Musicology

The University of Helsinki’s Music Research Laboratory & Electronic Music Studio celebrates its 60th anniversary this autumn. Over the decades, it has expanded its activities to become a versatile, wide-ranging music and sound research laboratory.

Jean Sibelius Works is compiling a critical edition of the complete works of Sibelius, based on a variety of archival sources. The study is building a fascinating picture of the composer’s creative process while also challenging the traditional notion of what is a ‘work’.

Heikki Uimonen does not have a favourite sound. As an ethnomusicologist and a sound scholar, he is interested in all sounds. The more disturbing the better.

"Let us accept as a starting point that one can be a musicologist if one has been trained as a musician and as a scholar. Failing to meet either of these two criteria removes the foundation from talking about music," writes musicologist, Professor Eero Tarasti in his FMQ column.

"As the climate crisis accelerates and other societal threats emerge, musicologists can, whatever their speciality, join in demonstrating that the close co-existence of humans with each other and with non-human creatures and things is a feature not only of non-Western worldviews and musical cultures as explored and shown by ethnomusicologists but of Western cultures too," writes Milla Tiainen, PhD and current Chair of the Finnish Musicological Society.

Doctors of Music have been graduating from the Sibelius Academy over 30 years. The spectrum of research undertaken at the academy is broad, but its principal strength is in artistic competence, which helps open up new research prospects. Now that the value of the artist's knowhow for research is better understood, investment in post-doctoral research is growing.

Whose are the voices we hear at concerts? Which stories are conveyed through art music, and which are not? Questions like this are becoming increasingly common, and now we are starting to find answers to them. The Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra is engaged in a project titled HUOM, History's Unheard Orchestral Music. The project is reviving orchestral music written by Finnish woman composers in the 19th and 20th centuries, thereby re-evaluating our cultural history, revitalising our concert institutions and fostering new collaboration between music scholars and performing musicians.

Composer Alexandra Zheleznova-Armfelt (1866–1933) was a member of the Finnish community in St Petersburg and created her career outside Finland itself. A review of her life and work adds to our understanding of the cosmopolitan nature of our musical history and also lends a perspective on cultural life in St Petersburg and in the Baltic Sea region in general around the turn of the 20th century.

Ida Moberg (1859–1947) wished to command ensembles that produced a large sound while also touching human emotions: Most of her output is for orchestra or choir or both. The topics of her works largely has to do with individual’s spiritual metamorphosis.

Takemi Sosa completed a doctoral dissertation on the orchestral works of Magnus Lindberg at the University of Helsinki, uncovering the Aristotelian dramatic arc governing their structure. This is the first doctoral dissertation on Lindberg’s music completed in Europe.

In Finland, doctoral studies in music are available at university musicology departments and at the Uniarts Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy which has two doctoral programs with a range of artistic and academic approaches. Both doctoral schools, DocMus for classical music and MuTri for music education, jazz and folk music, offer three streams: artistic study, research study culminating in a traditional dissertation, and applied study with either an artistic or academic focus.

Musicology must engage in closer cooperation with other disciplines and find focus areas for profiling; that might be a summary of the demands currently being placed on tuition in this subject. There are positive experiences of cooperation with other disciplines at universities, but the future of the discipline is a shared source of concern all around Finland.

The doctoral dissertations in music submitted in Finland in 2005-2006 are marked by two features: the topics are heterogeneous and the approach is multidisciplinary, ranging from the sonic environment and the music-making software of video games right across to Sibelius.

Since the late 2010s, gender has finally become a widely debated and prominent topic in media discourses about classical music and composers. Contrary to what media discourses often suggest, however, the topic itself is far from new and has been a subject of academic debate for decades. This 1997 article, written by Pirkko Moisala, a pioneer of feminist music research in Finland, reflects on the situation in the late 1990s. While much has changed, there are still many critical issues that need to be addressed today.

“. . . seule la métaphore est exacte ... “ (Roland Barthes) Eero Tarasti, successor to Erik Tawaststjerna as professor of music at the University of Helsinki, takes a look at the method applied by Tawaststjerna in his biography of Sibelius.