Earlier this year, I quoted in a grant application the phone note that appears further down. I had always assumed that a grant application, as a genre, could not contain text this unfiltered, and that it should be “digested” into some more finished or more elevated form. Sending the application felt good for the first time in a long while. Still, there was fear in me that writing like that would make me look like an arrogant kid who is just trying to be different. Of course, I can’t know how I was seen through the application. But it changed something in me and encouraged me to share some very unfiltered thoughts in this column as well.
As an artist, I spend so much time writing this elevated “art-text” and philosophical-existential pondering that sometimes I get lost in it. Sometimes it is a pleasurable place to get lost in. Sometimes that gets me somewhere and allows me to find new perspectives. But sometimes, I lose what I’m trying to do. I end up trying to frame things in ways that I think could increase my chances of getting funded. I’m SO TIRED of that. I lose my sense of my age, my background and my personality by becoming some general “ART”ist, an image of what I think is appreciated in ART and ART SPEECH. By sharing notes quickly jotted on my phone, or, at the other extreme, thoughts that were brewed on long tram and train rides, walks or at concerts – these are the places that always get my thoughts flying – I try to share a glimpse of what the actual is going on in my mind. Luckily, in recent artistic work, I can say that I’ve increasingly succeeded in sharing this side as well. More snot, more scabs, more dirt, mud… stink… risk… funny… stupid… cute… ass…
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27 November 2025
I condensed my goals in composition into a phone note on 27 November 2025:
what do you actually wanna do what interests you: Mercedes Benz, Blow everything up!!, Impossibility, Graphicness, Simplicity, Overtones, Emotions.
As means towards these, I am considering the following: “Extremely subtle handling of time and tuning – Empathetic listening to what is emerging, and hearing in advance – Intuitiveness, Inexplicability, Mystery.”
On the image of composers of contemporary music: “NOT a superhero MEGALEEVI sleek and graphic ideal, but rather a stinking and clattering messy pile of crap.”
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30 May 2026
A premiere has no access to the emotional impact and weight that culture or tradition brings. It therefore has to affect people directly and immediately. This is difficult by musical means alone, without extra-musical or peripheral influences. It is extremely challenging to create a musical language so compelling that it can break through the listener’s walls right away.
I often wonder why a black, empty space with sound in it starts to feel distressing. At festival gigs and in black boxes, when I look up at the ceiling and the sea of electronics and cables, I start to think that we are in the Matrix. There is something unreal about it. Then again, I wonder: do we need all this in order to affect and be affected? Could an idea be dressed in such a form that it could be conveyed to another person with very small and subtle gestures?
I am interested in human-produced and acoustic sounds. A work that is produced entirely electronically, or presented through speakers and media, lacks warmth and the energy a human being brings. A person on stage is energy in themselves; mere presence is enough as a gesture. Bodies produce energy that other bodies in the same space can receive.
In works of music, almost without exception, what I find most affecting and attractive is the subtle, not the loud thuds of a bass drum, clusters on a piano or sections rattling loudly with excessive bow pressure. For me, music is about more than the powerful being loud and the aggressive being bad.
On the other hand, I think, like Susan Sontag, that an artwork should be seen as itself, rather than forcing everything through interpretation. In my works, I have aimed at direct depiction and at bringing things forward as they are, instead of dangling at the symbolic level. I find it cognitively taxing to have to keep interpreting symbols and deciphering them. Wouldn’t it be liberating to experience contemporary music simply as itself, to not ask how the work’s “programme” relates to the sound you hear, and to experience it: the work, sounding and written, just as it is?
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11 December 2025
A composer’s work can be frustrating… after spending so much time writing this aforementioned art text, the disappointments can be real… and a well-behaved, put-together composer can briefly turn into a total nutcase on the inside… A phone note from 11 December 2025:
Like, things have gone really well for me but I’m bitter that things aren’t going the absolute best for me!!
Why does anyone else even get grants, because I’m the best and most interesting and most wonderful and most unique, and why is anyone else’s music played anywhere except mine or my best friends’ or my favourite composers’, everything else is totally worthless, none of this makes any sense, how this world works, and I don’t understand on what grounds even those grant evaluations were made, although there were a couple of people there that I totally endorse and I can be happy for them, but I’m still pissed off and bitter because I’d already managed to imagine I’d definitely get €80,000 from there, and now that I didn’t get it, it pisses me off like hell that I’m €80,000 poorer, or like, in my head I’m kind of already €80,000 in debt since I didn’t get it, because I kinda already thought it was mine, that I deserve it, and I’d already seen in my dreams many times that I’d get it, so fuck, why didn’t I get it.
