In recent years, the status and marginal representation in repertoire of non-male composers has been a topic of increasing discussion in Finland. For now, the debate is aligned to the male-female binary divide, but it is gradually expanding to include other genders too. Orchestras have engaged in rediscovering forgotten woman composers of the past and have commissioned new music. Equality, however, remains a distant prospect. I invited Outi Tarkiainen and Mioko Yokoyama to discuss these themes.
Sonja Saarikoski: Do you think of yourselves as woman composers or just as composers with no labels attached?
Outi Tarkiainen: I’d like to think that I think of myself as just a composer, but other people seem to regard me as a woman composer. I’ve learned to define the term as meaning how other people see me.
Mioko Yokoyama: I identify as a woman, so it is a fact that I am a woman composer. But I prefer to be referred to just as a composer.
SS: But do you consider it necessary to talk about woman composers in particular in certain contexts – for instance to make the public at large aware of how unequal the gender distribution still is?
OT: Yes, I feel it’s natural to assume that mantle and bear that responsibility. Sometimes my patience wears thin at being labelled a woman composer, but I can accept that identity in the service of demonstrating that we are still very much a minority.
MY: For me, highlighting gender is even more important in the historical context, when talking about times when women genuinely had no opportunities because of their gender.
SS: Have societal trends influenced discussions of gender and writing music?
MY: Yes. I’ve noticed that festivals, for instance, now pay attention to this aspect. I began to become more aware of gender when UNM [Ung Nordisk Music] introduced gender quotas. Their reception has been mixed, but many of my male colleagues support the idea of quotas too. I appreciate their kindness.
OT: In my last year at the Junior Department of the Sibelius Academy, my teacher said that I probably benefit a lot from being a woman. That led me to ponder the gender issue. Initially I was shocked and ashamed, but later I reflected on what that statement meant – we never revisited the topic. After all, I was studying composition and not ‘woman composition’. Sometimes I jokingly refer to [male colleagues] as ‘man composers’. They’re generally not best pleased.
SS: Why are things still not balanced, even though women have had opportunities for a long time?
MY: When I was a student in Japan, men and women were equally represented among students, but chances of finding suitable employment after graduating were slim, and there were no woman teachers. In Finland, there are fewer women among students, but on the other hand the Sibelius Academy has women among its teachers. There are more role models.
OT: If we think of our mothers’ generation, there was Kaija Saariaho, there was Sofia Gubaidulina, and there were a few others. In our generation, there are at least ten times as many [composers], I believe – but that only represents an increase from 1% to 10%. I was over 30 years old before a female composer had a look at my scores. It changed so much – before that, I’d never imagined becoming a teacher, because I had no role models for that.
SS: I well remember the first time when I realised that I’d never performed any music written by a female composer. That was long after I’d stopped playing the cello. I must have been in my thirties. Do you remember when you first had the insight that the vast majority of the canon of classical music rests on the shoulders of men?
MY: I don’t remember that, but I do remember the music classroom at my school and the portraits of composers, all of them men. But I never thought it was odd. I just thought that women did not have as many rights back in the day. I must have been in my twenties before I began to give the matter serious thought.
OT: I don’t remember when it was that I realised that music by women is performed quite rarely. Perhaps it was a premiere of a piece by Kaija. I believe that many people still don’t understand just how rare it is to perform music by women. When [my opera A Room of One’s Own was performed] at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in 2023, we spent an entire year thinking of how to market the piece, but it didn’t occur to anyone to promote the fact that it was the first opera written by a woman in the history of the Festival.
SS: Last November, I was at a concert at Berwaldhallen in Stockholm. It suddenly hit me that it was the first concert I’d ever been to where the leader, deputy leader, soloist and conductor were all women. Do you think there’s something particularly masculine in the Finnish culture of classical music? Are we being stalked by the ghost of Sibelius? Kaija Saariaho spent most of her career living in France, after all.
OT: I first studied at the Department of Jazz, which is an even more masculine environment than the classical departments. I was pretty much the only woman there. But many people said that the canon of classical music is a closed system nowadays, that women never even made it in.
SS: I’ve been wondering whether Saariaho could have created her entire career in Finland. I tend to think maybe not.
OT: And if we look at how we commemorate her: where are her statues, the streets named after her, the concert halls named after her...? My brother lives next door to her childhood home in Kulosaari in Helsinki. Why is there not a plaque on the house?
MY: We should do more to demonstrate her importance. Not just in classical music but further afield as well.
SS: But I can’t help but think that glorifying an individual is very much against what Kaija was trying to do. I feel she sought to find connections between people, to collaborate. I think you can hear that in her aesthetic.
MY: Maybe a forum where people could meet.
OT: I think there’s something very gender-driven here too. Men compete and win, women collaborate and share. This also prompts the question of why we don’t appreciate feminine and masculine things in equal measure.
