Shades of the In-Between: Exploring Musical Boundaries with Aino Peltomaa and Ilkka Heinonen

Being a musician who’s not easily categorised often leads to situations where the audience is somewhat baffled – usually in a good way. When Ilkka Heinonen returned to the Finnish folk music capital of Kaustinen this year as a showcase artist and brought along his explorations in early music, the folk audience was captivated, witnessing the quintessential folk instrument of Eastern Finland, the jouhikko, transform into something wondrous and spiritual in his hands. Aino Peltomaa recounts an audience member’s testimony of being mesmerised by a performance by Ensemble Gamut!, despite normally being sceptical of medieval music.

Both of them feel a strong calling to challenge listeners’ expectations and, quite literally, to think outside the box. In a small but culturally vibrant country like Finland, musical niches are energetic yet often highly specialised. Among today’s Finnish musicians, versatility is increasingly a necessity rather than a rarity, but a genuine bending of boundaries and a healthy muddling of preconceptions are less common. Aino Peltomaa, with her voice, and Ilkka Heinonen, with the jouhikko, a Finnish bowed lyre, have created a musical expression that defies categorisation, both individually and as part of Ensemble Gamut!.

FLOS is an interdisciplinary concert concept, brought to life by Ensemble Gamut! in collaboration with visual artist Vappu Rossi and sound artist Tuomas Norvio.

Music of the liminal 

“I try to let go of everything and just be in the moment with my instrument, be it the voice, the harp, or percussion”, states Aino Peltomaa, whose choice of instruments is primarily inspired by medieval music. Ilkka Heinonen recalls a recent gig with the Finnish Baroque Orchestra where his task was to improvise bridges between pieces using his jouhikko.

“And the audience felt that it was just music, not folk music or early music”, Heinonen says. Music as music, without labels, captures their vision. In a classical music field still grappling with rigid and outdated structures, this approach feels both cutting-edge and liberatingly ancient, a return to the roots.

This is neither a crossover – a term that feels very 2000s – nor ‘a bold combination’.

“To my mind, there’s nothing that gets combined”, Ilkka Heinonen points out. “It’s all dialogue. It’s about removing assumptions about how one should listen to music and focusing on the music and the artist’s expression, rather than on how the performance relates to a supposed context.”

Thus, it represents an ideal of musicianship stripped of traditions and preconceptions, restored to its expression in the here and now. However, this does not imply musical anarchy. To achieve such expressive freedom, a solid foundation of expertise, craft, and continuous self-development is required. Peltomaa and Heinonen emphasise that passion and expressiveness must be balanced with hard work, regardless of the genre. How the hard work is done and how it’s motivated, though, differs from the conventional classical music approach.

“When I gather material, the whole process is intuitive, personal and totally un-musicological”, Peltomaa says with a laugh. As the founder and driving force behind Ensemble Gamut!, she is responsible for the group’s programme planning, browsing manuscripts ranging from European pilgrimage hymns to Finnish folk songs and music preserved in Nordic monasteries. For her, all music exists on the same plane, allowing influences to circulate freely, sometimes resulting in a complete merging of melodies from different sources, as heard on the opening track of Ensemble Gamut!’s debut album, UT.

This is how timeless and contemporary themes become inseparable. On Ensemble Gamut!’s sophomore album, RE, the medieval Christianisation of Finland by Sweden is linked to today’s territorial conflicts. Meanwhile, ancient and modern perspectives on our planet merge in the projects of Aino Peltomaa and her trio Peltomaa-Fraanje-Perkola, blending elements of medieval music, jazz, and electronic minimalism.

Ilkka Heinonen’s work with his Ilkka Heinonen Trio, which he founded in 2012 with Mikko Hassinen and Nathan Riki Thomson, as well as his recent solo album Käki (The Cuckoo), create a space where all the musical elements from his professional journey come together organically.

“I’m fascinated by intermediate and liminal spaces that can help people, myself included, to let go of conventionally restricted modes of listening and music making”, Heinonen says.

A curious expedition

The expressive freedom of Aino Peltomaa’s singing partly stems from her long journey of exploring different styles and studying not only music but also psychology. She began her career as an instrumentalist, with modern flute as her major during her studies. It was only later in life that she started to take singing seriously.

“I decided quite late that I wanted, and could, make a living as a freelance musician”, says Peltomaa, who was teaching music at upper secondary school, studying psychology, and embarking on a career as a vocational counsellor. It took time to build self-confidence. “I just didn’t believe enough in myself. However, as a career coach helping others find their voices and realise their dreams, I saw no other way than to ‘live as you teach’. So, around 2012, I listened to my heart, as they say, and became a freelance musician.”

