New Contemporary and Avant-garde Music from Finland
Get to know the most essential contemporary Finnish composers and musicians from our playlist, available on Apple Music and Spotify.
Scroll down for all the composers' biographies and links.
Related Artists
defunensemble
Formed in 2009, defunensemble has established ifself as one of the most important contemporary music groups in Finland. The ensemble’s vigorous mission is to systematically delve into the world of electroacoustic music. Defunensemble gives Finnish premieres of the most essential electroacoustic repertoire both classic and current, while simultaneuosly actively commissioning new works incorporating the latest technologies. With artistic director Sami Klemola the ensemble’s concert concepts have proven to be highly innovative, blending different sub-genres of the electroacoustic persuasion with an unprecedented street credibility—any dusty notions of classical music are soon forgotten. A serious professional undertaking, the musicians and sound designers of defunensemble are some of the most active personalities in the Finnish contemporary music scene.
Tölölab
Helsinki-based ensemble Tölöläb's music combines woodwinds, electronics and free improvisation. Its members’ primary background is in classical music but its methods and influences come from a wide range of genres, ranging from western medieval music to EDM or hardcore noise. Collaborators of Tölöläb have equally varied backgrounds. Tölöläb’s natural habitat includes concert halls and churches as well as clubs, festivals, restaurants, abandoned lighthouses and trams. Tölöläb has collaborated with some of the biggest names in Finnish jazz and hiphop as well as orchestras such as Tapiola Sinfonietta.
Lucy Abrams-Husso
Lucy Abrams-Husso is a Chicago native currently residing in Helsinki, Finland. She completed a second Master of Music from the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the Sibelius Academy. An orchestral musician with a passion for contemporary music, Lucy's doctoral project focuses on the study of contemporary repertoire for clarinet composed post-1980 by Finnish and American composers. Her third doctoral concert was produced as an album, Duel. The album features works for clarinet and electronics.
Petri Kumela
Petri Kumela, one of Finland’s most versatile and sought-after classical guitarists, is equally at home with period instruments as in working with contemporary composers. He is also one of the Finnish guitarists best known on the international scene, with a reputation for originality and versatility, whether he is giving a recital in Calcutta or a school concert in Japan, or motorising guitars in Mexico.
Sebastian Fagerlund
Sebastian Fagerlund has rapidly become one of the most successful composers of his generation. His style is robust and easily identifiable, a combination of spiky rhythms and long, meditative arcs. His principal works include the Clarinet Concerto (2006), after which his career properly took off. In 2011, he received the Teosto Prize for Ignite for symphony orchestra.
Kaija Saariaho
Kaija Saariaho is one of Finland’s internationally best known contemporary composers. She gained world fame in the 2000s with her original and immediately recognisable style that has evolved slowly but surely over the years. She focused on tonal colour at an early date. Electronics and new technology have also been part of her musical makeup for quite some time; she found an important base in the Ircam studios in Paris, her city of residence since 1982. Melody took prominence in her work in the early 1990s and rhythm in the early 2000s.
Tuomas Turriago
Composer, pianist and conductor Tuomas Turriago (b.1979) is known especially as an experienced chamber musician and chamber music composer. He is an active advocate of contemporary music, both as a composer and as a pianist, as well as a regular conductor of the contemporary music ensemble TampereRaw, which collaboration has lasted for 8 years. As a composer, his style is marked by a tasteful combination of different 20th century idioms, but his aim is to compose timeless and player-friendly music that is not too closely associated to any isms.
Heinz-Juhani Hofmann
Composer Heinz-Juhani Hofmann is known from his great opera acts as well as work reflecting difficult themes such as complicated father-son relationship. His latest album, “Soita. Kirjoita joskus.” released in 2021 leans towards the traditions of European modernism as the compositions are written for cello and soprano, performed by Pia Komsi.
Tytti Arola
Helsinki-based sound artist, composer and performer Tytti Arola is interested in bringing daily life to concert venues and exhibition spaces, doing multisensorial compositions and exploring spatial sound.
Her artworks often include electronics and lately she has also explored performance art and instrument building.
Signe
Signe is a jazz band with four female vocalists (Riikka Keränen, Kaisa Mäensivu, Selma Savolainen and Josefiina Vannesluoma). The band's music reflects their background in jazz and nordic heritage and incorporates improvisation, taking traditional jazz expression in new directions through the unusual lineup of four female voices and a double bass.
