Yay, We Won a Composition Competition

Last Friday was different. In the best possible way. We entered the Kaakkomäki composition competition with my composer friend Jussi Rasinkangas, made it to the finals, and ended up at a concert celebration in the village of Topeno in Loppi.

In Loppi, the value of art didn’t need explaining. It was simply understood. The evening opened with local boogie-woogie dancers: young world champions who set the tone with a level of confidence and craft that immediately raised the bar. Then a representative of the Antti Peltovuori Foundation, the organizer of the competition, opened the concert by describing the foundation’s broad support for culture.

After that, the world-renonwed conductor Jorma Panula—who selected the finalists—spoke about music and his criteria in his own unmistakably personal style.

Panula, originally from Kauhajoki, Finland and now 95 years old, said in a strong dialect: “We Finns are a rather minor-key people,” and then hummed the melody of "Tuu tuu tupakkarulla" as a playful hint at where that melancholy comes from. He said he could hear that same “minor-key pull” across all 55 submissions. After the speech, the five finalist pieces were performed live.

The grand piano was perfectly in tune, and the hall resonated beautifully. And a detail I’m still impressed by: the piano had been brought in by exactly one person.

As the evening progressed, I won’t pretend it wasn’t a little tense: how would it go for us? Jussi had travelled all the way from Kempele, the northern city. In my short introduction, I mentioned my roots in South Ostrobothnia, and during the coffee break I met several audience members with their own connections to the region. Thankfully, people were generous and more than a few told us the right piece won.

Otherwise, the conversations would have been awkward.

One thing stayed with me: making music is serving an audience in the same way building products is. Panula described how compositions can sometimes suffer from unnecessary length or overly complex structure. He seemed to value clarity and a limited number of elements: accessibility, even simplicity. It’s easy to drift into complexity. Restraint is harder.

Thank you to the Antti Peltovuori Foundation for the competition, the experience, and the prize. And thank you to Jussi for the collaboration.

The finalist pieces can be heard here: https://www.anttipeltovuorensaatio.fi/kaakkomaki-savelmien-voittajaaanestys/