The Music of Joonas Kokkonen

Edward Jurkowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351145947
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Joonas Kokkonen (1921-1996) has been one of the most performed Finnish composers during the past 25 years both within Finland and abroad.The author's study of Joonas Kokkonen is the first full-scale account in English. Starting with a brief survey of Finnish music during the 20th century, the book then devotes a separate chapter to each of the major genres in which Kokkonen composed: symphonic, orchestral, vocal, chamber and keyboard. Illustrated with over a hundred music examples, The Music of Joonas Kokkonen seeks to overturn his reputation in some quarters as a conservative, even old fashioned, composer, and argues that Kokkonen created an interesting and refreshing approach to dodecaphonic composition and pitch organization. With a full chronological listing of works and bibliography, this book is the most important reference source to date on Kokkonen and his music." "Book Description: One of the most performed Finnish composers during the last 25 years, Joonas Kokkonen (1921-1996) was also instrumental in the development of the nation's system of music education. In this study, the author (music, U. of Lethbridge, Canada) examines Kokkonen's compositions in each of five major genres: symphonic, orchestral, vocal, chamber, and key

Chapter 1
Historical Background

Although art music has been a part of Finnish culture for several centuries, Jean Sibelius is widely considered the first Finnish composer of international prominence and remains the country's most celebrated composer—arguably the most famous composer from any of the Nordic countries. Sibelius' extraordinary success in the genres of the symphony and symphonic poem are important contributions to large-scale orchestral music and have become a highly valued aspect of twentieth-century Finnish culture.¹ Finnish composers know well the impact of Sibelius upon twentieth-century Finnish music—indeed, Sibelius' compositions are widely considered to be the sine qua non exemplar of late-romantic Finnish nationalism and as such they have also been the yardstick that has measured the output of his contemporaries and successors.²

Despite the achievements of Sibelius, one can identify composers even from Sibelius' generation whose music, while strongly rooted in a late-Romantic style, occasionally contained musical attributes that anticipated stylistic features found in Finnish modernist compositions from the late 1910s; two examples include Selim Palmgren's Kuvia Suomesta and Toivo Kuula's Eteläpohjalainen Sarja No. 2 (both works date from 1908). In an attempt to move beyond their inherited musical tradition, such works by these (as well as other) composers display elements of harmony, orchestration and texture found in the music of Claude Debussy. And even though the first Finnish premiere of an orchestral work by Debussy took place as late as 1922 (the composition was La Mer), the stylistic attributes of his music that began to appear in Finnish compositions from the early 1900s are an indication of the awareness of contemporary musical activities from France long before the music would have been heard in Finland's concert halls—not an insignificant point, given that late nineteenth-century German- and Russian-styled music would account for virtually all non-Nordic music to which a Finnish composer from the early part of the twentieth century would have been exposed.³

With the end of World War I and Finland's independence in 1917, the country went through a number of seismic political and social changes. Not surprisingly, these substantial transformations to Finland's society were mirrored by the visual art, drama, literature and music from the time period. While many composers played a role during the 1920s and 1930s in changing the prevailing style of Finnish music, one which, as noted above, was strongly entrenched in late romanticism, Uuno Klami (1900— 1961), Aarre Merikanto (1893-1958), Ernest Pingoud (1887-1942) and Väinö Raitio (1891-1945) represent a group of Finnish composers whose music has been recognized as the most significant attempt during this time period to overcome what many Finnish scholars have referred to as "The Shadow of Sibelius." These four composers founded no school and wrote music that is, perhaps not surprisingly, stylistically divergent. However, their association may be made by their attraction to the more progressive music of Debussy and Scriabin as the basis for their radical musical compositions, rather than such late nineteenth-century composers as Reger, Strauss and Tchaikovsky, the foreign composers who would have been favored by most Finnish composers from this time, as well as Sibelius. In short, while nationalism was still held as paramount, there was a general mood for change in the air, where a new generation of composers was ready to embrace novel influences outside of Finland.

