<![CDATA[LAURI SUPPONEN /COMPOSER/

<![CDATA[LAURI SUPPONEN /COMPOSER/ - KDD (diary)]]>Mon, 22 Jun 2026 02:47:03 +0300Weebly<![CDATA[fwd]]>Thu, 18 Jun 2026 15:29:04 GMThttp://laurisupponen.fi/kdd-diary/fwd...and fast forward to having finished the piece.

Already two weeks ago, in fact. Three days late on June 3rd, I sent the final score and parts for the organ version of the quintet southwest to the commissioners and the ensemble Continuum XXI.

As you may have expected, during those last five days to write the piece, I prioritised spending time writing the piece rather than writing about the piece. The suction of the workflow completely took me in, and I had barely time for anything else but food, sleep and having a few short breather breaks meeting with friends. Keeps me sane to have a minimum level of life underneath it all, even at the cost of being a bit late with the delivery time.

Helps also with recovery and the birthing blues, which was mitigiated this year by having a rather fruitful overlap with the next piece I'm writing for the good people of the Zöllner-Roche duo – a piece I've been looking forward to starting all the while while working on southwest.

It will be called east.

Meanwhile, the musicians of the ensemble have gotten in touch to clarify some techniques in the piece, and I've sent them suggestions and videos about playing techniques that I had experimented with. They will of course build their own relationship and interpretation of the piece, which I'm very much looking forward to hearing.

I love the feeling of the piece being 'out there' and 'out of my hands', now what's left is for me to both stay out of the way of the piece finally becoming itself in the able hands of the good people premiering it, and help it as much as I can.

See you in Viitasaari on July 4th.

]]><![CDATA[breakthrough]]>Wed, 27 May 2026 19:36:52 GMThttp://laurisupponen.fi/kdd-diary/breakthroughToday was a very good day.

Tomorrow will be interesting, as it will in no way have exactly the same feeling of safety, of openness, of vision and of facility of today, and I will have to accept it being different.

I had a breakthrough with the connections of the sections, the harmonic movement and the development and chromatic variations of the two chords that I'm basing this piece on.

Now what's left to do is to typeset the whole thing. It still all only exists in short score, but this time it's very detailed and I have a pretty good overview of orchestrational questions and instrumental techniques to be able to write it all up.

I'm spending a silly amount of time creating graphics for the score, and not enough time on the legibility and ease of the rythmic and formal relationship of the tempi, the barline structure. But I have a very good feeling about this today.

Early start tomorrow. 5 days to go.

]]><![CDATA[here grows paper]]>Sat, 23 May 2026 20:33:39 GMThttp://laurisupponen.fi/kdd-diary/here-grows-paperOne of the last sentences I heard my late composition teacher Paavo Heininen utter, was when he opened the door to his studio in Järvenpää I was visiting for the first time and said 'täällä kasvaa paperia', 'here grows paper'.

And indeed, there wasnt a surface including the sofa and the grand piano, which wasnt covered in fragments of score and sketches.

I'm frankly delighted of the proliferation of paper on my office desk today. Every time I've taken out a new manuscript paper, it has happened quickly and for the purpose of immediately jotting something down on it. Today's work has had urgency that was lacking yesterday. I promised to have the form of the piece figured out, and the short score ready by Saturday. I'm missing the last section, but otherwise the harmony, the rhythmic outline and gestural choreography is now mapped out for 8 out of 10 minutes.

My handwriting today has been of the kind where the thought is much faster than my ability to write it down, so everything speeds up. This is also the time when notational choices are greatly affected by the first intuition of how this idea could best be jotted down and read by someone else.

This is also a period of happenstances, typos and mistakes becoming integral details and elements of the piece, alongside all the carefully calculated and ruminated-upon material.

]]><![CDATA[showing up]]>Fri, 22 May 2026 19:52:55 GMThttp://laurisupponen.fi/kdd-diary/showing-upWhen things get stuck some hours of the day, some days of the week or even some months of the year, I find solace in thinking of the bigger picture.

The piece gets done, it has gotten done with in the past. What do I remember from days and weeks when nothing seemed to happen with my previous piece. The piece got finished, and I have moved on.

On days like these, even just showing up at the desk is a sign of respect for the process, even though I have nothing to show for it.

The time spent 'at the piece' can go a long way 'into the piece' eventually.

I sat for some hours without really doing anything, until I figured I might as well further a few hanging projects which are soon due in their own rights. Namely going through applications for a working grant board I'm on, and listening to the pieces recommended for the International Rostrum of Composers this year, in preparation for a radio programme at Finnish YLE radio the week after next.