Oh fucking hell, it’s total shit that I didn’t get it, and I can’t stand that the fucking waiting for decisions takes so long that I have to apply for all the other fucking small grants and get some fucking pocket change from there, and I don’t know how I can even do anything, because if I don’t get funding for my work then I can’t even do anything, right? Or how could I do anything if I don’t get money for it, because you can’t do this work without money anyway.
So here’s your HONEST TEXT for you, fuck, from the world’s most successful young composer WHO IS STILL SO YOUNG OH BUT YOU’RE SO YOUNG SO WHAT ARE YOU COMPLAINING ABOUT, EVEN WE FORTY SOMETHINGS ARE DOING SO BADLY oh damn, there go the boomers again, shut up, don’t you get that my problems are just as real as yours, even though I don’t have the same kind of entitlement, or well, actually fuck, I totally do… I’m a totally fucking entitled brat and PROUD OF IT, honestly I’m boiling on the inside because on the outside not everyone sees that amazing skill and unique charisma, nerve and talent, you know it, really, why does no one see it and why does no one interview me??
So imagine, even though you always see that totally mega composed guy from the outside who looks like things are going well and who’s satisfied with everything and also always says all’s good and things are going well, well THIS is the reality, I’m honestly just as messed up and broken as all the rest of you, if not even more, now this rage is already making me smile quite a bit, but it can’t be helped, gotta keep going and rage some more […]
Now I’m thinking about making a choir piece out of this text maybe…
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7 October 2026
Thoughts on how I think:
I am easily led astray and absent-minded. I remember next to nothing that I don’t write down. I live by my calendar, my notes, my task lists, reminders and note books.
My ideas become real only when they become visible on paper, on a computer or as speech to someone else. Thinking is in many ways a physical activity: it is affected by external stimuli (or the lack of them) and by the media available. I think onto paper, in words, images and graphs. My relationship with the notation software Dorico has become almost symbiotic: I handle musical material more naturally there than anywhere else. The software works excellently for stretching and compressing rhythms, handling time flexibly and working with microtonality.
In my head, ideas don’t develop anywhere. Only when I see my ideas physically do I understand what they are about and what dimensions they contain. Symbols make it possible to develop and process highly complex concepts and sounding events in a way that fits inside a human brain. It is impossible to imagine a 40-layer sounding event in the human mind (and if someone claims they can, I call bullshit!), but as images on paper, as symbols, as layered meanings that can later be decoded into a score, it is possible. My approach to creative work is therefore constructivist: I actively create the meanings my works deal with, and I can make real phenomena that did not exist before by creating symbols, words and notations for them.
“Imagination, life is your creation.”
– voice in the 'Barbie Girl' song
I feel as if most everything I have come across has happened as a result of active striving: first as dreams written down cautiously for myself, then as goals with milestones and finally as happenings in real life.
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10 September 2026
I am working to let go of the idea that there is some perfect thing that everything should be. The composer’s work is the first step in a series of interpretations of an idea, which performers and the audience continue after them. No interpretation is right or wrong.
[…]
I view composing as nurturing, following the idea as it takes shape. It is a process in which one simply has to know when the right moment to stop is. Every live performance of a composition is equally uncertain and imperfect: made by people for other people. This is a fundamentally human activity, showing again and again that the fear of taking risks is easier to bear together.
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3 July 2026
naming suggestions for pieces
Krrrt plörrrrrks ka tsäkäbäkädä plom
Grrrerr tf tf tsuh
Plinkssss
Ögrrr ögrrrr blrghtfdthtmngh
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10 September 2026
In my earlier works I strove towards the “shape of an egg”, making pieces that aimed to be unambiguous and logical in compositional technique, and transparent and purposeful in orchestration. Now I lift that egg in my hands from the pedestalI set it on, drop it on the floor and set off walking over the shells. Crick, crack, crick, crack. My blood starts to circulate. I walk towards my own laws, where I tingle, pinch and tickle my listeners. Crick, crack. In the shimmering surface of my living music, the porosities, vitalities, differences and states of the timbres stand out. Crick.
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Leevi Räsänen (https://www.leevirasanen.com/) is an internationally performed and award-winning composer known for his multidisciplinary collaborations, distinctive microtonal idiom, and playful, imaginative approaches to composition. Räsänen’s compositional practice is based on iterative and process-based methods. His oeuvre includes orchestral, chamber, opera, choral and interdisciplinary works.
Featured photo: Emppu Veinola.