MY: On the other hand, what is feminine and what is masculine is a subjective question.
SS: That’s something I wanted to bring up. Do you think that there is such a thing as a specifically feminine aesthetic? Can you identify a composer’s gender by their music?
MY: Generally not, but I did once hear a piece by a male colleague in his early twenties where I thought that this piece must have been written by a young man full of physical energy.
OT: I began to think about this when I read A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, based on which I later wrote an opera [staged at the Savonlinna Opera Festival]. Woolf asserted that a woman’s sentence is different from a man’s but that the structural concepts of the entire canon of literature are based on masculine aesthetics. A male structural concept in many cases means something like, there’s one idea, then another competing idea, then things escalate and a climax ensues. In Kaija’s operas, the structure is very different. An emotion emerges and then it just disappears, as emotions often do. My feeling is that we, as women, have to ask ourselves what the feminine way of building a structure might be. Or of writing sentences. Men don’t teach us that. We have to learn it from our mothers.
MY: What you said reminded me of when I was astudent. I couldn’t find a feminine way of being, so I just tried to fit into the mainstream, to compete and work in a world dominated by male composers. I wasn’t trying to discover anything new.
OT: For me, the birth of my first son changed everything. I thought, why doesn’t anyone talk about this in public? Mothers sit in cafés and talk about motherly things amongst themselves. Yet it is an enormous physical and mental transformation. I’ve written three or four pieces of music about giving birth. In the most recent one, the form followed the stages of delivery. Contractions and that sort of thing. It is very programmatic. When I became a mother, I found the courage to explore a woman’s way of writing music. I stopped looking to male composers of the past for answers.
SS: I often feel that disrupting hierarchies is a somehow feminine thing, trying to find something new and unknown. The music of Debussy often seems like this to me. Or even Mahler; his music, in its expansiveness transcending conventional forms, represents something feminine, despite its massive sound, which is often perceived as masculine. This dichotomy is entirely artificial, of course.
OT: My feeling is that all artists, irrespective of gender, have a feminine and a masculine side. All people do, in fact. There are just so many more men among composers that it is easier to stereotype them. Woman composers are just individuals.
MY: That’s true. We’ve not yet reached a point where we could discuss masculine features in the works of woman composers.
SS: Certainly not if we mean masculinity created on women’s own terms. Historically, women who have written music, and indeed other woman artists, have often been ‘forced’ to create art in the manner of their male colleagues simply because the works of those colleagues were the benchmark for what is good and right in art. I can hear this approach in the music of woman composers of the past, such as Amy Beach. On the other hand, [Finnish painter] Helene Schjerfbeck initially painted works with masculine subjects, proving her capability as a visual artist. Where do you find your aesthetic ideals?
OT: I’m increasingly drawing on the outside world as a source of inspiration. I’m in the middle of writing a grand opera, and I’m putting into it things from my environment: rivers, forests, the sky. And other music too, of course. Sometimes I have to take a step back when I find myself channelling Strauss.
MY: I’m interested in crafts and in other branches of the arts – literature, painting and various materials. I’ve been interested in small, beautiful things ever since high school. My views on gender have evolved in encounters with other people, including those of my male colleagues who consider equality important, and through the tiny flashes of anger that emerge for instance when reading the news and understanding what life is like for some women in this world.
SS: What are your thoughts on the dichotomy between absolute music and programme music? I’ve always thought it prohibitive.
OT: The aim to write absolute music is a trend in historical evolution. People wrote a lot of programme music in the early 20th century, so it was only natural for the next generation to turn to serialism and mathematics.
MY: Perhaps today we’re more interested in the story behind a composer rather than in what the composer feels. We live in a human-oriented age.
SS: I’m sometimes worried about this focus on the individual. It seems that artworks are being increasingly conflated with their creators, narrowing the margin for interpretation.
MY: My aim in my programme notes is never to explain everything. I want to leave room for interpretation. It must be possible to experience music without having text to support it.
OT: I feel that music should communicate as itself, but I do understand the people who want to read something about the works that they hear.
SS: Do you think that you always know what your music is about, meaning that you’re able to verbalise it in text?
OT: It’s a never-ending struggle. You create a world that is never exactly what you imagined it would be. All composers with whom I’ve talked about this feel more or less the same way. Sometimes my material surprises me. Things may emerge in the music that I only later recognise in myself.
MY: In my programme notes, I try to describe what I felt when writing the piece. It’s a little gift to the listeners. I don’t try to tell them how they should interpret my music; I just share some detail of the creative process. I don’t tell them everything, because writing is not my main means of communication. Music is.
Produced in collaboration with The Society of Finnish Composers (Kompositio 2/2025)
Translation Jaakko Mäntyjärvi.
Featured photo Mioko Yokoyama.