Listening to the works, varying from solo contrabass with electronics to full orchestra with two sets of soloist groups, and with no thematic connection between them what so ever, I found myself gravitating to a few instinctive parts of my musical taste. This was further accentuated by me being somewhat tired today.

I stuck with pieces that I felt were really going for something defined - not necessarily 'clearly' defined, some of them were beautifully nebulous and untangible, but still - they were going for something. And they stuck with this something for long enough for it not to feel like a random discovery - it is the discovery in the piece, or one of them. It's a crucial discovery, and the composer visibly knows this while composing and communicates this knowledge in the stuff of the music. We are hearing the composer discovering something, and them staying with this discovery.

This I found articulated in several pieces that were lauded at this years Rostrum.

Now how will I articulate my discoveries in southwest? This is something to ruminate over the next two days - come monday, I want to start on the final draft.

]]><![CDATA[short]]>Wed, 20 May 2026 21:08:25 GMThttp://laurisupponen.fi/kdd-diary/may-21st-2026I never had a lot of time to write this piece, but since the start it has felt very natural to think this piece into being.

I'm counting in hours now, not in days or weeks. Every moment spent writing southwest seems meaningful.

I don't wish I had more time. If I had much more time, the piece would become very different. This timeframe of almost instantaneous composition fits this piece, especially since I've been working on material very similar to this piece since 2018 or even 2017. The core of the material will keep ruminating even after this piece is finished. It's like a mushroom in rain.

It's raining. A piece comes out. Then the mycorrhiza goes back to sleep to keep the humus fresh.

I had started on the first page of the beginning of the piece in full score format yesterday. I had written it with proportional notation and shorthand, using text where jotting other symbols down felt too defining for this stage.

On a few long train trips in November, in the immediate days and weeks after hearing about this commission, I had written several sections straight into Sibelius and developed them there, with the help of the program's playback tools.

I went through these, my initial readily 'typeset' fragments, and selected a few that fitted my current plan. I'm going to print them tomorrow on paper, so that I can work with them equally alongside my manuscript.

I found myself sloping into short score, away from full score, as I got 2 minutes into the piece. I felt as though I needed a step back from defined notation, inorder to sketch out longer cycles of the piece. Some sections are more detailed, but overall I have a lower threshold to jot things down. The stuff of my writing looks like I will come back to it, so I don't have to worry too much about the definitiveness of it. I can go forward, keep the past open, and what may appear may still affect where I had come from.

Tomorrow I will focus more on the three sections after the first one. I feel like I need to break this chronological way of writing, in order to have a more defined picture of where I'm heading.

Balancing being specific and vague. I'm hoping to finish the short score on Saturday so that I can spend all of next week working in full score.

Getting there, good night!

]]><![CDATA[map]]>Tue, 19 May 2026 12:09:39 GMThttp://laurisupponen.fi/kdd-diary/mapFor what seems like the tenth time, I went through all my papers that have something even remotely to do with southwest.

This time, I opened one of my landscape A3 score papers, and turned to its blank side to draw a timeline for the whole piece.

I knew how I wanted it to start (at least for now) and to end. I pencilled in 10 minutes in between the endpoints, and mapped out the location of Φ and the half-way point. Estimating the length of the intro and outro, I had an overview of how much time I had for the other material within the piece, and I mapped out an order for them.

The first part, light and soft, 2' -foot register on the organ/harpsichord.

Second part, gigue-like material circling away for a good 3 minutes.

Gamba rising above the other instruments initiating an interlude of contrasting material for violin and gamba soli.

A final section, where the gamba presses down on the ensemble, bringing them to a 16' -foot register.

At lunch, I mumbled to the person working behind the till, and I couldn't hear what she was saying. I apologised and thought to myself I mustve been focusing for a few hours since I was so distracted and in my own thoughts.

The piece exists now. All is left to do is to write it.

]]><![CDATA[slow]]>Tue, 19 May 2026 08:57:05 GMThttp://laurisupponen.fi/kdd-diary/slowI give myself credit for appearing at my workdesk with all my project files for southwest, my manuscript folder, empty staff paper, laptop, midi-keyboard and headphones. I even remembered to take my two previous notebooks that contain the seeds for the piece.

Meanwhile my Lithuanian colleague is going paperless.

I didnt get anything done today. Realising that this was happening, i proof-listened to a track for a future recording project and sent my comments to the sound designer. I went for an early dinner.

