improvisation

This special issue of FMQ highlights improvisation. We delve into the experiences of musicians who balance spontaneity and structure, revealing how improvisation shapes their creative processes and performances in kaleidoscopic ways.

How does improvisation manifest on Finnish records today – in jazz and beyond? In this review article, Matti Nives, the founder and creative director of the Helsinki-based label, festival and magazine We Jazz, takes an in-depth look at three recent releases.

When choral conductor Ida Olsonen does vocal painting with the Musta lammas choir (whose name translates as ‘black sheep’), no one knows what the performance will be like. In this column, Olsonen describes how an improvised choral performance unfolds – and how it is even possible to conduct choral improvisation in the first place.

Folk musician, multidisciplinary improviser and educator Outi Pulkkinen and pianist-composer Kari Ikonen discuss improvisation, its limits and its potential. Both base their work on improvisation, and here they share their thoughts on what good improvisation is, why it is an attractive concept and how you can dispel your fear of failure with it.

The toughest yet most rewarding of all forms of musical expression, improvisation, has always thrived in Finland. Who knows, maybe the rigours of the freezing dark winter and the joys of the warm midnight sun form mental images that are easily translated into music. As far as the brave musicians adept in this discipline go, this article seeks to separate the wheat from the chaff. This article was originally published in FMQ 1/2003.

Katarina Barruk is an Ume Sámi singer and songwriter from the Swedish side of the Sámi region, Sábmie. Barruk sings in her native language, Ume Sámi, which is in the UNESCO’s red list of critically endangered languages with just an estimated 100 speakers. Making her language heard across borders, Barruk’s live performances have improvised elements, and improvisation is an important force in her music that mixes traditional joik with pop. In this interview with FMQ, Barruk talks about her relationship with improvisation.

Classical musicians are rediscovering the long-lost art of improvisation, which has been kept alive in jazz and folk. How does improvisation affect the brains of performers and listeners – and what does it require of each?

Libero Mureddu, who is completing a doctorate at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki, creates sonic frameworks that blend algorithmic unexpectancies with collective improvisation. His work is at once art and research, as it focuses on observing the intuitive actions of improvising musicians. What is required for these intuitive actions to blossom in a performance, and how can technology and human musicianship communicate with each other?

Hietsu is Happening! runs on the logic of improvisation, while Helsinki Seriös has ambitions to become a new cornerstone of the chamber music scene. Both are examples of how non-institutional concert organisers can foster continuity. There is plenty of demand for small-format concerts out there, even if bringing marginal music offerings and audiences together is tedious and time-consuming.

“During the previous year of my studies in Utrecht I had added theory of music and composition to my curriculum. I knew I wanted to be a performer, but the traditional jazz piano wasn’t where my heart was. I had studied Clare Fischer’s harmonic concepts, which seemed to open windows towards the contemporary classical sounds I had heard in Donaueschingen,” writes composer and pianist Sid Hille. This column is part of the series where composers and other music makers write about their music.

Saxophonist Jukka Perko has taken his musical communication ideas into other fields of working life with successful lectures combining musical thinking and everyday workplace dynamics. Can listening to improvisation in music teach us something about working together and communicating?

Folklore narratives, binaural recording techniques, free improvisation and electronics are some of violinist Meriheini Luoto’s tools.

“In Tölöläb, Elifantree have met their match, leading to their most ambitious, mature and cohesive album so far.”

Estonian musicologist Heli Reimann has come a long way, from a country village in Soviet Estonia via Florida to the University of Helsinki. As a musician and a scholar, she immersed herself in Estonian jazz culture in the Stalin era, delving into the reminiscences of musicians of the time and their underground jazz parties.