How I began to write music is rooted in a profoundly chaotic experience. Towards the end of my studies at the Sibelius Academy, I went to a conservatory in Mexico as an exchange student. In that strange environment, seen as an oddity by the local people, I felt free of all expectations and suddenly began to write music with the ecstatic enthusiasm of a beginner. I also learned to play the Paraguyan harp, which revolutionised my harp playing and led to me developing my very own technique. As my world view crumbled, chaos paved the way for a creativity I had not even known to exist.
My journey as a composer, a harpist and a performance artist has been an unexpected combination of musical styles, arts genres and encounters with the various social circles around them. I have written music for symphony orchestras, choirs, traditional instruments in various cultures, major commercial productions and experimental indie publications, and as a harpist I have toured with pop groups, improvised with jazz musicians and sound artists and created performance art pieces for arts events that might be described as utterly marginal. Diversity in musical and artistic styles is a treasure trove for me. My studies in the Global Music programme at the Sibelius Academy introduced me to collaboration with musicians from a variety of traditions, which became an essential part of the game music I write.
Chaos and order also have to do with self-criticism and an overdeveloped need for control, with which I constantly struggle. But creativity cannot be quantified. You have to allow things to go wrong sometimes, and you have to come to terms with your own clumsy incompleteness if you want to create something new and improve your skills. Composing, and creative activities in general, are the best exposure therapy for a control freak like me – and, on the other hand, organising elements into a new shape gives me great satisfaction. Chaos and control must be in balance in order for something new to be created.
I have learned to live with the uncertainty of chaos, particularly through improvisation and working with contemporary artists in other branches of the arts. The classical tradition, for me, represents imposing order on chaos taken to the extreme. Having grown up with regimented classical music studies, it blew my mind to see how contemporary artists approach something like the process of creating a dance production. They toy with the material and let it evolve into what it will become by constantly working at it – an intuitive process drawing on a huge range of influences from all areas of life. This is much more than tinkering with particular details to achieve technical perfection.
Improvisation can only happen if I let go of my control, forget myself, live in the moment and just focus on what is going on around me and react to it as instinctively as I can. This kind of flow experience is also at the heart of my composing process: it allows ideas to take flight that my self-criticism or control would shoot down immediately.
Paradoxically, I find things that are alien and novel to be a calming and liberating experience. They free me of my preconceptions, and my self-criticism relents when I feel that I am ‘visiting’ another musical tradition. I am allowed to be playful, to be amused and to be entranced by the particular features of that tradition. I soak up influences like a sponge, to be reorganised later. In game music, I consciously use elements from various musical styles and allusions to various traditions. In art music projects, these morph into material and sounds, dissociated from their original function, and take on new and unpredictable forms.
Game music is commissioned music. I harness my creativity to respond to the client’s wishes as well as possible. This process involves bringing order to chaos in a rather straightforward way: first I acquaint myself with the world of the game as well as I can and study references that I would like to use as influences (musical styles, composers, artists, films, books, historical styles...) to create an image of what I would like the end product to be. Then I try to reach that goal in a structured way, setting clear parameters: time (e.g. how much time I can spend learning new things vs. going with something familiar and quick), budget (how much I am being paid, how many musicians and how much studio time I can book, etc.) and the purpose of the music in the game (structure, intensity, narrative or mood-setting).
Out of a humongous quantity of musical details I craft a unique mix and style: a dash of Romantic-era harmonies to set a nostalgic mood, a couple of well-chosen retro synth sounds to bring a bit of edge and playfulness, a handful of orchestral scenes for cinematic epicness, improvised scenes for musicians comfortable with that kind of style in a unique touch of humanity, and so on. Creating music that dovetails into game development is architecture, the placing of selected blocks in exactly the right order. It is a conscious game played with musical pieces, a process of discarding in true KonMari style, as satisfying asikebana, as pleasing as a poem with witty rhymes.
In my art projects, by contrast, the premise, process and end result are all different from what I just described. At the start of any project, whether game music or art, I am possessed by terror in the face of chaos: a blank space where an artwork should be, and a huge surfeit of material where I need to select a handful of the right ingredients. When I create music on my own terms, I embrace the chaos, deliberately calming myself not to make panicky snap decisions in defense. I allow the material time to organise itself, and I make as few pragmatic choices as I possibly can. I just start somewhere, and a path to an unknown destination will reveal itself. I spend time with the harp, with effects, with space and with material, try out things on a whim and live in the moment – feeling the vibe, playing around, lingering in the mood.
I try to forget about the styles and laws of music and to think of sound as a material born of the interaction between my body and musical instruments. The end result often surprises me. A good example of works created in this way is my production Baba Yaga, which represents uncontrolled chaos, primitiveness and forces of nature. It begins with a minimalist harp solo but ends up in a wild, extreme state of physical trance. Such a production could only have emerged in an open and intuitive process; without that process I could not have even dreamed of that resolution.
What fascinates me about the artistic process is wandering around in chaos, surrendering to intuition and reaching an end result that defies my conscious imagination. Creating game music is satisfying because it allows me to create conscious order out of chaos by combining elements from various traditions. The entranced artist and the niggling designer wrapped up in one person –that’s me.
Translation: Jaakko Mäntyjärvi
Featured photo: Ilmari Hakkola