Im writing this on my phone at my friend’s couch, waiting to post tomorrow, once I get back to my laptop I left at the office.

I have 14 days to write this piece. On top of my mind is both a hesitation and a strong will to follow what I feel is the essence of this piece.

Namely two alternating chords, debris and chromaticism that accumulate over time and an increasing sence of pesanteur, pressing down on the gigue-like circular movement, initiated in bar one and carrying until the end.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. Decisions in the face of ignorance and hesitation.

Hesitation is a winter topos - tremolo and sul pont, as illustrated in Vivaldi - and yet plowing through a passage on a wintery street from A to Z demands commitment and a certain lack of care for detail.

At the core of southwest is this seeming lack of care. At the surface, a choreography of lively hesitations.

I wish I could strike today off the calender, but I feel this contact with the concrete floor is a necessary evil to wake me up for more consistency in my work in the coming days.

Courtesy of a lack of inertia, caused in turn by contemplation in stead of decisiveness, i feel like I’m living by a chess master’s rule:

”Don’t just do something, sit there!”

]]><![CDATA[byrd]]>Wed, 13 May 2026 12:43:39 GMThttp://laurisupponen.fi/kdd-diary/byrdToday I made a start on the full score for southwest.

I still have to work on the form of the piece – which section follows what, and what proportional lengths are they in relation to one another.

Any sound that I like and that I feel is very much of this piece doesn't exist on it's own. You come to it somehow, and then you leave it.

How you do this is equally important to the identity of the sound or the section. This game of proportions and relationships is a lot of fun, but it's also very elusive to me at the moment.

Starting on the full score even though I don't fully know where I'm heading with the piece, I push myself to decide on crucial aspects of the piece.

A piece can start in any number of ways, and they way I chose today eliminates a lot of potential starts. Moving forward or imagining later sections became a lot easier once I have a feeling of how I arrive towards them.

What's also fun is to then either delete the start of the piece if at some point it feels like the form isn't working, or moving it to another point in the piece. The original teleological ratinale of what follows what is then broken, but if you see the piece as being in bubble-form (the past, present and future of the piece is present at any given moment simultaneously) the order becomes less defining. All sections are affected by each other within the frame (the start and the finish) of the piece.

I'm listening to Byrd today. I love the album featuring Fretwork, Magdalena Consorts and His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts, especially Christ Rising Again has a fabulously beautiful and engaging polyphonic grid, and a balanced dual form with a slow and fast passage. Almost naive, humble. It communicates a similar sense of humility and contemplation, yet chromaticism and illuminating use of colour and dramaturgy as Beato Angelico's murals at the San Marco monastery in Florence.

What is enough is enough, and for today, having made a start on the piece is enough of a days work. I will have very little time this week to continue on this, so I put all my hopes and dreams on next week. Coming back to this will be easier now I'm able to ruminate on what follows, since I know where I'm coming from.

]]><![CDATA[leafing through notes]]>Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:27:11 GMThttp://laurisupponen.fi/kdd-diary/leafing-through-notesI've come back to writing here. The thought of keeping a composition diary has not left me alone, and this new piece I'm currently working on seems to me a good project to bounce some reflection off. It might clear some murky aspects of the process to me, and help me realize the potential of the material I'm working with. The piece will be called southwest.

To give a little bit of background, Johan the AD of Viitasaari festival asked me to write a work for their visiting ensemble Continuum XXI, a specialising in cross-programming HIP baroque works alongside new ones. The schedule for delivery of the finished piece was tight as it was, even without the 2 pieces I had to get out of the way before fully being able to start on it.

Immediately during the call with Johan I 'saw' the piece and how it could unfold, and how it is linked to what I was then currently occupied with, namely a fascinating mean-tone temperament (Pietro Aaron 1/4-comma if you must) and a practice linking early baroque and contemporary music together.

I also saw the potential for 'southwest' to link with a cycle of pieces I've been working on on and off since about 2018, with the first outcome being 'north' for ensemble (2023) and for organ positive (2025). The cycle is still in process, but let it's working title be 'the compass cycle' for clarity.

So although the schedule was tight, I felt as though I had this piece in me.

I've been gathering material for southwest all the while I was working on the two other pieces.

I gravitated towards the concept of the 'diagonal'.

This came about when I was looking through the harmonic material I had devised for compass through the years. The chords for 'south' and 'west' had an interesting potential to mix and merge, so I combined them to give birth to two chords distinct from their parents.

