On my music and beyond: Escaping the romantic orchestra’s grasp
The sound of early music instruments has always appealed to me. I was introduced to baroque instruments at an early age through the Bach recordings of Concentus Musicus Wien and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and later through my various pursuits as a baroque cellist, ensemble leader and composer. I am of that generation of early music performers who were able to reap the full benefits from the pioneering work from the early music authenticity movement which revolved around early music performance practices and instrument research, yet had to contend with the conservative orchestral establishment and the institutions surrounding it.
All the way to the turn of the 1990s, conductors, soloists or orchestral players were rarely expected or required to understand the basis of, or the reasons behind the performance practices of different eras. It was simply not necessary to have any knowledge of them as the prevailing Romantic music performance practices, established after the Second World War, formed a funnel of sorts through which all music was blithely channelled, regardless of the stylistic era. The advocates of early music performance practices with their challenging ideas and demands were firmly at the bottom of the pecking order. This setting provided a fertile ground for the idea of defiant rebellion, which of course was a great match for an angry young man like me.
My own musical preferences at that time reflected the gap in the different approaches – I simply chose to bypass Classicism and Romanticism, which I considered to be irrelevant missteps in the history of music, and proceeded straight to the music of our time, which I was introduced to in my late teens. I was drawn to the work of composers who deviated from the academic mainstream, such as Igor Stravinsky, György Ligeti, Conlon Nancarrow and Frank Zappa. As a baroque cellist, I was keen to explore the idea of performing contemporary music on baroque instruments and a perfect platform was discovered in Ensemble Ambrosius, which I founded in 1995 together with harpsichordist Ere Lievonen and multi-instrumentalist Jonte Knif.
Our initial intention was to create performance arrangements of Frank Zappa’s instrumental music, which we had to transcribe from albums as there was no sheet music readily available. Notating his intricate melodies, difficult rhythms and complex harmonies by ear effectively provided good preparation for my future career as a composer. In the end, we managed to successfully transcribe, arrange, perform and record a set of Zappa pieces. Released in 2000, The Zappa Album represented some of the best crossover of its time. Throughout our approach, we took advantage of the similarities between the performance practices of the baroque continuo group and the rock band rhythm section and put the affective expressive power of baroque instruments at the service of Zappa’s musical grammar. If Gramophone and The Wall Street Journal are to be believed, our interpretation made Zappa’s music appear in a new light.
::
The driving force behind Ensemble Ambrosius was to play music by Zappa, but for me the group also provided another, equally important opportunity: a forum for composing and performing my own music. The bulk of my early works from 1995–2002 were composed for Ambrosius and the period instruments we used – baroque strings, traverso flute, recorders, archlute and baroque guitar, the baroque oboe family, baroque bassoon, harpsichord and baroque organ, as well as Renaissance wind instruments, bagpipes and dulcimer. During my composition studies at the Sibelius Academy, I began to gradually steer away from this instrumental world and look towards instruments specifically designed to enable the tonal ideal of the Romantic era. As can be expected, this journey was not entirely without problems.
When delving into the world of orchestral instruments, it soon became obvious how superiorly flexible they were in a technical sense compared to period instruments. Their wide playing range and ease of chromatic functionality increased my compositional possibilities. And even though the use of wider instrument families gradually began to go out of vogue after the Renaissance, a modern symphony orchestra still boasts a large number of different instruments. The sheer breadth of the instrumental spectrum translates into a rich palette of possibilities which allows a wealth of choice but at the same time requires extensive work to map out.
::
With an abundance of interesting and attractive choices at my disposal, however, my main issue was that the overall sound world of the symphony orchestra had no appeal to me. The Romantic sound ideal favours a thick and rounded sound, standardised in all its characteristics, which include bending the pitch with vibrato and the use of equal temperament consisting of evenly spaced but effectively out-of-tune intervals. The sound made up of these components is reproduced by the full instrumental complement of the symphony orchestra, rendering it into a hundred-strong super-instrument of uniform quality. The difference to the contrasting and layered tonal textures of the Renaissance and Baroque could not be greater, which is also easily noticed when comparing the different organ stop options of the Romantic and Baroque organ: the former operating on creating layers with the same set of basic tones and the latter with a wealth of contrasting options to choose from. I myself preferred the clear translucency, diverse tonal layers, natural thirds and the modal characters of the tempered tuning systems and had no affinity for the way the constant vibrato of the strings would cloud all the harmonies.
