What can we learn from musicians?

12.8.2025 0 Like 0 kommenttia Karoliina Pirkkanen

Co-creation with external stakeholders: An example from the creative sectors

Anu Lampela gave the following speech at the HUMANE Annual Conference “Performance Unleashed: Co-creating High Value for Stakeholders” (Aalto University 5 June 2025) and performed Karol Szymanowski’s Métopes Op. 29.

Karol Szymanowski’s work Metopes Opus twenty-nine was composed during the World War One, in 1915. Due to a leg injury in childhood years, Szymanowski, the Polish modernist in music, was unable to join the army when the war broke out. So, he stayed in his family’s estate in Tymoszowka and in a very short time, composed his most famous works. While the war was tearing the world apart, Szymanowski created his own, expressive new musical language, which was different from his earlier Late-Romantic period. In these new pieces one can hear Szymanowski’s personal interest in Mediterranean culture. Metopes tells us stories of Homer’s Ulysses’ women: in the first movement we can hear the terrible Sirens who were half-women and half-birds and who tempted the sailors to death with their mesmerizing singing. The second movement is a story about the fairy Calypso, who lived with his beloved Ulysses for seven years in an island Ogygia but had to let him go since that was the decision of the gods. Finally, the third movement introduces us Nausicaa, a princess who meets the shipwrecked Ulysses on a shore.

Szymanowski’s pianistic texture is multi-layered and dense, it’s a combination of idiomatic pianistic solutions and at the same time, orchestral writing. Already in his early career he wanted to compose to a big orchestra and while it wasn’t always possible, the piano worked as a substitute. This of course poses a challenge to a pianist: the chords are large and there are many notes to be played at the same time. Fortunately, I have quite big hands so it’s not impossible for me to play what is written in Szymanowski’s piano texture.

The key to make this music approachable and understandable is continuity. One can never get stuck in the thousands of details, instead, one needs to be very clear about the main musical ideas. While I practise, I quite often sing the melody lines which sometimes are found in the higher level, in the soprano, but sometimes in the middle levels, which is more difficult to hear. The multi-layered textures are challenging to learn but also, it makes the music fascinating to return to after many years: I can always find new details to highlight and new possibilities to interpret the music.

One way to practice Szymanowski’s textures is to conduct it, not to play, but to imagine the music while reading the score. In that way the phrasing and breathing become natural and the form of the musical structure is embodied before I play the music out loud.

To really learn the piece requires hours and hours of practice. Each note, chord, passage and phrase need to be internalised both musically and technically and then integrated to a wider context. I always try to play the whole piece from the beginning to the end, even though I don’t yet master every detail. To get the idea of the entity is essential at the very beginning; one should not be afraid of playing the whole piece at the very early stages of the practicing process, since it is healthy to have to the goal in mind all the time.

Calypso, the second movement of the Metopes, was the first Szymanowski work I ever learned. At the beginning of 1990’s I was practicing a programme for a piano competition and found this fascinating piece. Later, I focused on Szymanowski’s whole output for piano in my doctoral studies and recorded all Szymanowski’s piano works in five albums for Alba Records between the years 2010–2017. This means, that I have spent more than three decades in a close relationship with Szymanowski’s piano music. His musical language and pianistic textures have moulded my brain, ears and fingers and trained me to deal with massive forms. Playing a 15-minute Metopes from the beginning until the end, requires responsibility for tiny details and long entities, for the stylistic and artistic understanding, for interpreting programmatic allusions, for phrasing the Siren’s melody so clearly that each and everyone sitting in the concert hall will get it. Playing massive pieces requires diligent practice and extreme tolerance; it requires the will to try to see the goal and however blurry the goal might be, to sit at the piano again and again and practice.

Also, it requires the desire to meet the audience and to share 15 minutes together and a will to experience something within music, together.

***

So, what could we all learn from artistic expertise? If it is intangible, how can we talk about it? Are there ways to increase influence of the arts in society, especially nowadays when the societal changes are evolving rapidly. For instance, as Patrizia Hoyer (2020) points out, the relationships between organizations and employees are changing drastically: the career paths are increasingly becoming more unpredictable and discontinuous. In future, we may have surprisingly different jobs and positions.

When we think about intangible capital, it is the arts that intuitively come to mind. During the last year, the University of the Arts Helsinki took the initiative called Futures Forum, to cooperate with Sitra and VTT Technical Research Centre to tackle today’s wicked, global problems – such as biodiversity loss, the climate crisis, exclusion and polarisation. In the Futures Forum, we all wanted to gain a new kind of understanding of intangible value and to innovate what the sustainable future would look like. Over the course of two days, the three organisations focussed on these questions with presentations, discussions and small-group work. During the forum, the participants produced new ideas for solutions that should now be promoted and developed further.

To develop anything further on the area of intangible value, I suggest we lean towards artistic research.In my article ”Towards the Body: An Artistic Research on Orientations of Playing in Karol Szymanowski’s Piano Music” (Vehviläinen 2020) I contextualize my study within the Finnish and European discourse of artistic research, where reflection on the creative process, the artist’s voice and experience are central issues. The methodology of artistic research has developed in closeness to the thinking and vocabulary of art. Coessens, Crispin and Douglas (2009) see artistic research as representing a major paradigm shift and perceive a particular artistic turn as a continuation of the linguistic and cultural turns.

