Odotustila

by Leevi Räsänen

Waiting Room

for orchestra

Description

”Is that your final answer?”

”Yeah.”

If you’ve ever watched ”Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, you can probably already imagine the music preceding the reveal of the correct answer. What kinds of scenarios does the contestant run through in their mind at that moment? A single moment of waiting can contain a life’s worth of hopes, fears and fantasies.

We encounter moments of waiting throughout our lives. We wait to see our loved ones, to receive results, for that one important phone call, or even just for the lunch break fifteen minutes away. One waits to have a moment of peace at last, while for another, their biggest wish would be to have someone beside them. Adolescence, too, could be seen as a kind of waiting room, a place where we plan and dream of adulthood and our own lives to come.

In hospitals, public spaces, health centers, airports and railway stations, waiting rooms manifest as physical spaces. What occupies the mind while we wait? Do we wait in boredom, indifference, impatience, nervousness or panic? What visions of the future run through the brain?

In the autumn of 2025, while composing this piece, I constantly found myself circling the question “What would be enough?” – for me, for others, for this work, and for the next one to come. It stems from the familiar, persistent desire and hope to always keep achieving something bigger, better, more impressive – without a concrete goal or measurable acceptable outcome. Waiting Room suggests that perhaps waiting itself might carry its own intrinsic value.

Instrumentation

3232 4 4331 13 0 pno, str [pic, 2asax, tsax, barsax]

Category

Works for Orchestra or Large Ensemble

Premiere

IHMO Sinfonia, cond. Kasmir Uusitupa, East Helsinki Music Institute 60th Anniversary Concert

Commisioned by / dedications

Odotustila was commissioned by the East Helsinki Music Institute.

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Archive number

MF36268

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