Photo: Ville Juurikkala
Weaving a web of connections Cecilia Damström’s compositions tackle the crises of our time with wide-ranging topics and emotional states from black humour to all-encompassing empathy. Often the idea for a new piece is born out of scientific facts which transform into musical forms and motives. Her recent orchestral highlight Extinctions was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize, and her first full-scale opera is on the making.
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n 20th century modernism, programmatic music was virtually a taboo, and extramusical narratives were seen as a threat to the imagined autonomy of art. Amid the younger generation of composers, the reality of composing is often quite the opposite: an urge to address the most pressing questions of our time and to create feelings of community. This is the case, in strongest possible terms, for Cecilia Damström. For her, musical abstractionism would be unimaginable. Instead, her music springs from the themes that most occupy her mind. Her most recent works represent a wide-ranged scale of topics and emotional states typical of her output. Receiving its premiere in Tampere on 18 September with the violinist Elina Vähälä and TampereRaw chamber orchestra, the violin concerto Earth Songs is a series of love songs dedicated to different life-sustaining forces of our planet. Scheduled in November, this time with Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, Damström’s new orchestral work Information is an explosively dense piece about disinformation. The musical material consists entirely of certain keywords, the letters of which are transcribed into corresponding notes and rhythmically written as Morse code. “I have read numerous books about the spreading of disinformation, and when I wrote this piece, it all summed up in very elemental things: are we making connections or destroying them”, says Cecilia Damström. “There are words like ‘lies’, ‘fear’, ‘hate’, and ‘conspiracy’, but eventually also ‘humanity’ and ‘love’. The ability to spread information is a unique achievement of humankind and we should use it to unite people.”
Music can inspire hope As seen in Information, when making an impact with music Damström primarily, and consciously, relies on positive feelings: empathy, a love for our home planet, a sense of wonder towards all life. She also keeps referring to the joy she finds in composing, how grave the themes may be.
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HIGHLIGHTS
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“It’s important to inspire positive feelings, only then will you be able to take action. Sometimes I am ambivalent about writing music that doesn’t offer enough hope, but all emotions are part of life”, she points out. “The young people, especially, experience a lot of despair, and it’s important to give voice to this, too, and to show that you are not alone.” One alternative is black humour, as with the orchestral suite Wasteland (2021-22) which discussed textile recycling while also recycling musical quotations. The ending of the semi-staged choral piece Requiem for our Earth (2019), on the other hand, was dark and dystopian. The violin concerto Earth Songs is, in a way a continuation to it, and ends with the orchestra singing words from the Catholic Penitential Act and Agnus Dei. “I see it as humanity asking Planet Earth for forgiveness.”
Sonification as a method Both Requiem for our Earth and Earth Songs feature video art by Marek Pluciennik, whereas in the accordion concerto Permafrost, premiered in February 2024, Damström collaborated with the video artist Irene Suosalo. Damström says she
often experiences music in visual terms. She is constantly reading about climate change from a variety of perspectives, and a new work often begins with some scientific fact forming a musical image in her mind. The clarity of the image is at times accompanied with a sense of bewilderment. Permafrost is a good example. “I was reading about huge craters in Siberia which are formed when the permafrost melts and the methane underneath explodes. Our Earth is literally exploding! It felt simply self-evident to transfer these processes into music: the bubbling of methane, the landslides and the massive explosions.” A commission from the Kokkola Winter Accordion Festival and the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, Permafrost was premiered by the commissioning orchestra with Sonja Vertainen as the soloist, and it was selected to the recommendation list of the International Rostrum of Composers. Apart from the chemical formula for methane as a musical motive, it also applied hexachords and hexagon shapes referring to the molecular form of ice crystals, a musical element already used in the Teosto prize winner ICE .