All the while moving towards earlier repertoires, she participated in several masterclasses on medieval music across Europe and developed a deep love for medieval harps. Although she has no formal training with the instrument, she considers herself a fiddler (in Finnish, ‘pelimanni’ – “a player”) in the truest sense of the word. She describes her harp as a personal plaything, with which she aims to maintain a sense of independence and gentleness. The voice, too, was always a secondary instrument during her studies in classical, pop and folk music.

“For a long time I was the odd one out in every genre,” she says with a smile. “Now I’ve started to let go of all that, evolving, in a way, into the feeling that I am who I am, not somebody else.”

It is telling that Hildegard of Bingen, the legendary medieval polymath, is a central figure in Peltomaa’s journey. The 12th-century abbess, writer and mystic appears in almost every one of her projects.

“I was drawn to her, to her absolute versatility, right from the start.”

Hildegard was active in theology, linguistics, herbology and more. She had mystical visions, worked as a healer, and even invented her own language, Lingua Ignota.

A certain mysticism also surrounds Peltomaa, whose expression often touches on meditativeness. In addition to her various projects, she organises retreats that combine yoga and Gregorian chant.

“Voice is a curious expedition”, Peltomaa says. “Being supported by your bandmates is crucial when you try to stay true to yourself and let creative impulses and intuition take the lead. I’m drawn to fragility. How can I be present with the fragility of the human voice and allow it to be fragile?”

This is, of course, the exact opposite of the classical opera industry, which aims to produce voices powerful enough to carry over large orchestras. Solidity, evenness, and strength are key values in classical singing technique. Peltomaa, however, has been moving increasingly towards quietness.

“What’s the quietest sound I can make?”

Towards the fountainhead

How did Heinonen end up doing radical musical fusion with the jouhikko? As a youth playing in pop bands, he took up the double bass, believing that “the only way to become a professional musician was by playing in an orchestra”.

“No one told me that being a freelancer was an option!”

Soon, he was exploring a range of genres from jazz to world music, quickly finding a home in the folk music scene, which felt as cosy and non-hierarchical as the band garages where he grew up. He had already encountered the jouhikko in the early 2000s and ordered one from Rauno Nieminen, a jouhikko player, researcher, and luthier. This happened at the same time as Pekko Käppi, a prominent jouhikko player in the Finnish contemporary folk scene, also ordered one.

“At that time, I spent my days drilling orchestral double bass repertoire and my evenings improvising Karelian trepatska dances”, he says with a laugh. About ten years ago, the jouhikko was still more of a personal side quest, with Heinonen’s main focus remaining on the double bass. Playing in folk and world music groups, he began to question the folk music arranging conventions, which often referenced popular music. Why not delve further into the source, into baroque music?

“So I started taking baroque double bass lessons, joined baroque orchestras, and collaborated with early music practitioners.”

Curious about early music aesthetics and its potential for other genres, Heinonen felt he had landed on the shared roots of folk and jazz music. Later, he took up the viola da gamba, applying its playing techniques to the jouhikko. Drawn to church acoustics, he played the jouhikko without PA, meditating on its raw and honest sound. Thus, his unique approach to the jouhikko was born, a musical expression weaving through various music traditions.

A love-hate-relationship

Heinonen’s album Käki, a tribute to the jouhikko released in 2023, encapsulates the explorations he has pursued since 2010, when his main interest began to shift from the double bass to the jouhikko. The album is also part of his artistic doctoral degree at the Sibelius Academy, focusing on the multifaceted nature of Karelian jouhikko playing. Working with luthier Rauno Nieminen – a pioneer in the Finnish jouhikko renaissance, as discussed in an article in FMQ earlier this year – Heinonen experimented with instrument structures and string materials, resulting in a total of six custom-made jouhikkos featured on the album, including one of his own making.

While the album showcases the full spectrum of Heinonen’s musical interests, all of its tracks – created over a period of one and a half years – are linked in some way to the Karelian musical landscape and its borderland position, either through melodic material or playing styles. Rather than viewing it as a Finnish folk album, Heinonen sees it as a classical solo programme comparable to baroque partitas, a concept reflected in the cover art, which he created himself, inspired by seventeenth-century still life paintings.

“Jouhikko is originally an instrument designed to accompany dancing. But what if a Karelian jouhikko player were spiritual and incorporated Orthodox religious songs into their playing?” Heinonen muses. “I absorbed as much material as I could and then began exploring how it all resonated together.”

The long brewing time, an improvisatory process of ‘temporary compositions’ and an abundance of influences ranging from renaissance viola da gamba to Near-Eastern music paved the way for a musical fusion that doesn’t merely combine or interpolate elements but creates something greater than the sum of its parts. Another vital point was working without a fixed hypothesis, although within a carefully prepared framework. Heinonen sought to explore the jouhikko’s primordial and ingenuous sound and see what emerged.

