CHANGING INSTRUMENTS AND MUSIC
TRADITIONS
How can the process of changing the focus of a main study impact on musicianship and a musician's sense of identity?
INTRODUCTION
In my bachelor project's artistic research I am focusing on my journey from playing folk music with the cello to singing flamenco. My research question is:
How can the process of changing the focus of a main study impact on musicianship and a musician's sense of identity?
I am writing about the turning points, the discoveries and also the struggles that came from inside and outside. As some methods to go through this topic I have reflected on my journey by writing about that, reading my old writings and talking with many people about these topics. I have also read research papers and talked with my teachers about these topics because they have been going through almost exactly the same questions. There are many people who have similar journeys either from one instrument to another or from one tradition to another. It has been important for me to read other research about these topics and talk with people who have similar questions about their musicianship. By writing about my own experiences I can process and reflect on my journey and by reading other research papers and talking with people about their experiences I can understand more about this topic and learn from them instead of thinking that I am alone with my questions.
FIRST CHAPTER: SINGING
In this chapter I will reflect on my background in singing and memories from childhood
I have always loved singing and it has been something I have enjoyed doing at home with my twin sister and the rest of my family growing up. Singing has been a big part of my life but more as an everyday pastime than as something that I could have imagined doing for a career. With my twin we have made little songs for fun or when we had to do boring household chores since we were very young and because we were singing in a school choir in different registers, we could sing the choir songs we learned at school in harmonies at home. We have also performed singing since we were very little girls because for every family celebration we prepared a song to perform and also I remember our grandparents taking us to sing in nursing homes as a child. Still I did not think when I was younger that I could be a singer because I always thought that I could sing in tune but that my voice should be more interesting. All the singers that I saw on television had so beautiful voices that I just thought that you have to be born with a perfect singing technique and a unique color of voice and that I just unfortunately was not born with those qualities. So I always sang at home and in all the bands as a backup singer because then I just had to sing in tune and the color of my voice did not matter as much, or at least that was what I thought at the time.
The music education system in Finland has an impact on my thinking because when you enter the system you are presented with a very defined path that would not let you change easily to another instrument or a genre. You are expected to follow the path the certain way. That is why I have felt since I was ten years old and first wanted to change my instrument, that I am too old to change my main focus even though since that I have at certain intervals wanted to try new instruments and make them my main focus.
I can thank the ideology in folk music for that it praises everyone’s voice for what it is. That kind of thinking influenced my singing first in high school so that I had the courage to sing as a lead singer, although by still playing the cello at the same time, and from that I could start building my confidence as a singer. Nowadays I think that everyone has an interesting and important voice and from that on it is up to the individual how much they want to work on it to develop their technique and interpretation.
Starting to focus on singing in my studies
For the first two years of my studies at the Global Department almost all of my individual lessons were vocal lessons and I only worked on my voice rather than the cello, but still in the ensembles and the Global Orchestra I mostly played the cello because there were fewer cello players compared to singers. Having to play the cello almost always when I performed or even played together with other musicians made a conflict inside of me because my personal choices in how I used my practice time and how I wanted to see my future musicianship and how others saw me as a musician were very contradicting. Johanna Rantala writes in her thesis about self-esteem and singing and says that the performances and succeeding in them makes a biggest part of a singer's self confidence.(Rantala, 2012, p.15.) That is why the opportunities to show others your voice are so crucial in order to build up strong self-esteem as a singer.
Gaining confidence and forming an identity in something that you do happens by actually doing it a lot and so, because I have had to play the cello for such a big portion of my studies, it has been difficult for me to gain confidence as a vocalist during my studies at the Sibelius Academy. I first entered the Sibelius Academy as a cellist who also sings so it has been difficult to form a sole singer identity. Hargreaves, Miell and MacDonald write in their book What are musical identities, and why are they important about the importance of one’s environment while building a musical identity.
"This influence of other people’s views can be felt partly through the indirect process of comparing ourselves and our behaviour with similar others to obtain a sense of our relative effectiveness and worth, even when those others may be unaware of their effect on us. It can also operate more directly, however, when others comment directly on our abilities, appearance and general behaviour.” (Hargreaves, Miell & MacDonald, 2002, p.8)
Almost all of the band and project invitations I have gotten, as well as the compliments on my musicianship, have come from playing the cello. This has led me to work hard on my singing and to be very hard on myself believing that I need to be perfect on singing so that I would have the permission to sing. Now I have worked on trying to shift from that kind of thinking more to just singing a lot and forming new bands without worrying about being perfect. I believe that through that I will be able to form my identity and trust myself in that I am good enough and that I will develop all the time.
