Sounding Together?: Intertextuality and Self-Quotation in the Symphonies of Einojuhani Rautavaara

Event details

ALL WELCOME

What happens when a composer quotes their own music a lot? Especially if that practice comes to define part of their late style? Finnish composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016) certainly had a habit of repeating himself musically. It's a thing. His eight symphonies also comprise one of the most significant contributions to the symphonic genre in post-war Finland, reaching international audiences and epitomizing a distinctive compositional voice. So far, the symphonic impact of his self-quotation has not been fully explored. So this talk focuses on it as a fundamental part of a unique symphonic process, channelling existing ideas into something new.

Questions we'll consider include those that might also crop up within wider conversations around musical quotations – of what constitutes a quotation, of originality,  perspectives on unity, of the intended meaning and purpose of such explicit (and often extended) quotations which make them hard to ignore, and the compositional process itself. Tracing these intertextual connections shows just how fertile certain musical ideas were for Rautavaara, reflecting his beliefs that material needed to be cultivated, that it somehow has a will of it's own, and that the composer is not always in control of the motifs they find, but rather what is to be done with them. 

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About the speaker

Owen Burton is an Associate Lecturer at the University of York, where he teaches in the areas of musicology, music analysis and music education. His doctoral thesis offered the first detailed examination of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s complete symphonic cycle, and he is currently preparing a monograph called Einojuhani Rautavaara and the Idea of the Symphony. This book is under contract with Routledge and was supported by a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship through the Humanities Research Centre at York. His wider research on Rautavaara’s music has been published by the journal Twentieth Century Music and his interests within Nordic music have included figures ranging from Carl Nielsen to Anna Thorvaldsdottir. He also has research interests in music theory in education.