Blog: Building Heterochrony 1

Photo: Heli Sorjonen

In her series of blogs, TMF’s Artist-in-Residence gives the audience a closer look at the background to her 2024 concert trilogy and her process in preparing it. In the first issue, Barrière discusses Songs of Judith, which will be performed at the Sibelius Museum on 12th August.

In the winter of 2023, I was contacted about a residency with Turku Music Festival. This immediately piqued my interest, as it combined my love for curation and performing.

The following story is that of how the concerts came to be.

In the three concerts that I was asked to curate, I wanted to create a sense of unity. They can be experienced separately, but form a whole.

As a conductor, orchestras often ask me to design a program. It’s something I enjoy doing – in addition to the fun puzzle, I often discover a lot of new pieces and composers and expand my knowledge.

In the process, I have discovered female composers I didn’t know of and been flabbergasted at the great music I have found that is never played. When reading about their lives, I have discovered that often, these women had a successful career, they were celebrated in their lifetime – but soon after their passing someone decided to erase their names, so as to make sure we wouldn’t hear of them, discover their works, or get the wrong idea that we could follow their path. Still somehow, throughout the ages, many fierce women persevered and left their mark.

And today, we rediscover the gems they have left – many thanks to historians and musicologists.

This systematic injustice has made me ask myself a lot what history could have looked like, if humanity hadn’t repeatedly erased the voices of women and minorities.

I discovered the principle of Uchrony, or alternate history and knew this was something I wanted to work with. It offers an untarnishable number of possibilities – one could imagine an infinite number of other ways history could have gone. And we had to build just three performances. Eventually, the idea of uchrony turned into heterochrony – a set narrative instead of many different stories and outcomes which was my original plan. But with only three concerts, it felt like linking these concerts, building a journey from the beginning to the end, was more powerful.

I have imagined these three concerts as a triptych, a journey where women find their place in the world.

In Songs of Judith, the main protagonist has had enough of being portrayed as a helpless victim. She seeks emancipation through revenge, as illustrated by the myth of Judith beheading Holofernes to save her country.

Yet we are led to wonder if that really was the solution, and we yearn to try again, another way.

For this concert, the musical tapestry is mainly of great female composers that were forgotten throughout history despite composing the clear gems that you will be able to hear (and many more!). Luckily their music is constantly being rediscovered.

Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre’s cantata Judith is the center of this concert, as both the character of Judith and the music of Jacquet de la Guerre are extremely compelling.

Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729) was born into into a family of musicians. Her father and grandfather being harpsichord makers, she learned to play the harpsichord from a very young age, and she was only five when she played in Versailles for the first time and was noticed by the Sun King Louis XIV. She later became a musician at his court, composing most of her works for him.

The concert will open with Jacquet de la Guerre’s Prelude from the a minor Harpsichord Suite. To set the tone for our journey of emancipation, I thought it would be powerful to begin with a non-measured prelude. Here, Jacquet de la Guerre has mostly written free notes on the sheet, giving a lot of interpretive freedom to the player.

Next will follow an aria by Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677), who due to the extensiveness of her body of work, is probably the best known female baroque composer. Her father, poet and librettist Giulio Strozzi made sure she received a thorough artistic education at the Academy of Music in Venice. She studied with Cavalli and Monteverdi, among others. Her music was very popular in her lifetime and extensively published, thanks to which, unlike many other women, most of her works have survived.

La riamata de chi amava is a classic lamento, where a woman tries to put her sorrows behind her.

When building the dramaturgy of this concert with librettist Aleksi Barrière, it was clear to us that we wanted to have an example of this beautiful music – but it had to be the catalyst of the rest of the story we were building, drawing a line and moving on from the self-pity that typically represents women in music.

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), one of the most celebrated French composers of his time makes a short appearance as well – although in a bit of an unexpected way. We will hear an interpretation of the piece ‘Les sauvages’ from his opera ‘Les Indes galantes’ arranged for two violins by Jean-Pierre Guignon (1702-1774). Born in Italy, Guignon moved to France to pursue his career as a violinist. As far as we know, he wrote mainly for strings. His duets contain many gems, two of which are part of this concert. His virtuosic interpretation of what is still one of Rameau’s most iconic themes is fully decadent!

Here, we took the idea of the ‘savages’ out of context – it symbolizes the outcasting of different people, and the difficulty in this specific context for women to be seen as intelligent, capable individuals.

Antonia Bembo (1643-1715) was also a student of Cavalli (like Strozzi). But she ran away from an increasingly violent husband and set anchor in Paris where she received the protection of Louis XIV.

Her psalm ‘De profundis clamavi’ is part of a set of seven psalms for different settings. In Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron’s translation of the psalm, a plea is made to God to judge fairly and respect equity in order to help those who are worthy.

Isabella Leonarda (1620-1704) was only 16 when she was sent to a convent, the Collegio de Sant’Orsola. There, she received musical education, including composition lessons. She devoted her life to religion, rising to the status of vicaress. Although she wrote mostly for religious settings (and her catalog contains over 200 works!), she also published sonatas in different settings – in this concert we will hear her sonata XII for violin, which breathes of freedom.

Juha T. Koskinen (b.1972) honored us with a new piece ‘She who saw things to come’. This piece is a sketch for Koskinen’s upcoming project with FiBo at the Finnish National Opera this fall, called Earthrise. The original text by Aleksi Barrière tells the story of three sisters of Čech blood in Bohemia. One of them, Libuše, decides the country needs a ruler, so she finds herself a King and builds Prag. After her death, men regain control and Libuše is forgotten.

Jacquet de la Guerre’s Sarabande from her harpsichord suite in D minor will directly follow her Judith. Both stately, sassy, and profound all at the same time, this sarabande felt like the right way to follow up the story of Judith. The sarabande as a dance also has an interesting background, as it originally was a very quick dance, even described as ‘savage’. After 1700, as it was forbidden in some places, sarabandes started being composed as a slow dance. This historic evolution also seemed very relevant to the unfolding of the story we had built.

Originally Heta Aho’s piece Revanche on Edith Södergran’s eponymous poem was supposed to appear on this concert in a new version, but a change of player unfortunately made this impossible.

Södergran’s poem will still be a part of this performance though, as it was built into the dramaturgy and text by Aleksi Barrière.

Jean-Pierre Guignon’s duet ‘Tendrement’, as it name tells us is a wonderful, tender page of music. It felt right to me for it to be the catalyst of the ending remarks of this show.

Mioko Yokoyama (b. 1989) also blessed us with a new work. ‘Poslude’ was prompted by my request to have an echo to Jacquet de la Guerre’s prelude that opens the concert. Yokoyama wished to celebrate the timelessness and, from a contemporary approach, almost avant-gardism of the non-measured prelude. With these freshly composed notes, I wished to also keep the dialogue with history open and give the last word to a young composer whom I respect and admire.

All of this will be brought to life by way of a very special collaboration between the Finnish Baroque Orchestra and the young Nordic collective Hehku.

The whole will be tied by an original text by Aleksi Barrière, illustrating the journey of our protagonist’s growth and ours along the way, learning through historical paintings.

I am grateful for the support of Arts Promotion Centre Finland for giving us funds to commission pieces from Mioko Yokoyama and Juha T. Koskinen for this concert.