GUIDED BY INTUITION AND HARD WORK

Having arrived in Finland, Jovanka Trbojević shifted her career from classical pianist to contemporary composer.

“I write my own music and try to reflect something of what is happening in the world and what is happening inside me,” says Jovanka Trbojević, a contemporary composer who is a native of the former Yugoslavia. She considers music as a vehicle for expressing her thoughts and emotions, without subscribing to any particular method of composition.

Of course, one has to have command of one’s means of expression, but Trbojević does not consider rational thinking to be the only avenue available to a composer. She believes firmly in intuition and instinct.

Jovanka Trbojević began studying for a piano diploma at the Music Academy in Prague in the early 1980s with a teacher who was a pupil of a pupil of Franz Liszt, no less. Her strict classical training cast itself in a completely new light when she visited the Time of Music contemporary music festival in Viitasaari in 1984.

“That was my first encounter with contemporary music. I realized that this is something I want to do. It was as if new doors had opened up before me,” she says. Two years later, she moved to Finland and began studying composition at the Sibelius Academy, first with Eero Hämeenniemi and later with Paavo Heininen.

But music was not the main reason for moving. “I came to Finland because I fell in love,” she laughs. “At that time, it was virtually the only reason why anyone emigrated to Finland. Now there are many more foreigners in Finland who come here to study or to work.”

Today, Trbojević is a full-time composer. She begins work every weekday at nine in the morning and stops around four in the afternoon. She needs a regular schedule, because for her creativity involves not just inspiration but hard work too.

“But I don’t need to force myself to do this, because this is my thing. I love this job,” Trbojević says emphatically. Composing is not just about vision but also about choices, organization and tweaking.

“A composition is like a living creature that the composer puts together.” Trbojević’s creations have proved to be viable, having been performed not only in Finland but also elsewhere in Europe and in Japan and Australia.

Osmo Tapio Räihälä has written that Trbojević avoids strong accents and fast tempos, giving the dramaturgy of her works space to develop. She has mainly written chamber music, but recently she has explored larger forms and larger ensembles.

Last year, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra premiered her orchestral work Orgone Accumulator, and spring 2008 saw the completion of her most recent project, the chamber opera Heart in a Plastic Bag. It was premiered in Copenhagen in a truly international project involving a Norwegian director and singers from the UK and Denmark.

In addition to large forms, Trbojević is interested in encounters between artists from different fields of the arts. At a concert of her works at Temppeliaukio Church in Helsinki, musicians were joined by a poet, a clothes designer, a painter and a scent artist! She has also worked with authors such as Sigurjón ‘Sjón’ Birgir Sigurðsson and Jyrki Kiiskinen, and she is planning a Kalevala-based collaboration with sculptor Martti Aiha.


Home is here

“I don’t really feel like an immigrant, because I have lived here for so long,” Trbojević says. She has now lived in Finland longer than in Yugoslavia, and her home is here. “My children are Finnish, and through them I am bound to Finland. The country I was born in no longer exists, so this is all I have.”

Settling in Finland was not without its problems. “Of course, when you arrive in a new country, there are all kinds of new things to get used to. But there was nothing I could not cope with — otherwise I would not have stayed. Many things are good here, although I feel people could interact and talk more. But one gets used to the occasional silence. I have become Finnish enough to enjoy not having to be social all the time.”

Trbojević finds it amusing that Finland favours the West so strongly. “There are so many influences here from the East, even if Finland wants to be a Western country,” she points out. “The Slavic emotional strain is easy to identify: people pour their hearts out when they feel a need to open up.” She says that this can be heard in Finnish music too.

Her immigrant background has not been a problem for her, at least not in music circles, where she is respected as a capable professional. “Over the years, they have seen that this is what I want to do and that this is what I can do. So they accept me, which is only fair and proper. But there must also be people who just think that I’m not Finnish.”

She has received plenty of institutional support: grants from the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the National Council for Music, among others. “When I received a three-year artist grant and the Cultural Foundation’s awards ceremony concluded with the national anthem, I had tears in my eyes. My husband, who is a Finn, laughed. It is so wonderful that these people have a country they can be proud of and that I can be part of it.”

Trbojević is critical of certain recent trends related to the role of a composer. “These days they are saying that a composer has to be an entrepreneur and run his own business,” she says with disgust. “I am an artist. I am not and do not want to be an entrepreneur.”

There is also work to be done in attitudes in the field of concert music. “No one is interested in living composers any more. It is like a museum. Of course the heritage is valuable and must be kept up, but we must remember that living composers are the only ones who have an active relationship with today’s world and the times in which we are living now.”

Trbojević reaches into her bag and brings out a collection of essays written by composers, Elämäni on musiikki (My life is music, 1980). She quotes Aulis Sallinen reflecting on the metaphor of poet Lassi Nummi describing art as a blooming meadow: “That is it, the ultimate mission of art, a valuable and irreplaceable one. Its task is to carry the pollen of humanity, to spread the scent of mental stimuli and an appreciation of beauty even when — or perhaps especially when — our societies are torn by a multitude of problems.”

Text: Mika Kauhanen
Translation: Jaakko Mäntyjärvi
Photo: Maarit Kytöharju