Eero Hämeenniemi
Eero Hämeenniemi
Genres: contemporary classical, composer, finland, Classical, nordic
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About Eero Hämeenniemi
Eero Olavi Hämeenniemi (born April 29, 1951 in Valkeakoski) is a Finnish composer, musician and writer. He is docent and professor at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Hämeenniemi has written several books about Indian culture and translated Tamil poetry. Hämeenniemi is properly called a symphonist: first, because he has four symphonies to his name and second, because he is an orchestral composer whose music is based on the development and relationships of melodies, themes, and gestures. Early twentieth-century atonality is an important stylistic influence in his work; his sonorous lyricism may bring Alban Berg to the listener’s mind. Sibelius’s late symphonies are another source of inspiration. Hämeenniemi, however, is a seeker, a pioneer who finds his own way: there is no room for imitation or quotations in his music. Hämeenniemi’s music displays its sources without affectation; it also reveals his deep knowledge and personal reworking of tradition. This living relationship with tradition is the keystone of musical communication: Hämeenniemi admires the way in which classical Indian music is transmitted from one generation to the next, with gradual, organic change. After completing his studies at the Sibelius Academy (diploma 1978) under Paavo Heininen, Hämeenniemi studied with Boguslaw Schäffer in Cracow and with Franco Donatoni in Siena. He spent the academic year 1980 - 81 in the United States as a graduate student at the Eastman School of Music. There he composed under the direction of Joseph Schwartner and applied himself to a thorough study of the theory of music. Far from home, Hämeenniemi found the freedom to clarify his musical philosophy. Having encountered the theory of pitch class sets on the one hand and confronted questions of tonality on the other, he began to feel his way toward a music optimally capable of carrying and transmitting complex relations. Pitch and ideas based on pitch - motives, melodies, chords - are central to this kind of music. Hämeenniemi writes: “[-] the organization of pitch offers much richer structural potential than, say, the organization of timbre. [-] The expansion of musical material in our century has concentrated largely on musical elements (timbre, texture, etc.) which provide rather limited structural potential. This shift in emphasis within musical thinking has given rise to a flood of structurally, and thus also expressively, impoverished music. Moreover, abandonment of the complex, delicate network of structural relations in tonal music has decisively weakened the power of pitch organization to generate relations.” On returning home from the United States, Hämeenniemi brought with him a short orchestral piece entitled ...vain maa ja vuoret (...only the earth and the mountains, 1981). In a presentation at a seminar of the Korvat auki (Ears Open) society of contemporary music, commentators called attention to the “tonal” character of the piece. The quotation marks are appropriate, for Hämeenniemi has never resorted to the vocabulary or syntax of traditional tonal music; instead, he has created his own harmonic world, admittedly often soft in sound with its abundance of thirds. A typical way of forming chords is by piling up major thirds and perfect fifths in various combinations (as in the First Symphony and Dialogue). The few isolated triads occurring in the Violin Concerto are used for dramatic effect. More commonly in Hämeenniemi’s music, a specific pitch assumes the position of a tonal pivot, i.e. this pitch is more important than others. One of the ways to create such pivots is by using long, sturdy pedal points and octaves. The octaves may be simultaneous, i.e. doublings, or, in the melodic or chordal succession, one pitch class may appear accented in several registers. The Violin Concerto (1991) presents drone-like octave pedal points which remind us of Hämeenniemi's passionate absorption with the music of India. The same goes for the additive rhythms of the concerto’s fast movement, although their most obvious source of inspiration are the motoricism and variable time signatures of the Neoclassics. In Darshan (1990), composed for flute and strings, Hämeenniemi employs a kind of raga principle: the music relies on a number of fixed pitches, and specific pitches involve certain types of melodic movement; thus, melody is based on a set of figures. This is in fact the key difference between Indian raga and the Western mode. Indian music also influenced the form of Darshan: the rhythmically accented final passage, for example, has a counterpart in Classical Indian music. The melody, rhythm and formal principles of Indian music have increasingly inspired Hämeenniemi’s art in the 1990s. Largely through them, he has succeeded in smoothly combining his own musical idiom with that of jazz. Working closely with the musicians of UMO, the leading Finnish big band, in 1993 he composed an ambitious pair of works, From a book I haven't read and Navarasa. The music, alternating strictly notated passages with improvisation, is based throughout on scales, with fixed vocal points and characteristic figures. Hämeenniemi continued to work along jazz lines with his own Nada ensemble, which consists of both classical and jazz musicians, with the composer himself playing the piano. Hämeenniemi employs swinging rhythms even for more classical ensembles. Thus, in Nattuvanar, a composition for male voice chorus that won the UNESCO Rostrum of 1994, the focus is on rhythm: echoing the soloist, the chorus repeats rapid, increasingly intense rhythmic figures, based upon South-Indian rhythm syllables. Hämeenniemi’s music is thematic. What are his melodies like? At least two easily distinguishable characteristics recur frequently, e.g. in both symphonies and in the ballet Loviisa: a long, expressive string cantilena line, possibly part of a contrapuntal phrase, and a playful, dancelike warbling of woodwinds, in which rests capriciously interrupt rapidly repeated notes and bursts of tones. Hämeenniemi’s use of intervals is highly uniform. Seconds provide the basic motion that lends his music a peaceful songfulness; characteristic shapes are created especially with minor sevenths and, frequently, with tritones. The short solo flute piece Canterai? (1983) provides a good introduction to Hämeenniemi’s melodic language. The Indian influence of the 1990s brought clearly defined