Composer Asta Hyvärinen, who describes her works as “cross-sections of a shattering world”, premieres a spellbinding new work at Scotland’s Sound Festival in November.

Asta Hyvärinen’s latest piece is “She, Miracle,” a 15-minute piece described as an “imaginary dream play for soloist & electronics,” features Stephanie Lamprea, a Colombian-American soprano based in Glasgow. It was commissioned as part of Music Finland’s Northern Connection project and will be first performed at the Sound Festival in Aberdeen on 1 November.

“The work was inspired by my pondering of reality, dreams, and existence as well as films such as American Psycho, The Matrix, and some by surrealist Luis Buñuel,” she says, adding that “the performer of 'She, Miracle' needs all of her acting skills. Instead of performing the work, the singer has to transform into being her.”

A startling soprano is front and centre in many of Hyvärinen’s compositions. For instance, “Star Child Arise/Star Child Aria” (2022) conjures up a dramatic, eerie space odyssey with soprano, electronics, percussion and other instruments. It was composed for a stage work by Finlandia Prize-winning science fiction/fantasy author Johanna Sinisalo.

The composer describes the vocal lines in that piece as a “longlined, gradually increasing, expanding swerve”, and the vocal part in her 2007 work “A Lie Nation” as “very fragmented and alienated”.

"I work with textures, tension, movement changes, and timing, for example"

Other recent commissions include a solo piece for guitarist Patrik Kleemola and four pieces for the Helsinki electroacoustic group defunensemble. Her works have also been commissioned for the Crusell Music Festival and Musica Nova Helsinki and premiered by groups such as the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra, the Tapiola Sinfonietta and the Helsinki Chamber Choir.

Hyvärinen studied at various institutions including the Turku Conservatory, where she was later Composer-in-Residence and taught percussion. As a percussionist, Hyvärinen naturally creates works where rhythms play a prominent role.

“For me, though, rhythm is much more than just patterns with a pulse in different tempo,” she says.

“I work with textures, tension, movement changes, and timing, for example.” As to the strong sense of dynamics and stirring drama in her works, Hyvärinen says that she aims to “create tension between sound objects and events in a certain space”.

Watch: HYSS Trio: Konetiloja Machine Moods for cello, percussion and electronics (Asta Hyvärinen, composition & percussion and Iida-Vilhelmiina Sinivalo, cello)

Surrealism and serialism

Hyvärinen describes her music as ‘Surrealist Cubism’, with a nod to 20^th-century visual art.

“Surrealism relates to a state of mind, a kind of active non-thinking mood that happens in a subconscious state, which I started training about 20 years ago,” she explains. “Cubism refers to constructional details of composition. In visual cubism, we see objects from many angles at once. I bring out the different angles of the one pitch or sound, so that it’s possible to hear different qualities of sounds or pitches at once.”

As to how her style evolved, Hyvärinen says that her early works in the 1980s were influenced by English guitarist John McLaughlin’s jazz-fusion group Mahavishnu Orchestra and Béla Bartók.

"I bring out different angles of one pitch or sound, so that it’s possible to hear different qualities of sounds or pitches at once.”

Then she found a new direction after discovering Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and European contemporaries such as György Ligeti and Karlheinz Stockhausen. She studied with Saariaho, as well as the German pioneer Helmut Lachenmann, creating her own serialism-based pitch and rhythm methods along the way. This process culminated in the 1997 orchestral works “Approche” and “Lueur”.

“After that, I felt I was done all in that field. Over the next couple of years I drifted, writing music without specific purpose,” she recalls.

With a year-long grant around the turn of the millennium, she “was able to sit down without any rush for nine months” and create her largest work to date, “The Sound of Inevitability”, which was premiered by John Storgårds and the Turku Philharmonic. Again, she found a new direction, as evidenced by other pieces from that period such as “Karu” for saxophonist Olli-Pekka Tuomisalo and “Spring Contours” for Canada’s ERGO Ensemble.

Watch: "Wired" for violoncello and electronics/fixed media (Iida-Vilhelmiina Sinivalo, vlc, Marko Myöhänen, sound engineer)

Electronic inspiration

“The next step of my evolution was in 2009, when I started working with electronics,” she says.

Like her newest piece, electronics play a central role in her hour-long work “Carte noir” (2020), a rarity in her oeuvre in that it leaves plenty of room for improvisation by the vocalist and other musicians, who are instructed to play parts in an array of styles ranging from mambo and bolero to ‘Indian ambient-pop’ and ancient Greek music.

That genre-hopping points to her own wide-open listening.

“Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve listened to electronic and ambient music, prog rock, global music and fusion jazz. One of the most memorable musical events was when I was around 11 and saw a studio concert of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells on television. It was mind-blowing! Another significant memory is the sound of electric cables I used to listen to in snowy fields in cold winter weather,” she recalls.

“Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve listened to electronic and ambient music, prog rock, global music and fusion jazz."

At times, she takes a playful look at the classical tradition.

“There are a couple of pieces where I amuse myself with classical cliché and virtuosity,” she says. “For instance, in “Spring Contours” the percussionist is called on to play cymbals as if they were orchestral clash cymbals (piatti), but instead of large cymbals, the player actually has a tiny toy monkey’s cymbals,” she says with a grin.

How about opera, which comes to mind when listening to her high-drama vocal works? She cites Pierre Boulez’s call to “blow up the opera houses!” – but says that “instead of blowing them up, we need a refreshing, earthshaking, mind-opening new kind of opera that brings that mouldy old artform into the 21st century.”

Besides composing and performing, Hyvärinen also actively champions that kind of fresh contemporary music in her role as chair of the annual WeW! Contemporary Music Festival in Turku, this year on 18-23 November.