Paavo Heininen

Paavo Heininen is a composer, essayist and pianist. A highly revered figure in Finnish musical circles, he is known as a prolific composer of chamber music, vocal music, piano and orchestral works. Heininen is one of the most comprehensively schooled of all Finnish composers, having studied privately with Usko Meriläinen and then at the Sibelius Academy with Aarre Merikanto, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Einar Englund and Joonas Kokkonen. After receiving his diploma in composition in 1960, he continued his studies first with Bernd Alois Zimmermann in Cologne and then, a year later, with Vincent Persichetti and Eduard Steuermann at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. In the mid-sixties Heininen paid a brief but important visit to Poland to work with Witold Lutoslawski. He also studied the theory of music at Helsinki University. Heininen has been active as a pianist of considerable virtuoso skills and as a conductor, and his work as theory and composition teacher has been of seminal importance. He has guided young composers at the Sibelius Academy during a teaching career of more than thirty years, and although an entire generation of composers has emerged from his classes, any talk of a Heininen School fails to take into account his unprejudiced teaching methods, which are open to any style, and the wide divergences between his pupils. Heininen has also made a significant contribution to a wider understanding of Finnish music through his many articles: he has written more extensively and with greater perception about individual composers than anyone else and the viewpoints presented in his essays on other topics are often refreshingly different. Heininen's natural starting point was from the beginning modernism; and he has remained true to his own ideas and ideals throughout his entire career. According to him, there is no need to change direction since to him, modernism means being open to all the possibilities that exist. He started exploring electro-acoustic music during the latter half of the 1970s and the potential of the computer in the early 1980s. Heininen has also produced a wealth of intrumental music, and the reconstructions of works by Aarre Merikanto, his former teacher, constitute a chapter in themselves in Heininen's output. Vocal music is, however, very close to his heart because of his passion for texts: the marriage of words and music is, in his opinion, something unique; allowing the composer and the poet to express more together than they could ever do alone. Heininen emerged in the 1950s with works that, in terms of their intervallic and rhythmic material, were on the threshold of Serialist organization. Between 1960 and 1965, he advanced further but did not take a decisive step towards multi-dimensional Serialism; instead, he tried to create a coherent musical world view where the technical and sonorous properties of Serialism and aleatorics would appear as components.

60 Variations (2003) was performed during the 2006 AFNOM festival in London.

Contact information

Paavo Heininen
Email: pheinine@siba.fi
www.fimic.fi/heininen