The artistic turn refers to a space in which culture becomes real in private, specific experiences (Coessens et al. 2009). Hence, the artistic turn challenges both us artists and the society. We ask: what is the place of the artist and her praxis in contemporary world?

For us at the University of the Arts the big question is, how to contribute other areas of research and society with our expertise on creativity and artistic skills and thinking. Are there some barriers between art and the rest of the world? I think there are.

Sometimes an artistic experience is so powerful that it feels mystical or even sacred. It quite often may be the very reason to consume, for instance, music. We need mystical and unexplained experiences in our lives. Lydia Goehr (1994) argues that in the area of the Western Art Music, the Romantic era underlined the mystique of the art, and made the distance between the artist and the audience longer than it was during earlier centuries. And, as Henry Kingsbury (2001) has pointed out, we still use the darkened grandstand and put the performer in the spotlight to highlight the sacredness of the western art music.

Let’s be very clear. An artistic experience may be sacred. An artist hardly is. The canonization of great male composers during the 19th century has served these composers in a fruitful way but has also caused many misunderstandings. It took years to point out that composing art music is not gender specific. Also, underlining Werktreue, the fidelity towards the musical work, attracts elitist connotations and at worst, causes fears among audiences. There are people who feel that art music is not for them, since it’s too complex or exquisite.

To be able to work as an artist, I have got rid of everything that prevents me of practicing and performing. I have questioned all unnecessary, romantic connotations and torn away any internal obstacles I have perceived. For me, first and foremost, an artist is a human being, who is willing to work hard and who likes herself. I hated myself when I was younger since the pressure of being bohemian or eccentric or brave or something, was too strong. I didn’t feel like a real artist and didn’t really find time to reflect that, since I was busy practicing all the time. Fortunately, I was practicing, since making art equals working. But I think it is necessary to increase the peer support and critical reflection during the years of studying to avoid too much pressure for the young art music students.

The secret is not to become something, it is to be the person you have always been inside of you, before the world gets its hands on you to make you an adult.

***

So, the art can teach us all quite many things.

First. We can just experience art in its many forms and find ourselves in new worlds and spheres. And what’s best of all, we can do it every day. Every minute spent with art is time stolen from fragmented, stressful, nerve-wracking normal life. Imagine that instead of answering twenty emails and hearing one concert, you would hear twenty concerts and answer one email. How would that affect your blood pressure?

Secondly. We can learn from artistic processes. One key research area in artistic research is to articulate tacit and embodied knowledge. The outcomes of artistic research where artists open up their artistic thinking and praxes offer a fruitful database for any other areas. It may also bridge the gap between artists and audiences.

But not all artistic knowledge is tacit. It is sometimes very loud and clearly articulated and all you need to do is to go to the Sibelius Academy and open a door to an instrumental lesson. Every instrument or composition pedagogue verbalize intangible capital every day. The teachers are the real heroes: during one lesson they give instructions about

• a musical work,
• the style of the particular work,
• the style of the particular composer’s other works compared to the one at hand,
• phrasing, breathing, sound, tempi, character, entity.
• The position of the wrist, fingers, elbows, shoulders, neck, back, feet,
• Pedalling. Etc.

All this multi-dimensional information may be articulated during one lesson. Learning to perform a musical work is about refining technical, physical and artistic details with cultural understanding and context, and repeating all that, day after day, month after month, while creating a vision of an entity. Little by little that entity, the whole arch of a musical work, is perceived and the work is ready to be performed.

This kind of praxis moulds artists in a specific way: they are experts of large, complex and challenging entities. The world today is a large, complex and challenging entity. So, forget the idea of a fragile, suffering, suicidal Werther or Frederik Chopin in tuberculosis – artists are the real transformers of the universe and masters of resilience. They have strength and knowledge, and they can change the world.

Finally, the third aspect. Art is a birthplace to creativity. It means, that art requires you to break down your barriers whether you perform yourself or participate as a member of an audience. About my own creativity, I find it unnecessary to even ponder whether I’m creative or not – I really don’t need to concentrate on that question. But when I need to play even one bar of a musical work, I need to be totally free. Any mental obstacles that would get in the way and prevent me from enjoying and concentrating fully, need to be removed. In that sense art offers well-being for each and everyone of us.

Sources

Coessens, Kathleen & Crispin, Darla & Douglas, Anne 2009. The Artistic Turn. A Manifesto. Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute. ORCiM 01. Leuven: Leuven Univer-sity Press.

Goehr, Lydia 1994. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hoyer, Patrizia 2020. Career identity: An ongoing narrative accomplishment. In Brown A.D. (ed), The Oxford Handbook on Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 101-116.

Kingsbury, Henry 2001. Music, Talent & Performance.  A Conservatory Cultural System. Temple University Press, Philadelphia (1988).

Vehviläinen [Lampela], Anu 2020. Kohti kehoa: Taiteellinen tutkimus soittamisen orientaatioista Karol Szymanowskin pianomusiikissa. [Towards the Body. Artistic research on orientation in Karol Szymanowski’s piano music.] Musiikki, 50(1-2), 157–189. https://musiikki.journal.fi/article/view/95491