Can newly written music give new hope for the Baltic Sea? Last year, the Baltic Sea Festival allowed composers to create music based on environmental research for the first time. Not even project leader Emma Nyberg could have imagined the effects.
It touched me much more than I had thought, I had expected to be moved but not to the extent that I actually was. There's something about music that opens up, that speaks to different parts of the brain. You remove your barriers.
A Rubber Duck
Pietari Kaasinen, one of this year's selected composers, has now composed a piece based on Natasja Börjeson's research on how different actors can achieve a circular, toxin-free society. He started from the text that Börjeson herself will read from the stage at Berwaldhallen, which, among other things, deals with how toxins from old products return in new ones.
Natasja would bring a rubber duck on stage, and I thought there might be some room for humor in the music. It felt fitting to let it be a bit funny, he says.
Pietari Kaasinen borrows elements from Britney Spears' song "Toxic", and Natasja Börjeson and director Elisabet Ljungar decided to cite Spears' lyrics in the research text, he explains.
I wanted to have an exciting connection to what Natasja says, but also for the music to have its own identity. I think it turned out quite well.
Not Alone
Ecological themes have become more common among contemporary composers, just like among authors and poets, but Pietari Kaasinen has never before depicted ecology so concretely.
Without text, there's always a risk. How do you connect different musical symbols to a phenomenon? Just in this case, it's been so rewarding to be able to do it in an honest way since we have the text. It's not like I'm just claiming that the music is about this.
Emma Nyberg thinks that the newly composed music inspires "a budding hope":
That's what you achieve by combining this, there are things you can do, there are things that many already do. It's not hopeless.
When: August 23-31
Where: At Berwaldhallen, the Finnish Institute, and the Technical Museum in Stockholm, as well as on Sveriges Radio P2, which broadcasts live.
Some concerts: Ukraine's Independence Day is celebrated with newly composed "Reflections on a folk song" by Leonid Desyatnikov, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the opera "Khovanshchina" set during Peter the Great's reign, the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra interprets Arvo Pärt and Kaija Saariaho, the Radio Choir gives a concert on the theme of dreams with, among other things, Märt-Matis Lill's joik-inspired "The dream stream".
