The composition course Composition Workshop for professional composers is held annually at the same time as Avant’s Summer Music Festival. This year, seven composers from Europe, Asia and America are taking part. The course will be taught by composers Jukka Tiensuu and Tomi Räisänen.
As an important part of the course, each participant has been given the task of composing a new work during the spring, which will be performed by the chamber orchestra Avanti! at a concert in connection with the Summer Play on Friday 28 June at 16.00 under the baton of conductor József Hárs in the Factory Hall of the Art Factory in Porvoo. The concert is free of charge.
“The task is different every year, but it always aims to force the composers out of their comfort zone and create something they’ve tended to avoid before,” says Jukka Tiensuu, one of the course’s co-teachers. “Through this new kind of challenge, the hope is that composers will discover a new kind of creativity lurking within themselves – to the delight of us all.”
This year’s task was to compose a musical response to an abstract film from a hundred years ago, which itself represents abstract “visual music”. The identity of the films chosen by the students was not revealed, so as not to be influenced by their authors or other historical documentation.
The ideal is for the composition alone to produce an experience similar to that of the original moving image. In the concert, these films will be presented in sync with the musical counterparts created for them.
The first composition course was held in 1987. Over the years the course has been taught by Magnus Lindberg, Jouni Kaipainen, Jukka Tiensuu, Kaija Saariaho, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Tomi Räisänen. The Composition Workshop Association was founded in 2006 to support the organisation of the course.
This year’s participants can be found on the Composition Workshop website.
Composition workshop: fresh sound music for a century of visual music
Time: Friday 28.6.2019 16.00 (free entry)
Place: Tehdassali, Taidetehdas, Porvoo
József Hárs, conductor
Chamber Orchestra Avanti!
Photos from the 2018 Composition Workshop by Heikki Tuuli
