In February, the Finnish copyright organisation Teosto published an article titled “What’s Trending in Classical Music in 2026?” (in Finnish). One of the key points it raised was the prediction that concert conventions would be challenged. As concerts increasingly position the audience as an active participant in the artistic experience, the roles of creators are also expanding: new music appears ever more often as part of interdisciplinary artworks in which every element carries meaning.

This development was vividly embodied in the exhibition Puu ei laula yksin (“A Tree Does Not Sing Alone”), organised in connection with the Tampere Biennale. Five works shared the same exhibition space, some of them inseparably intertwining music with visual or interactive elements.

Encountering the works was pleasantly perplexing: they played continuously in a loop, independent of the presence of listeners. In a traditional concert, the experience centres on interaction – music conveying something from someone to someone – whereas here it felt as though, by putting on headphones, I stepped into a journey within a self-contained musical world that existed independently of me. This initial sense of perplexity was partly of my own making; only afterward did I realize that I had approached the visit as if it were aconcert, where I could choose the order in which to listen, rather than as an exhibition.

Two works stood out above the others. The first was Riikka Talvitie’s video installation Puumaisuus (“Tree Matter”), in which sound, space and materiality intertwine with remarkable subtlety.

The work combines a poem by Sini Silver with a continuously descending pizzicato line performed on the viola da gamba by Mikko Perkola. The sound of the instrument seems to operate in two dimensions simultaneously: as the pizzicato line descends, it shifts in the headphones toward the right ear, until an octave doubling emerges on the left. As the lower line fades, the sonic image gradually moves back toward the left. In my experience, this fused a musical “vertical axis” with a spatial “horizontal axis,” creating a striking illusion of movement.

This motion is mirrored by the sonic transformation of the spoken poem. Gradually, the poem becomes “tree-like”: Talvitie has played a recording of the poet’s own voice inside a piece of wood and re-recorded it repeatedly, turning speech into an organic resonance characteristic of the material itself. Linguistic meaning recedes, giving way to a tactile, sonic surface.

The ending brings the work together with quiet elegance. Bowed sounds return as flageolet tones to the original register, as if closing a cycle. At the same time, the looping structure playfully engages with tradition: the concluding pitches forming a D major chord make the pizzicato note G that begins the next cycle feel both like a new beginning and the resolution of the previous one. The network formed by pitch, space, and the headphone listening experience is so compelling that I found myself returning to the work several times before I could finally leave the room.

Another work that left a lasting impression was Leevi Räsänen’s string quartet maisema, muistuma, enne (“landscape, reminiscence, omen”). The piece is part of a collaborative project String Quartet by Räsänen and Anne Naukkarinen, in which personal memory is transformed into a multidimensional artistic expression.

For the project, Naukkarinen collected memories from four generations connected with Pappilanlahti in Ruokolahti – a place where her maternal family has lived for over a century. The script compiled from these interviews brings together intimate yet widely relatable experiences: for one person, the place is their birthplace; for another, their “grandma’s house”. This temporal layering also inevitably reveals the structural changes in the Finnish countryside. (The script was provided in booklet form.)

Räsänen’s music captures this complexity with striking precision. The polyphonic, contrapuntal texture, combined with subtle microtonality, keeps the music constantly alive and unpredictable, even though its core lies in memory. The listening experience unfolds as a tension between recognition and estrangement: at moments, echoes of the past seem to surface, yet without the burden of pastiche or direct quotation.

The piece unfolds with an intensity that is at times overwhelmingly beautiful – thanks in no small part to the excellent performers: Aino Szalai (violin I), Anna-Maria Huohvanainen (violin II), Ida Kosonen (viola), and Katariin a Selenius (cello). Although the work premiered in the intimate setting of Naukkarinen’s grandmother’s home, it deserves to find its way into the string quartet repertoire.

The Tampere Biennale: Puu ei laula yksin at Kulttuuritalo Laikku 8.4.–10.5.2026

The exhibition was realised with contributions from composers Teemu Mastovaara, Leevi Räsänen, Riikka Talvitie and Felix Hirsch, as well as choreographer and visual artist Anne Naukkarinen.

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