Music Finland Core

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Multidisciplinary collaboration has been transformative for me as a composer. Our work with choreographer Laura Jantunen began with Outoliini in 2023, and planning the next project started immediately after. Intensive participation in the working process of a dance piece with Laura has taught me the importance of scores, process-based work, and artistic practice. Unlike in more conventional ways of composing music, in the context of dance, material can be “mined” through active practice, without relying on ready-made ideas or ideals. The work and its material are connected to the bodies and arise from them. Selection emerges from observations.When I began composing The Area of Bigons, I asked myself: ”What if something similar could be brought into the musical context?” What would it mean to ”mine” material as a composer? Where would I direct my attention, and on what kinds of observations would I base my choices? For several works now, I have used process-based methods in which a small amount of material generates new material through digital, mental, or physical processes. I then transcribe these materials back into notation and further filter, stretch, and reshape them, selecting the fragments that turned out best. These methods also form the basis of The Area of Bigons.The title derives from Laura Jantunen’s work ”ympyrät, jotka kuvittelevat olevansa viivoja” (circles that imagine themselves as lines) in connection with which this piece was first presented in public. If there is a subject, there is always a countersubject; for one kind of form, there is another. From circles that imagine themselves as lines, I immediately thought of lines that imagine themselves as circles. The bow of a string instrument, which causes the strings and the body of the instrument to vibrate, is a sort of line that can also be moved in a circular manner.Circular bowing on string instruments refers to using the bow not in the usual back and forth way, but so that the contact point shifts continuously from near the bridge onto the fingerboard. This alters the timbre: the sound sharpens and softens in turn, and between these extremes one hears breathy noises and airy friction. The variation continues for as long as the circular motion continues. The technique gave the music a fundamentally flickering, iridescent quality, in which sounds flicker and weave between one another, like dancers cutting through air, like a bigon searching for its area.Just as a circle cannot become a line, a bigon is a paradox that becomes possible on the surface of a sphere, where its area can be defined. I began to wonder how one might search for roundness in music. The circle is not an especially musical shape, since music often relies on regular divisions: two, three, four, or other simple integers. In The Area of Bigons, the sense of lines seeking a circular shape grows out of the music’s triple meter, sometimes almost waltz-like in character. The pulse emerges from individual sustained tones that overlap and interlock, creating a ternary pulse. Music in three is often conducted in a circular gesture, with only the downbeats clearly marked.The unique sound of the piece is created through the use of smaller-than-usual thirds throughout the work. A third is the interval that is used to build, for example, major and minor chords. I think of them as contracting straight triads and seventh chords so that their angular edges begin to tilt upward, like earthworms reaching toward the sky, like lines straining to close into the shape of a circle.

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