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Many of today’s Finnish professional musicians attended the Sibelius Upper Secondary School in Helsinki. In addition to general education and musical & dance tuition, the school provides contacts, networks and encounters.

The Time of Music 2017 festival in Viitasaari took a broad-based look at the theme of Art & Autonomy. There was also discussion about social bubbles within the contemporary music culture. Yet bubbles too can be looked at from various perspectives, writes Merja Hottinen.

Composer Ville Raasakka creates hyper-realistic music using sources ranging from individual sounds collected in everyday life to entire concerts. His work Hypermarket and hypercommodity for shopping items, piano and chamber orchestra highlights the utter insanity of consumerism.

Composer Lotta Wennäkoski reminisces about her friend, the composer Jovanka Trbojević, who passed away in May [2017].

Today, the kantele inspires composers and performers across genre boundaries. Musician Maija Kauhanen and composer Adina Dumitrescu discuss the instrument from their respective perspectives.

The music on Jukka Eskola Soul Trio's album is straightforward, stylish and groovy Soul Jazz, almost directly from the 60s. However, the discerning listener will find details with a more recent time stamp.

Jukka Perko Tritone moves the onetime fierce music of Dizzy Gillespie to somewhat gentler realms, still not losing the original ideas and logics of the songs.

It can take a while before you realise that Heikki Sarmanto actually is playing an old standard song. That’s why it is both an under- and overstatement to simply say that Sarmanto plays standards on his solo piano twofer CD.

Holding a mirror up to the past can be burdensome. But it can also be a revelation. Both applied to trumpeter Verneri Pohjola as he took the bull by the horns last year and interpreted his father’s music at the Viapori Jazz Festival and at the Tampere Jazz Happening. No mean feat, as Pekka Pohjola (1952—2008) remains one of the revered icons of the 1970s European prog rock scene. The stakes were high but Verneri pulled the concerts off with flying colours.