Composer Minna Leinonen, the 2024 Teosto prize winner, often finds her music an expression for a feeling of confusion that arises from the world around us. “There is a huge change taking place in how we think about music and listen to it”, she says. “There is no reason why contemporary music should find itself in the margin.”

When Minna Leinonen heard she would be winning the prestigious Teosto prize this year, she hardly believed it at first. The annual award for Finnish musical creations values originality and boldness, and covers all musical genres. The prize winners typically includes two to four names, and this year the podium was shared between Leinonen and rock group Tinyhawk & Bizzarro. Each year the number of potential works is quite large, and the odds for a single classical composer to get the laurel small. It’s not a big surprise, however, that Leinonen was singled out with her 2023 string quartet …and we are rotating with it (listen to it on Soundcloud and watch Leinonen's video interview in Finnish about her prize winning work).

During the past few years she has been producing a high number of distinctive and engaging compositions from orchestral pieces to collaborative stage works and imaginative chamber music. With her sound-driven, texture-sensitive approach and an ability to viscerally convey both personal and universal experiences Minna Leinonen (b. 1977) belongs to the most interesting voices in Finnish contemporary music.

Overlapping roles

Whether composing for chamber ensembles or in an interdisciplinary setting, a typical feature for Leinonen’s work is collaboration, a creative dialogue. Her composition process often includes a sort of sound laboratory work with the performers, and this was also the case with …and we are rotating with it and its commissioner, Kamus Quartet. Inspired by the brave and innovative group, Leinonen gave the string quartet additional instruments like whirley tubes and made them whistle, sing and speak as well.

Leinonen’s recent collaborations also include the multimedia work Maa jonka jätämme (The Land We Leave) with flutist Malla Vivolin, sound designer Jussi Suonikko and photographer Touko Hujanen, based on Hujanen’s photographs of a former agricultural institute in eastern Finland. The music was composed by Leinonen, in close dialogue with the others, whereas the installation From Me to View (2019) was a thoroughly collaborative project conceived with the visual artist Heta Kuchka and musicians from the contemporary music collective defunensemble.

”We started by asking the musicians: Close your eyes, what do you see? They then took us to their favourite spots in Helsinki and nearby, like the Linnanmäki amusement park or to the seaside, and improvised there.”

The practices on the music field are changing and can be changed. We are starting to understand that sometimes the roles of a composer and performer may overlap.

These sounds, created in dialogue with different soundscapes, were recorded and used as a material for Leinonen’s composition. The process resembled a cycle where music born from landscapes and personal experiences of individual musicians was transformed into an organized whole by Leinonen and then interpreted by the musicians at the same places. The resulting five-channel video installation was first presented in art gallery Myymälä2, Helsinki, and was reworked into a concert version, including live music, in 2023.

“I suggested to the musicians that we share the copyrights of the piece because the authorship was genuinely shared and not by any means only by me”, Leinonen says.

“The practices on the music field are changing and can be changed. We are starting to understand that sometimes the roles of a composer and performer may overlap.”

Open your ears

Leinonen perceives a larger trend where composers are taking an active role on the field, engaging in different artistic roles and making their personal values heard. For Leinonen, for instance, teaching composition is an essential part of her creative work. She teaches individuals, gives workshops and works with young people. The work as a pedagogue is in no way isolated from her composing but strongly influences her creative processes.

“It’s absolutely fascinating how teaching makes you listen with different ears”, she points out. “Working with young people can change the way we think.”

This can be heard in the way strong emotionality and a certain fragility often permeate her musical language resulting in music that “may be screaming and delicate at the same time”, as she puts it.

It’s fascinating how teaching makes you listen with different ears. Working with young people can change the way we think.

“The starting points in my music are rarely absolute and tend to rise from experienced ideas. Then I start experimenting with instruments and collecting musical material”, she explains.

“Composing is creative imagining. Sometimes the process unfolds differently than one first thinks, for example my recent accordion concerto Vyöry [Avalanche] initially had a very different starting point and then started to express the restless atmosphere I felt in the society at that time.”

Minna Leinonen: Wish (2020), Markus Hohti, cello.

According to the composer, the impulse for this work came from a 9-year-old girl's wish for a Christmas gift for Santa Claus, that the world wouldn't end. Along with the interpretation of cellist Markus Hohti the seemingly small piece grew to be a very meaningful one for Leinonen.

Music of change

Leinonen names the emotion behind many of her works a kind of bewilderment. …and we are rotating with it is based on the fact that the rotation speed of the Earth is increasing, apparently because of climate change.

“The image of a planet spinning faster and faster was very confusing. At that time, Rhodes was on fire and the UN Secretary-General was saying that our situation is out of control – which became one of the performance notes in the piece”, Leinonen describes. “I wanted to express this feeling of unease and rapid change with that very traditional ensemble of string quartet.”

The carbon footprint of the whole project was counted and compensated for, presumably the first work in classical music to do so.

“This piece broadened my conception of what a composition can be”, Leinonen says with enthusiasm.

A scene in metamorphosis

Minna Leinonen believes contemporary works of art can open us new perspectives for a sustainable way of living, even if their impact is perhaps not measurable in a conventional way.

“For me art is something that makes you see differently. It demands reflection and reorientation and that’s how it is capable of broadening the mind.”

We tend to think classical music is conservative, but the art that is created is constantly evolving, strongly in touch with our times and very hard to categorize.

This year Leinonen was the artistic director of Tampere Biennale contemporary music festival that took place in early April. The theme was Worlds in Metamorphosis, and Leinonen wanted to showcase the versatility she has experienced in Finland’s music scene in recent years.

“We tend to think classical music is conservative, but the art that is created is constantly evolving, strongly in touch with our times and very hard to categorize. We don’t have ‘contemporary music’ but musics in plural. There is a huge change taking place in how we think about music and listen to it. There is no reason why contemporary music should find itself in the margin.”

Language of freedom

Leinonen herself has found her musical language constantly transforming, a sense of freedom growing with years.

“Stylistic boundaries don’t exist for me anymore, and I feel I trust my inner voice better and better.”

Leinonen grew up in the little town of Pirkkala near Tampere and felt passionate about music from an early age, but as she didn’t enjoy performing she ended up studying music theory in Tampere University of Applied Sciences. There she met composer Jouni Kaipainen who had just started as the institution’s composition teacher and who was soon going to bring up a whole new generation of Finnish composers, Leinonen among them.

Stylistic boundaries don’t exist for me anymore, and I feel I trust my inner voice better and better.

“He encouraged me that I could be a composer. At some point I realised that the essence of composing was not about rules and constraints but about possibilities and freedom”, she recalls.

This experience also led to a desire to help others find their creative voice. For Leinonen teaching is much about dialogue, and the same goes for the composer-performer teamwork. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation for Sibelius Academy on the communication of musical notation – that is to say, what the score can convey and what freedom the musician can take.

“The best moments in my work are the ones where a musician takes up my piece and gets inside and beyond the score. Then the music becomes so much more.”