18 October 2024
Hong Kong, HKSAR

shadows turn / to new shadows / faces elide, the final poem in Taneli Viljanen‘s magnificent poetic cycle exclaims. The sound is not quite what one expects- it comes from a little speaker, ‘performing’ (wirelessly) a music of the past, written in the recent present, dreaming subtly of the future. The three performers approach the speakers, whose sound, at first clear if slightly muffled, turns to interrupted, overwhelmed, and ultimately relented into a gentle sea of static and resonance. They stand mostly emotionless. A tear might appear. It has, many have, every time.

I really had very little conception of how the premiere of Otherhood (2022) would go. I didn’t know what I was doing with the piece when I wrote it, anyway. After five huge projects, over five hours of music for some of the world’s leading ensembles incorporating the latest technology and so on, to return to a small form (still in a fairly ambitious package of over thirty minutes of music) was intimidating. There is truly nowhere to hide with a piano and two voices, and writing in the genre of the lied cycle, where over two hundred years of common practice has created an incredibly rich and, more importantly, canonic sound, means daring to say, “there is still a stone unturned, and here, I have unturned it.”

But sometimes one gets very lucky indeed. For whatever reason, I’ve been incredibly privileged to work with some of the most incredible, talented musicians on this planet, the multiple Grammy-award winning Iris Oja, Martti Anttila, and Anna Kuvaja, who on October 6th, gave an absolutely tour de force performance of the work at the Musiikkitalo in Helsinki. Having written the piece over various weeks on two continents, I could look back on the process only in a sort of daze- it is, itself, going through the piece from start to finish, a kaleidoscopic ‘trip’ through the intensely subconscious experience of listening, remembering, imagining. Triad after triad, colour after colour (never have I written something so ‘major’ and colourful!), the work seems to circumnavigate the world of experiencing something old anew, and ending on the nostalgia of just the experience itself. Those almost-last words of Taneli’s, the merging of everything, it happens at the very end in a way that nobody really could imagine at the beginning. But somehow we find it all incredibly familiar anyway.