Viitasaari

Summer 2023 marked 40 years since John Cage visited the Time of Music festival in Viitasaari. There are clichéd narratives still circulating about the snapping of twigs, the picking of mushrooms and the sloshing of milk in pails, but what did the guru really say during his masterclass? Composer Juhani Nuorvala participated in the 1983 composition course and has now unearthed his tape recordings of the event. These previously unpublished excerpts offer valuable insights into Cage’s philosophy.

"The festival has thoroughly taught me to question and to puzzle over what music actually is, whether considered as actions, definitions or delimitations. Even the simplest contemplation of the relationship between music, tones and other sounds, let alone their relationship to silence and other forms of expression and art, blew my untutored mind, and more than once I found myself reeling as I exited an overwhelming concert into the dusky Viitasaari summer night", writes Jari Hoffrén.

Viitasaari, in central Finland 350 km north of Helsinki, is the home of the Time of Music festival. Founded in 1982, it is Finland’s oldest annual festival of contemporary music. But that is not all: it is also a continuing education event with a legendary reputation. Today, the courses given at the festival attract more top-notch foreign participants than the town can accommodate. Is this Finland’s Darmstadt – or something even better than that?

One of the international guests at this year’s Time of Music festival in Viitasaari is the music theatre company La Chamber aux échos. Its mission is to explore subtle connections between the various branches of the arts. Co-founder, director-dramaturge Aleksi Barrière considers collaboration with contemporary composers to be a key element in his work. Recently, one of his principal artistic partners has been his mother, composer Kaija Saariaho.

The Time of Music 2017 festival in Viitasaari took a broad-based look at the theme of Art & Autonomy. There was also discussion about social bubbles within the contemporary music culture. Yet bubbles too can be looked at from various perspectives, writes Merja Hottinen.

Viitasaari was once again the crossroads for different generations of composers: from the “dinosaurs” Brian Ferneyhough and Harrison Birtwistle to recent breakthroughs such as Mark André and Pierluigi Billone, to name just a few, along with the Finnish Lauri Supponen and Heinz-Juhani Hofmann.