"What matters most is that the poem has personal significance to the composer"

Composer Kaj Chydenius is 70 this year. To mark the occasion, his songs will be performed in numerous concerts across Finland and the year of celebration culminates in a gala concert at Finlandia Hall on 15 November.

“I don’t remember exactly where I found the first poems that I began to set to music. Poetry was not read in my childhood home at Juankoski – at least not in Finnish. It must have been in my senior-school years in Joensuu.”

After school Chydenius enrolled at the Sibelius Academy but did not compose anything for seven years. He did conduct several choirs, however, and was an active member of the Society for Contemporary Music. “I didn’t compose because nobody asked me to. In 1964 I was inspired to take up composition when I met artists who had been involved in Ylioppilasteatteri (The Students’ Theatre). There weren’t really any composers among them so I started writing songs, and I did have years of studying the theory of music behind me.”

Since then he has done the bulk of his compositional work for the theatre. He sees certain similarities between theatrical work and music. “If you compare a play with four characters with a string quartet, they have a lot in common. And good theatre directors are often musical.”

Chydenius compares composing a little song to painting a watercolour. “The work must be finished when the paint is dry. If a song isn’t done in an hour, you’d better go for a walk. Of course you can add finishing touches afterwards, but the draft version must be done quickly. You have to read the poem first, though, and learn it properly. You have to get a clear idea of it.”

He does not think there is any type of poetry that you could not set to music. “Long prose poems seldom make a decent song, that’s for sure. And with very short poems it can be tricky, too. In a way, music is heavy apparatus to get going, you need a bit of intro and so on. A short poem doesn’t necessarily work in that kind of context. But whatever a poem is like, what matters most is that it has personal significance to the composer. And this is individual, of course. Something that isn’t close to me can be so to somebody else. Me, I prefer a compact mode of expression in poetry. Babbling poets give me the creeps, ha, ha.”

Chydenius has set a tremendous number of texts by different poets from several different periods to music. “I have a passionate relationship with poetry. I could not imagine life without it. Nowadays people keep finding and bringing me lots of fine texts to work on and I’ve come across old Finnish poems that were set to music more than two hundred years ago.”

The composer’s autobiography Muistin juuri was published recently (Otava 2009). He writes about his childhood, people, the theatre, music, islands, pianos, politics and various events. Above all, however, the reader realises that poetry has been present in this man’s life to an extraordinary extent. The following is a quotation from it:

“The poets have helped me realise my old dream: finding a beautiful melody, creating the kind of music that could take poetry to the listeners/readers and inspire them to discover new perspectives, insights and joys.”

Text: Pasi Lyytikäinen
Translation: Joan and Henrik Nordlund
Photo: Jakke Nikkarinen