My own orchestral language has been informed and shaped by these aesthetic negations. Considered my breakthrough work, Kuru (2009) for symphony orchestra presents the results of my problem solving: instruments that produce little or no vibrato are highlighted in the orchestration and soloistic roles, pitched percussion instruments, piano, celesta and harp are featured, and harmonies are enriched through clarinet multiphonics and the natural harmonics plucked from the piano with a plectrum. The intense Romantic string sound is replaced with airy and spherical colour surfaces made of natural overtones. Although my musical language has changed quite significantly since composing Kuru 15 years ago, some traces of the orchestral aesthetics of the piece are still present in my subsequent work, for example in the second movement of my electric cello concerto Romer’s Gap (2015) written for cellist Perttu Kivilaakso, that operates through colour, power and mass.
::
After working exclusively with orchestral instruments for close to a decade at the beginning of the millennium, I returned to early music instruments again in the early 2010s. The initial impetus came from two directions: getting back to viol playing after a break of almost twenty years, and Markku Luolajan-Mikkola’s commission for a piece for two bass viols (Songs of Innocence, Lust and Sorrow, 2011). In addition, I wrote a series of folk music inspired solo pieces for treble viol, just for my own amusement.
Following the viol works, my former Ambrosius bandmate Jonte Knif and I hatched a plan to compose a concerto for the Knifonium, an analog synthesizer he had designed and built, teamed with a baroque orchestra. Through my concerto Ambrosian Delights (2013) composed for Jonte and the Finnish Baroque Orchestra – and later reworked into a new version for a modern orchestra – Finland’s baroque community began to take notice that I was available to write music for period instruments, joining the ranks of pioneering composers Jukka Tiensuu and Eero Hämeenniemi who had already composed for baroque instruments. As a result, I started picking up commissions from early music professionals, and by composing for the Renaissance recorder quartet Bravade and Baroque Ensemble Cornucopia, the use of baroque instruments once again became an organic part of my composer identity.
As for my search for an alternative path as a composer which stemmed from the defiant spirit of rebellion, and for my composition style focusing on baroque instruments, it must be said that the past decades have been effective in mellowing out my confrontational views on the symphony orchestra and its instruments. There has been a shift in the attitudes towards the early music authenticity movement amongst orchestral musicians, conductors and the massive machinery behind the orchestra itself. Today, early music instruments and performance practices are an organic part of many orchestral players’ musical identity. Likewise, it is now standard practice for both orchestral players and conductors to consider and apply the appropriate early music performance requirements when performing orchestral repertoire.
::
The standard of music performance and the consideration towards composers’ expressive ambitions are also on a higher level than before. Audiences who have a penchant for diverse orchestral tonal worlds, as heard in my own works, also benefit from the fact that composers like Kaija Saariaho whose orchestral works include specific expressive demands have forced orchestral musicians and conductors to learn the aesthetics of translucency, and bright, unwavering tonal surfaces. The breadth of orchestral expertise has risen to such a level that nowadays it is possible for a composer to request their preferred sound from a symphony orchestra without having to resort to any special arrangements.
Although my musical roots remain in baroque music, I must admit that the music and compositional structural principles of that no longer offer much interest to me. However, what early music has contributed to my musical expression is an interest in timbres, tempered tuning systems, pure intervals and various contrapuntal techniques. The aesthetics and background philosophy of the Romantic arts still generally fail to appeal to me within any art form, but in music, over the decades, I have started to both tolerate the music of the composers of that time and get along with the instruments of the era.
Furthermore, the symphony orchestra has proven to be a surprisingly flexible instrument in terms of its sonority and expression. It may not be the ideal tool for interpreting the musical ideas of our time, but it continues to offer the composer plenty of opportunities to last for one lifetime.
Featured photo: Juhana Rossi