On my music and beyond: Composing music as a family

Intro: Water and the Teosto Prize

Sanna Ahvenjärvi: In January 2023, I’m driving from Oulu towards Haapajärvi and am just passing Siikalatva when my phone rings. It’s from Teosto, the Finnish performance rights organisation. Water, a piece jointly composed by Tapio and myself, is one of the six works nominated for the Teosto Prize! I immediately phone Tapio. This is such a mad thing that my first instinct is, as Finns do, to go out into the marketplace to celebrate. In a flashback, I review how we’ve come here.

Back in 2013, I was asked to join a chamber opera project for children, titled Rakennetaan koulu! (Let’s build a school!), organised by the Atlantis chamber opera association in Jyväskylä. I asked Tapio to join me in writing the piece at an early stage, because in a family with two composers and small children it was a welcome thought to share out the work and the responsibility. Our collaboration was exceedingly successful on the chamber opera, and we decided to make the arrangement permanent. 

Beginning the collaboration

In 2018, we co-wrote Jubileum for the 50th anniversary of the Jokilaaksot Music Institute, to be performed by the jubilee orchestra. In 2019, we co-wrote Bußetuende Zitrusseife, a commission from the Salzburger Gesellschaft für Musik that was premiered on Bloomsday – the international celebration of Ulysses by James Joyce – in Salzburg in summer 2019.

In 2020, we completed two collaborations, Ikirouta [Permafrost] commissioned by the Lokakuu contemporary music society and Water commissioned by the Tampere Philharmonic. We completed Water in mid-February, and it was scheduled to be premiered at the Tampere Biennale in spring 2020, but Covid intervened and the performance was cancelled. This was a heavy blow. We feared that the work would forever remain in limbo, but fortunately Water was put back on the programme for the 2022 Tampere Biennale.

Then came spring 2023 with the Teosto Prize nomination, and later in the spring we found that Water had won. In October 2023, the Oulu Sinfonia performed Water at the New Music October festival, and soon after that we received an invitation to the President’s Independence Day reception from President of the Republic Sauli Niinistö and his spouse, Dr Jenni Haukio. That was one hell of a way to celebrate the 10th anniversary of our composer collaboration!

A recording of Water with the score:

Why do we write music together?

The roots of our professional collaboration go back to the year 2000, which is when we co-wrote arrangements of ten Christmas songs for the Christmas album of the Suzuki School in Oulu. It did not exactly go smoothly back then, and it did not seem like the right time to embark on more ambitious collaborative ventures. We were both in the early stages of our careers and trying to establish our respective composer identities. After the Christmas song project, we did not return to the drawing board, so to speak, until 2013. Our first co-composition was the chamber opera Rakennetaan koulu! [Let’s build a school!] for the visually impaired and hearing-impaired students at the Onerva Mäki School and Kukkumäki School in Jyväskylä. 

It was clear from this very first project that writing music together would be a permanent thing for us from then on. In a family with two composers, this allows both an uninterrupted creative process and an uninterrupted family life.

Among the joys of joint composition are the input of ideas from two people in a project and working on these ideas, sharing both successes and setbacks. We also copy out instrument parts in shifts and encourage each other when fatigue or desperation sets in. And it’s a great feeling to know that the work is progressing even while one of us is at the gym!

Collaboration has shown us that 1+1 is more than 2. We have often noted that the end result is better than anything either of us could have come up with alone. Our work practices have evolved from one project to the next, boosted by the fact that we are both composition teachers and have mentored our students’ co-composition projects as well.

Our workplace atmosphere these days is generally a friendly and accepting space where both can express whatever ideas come to mind without fear of being criticised or shot down. We believe that this is important, even vital, for co-composing to succeed.

However, this does not mean that we never disagree or argue. There are always moments in the composition process where one of us does not immediately like what the other one is suggesting. We have agreed never to dismiss each others’ ideas; we have to give enough time to take ideas on board and understand them. Constructive criticism is only allowed once we have internalised an idea. In many cases, processing an idea needs both of us to develop a version of the initial idea, after which we decide which is the better approach to continue or perhaps create a synthesis of both. It is not necessarily possible to determine from the end product which of us came up with which idea, because the end product is something that neither of us would have written on our own.

We have realised over the years that when we are co-writing music, we need to have meetings very frequently to avoid diverging too far from one another. If we stray apart, it can be very challenging to reconcile our ideas. These meetings are about discussing what we are looking for in the work as a whole or in an individual section, and which of us will work on which part. One of us may have ideas for a particular bit and may want to work on that, or one of us may be stuck and ask the other one to take over.

In the course of the process, we vary which one of us has the lead in any particular section. But even though the lead may remain the same throughout the process, the other person can always contribute ideas. There is so much to music to write in any given piece that it is neither possible nor necessary for both of us to have a say on absolutely every detail.

There are measures and sections in the finished pieces that we can point to and say, Sanna wrote that or Tapio wrote that. But then there are also cases like one where Tapio worked out a passage but Sanna suggested deleting a particular measure to make the music flow better. In a case like this, it is impossible to detect after the fact who contributed what.

Water – The hybrid instruments in our breakthrough work

The composition process for our Teosto Prize winning work Water exemplifies many of the key features of our collaborative approach. We sought to give space in this piece to our respective aesthetic preferences.

Sanna’s own works tend to be characterised by emotional catharsis, comfort and an almost therapeutic vibe. Tapio, on the other hand, has worked with music technology throughout his career as a composer, and this inspired him to invent and innovate hybrid instruments for Water.

Water is the first of a planned set of four orchestral works reflecting on climate change. This work highlights the importance, sensitivity, beauty and terror of water. It begins in a drought and passes through rain, stream, lake and waterfalls to a tsunami. We researched this piece by reading up on the science and by watching documentaries on sobering topics such as glaciers melting and the bleak future of coral reefs. We consulted biology professionals whom we know on several occasions about issues having to do with the natural environment.

Water has been an inspiration for music for millennia, including the centuries of Western art music. We may point to La Mer by Claude Debussy and Die Forelle by Franz Schubert or, closer to home, Waterdrops by Jean Sibelius or Yö meren rannalla [Night by the sea] by Heino Kaski. We considered how we could contribute something new to this tradition of water-inspired music. We decided to integrate water (in the form of liquid and ice) into ‘hybrid instruments’, meaning that we put together nature (i.e. water) and technology. These hybrid instruments are played jointly by a percussionist and a music technologist. The titular element in Water functions as a source of vibration (dropping water from a dropper into a measuring cup attached to a mic), a modulator of instrument vibrations (immersing triangle, chimes and glockenspiel keys in water after striking them) and a vibrating object (an ice cube with a hydrophone frozen in it, being scratched and struck).

Our long-term plan is to write pieces on all of the four classical elements – water, earth, fire and air. This might take ten years or more. At the moment, we are looking for orchestras that would be keen to join the project. We are currently working on Air on a grant from Arts Promotion Centre Finland.

Although we have often wondered how it is possible for two composers to keep themselves going artistically in a family with small children, somehow we have muddled through. A family with one composer may find its finances precarious, but just imagine the economic prospects of having two composers in the family. Because of this, both of us have sought teaching jobs to provide us with the financial stability we need for our creativity.

When our children move out in a few years’ time, our original motivation for collaboration will be no more. But because writing music together is so rewarding and pleasant, we would not dream of giving it up. We look forward to many fascinating co-composed projects!

Featured photo: Ville Juurikkala
Translation: Jaakko Mäntyjärvi