Sauli Zinovjev
Since graduating from the Sibelius-Academy Sauli Zinovjev has been focusing mainly on orchestral music with commissions and performances by distinguished orchestras such as the Finnish and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestras, Orchestra de Chambre de Lausanne and most important Finnish orchestras in collaboration with some of the frontline conductors and soloists such as Klaus Mäkelä and Pekka Kuusisto. At the moment Zinovjev is composing a Piano Concerto for pianist Vikingur Olafsson commissioned by Finnish and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestras to be premiered in 2020. Zinovjev composes music that conveys vast emotions. He uses classical music to make his view of the world intelligible. To convey it – life – to others.
Harri Wessman
Composer Harri Wessman is interested in all aspects of music that may be expressive, without in any way ignoring the possibilities of melody. He himself describes his harmonic method as a kind of contrapuntally treated jazz harmony. Wessman is particularly preoccupied with the ability of music to express emotions, an interest which has led him to study the so-called doctrine of the affections and the musical rhetoric of the baroque era. His "Eine kleine Figurenlehre" for wind quartet and piano is a playful application of a set of baroque musical figures. His output is dominated by chamber and vocal music as well as a number of concertos for various instruments such as the "Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra" and the "Serenade for Piano and String Orchestra". During recent years pedagogic music has become a more and more central area in his output with an emphasis on creating repertoire for budding musicians, from beginners to young professionals.
Alex Freeman
Alex Freeman (b. 28 April 1972) grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Around the age of 13 he became interested in composing. He moved to Helsinki in 2001 to research Sibelius's sketches and study composition with Eero Hämeenniemi at the Sibelius Academy. He was also a student of Jouni Kaipainen and Magnus Lindberg. He taught at Carleton College from 2007 to 2014. Dr. Freeman is currently composing full-time and lives with his wife and children in Finland.
Magnus Lindberg
Magnus Lindberg is one of Finland’s internationally most celebrated contemporary composers, whose works are regularly performed by the world’s leading musical institutions. He has progressed from his early Modernism towards a more human idiom, defining a new classical Modernism. Harmony, tonal colour, texture and rhythm are important elements in his music; recently, melody has grown in importance. Lindberg is above all a master of the orchestra, and he has also written a considerable body of chamber music. His persona combines a rational technology buff (who experimented with computers at a very early stage) with a practical musician. He himself plays the piano, and he sometimes also conducts his own works.
Sampo Haapamäki
Sampo Haapamäki searched and explored Modernism in his compositions before extending his idiom to microintervals and spectral music. Quarter-tone harmonies have played a key role in his music since 2004. He has written works for instance for the quarter-tone accordion. He won several international prizes at an early stage in his career, including the ISCM Young Composer Award in 2005. His work Kirjo, a concerto for bass clarinet and chamber orchestra, was awarded the Teosto Prize in 2006; the jury described it as a “jubilant and bold work unheeding of boundaries”.
Jarkko Hartikainen
Jarkko Hartikainen is a composer who explores sound phenomena in his music, including the ‘musicalisation’ of speech, i.e. how the harmony of music can imitate speech. He has rapidly gained international recognition with his works, and received commissions from leading ensembles such as the Ensemble Schwerpunkt brass quintet.
Lotta Wennäkoski
Lotta Wennäkoski is one of the most sought-after contemporary composers in Finland, and recently she has gained great international recognition and appreciation too. Her music falls within the Modernist camp, but she distinguishes herself as a master of lyrical tones. The works of Lotta Wennäkoski are often marked by transparent timbres and dreamy glissandos. She herself likens the composition process to baking bread: there is an idea – a recipe – according to which the ingredients are added and the dough is kneaded. Her works are designed to make a statement and she considers it important for her music to engage in dialogue with society. Wennäkoski says she has always been interested in language and literature too, including lyrical poetry. In 2017 her orchestral work Flounce, commissioned by the BBC, was premiered at the Last Night of the Proms. Recently she finished her first big opera, Regine, a commission from Savonlinna Opera Festival.
Osmo Tapio Räihälä
Osmo Tapio Räihälä is a Finnish composer of art music. His output focuses mostly on instrumental music: he has written several works for the symphony orchestra, concertos, chamber music and solo works. In 1998, he formed the Uusinta Ensemble, which has premiered many of his works. He has been commissoned and/or performed by the likes of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Gewandhaus, London Sinfonietta, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, Nuova consonanza, Virtuosi di Kuhmo, Helsinki Chamber Choir, nearly all Finnish orchestras, major festivals and musicians – but the most important performance is always the next one. His music is published by Sikorski Musikverlag.