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My presentation is an excerpt from my upcoming article on Finnish composer Carita Holmström’s song cycle Dagen svalnar (The day cools) – 4 songs to poems by Edith Södergran. Holmström composed the cycle in 1977, when she was a young composer in the beginning of her career. Also Södergran’s poem was a part of her first published book of poetry – making this song cycle a combination of two women’s talents in their early twenties. In the talk I analyze the relationship between the cycle’s music and text from various perspectives: how music and text align, how they seem to contradict each other, and how music can add a completely new interpretative element to the poem. I also examine the interpretations me as a pianist and two singers working with me have made of the music, and analyze how the music-text relationship affects our interpretative choices. My analysis combines three different methods: performer’s analysis (Korhonen-Björkman 2019), dialogic analysis (Moisala 2001), and descriptive analysis (Marion A. Guck 1994). This presentation will focus on one of the four songs, “Du sökte en blomma” (You searched for a flower), in which Holmström’s music seems to take the side of the woman, and add aspects to the story that the poem itself does not contain. I will talk you through why I think that this is the case.
Jenna Ristilä is a Finnish pianist and doctoral researcher at the Sibelius Academy of University of the Arts, Helsinki. Her doctoral project focuses on Finnish composing women from the 19th century until today. In her four doctoral concerts she performs a wide array of women’s compositions, and in two articles she takes an analytical approach to two of those works, namely Carita Holmström’s song cycle and Laura Netzel’s piano sonata. In addition to research, RIstilä works as a freelancer, mostly with opera and lied. In 2014 Ristilä graduated as a Master of Music from the Department of Performing Arts at the Sibelius Academy, and in 2018 she completed her second master’s degree at the same university, this time with vocal coaching as her major. She is a member of the research association Suoni ry, and feminism and equality are important values for her in all her work.
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