1920s modernism

Väinö Raitio was a Modernist Finnish composer whose works were received with considerable reservations in his lifetime. Today, Raitio’s music is interesting both because of the period in which it was written and because of its artistic quality. Pluralism has rehabilitated Raitio, and music historians no longer need to adhere to the dramatic martyrdom conventionally ascribed to him.

Independent Finland is 100 years old and has a classical music scene that is diverse, pluralist and multicultural. A century ago, the situation was very different: just as the nation was heavily polarised after the bitter Civil War, musical life was similarly divided. It is not too much of a simplification to identify two musical camps: official national neo-Romanticism and “left-wing” modernism.

The Russian-born composer Ernest Pingoud (1887–1942) emigrated to Finland to escape the revolution in 1918 and spent most of his working life there. He became one of the champions of musical modernism in Finland at its height in the 1920s, together with Väinö Raitio and Aarre Merikanto.

With the works he wrote in the 1920s Aarre Merikanto (1893-1958) together with Ernest Pingoud and Väinö Raitio, planted the seed of modernism in Finnish music. The seed germinated in spite of adverse cultural conditions at the time, but only later generations were to reap the harvest.

Ernest Pingoud was an exceptional figure in Finnish music. During the 1920s and 1930s there can have been no other composers in the country whose works did not include a single solitary Kalevala-inspired composition, who had not drafted even one tentative folk song arrangement, and who when he felt the need for a drop of something more earthy composed (perish the thought!) shimmy-shakes and foxtrots under an assumed name. Ernest Pingoud was the cosmopolitan of the Finnish music scene.