Jukka Tiensuu

Jukka Santeri Tiensuu was born in Helsinki on 30 August 1948 and belongs to the generation of Finnish composers who turned towards the avant-garde from the 1970s onwards. Besides composing, he has worked as a keyboard performer, teacher and festival promoter, activities that are closely intertwined in his career.

He trained at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, where he studied piano and harpsichord, and in 1972 he won the Maj Lind national piano competition. In the same year he obtained diplomas in composition and piano; his composition teacher is said to have been Heininen, although some accounts name Einojuhani Rautavaara instead. He later broadened his training in Freiburg with Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber, and completed studies in electronic music, harpsichord, conducting and baroque music. He has taught at the Sibelius Academy and at IRCAM in Paris. He returned to Finland in 1977 and since then has combined performance, teaching and festival organisation.

In 1981, the inaugural year of the Helsinki Biennale devoted to contemporary music, he served as artistic director of the event, and he held the post again in 1983. That same year, 1981, he founded the contemporary music festival linked to Viitasaari, in central Finland, whose artistic direction he held until 1987. His wife, the composer Anneli Arho, was previously his composition student.

From the outset his music was oriented towards the avant-garde, with particular attention to timbral colour and to harmony based on the analysis of the sound spectrum and the upper harmonics of instruments. From his earliest works he employed microtones and abandoned conventional bar lines. Works such as M for harpsichord, strings and percussion (1980) feature a harpsichord tuned to a non-tempered scale, while his Prélude non-mesuré for piano (1976) pays homage to the free-rhythm preludes of seventeenth-century harpsichordists and lutenists. In the 1970s and 1980s he sought to begin each work afresh, free of any fixed stylistic stance; from the second half of the 1980s his language became more coherent, although his output decreased, partly because of his intensive dedication as a harpsichordist.

Puro (1989) for clarinet and orchestra marks a turning point in his orchestral music, replacing blocks of sound with a fluid, crystalline texture. This sonority reappears in Halo (1994) and Alma I (1995). In chamber music, his most notable work of the 1990s is Arsenic and Old Lace (1990), for harpsichord tuned in microtones and string quartet.