scales with their fixed pitches into his music. Occasionally the music makes a distinctly modal impression, as in many of the melodies of the Second String Quartet (1994). Sometimes Hämeenniemi uses very limited pitch material; thus, the fast movement of the Violin Concerto centres on just one simple chromatic motive; the composer seeks to extract as much as possible from his reduced material. A common pattern of motion in Hämeenniemi’s music is a burst of notes preceding a long, accented pitch. This gesture occurs frequently in his piano texture, but it also appears in numerous orchestral guises, including one in which aleatoric scale passages on the strings are reunited at the final pitch. The pronounced contrast makes these small events memorable and easily recognizable. Such gestures are similar to the cells used by Hämeenniemi in the late 1970s to construct his less thematic, stylistically post-serial music - in fact “musical gestures” was the term current at the time. Clearly identifiable materials, ideas which “look like themselves”, were thus Hämeenniemi’s point of departure, and goal, even in his student days. Hämeenniemi’s music has always been based on the interaction of distinct musical ideas, not on the transformation of continuous masses of sound. Hämeenniemi’s music is made up of clearly delineated, closed motives, melodies, and themes. These enable him to weave the webs of multiple reciprocal reference, the “multidimensional” forms for which he strives. The internal struggle or interaction between contrasting materials, and the superimposition of these materials, are features of this multidimensionality. An example of the counterpoint between different characters is the simultaneous slow and fast music of the First Symphony’s finale. A similar combination occurs in the Second String Quartet (1994). Both this quartet and, even more pointedly, the Second Symphony (1988) juxtapose contrasting moods, with gaiety turning into melancholy. In his concertos (Dialogue for piano and orchestra, 1985, Violin Concerto, 1991, and the short works Efisaes, 1983, and Darshan, 1990), the form is further enriched by various contrasts and combinations of the solo instruments and orchestra. The orchestra is the instrument best adapted to transmit Hämeenniemi’s musical ideas, to most clearly delineate myriad forms and to colour them most vividly. Hämeenniemi is a past master of orchestration, and his experiments with new instrumental techniques in the 1970s gave him the assurance to use them as needed. The essence of Hämeenniemi’s style is his way of using the orchestra as a palette, something learned from the early 20th-century masters Debussy and Stravinsky. Hämeenniemi’s sound does not resemble that of either precursor, but the philosophy of his orchestration is similar: he shuns mechanical sectional scoring in which “this melody is played by these instruments”, using the orchestra flexibly, in true palette fashion, to highlight each idea as clearly and brilliantly as possible, adding reinforcing contour or brightening patches of colour where necessary. The orchestral fabric contains a hierarchy of deep and surface structures. Hämeenniemi’s music is in fact generally hierarchical, with its closed patterns forming component structures. Hierarchy is a means to the structural richness that Hämeenniemi strives for. His tonal thinking, based on pivot tones, is also an example of hierarchic structuring. Although Hämeenniemi is an enthusiastic and articulate speaker and writer, he has great reservations about verbal explanations of music. He wishes to emphasize that musical thoughts are concrete facts and that music does not consist of notes on paper or of sound waves in a medium but of a mental experience arising from the interaction of the perceiver and the perceived object. Verbal interpretations or concepts derived from extra-musical factors or from merely staring at the score can be rough or distorted. Thus, Hämeenniemi’s Violin Concerto contains textures of which one cannot say whether they are harmony or coloration. This, however, is not a problem of musical perception but a conceptual trap arising from an artificial way of looking at music in terms of parameters. Not surprisingly, Hämeenniemi, for whom “the interesting thing about music is just the music”, gives his compositions purely musical, non-narrative titles. This does not prevent him, however, from taking a great interest in the combination of dance and music. Loviisa (1986), his first full-length ballet, was an event in the Finnish arts world: apart from the fact that the genre as such is rare nowadays, the composer worked closely with choreographer Tommi Kitti, demonstrating his ambitions for the independent potential of music within the dance theatre. The libretto is based on a classic Finnish play by Hella Wuolijoki, Niskavuoren nuori emäntä (The Young Mistress of Niskavuori). The settings of three Finnish folk poems provide both musical impetus and dramatic commentary. Leonardo (1992), Hämeenniemi’s second ballet, is based on a scenario on the great painter’s life by the playwright Pirkko Saisio. Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala, has also been a source of inspiration for the composer. The orchestral composition Soitto (1984; the title, which means approximately “The Playing”, suggests both the story of the Kalevala and, obviously, music itself) even has a programmatic tendency: the plucking of piano and harp strings suggests the playing of the traditional national instrument, the kantele. One should not expect superficial folklore or “world music” from Hämeenniemi, however: once more, his attitude to tradition is vital and creative. An excellent example of a smooth blending of contrasting traditions is Lintu ja tuuli (The Bird and the Wind; 1994) for soprano, strings and two Indian classical dancers. The text mixes Finnish folk poetry with classical Indian texts. The form and rhythmic structure were worked out jointly in great detail by the composer and the choreographer, Shobana Jeyasingh. To Hämeenniemi, leaning on tradition does not mean neotonality, neoromanticism, or any other imitative style, nor does creative renewal mean the institutionalized international avantgarde. According to him, it is the composer’s task to write what he wishes to hear - regardless of whether this is in tune with contemporary musical “trends”. Sibelius himself said as much, adding: “I know it takes a lot of courage.” © Juhani Nuorvala (1991/1994) translated by © Timothy Binham
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