While the popularity of Sibelius' musical style, both within Finland and abroad, may have elevated the composer's status to near mythical proportions, Erkki Salmenhaara has noted that, paradoxically, Sibelius' influence on younger Finnish composers such as the above-mentioned four modernists was marginal.⁴ For instance, composers such as Merikanto, Pingoud and Raitio all openly acknowledged Sibelius' use of overt tonal structures as, for instance, in the fifth symphony, was a major disappointment and could not (or refused to) see the significance of the composer's later output.⁵ Einar Englund has described a personal accounting of their reaction to Sibelius' later music as follows:

After the first performance of the fourth symphony by Sibelius Väinö Ratio and Aarre Merikanto were sitting in a restaurant and celebrating the occasion with a glass of wine. Both radicals were of the opinion that Sibelius with his new symphony had proved that their belief in the validity of music which shunned tonality was right. "If he goes on along this line, the fifth will have already moved towards atonality," they thought, and waited excitedly for the next work. The fifth came, and with it disappointment. The fourth symphony thus was a sheer experiment, a brain wave of their idol. Disappointed, they turned their gaze in the direction of Schoenberg and Hindemith—and, specifically, the latter's early expressionistic compositions—and continued persistently to write their bold works.⁶

To claim that these modernists had difficulty getting their music accepted is no mere understatement. Simply stated, Finnish composers during the 1920s and 1930s had to contend with an audience that placed Sibelius' music—and specifically, his overtly tonal compositions—on the highest order, a demand that was exacerbated by a country proud of the independence it had attained in 1917. As Glenn Koponen has noted, following the country's independence in 1917:

[N]ational unity and cooperation in all areas of Finnish society were essential factors in light of the Russian and German oriented tensions which were continually pervasive during the first half of the century. Thus the official façade of musical life remained one of national romanticism during the period between the two world wars.⁷

With their edict for dramatic changes to the stylistic norms of Finnish composition, it would seem inevitable that these young composers would be controversial and harshly received by both audiences and critics. In fact, several of their works remained unperformed until the last few decades. An often-cited example of such neglect is Merikanto's acknowledged masterpiece, his 1922 opera Juha, a work which received its first complete staged production as late as 1962, and four years after the composer's death. Although not immune to the negative criticism many modernists encountered, Klami's music enjoyed more success in the concert hall than his contemporaries. For instance, Klami's most famous piece, the Kalevala Suite Op. 35, has been actively performed both within Finland and abroad (the work was even programmed several times in the United States by Leopold Stokowski during the 1940s). It should be noted, however, that for as much as he had embraced progressive compositional features of Ravel and Stravinsky, Klami also used themes from Finland's national folk epic The Kalevala in his music to a far greater degree than most other modernist composers—and especially when compared with Merikanto, the Russian-born Pingoud (who may be the sole composer from this time who never once used elements of Finland's famous folk epic in his music), and Raitio—which may have provided a more familiar basis for audiences anticipating such musical attributes and thus engendering a more favorable response to his work, at least within Finland.

While the fifteen years from 1915 to 1930 represented an unprecedented period of musical growth in Finland, the harsh criticism that the modernist composers faced inevitably took its toll: by around 1930 one can detect a pronounced change to a more reactionary style in their music.⁸ Consider, for instance, the differences between Merikanto's Abduction of Kyllikki, an orchestral work written in 1935 to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Kalevala: as Salmenhaara has observed, the composition is much less adventuresome, as regards harmony and rhythm, when compared with a work such as Merikanto's tone poem Pan from fifteen years earlier.⁹

The paucity of experimental works by composers such as Merikanto and Raitio came to nearly a complete cessation by the end of the 1930s, prompting the Finnish composer Sulho Ranta (1901-1960) to write:

To put it in general terms: the work "modern" has lately vanished entirely from the annals concerning our young composers. I cannot, however, have another opinion of a young tone-smith's first concert of his works, where one sits "with a sage mind," than that it somehow tastes strange. One has time later on to cool down 'intellectually speaking.' And recalling other branches of our art, so far there is not yet as much of romanticism as among the youngest of our music: the poets still go on with their free metres and among the painters there are even surrealists!¹⁰

In addition to the hostile reception many modernist composers received during the 1940s, they also faced a more practical problem: like continental Europe, there was a drastic decrease of musical activity in Finland during World War II—a situation greatly exacerbated by its complex political role between Germany and Russia—as many musicians were called to active service duty during this seven-year time period.

The end of World War II seems to have sparked a major moment in Finnish culture. Specifically, there was a general sense that it was time to move away from nationalistic styled art that had dominated the first half of the century; music, more than the other art forms, seemed galvanized to catch up with continental Europe's lead. As Kalevi Aho writes, "New trends followed one another in Finnish music in such rapid succession that several styles were always simultaneously present, and the general image of Finnish music has been pluralistic ever since the [end of the] war."¹¹

With a musical landscape ripe for change, the appearance of Einar Englund's first two symphonies, dating from 1946 and 1948, was heralded as a pivotal moment in Finnish music. An important feature of these two works—indeed, his compositional style in general—is that Englund consciously set out to free himself from the established styles of Sibelius and Leevi Madetoja (1887-1947), and did so by instead relying upon the Russians Stravinsky, Prokofiev and, especially, Shostakovich. Further, stylistic attributes by these composers are cast within formal designs, orchestration and textures that demonstrate Englund's proclivity towards European neoclassicism.

