Sibelius Academy Alum Maria Hämäläinen: Behind one word, one dot, and one note only we can finally start discovering the whole world

14.2.2024 2 Tykkää 0 kommenttia

What really makes a blank paper to become a canvas..

What really augments the audible, sonic environments perceived by musicians so that instead of listening (listening so, SO hard, and well-intended, and disciplined, and all that that comes to our minds but usually is still not enough) one starts – finally! – hearing music?

Envisioning, deciphering, interpreting while supported by analysis and studied theories – salut, siècle des Lumières!.. – and inspired by the most worthy concepts that sprout during our lifetime – critical reasoning, aim of equality and essence of education – I wanted to track the sources and the sacred keys of these skills I bet every learner and artist is craving having access to. In my wandering towards them amidst my reflection my memory got carried away to the years of my school learning, more precisely one particular course in high school that later proved to be an incredible key for opening so many topics of interpreting notation, building musical phrasing and designing the most suitable sound and tone for whatever musical style I would ever work on.

The course I just mentioned was a part of Finnish language high school studies and was titled as “Texts and actuation”. What does it have to do with music and instrument playing one might ask.. At that course we seeked the core of the definition for the meaning of the word “text”, tasting the flavour of different literature forms and their subforms, measuring the relation between a text and media, and their proportions. Personally, I was thrilled when the definition of a text was ruled as basically anything that was both a message consisting of word(s) with a certain meaning. Thus, it meant, that one word (only!) can already be conceived already as a text. And such a text can be and should be performed, interpreted and shared with its audience. Ha!

Eventually, we (the highschool students) tried to understand the essence of the famous quality vs. quantity dilemma. Can there really be a text of one word only?

What you just casted your look upon is a one-word poem from 1965 by Aram Saroyan. No, it is not a typo. And now, as an experiment, try to interpret and perform this poem.. Wherever in your thoughts (internal speech) or aloud, try it now

….what happened? Magic, right…

So, if one word only has already brought poets to the core of language, its contexts and meanings, why do we still suffer from the plenty of music notes so often hearing that our performances of western art music – the so-called classical music – is “too complicated, heavy, unnatural”, and burdened by unnecessary and unwanted load of expression and intonation that are not at all sourced by the text – musical notation – itself, and last but not least the most famous: “Mozart should sound SiMpLe”?

The problem here is that the elements of Mozart’s music are as beautifully and as equally complex as any other composer’s musics and texts, that is the meaning of equal music education: when all texts, scores, manuscripts are to be analysed through many different lenses, minding the art history, notation history, instrument history, musical elements of notation, and so many other things, but never stereotypes that would leave one to feel confused with emptiness of an answer..

These elements – likewise the elements of Saroyan’s poem – I was lucky to dig into while studying at the University of the Arts Sibelius-Academy at the courses such as music theory (disclaimer, pianists: it’s opening the whole challenge of phrasing through scales and the hierarchy of their notes and degrees), history of western art music (hot hot! debunking myths and nearing historical truths we seldom hear in daily music small-talk), music analysis (phrasing again!),  interpreting notation (hello, baroque articulation!) and performance practices (soooo, how much pedal and vibrato is really adequate-ish), sight reading (a treasure at a bottomless ocean that is so much overlooked by nearly everyone), sonic art and experiments (if you want to overstep the line from listening to hearing you should study this), music editioning course (what to do if you found a manuscript), chamber music (COMMUNICATING WITHIN THE FULL PARTITION NOT ONLY YOUR OWN PART), and even international business basics because at some point you will have to write and to claim to the world your own t e x t – your own story.. All of these courses are so extraordinary, because despite being focused into one or few very specific topics they all lead towards one goal only: the enlightenment of students’ conscious comprehension.. (Les Lumières, salut encore une fois!).. that in turn points out to the lighght at the end of the tunnel: the sound and its design, structure, texture, tone..

The areas of music studies I just listed above are not all foreign to the majority of classical music students, but only lucky ones – and I happened to be among such – have drifted towards all of them and have prolonged their seeking of Sound further, and reflected on sound as an Environment.  For me it meant the inevitable research of written notation of the sounds I read, heard or saw, or played, or taught. The research of tone and inner relation between the sound and its note, the symbol I read but whose idea was initially created in the sonic thoughts of the composer.

So, what was first? you will ask.
First, there was Sound.
Then why do we still struggle with note-reading, and not at all firstly concern ourselves with sound-hearing?

Why do we find practising pieces a scarce topic, performing on stage far from the mysterious and mythical flow, performing by heart threatening and performing with score mediocre, and virtuosic passages a matter of chance, and sImPlE miniatures usually “less” than voluminous monuments that are just quietly agreed to be “more”?

It seems we should all restudy Texts and actuation.
And then soar to a Sound that has been structured in a visual form with audible material just written on a paper. 
Sound image. Image. Sound.
Not. Any. Other. Way. Around.

Then we will be free and empowered to read edited scores and manuscripts, performing with confidence with or without score, but also we will finally start embracing one of the most sought-after topics of arts in 2024 – more equality in art and art education.

Discovering the inter and intra connections between texts – we now know it is not about thousands of vowels, it can be just lighght – or a few – will allow us to step into the world of historical art but to relive it in ours.

What will it result in? 

Perhaps more diversity in repertoires?
more enlightenment in learning minds?
Maybe more happiness because more reasoning and independent, embodied thinking?
And certainly more strength and certainty for the Life after graduation;
as also so much more answers to my (and I bet all of yours too) last question –

where to start once the script ends and the life starts…

About the writer

After graduating from Sibelius Academy from the department of classical piano music and completing besides the master of music studies also the full pedagogical studies pianist and pedagogue Maria Hämäläinen settled to Istanbul where she teaches classical piano music with various European curricula such as Cambridge International Curriculum and London College of Music.

Hämäläinen continues to explore the topics and mediums of musical notation, sustainable piano technique and equal music education in her own active performance and teaching practices.

www.mariahamalainen.fi
@mariamusique (instagram)
mariamusiceducation@gmail.com