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Tommi Kärkkäinen
Tommi Kärkkäinen (born 15 June 1969) studied at the Sibelius Academy under Paavo Heininen and took the first prize for young composers at the Unesco Rostrum in 1998 with his first orchestral work Seven Miniatures. Among his early works are a number of interesting studies in harmony or form, such as In a Cave of Silver Grey for flute and live electronics or Calvin & Hobbes for piano. Kärkkäinen’s output to date includes a number of chamber works, such as the wind sextet Syntymätön (The Unborn, 1997) and the variable Music for Tuba and/or Trombone and/or Tape (2000). He has, however, fast become associated with orchestral music and feels most at home in this genre.
Examples of his large-scale works are Fontana Obscura (2000), commissioned by the City of Helsinki for its 450th anniversary, Atrum Unda (2001-2002) and the Cello Concerto (2001). One of his most exciting works is Somnium fraude, commissioned by Esa-Pekka Salonen for a performance in June 2003. The Finnish Technology Award Foundation commissioned two orchestral works from Kärkkäinen in 2004 (Fanfare and Cygnus X-1 Book III, Millennium). Other recent works include Fragilia (2003) for guitar and string quartet, Isafold’s Eye premiered in 2004 by the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra and the UMO Jazz Orchestra, and Aedes Artivus (2004) for flute, guitar, violoncello and piano.
Tommi Kärkkäinen has also a background in rock music and has experimented with crossover elements in his orchestral Paranoidia (2000). He is investigating ways of constructing homogenous harmonies with the help of a computer but sampled and processed with, say, a piano. Computer-aided harmony reached its peak in Nocturnal Journey (Läpi yön, 1999) for orchestra.
Kärkkäinen’s music has been heard at concerts given by the Ears Open! Society in Helsinki and at various festivals in the Nordic countries, such as Ung Nordisk Musik (Young Nordic Music) in Copenhagen (1996) and Reykjavik (1997), the Ultima Festival in Oslo, the Göteborgs Art Sounds festival and the Nordic Music Days. ALCHEMY 2006, a multimedia concert with tape and chamber music by Kärkkäinen was heard in conjunction with the Musica nova Helsinki festival of contemporary music in March 2006.
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