The oscillation between these chords forms the harmonic base of the piece. I've been since looking for ways to include temporal and timbral processes to latch onto the harmonic skeleton.

Today I started by clearing the office from bits and bobs from the previous project. I coiled some cables and built my meantone keyboard setup again.

After lunch I leafed through my most recent notebook which contains all the thoughts and ideas I've been collecting since November when I received the commission to write southwest. I collected key fragments and sentences, ideas and concepts around the piece and wrote them out on one of the last pages of my notebook. I found that I had done a similar summary earlier in March, one that was more concerned with musical, rythmical and timbral questions. Today I was more interested to step back and think more conceptually.

I downloaded images of two paintings that I've been associating with this piece: a painting of the Norwegian glacier Josteinsbreen by Peder Balke and the famour Das Eismeer, by Caspar David Friedrich. The concept of the diagonal is very central to romantic landscape painting, and Das Eismeer is a very schoolbook example of it. The diagonal is a hypothenus of time and gravity, and of gravity and forward motion. A glacier slowly descending down, carving a U-valley for itself.

Friedrich had made three small sketches of ice on the Elbe river during a very cold winter in the late 19th century. I was these sketches when passing through Hamburg when traveling to Belgium for Christmas and New Years'. I wanted to keep these works, their level of detail, their spontaneity and their fragmentary form, close to 'southwest''s project.

After this archival work, I listened to the chords I had devised already some time ago in early December, and looked for ways make new combinations out of them. I also experimented with chromatic transpositions, as I was in any case looking through ways of having mixed 440Hz and 415Hz performers playing the piece together. I felt that it would be interesting to somehow compose this discrepancy into the piece, even though most of the piece's tuning will will be matched with a simple and very common chromatic downward transposition.

I knew I wanted to work with a very small percussion setup, and I was intrigued by the notion of having just a hand drum and a tambourine - this was also the extent of my knowledge of what baroque percussion constitutes. I went to buy a hand drum from a music shop just down the road that had a suitable approximate pitch (close to Bb) and brought my tambourine from home, jingling in my tote bag on every step of the way from home to my office.

I spent the rest of the day experimenting with different nail, thumb and rubbing techniques on the hand drum, and different angle positions for the tambourine. The concept of the diagonal is fascinatingly audible in how the tambourine sounds different when positioned horisontally and vertically, with exciting sound worlds in between across the diagonals.

I pledged to write at least 10 minutes after every composition day, this one took a bit longer, but next time I won't need to give as much context.

Tomorrow I'll have a rehearsal for another project, but I'll be able to get back to this on Mayday's eve.

Thanks for reading!

]]><![CDATA[foraging]]>Sat, 29 Jul 2023 07:15:54 GMThttp://laurisupponen.fi/kdd-diary/foragingI was sitting in the far corner of the milder of the two saunas at the former Olympic swimming stadium when I overheard a young father ask his son whether they should go to the lockers to his phone to see if someone had answered a message they had sent.

I started thinking about foraging.

Perhaps because it's the closest reference I have from my own experience to hunting with bait.

The day before I had come back from spending a week with the families of my sisters at our summer house in Northern Carelia. The morning of departure I had taken my nibling to collect blueberries.

I woke up to the fact that I might not have time to collect the critical amount of blueberries this summer to labour into jam that would bridge the winter, so on our last day we pledged to bring back at least half a bucket, conditions permitting. The blueberry-forecast had been boding well all June, with an abundance of flowers that I had tasted for the first time. They are in fact edible in themselves, and make for a great seasoning to porridge and yogurts.

We had half a bucket in time for lunch, and by the afternoon we had produced twenty or so small jars of blueberry jam.

In the forest my nibling was asking a lot of questions. She was curious about my favourite animal, and wondered about the many holes that formed in between the boulders on which we were balancing to navigate through the blueberry bushes. Past an imposing rocky ledge there was a slope gently descending down to the lake filled with blueberry bushes in between towering pine trees. I blinked and looked again and I saw black and dark blue spots everywhere. I had quickly developed the blueberry eyes.

Closing my eyes on the way back on the train I saw the same blue and black spots.

It's an instinct that the young father in the sauna was tapping into. He had sent a message, perhaps asking their partner to spontaneously join them for a swim, and now he was eagerly awaiting to go check the bait if something had been caught in it.

Will there be mushrooms? Will I eat fresh mushrooms tonight? Will we find enough mushrooms to conserve them to bridge the winter?

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