Joonas Kokkonen

Joonas Kokkonen began his life in a small town in the 1920s and went on to become one of Finland’s most celebrated and internationally most successful composers. Today, his music is rarely performed in concert.

The wars fought in the early decades of Finland’s independence cast a long, dark shadow far into the second half of the 20th century. The voice of war in works by Finnish composers speaks of victory, defeat, grief and reconciliation.

"It's rather odd, these days, thinking back to the days in the 1960s and '70s when the musical world was riven by the competing claims of tonal and atonal music: in our own polystylist times we simply accept music as good or bad, regardless of the manner of its expression. That's as it should be, of course, but we shouldn't forget the kind of pressure that composers were under to keep abreast of the times - that is, write serial music."

What does it take to be a great composer? What is characteristic of a vital tonal art that appeals to different kinds of people in different times? How do you define a unique musical voice that by virtue of its originality remains interesting even after the death of its author?

Each generation of composers, every single composer, has, either deliberately or intuitively, been forced to solve the problems of how to combine the vertical elements of music with the horizontal. New methods of composition are constantly being devised, new devices invented for solving the problem, but no ultimate solution will, of course, ever be discovered. The composer is therefore still left with the task of finding his own personal answer.

In his article from 1987 Markku Kilpiö takes a look at Finnish choral singing.

"Art should be able to stir us, to wake us from our dreaming and our torpor, so that we should be forced to take a stand on the work and explain to ourselves what it means. If a composition is capable of this, then it has at the same time been able to activate the listener both emotionally and intellectually."