservedly qualifies as ‘music of our time’.” The opposite view was espoused by composers such as Harri Wessman, who was bothered by the fact that “contemporary music is ‘actual’ only in reference to contemporary music itself and not to the world around it”.

Today, artworks are considered to be ‘actual’ or ‘topical’ particularly if they address the world around us and issues therein. You, colleague Aulis, suspect that this results in pressures for composers to give titles to their pieces stating their position on a particular contemporary issue. In other words, the argument would be that a composer who labels a work simply a Symphony cannot be as seriously concerned about climate change as the next person. Of course he or she can. How this concern manifests itself in their artistic decisions is another matter altogether. One composer may consider that in times of crisis, music must proclaim doom and gloom, while another may think that we need solace and light as a counterbalance. Both approaches are legitimate, and both can be experienced by the listener as a topical statement – even if the piece is titled nothing more than a Symphony.

In 1940, Igor Stravinsky declared that the concept of ‘modern’ is void and unnecessary in the specific sense of being ‘of this time’. He remarked: “Which time could we possibly inhabit if not our own?” Every good piece of music is timely and relevant right now, as proven by the thousands of pieces dating from many centuries ago that people still want to perform and listen to. But they do not need to be written again; not even the most conservative of audiences would think that. If an audience is willing to listen to the world premiere of a new piece in the first place, they will certainly be expecting a work the sort of which did not previously exist. And if the work comes across as poorly written, then no moral or ecological imperative in its title will save it from falling into obscurity.

There are other problematic aspects to the concept of ‘actuality’. It seems to detach a piece from the historical continuum, which in Western art music in particular is exceptionally lengthy and strong. An artwork cannot respond to the world around it with the turnaround time of a newspaper. Often the process from beginning a composition to its premiere takes so much time that any current burning issue being addressed may well be a thing of the past by then.

I cannot quote statistics as to whether compositions are being given more non-generic than generic titles these days, as you suspect. Symphonies, at least, are still being written by composers today, very much so. On Wikipedia, the List of symphony composers names some 200 composers born between 1945 and 1992. Admittedly this list does not indicate how many of them have given their symphonies an additional title, nor whether in such a case ‘symphony’ is the main title or a subtitle. My first symphony was titled Possible Worlds – A Symphony, while my second was Symphony no. 2, ‘Songs of Night and Love’. This, of course, says something of my personal relationship with the traditions of this genre (but that would be a topic for an article in itself).

Following the lead of your question, I have not addressed vocal music or works for the stage. But I may be allowed one exception: with my church opera Riddaren och draken [The Knight and the Dragon], my librettist Bo Carpelan was initially not pleased with my choice of title, suggesting instead naming it after the main character, Marina. But he deferred to my choice when I explained to him what he as a Swedish speaker had not realised: that with such a title, the opera would inevitably be referred to in Finnish as Heiniö’s Marina, which could be understood as ‘Heiniö’s whining.

Translation: Jaakko Mäntyjärvi
Featured photo: Maarit Kytöharju / Music Finland 

Originally published in Kompositio, the member magazine of the Society of Finnish Composers.