Englund is usually acknowledged as the first Finnish composer whose style was more predisposed to Shostakovich's music than his Finnish predecessors. For instance, the melodic and rhythmic ideas from the two symphonies demonstrate that he knew his Shostakovich well (the first and ninth symphonies are particularly relevant here); Englund also wrote an unpublished study of the composer as early as 1946.

During the 1940s and 1950s Englund s neoclassical-styled compositions were of great interest for many younger Finnish composers looking to Europe for musical influences; four prominent composers include Nils-Eric Foufstedt (1910-1961), Nils-Eric Ringbom (1907-1988), Ahti Sonninen (Sonninen (1914-1984) is the composer of arguably Finland's most performed ballet score, the 1952 Ρessi ja Illusia) and Jouko Tolonen (1912-1986), as well the early works of Usko Meriläinen (b. 1930) and Kokkonen. However, a significant boost to the influx of new musical trends in Finland was the founding in 1949 of the Society of Contemporary Music, an organization in which Englund played a founding role. The Society not only arranged concerts, but also brought prominent foreign composers and performers into Finland who specialized in contemporary music.

One Finnish composer who also played a role in the early years of the Society was Eric Bergman (b. 1911). Bergman is usually attributed as the first Finnish composer to utilize dodecaphonic procedures extensively in his music, a compositional style he learned primarily from his studies in 1954 with Wladimir Vogel. Vogel, in fact, became an important foreign teacher for several Finnish composers during the 1950s. For instance, following Bergman, Tauno Marttinen, Einojuhani Rautavaara and Meriläinen all traveled to Switzerland for private instruction (all these composers were leading dodecaphonic Finnish composers during the second half of the 1950s and the 1960s).

Marttinen, Rautavaara and Meriläinen all began their respective careers as neoclassical composers but altered their styles during the 1950s once they recognized the variety of modes of expression that became available to them via dodecaphonic composition. However, Paavo Heininen (b. 1938) is another composer who rose to prominence during the 1950s who should be acknowledged. Even from his earliest works, Heininen has displayed a much greater proclivity towards the modernist stance of the Darmstadt serialists than his Finnish heritage. In fact, a strong argument can be made to consider Heininen as one of the first composers to have successively shunned all traces of Sibelius' influence, a tradition that had been such a vital part of Finnish composition during the first half of the twentieth century. Not only has Heininen (himself a student of Kokkonen) had a distinguished career as a composer, but he has also taught the vast majority of the internationally prominent composers who studied at the Sibelius Academy during the final thirty years of the twentieth century—a roster that includes Eero Hämeenniemi (b. 1951), Jouni Kaipainen (b. 1956), Magnus Lindberg (b. 1958), Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952), and Jukka Tiensuu (b. 1948).

Notes

1. Present day statistics bear witness to such a statement. Although Finland has a population of approximately five and half million inhabitants, it contains twelve professional orchestras (several of international stature) and an equivalent number of semi-professional orchestras, indicating that there is indeed something quite special about the state of musical affairs in this Nordic country.

2. For discussion regarding the impact of Sibelius upon Klami, see Helena Tyrväinen, "A l'ombre de Sibelius, Uuno Klami à Montmartre" Boreales 54-57 (1993), pp. 109-135.

3. A substantial portion of volume 24 (2000) of Cahiers Debussy is devoted to the reception of Debussy's works in the Nordic countries. In particular, see Helena Tyrväinen, "Les origines de la réception de Debussy en Finlande (1901-1933)" Cahiers Debussy 24 (2000), pp. 3-23.

4. See Erkki Salmenhaara, "Finnish Music in the 20s and 30s: Internationalism vs. Nationalism," article contained in Tomi Mäkelä, ed., Music and Nationalism in 20th-century Great Britain and Finland (Hamburg: von Bockel Verlag, 1997).

5. While it is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the more advanced aspects of the later compositions by Sibelius, for instance, issues of large-scale formal structure or long-range time spans, it should be acknowledged that these features have been either ignored or placed on a lower level of importance when compared with more surface aspects of his music—for instance, triadic harmonies or nationalistic folk influences, features which critics, for decades, have us...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Definitions
• 1 Historical Background
• 2 Biographical Sketch
• 3 Stylistic Features
• 4 Symphonies
• 5 Orchestral Works
• 6 The Last Temptations
• 7 Vocal Works
• 8 Chamber Works
• 9 Keyboard Works
• 10 Kokkonen's Legacy
• Appendix: Chronological Listing of Works
• Bibliography
• Index of Works Discussed