“I wanted to cherish this fragile sound that I love, even though I hate the user interface of the jouhikko,” he laughs. This love-hate relationship led him to apply violin and viola da gamba bowing techniques to the jouhikko, premier concertos, stretch the instrument’s limits, and deliberately distance it from its origins. During the Käki project he set aside all preconceptions about how the jouhikko should or could sound, finding himself reconnecting with the instrument’s roots.

“There is no one and only way to play the jouhikko, just sounds that suit different functions”, he explains. “But it makes no sense to imitate other instruments with the jouhikko. I always strive to find a connection with the Karelian tradition because there, the jouhikko is in its element and feels meaningful.”

A dialogue à 3

This practical and hands-on spirit is also reflected in Ensemble Gamut!. The core lineup, alongside Peltomaa and Heinonen, includes the versatile recorder player Juho Myllylä. This past summer, Ensemble Gamut! toured Finland and Europe, testing their new programme and sometimes making changes right before a gig. A new album is in the works, and, as always, it’s set to expand the group’s artistic horizons.

“On the previous album, we collaborated with the rap artist Paleface AKA Karri Miettinen, and now we’ve invited visual artist Vappu Rossi and sound designer Tuomas Norvio to join us”, Aino Peltomaa says. She has gradually started incorporating her own lyrics into her musical projects and draws inspiration this time from arctic flowers on the verge of extinction. The presence of an experienced electronic musician like Norvio broadens the ensemble’s usual use of live electronics into something more substantial, and intriguingly, also connects with Vappu Rossi’s art.

“We’ll have microphones on the board that she draws on, so we’ll hear what drawing sounds like”, says Heinonen excitedly. In the concert version of the programme, scientific perspectives on the Arctic are explored in collaboration with Mia Rönkä, a lecturer in biodiversity and poet.

“We are always seeking something new and different,” Peltomaa states. “We’re interested in what the perspectives and expertise of the three of us can yield when combined. It’s about being together and reflecting on one another, exploring our expressive ranges and sounds both individually and collectively.”

Ensemble Gamut! is indeed a collective, not just by name but in their approach. Their creative process resembles a magic cauldron where three different musicians contribute what they have gathered on their respective paths. It also recalls the spirit of band garages where Heinonen spent his youth: no sheet music, no hierarchy, no fixed roles, and no preconceived vision.

“Aino brings some material or a draft for a song, and we work on it, whether it’s music by Hildegard von Bingen or original compositions by Aino”, Heinonen describes. “The question is how we can make it sound with our skill sets and interests. All material is merely a starting point for an equal dialogue.”

“No one tries to execute someone else’s ideas but their own, in interaction with others”, Peltomaa says. “And similarly, we cannot turn away from our world, even if the music is centuries old, because we are creating this music today.”

Peltomaa believes that the sometimes uncomfortable process of not knowing where the path will lead is worthwhile. “It’s fascinating if one dares to embrace the unknown and let the music take shape in the moment.”

Navigating theory and practice

The early music movement is at a crossroads, or has been for some time. The unattainable pursuit of “historical authenticity” is long gone, as is the marginality of period instruments. Finland has boasted a strong early music scene since the late 1980s, and ideas of historically informed performance practice, or ‘HIP’, have become integrated into symphony orchestras and instrumental pedagogy.

Some musicians, especially those straddling genres, are grappling with their identities and wondering what the next step should be. In both early and folk music scenes, there has been a shift towards an ideal of being historically inspired rather than historically informed – a recognition of historical knowledge as an ongoing journey.

Aino Peltomaa points out that in medieval society, musical theory and the practice of music making were worlds apart. The further back you go, the scarcer the written sources become. Oral traditions can only be glimpsed through the historical documents available, and many musical practices remain virtually unattainable.

“I have sometimes been told to play the harp ‘in a more medieval sounding way’ by an early music ensemble leader”, sighs Peltomaa. “But the theoretically correct scales are just one aspect, more likely a scholarly one, of this music. I simply cannot believe that the harpists of that time would not have been playing around with their instruments! I’m sure they were just as creative and crazy as we are, drumming and strumming and tinkling their harps.”

According to Heinonen, modern conventions of performing early music and historical evidence may become muddled, especially with the earliest repertoire. Letting go of the ‘historically informed’ aspect is not an option, however.

“I strongly believe that whatever the genre, the music must be rooted in its historical context and performing practices,” says Heinonen. “I am more of a bridge builder myself, but I couldn’t build bridges if there were no islands. That’s why I have enormous respect for those who preserve historical knowledge.”

Featured photo: Jaakko Paarvala