These thoughts can be seen in the following excerpt from my reflective text prepared for the jury for my second year Bachelor concert:
”This is a big concert for me also in that sense that this is the first concert when I just sing and I don't play at all. I have been thinking about and struggling with this cello versus voice issue a lot. I've also been thinking about my path as musician and about the choices I have. I have been very happy now that I have been able to just concentrate on singing and I want to show people that side of me since many people know me better with the cello. I don't know yet how this will go, if I will have the cello in my future concerts, but now it feels so good to just listen to my heart and do what I want and work hard for those goals.” (Petäjä, 2019)
Experience with the cello
I have thought that I have always had a very good self-esteem as a cellist but upon reflecting on my previous studies of Finnish folk music as a teenager, I remembered that I did have to build it up then. When I was younger, I did not think that I could play folk music since I did not play the fiddle and because I was not born into a family of folk musicians in Finland. That time there were not so many folk cello players at least that I would have known of, so I had to learn it by myself and find out what I could do. By starting to play folk music more and more in high school, finding my own sound and getting a lot of good feedback I started to see how I could fit the cello and myself into folk music.
I am trying to keep the experience of starting to play folk music with the cello and gaining confidence in it by doing it in mind. I have also heard from other musicians that through every project and gig where they have either played the new instrument or the new music tradition they have started studying, they have gained confidence in what they have started.
Gaining confidence during the exchange studies
Below there is a paragraph of homework for my singing lessons with Jenny Virkkunen this autumn after my exchange in Barcelona. I was assigned to write a letter with a title: “Me and singing - how are we?”
”Vaihdossa sen lisäksi että opin valtavasti flamencoa oli ihanaa se, ettei kukaan kyseenalaistanut laulamistani, olin laulaja ilman selloa ja tuntui niin vapauttavalta saada keskittyä kaikessa opiskelussani lauluun.” (Petäjä, 8.9.2020)
“In addition to learning a lot about flamenco tradition during my exchange year in Barcelona it felt lovely that nobody questioned my singing, I was a singer without the cello and it felt so liberating to be able to focus on singing in all of the studies there.” (Translated from Finnish by Laura Petäjä).
My exchange year in Barcelona helped me gain confidence as a vocalist because there everyone perceived me as a singer so I did not have to ask for permission to sing in school courses such as ensemble lessons. It was so lovely to be seen as a singer. I noticed especially in band lessons as a vocalist I felt full of joy just for the opportunity to be there. Now coming back to Finland I can have more confidence when I sing flamenco than when I sing something else because flamenco singing is so complex that I have to concentrate on the singing it well with its rhythms and melismas and devote myself for expressing the emotions so it leaves very limited space for worrying if people like my voice or not. I have noticed the same effect also as an audience member. I remember hearing some singers whose sound did not initially interest me but because they were very fluent both technically as well as in the material they were interpreting, I was left feeling impressed. On the other hand I have more confidence when singing flamenco because I have studied it intensively and it shows already something about me and can work for me as a permission to sing. I talked with my teacher in Barcelona and she said also that the older she gets the more she listens to how well people are interpreting flamenco than on what kind of voice they are singing. (López, personal communications, 2019)
Searching for my own voice
The following is another excerpt from my reflective text prepared for my teacher:
“Kaikki laulajat, joita olen ihaillut pienestä asti, ovat olleet aina niin kaunis äänisiä ja keveästi laulavia, että on tuntunut, että pitää pienentää ääntä, että voi laulaa kauniisti. Viime vuonna katsoin espanjalaista Operacion Triunfo -ohjelmaa, joka on vähän niin kuin Idols ja rakastuin miten mun lemppari laulaja Nia lauloi tosi isosti ja syvästi. Haluan oppia laulamaan koko äänelläni ilman että pienennän sitä automaattisesti. Haluaisin oppia jotain keinoja siihen, jos jännittävässä tilanteessa en uskalla laulaa niin syvästi. Eli haluaisin löytää omaa ääntä ilman että heti automaattisesti muokkaan sitä heti kun kuulen sen.” (Petäjä, 8.9.2020)
“All of the singers that I have admired since I was a kid have sung with such beautiful and light voices that I have felt that I need to make my voice smaller that I can sing beautifully. Last year I watched a Spanish show called Operacion Triunfo which is a bit similar to “Idols” or other singing competitions. I fell in love with the way my favorite singer, Nia, sang with a very big and deep voice. I want to learn to sing with my full voice without making it smaller automatically. I would like to learn some tools to cope with if in some situation I feel nervous and find it hard to show my full voice. So I would like to find my own full voice without automatically changing that when I hear it.” (Translated from Finnish by Laura Petäjä).
This autumn I have experienced a breakthrough in the search for my voice. I have finally admitted to myself that I am making my voice smaller by keeping my larynx a bit higher than it would be if I had the courage to let it be relaxed. By letting my larynx be lower while singing I have much more deepness in my voice. I feel very exposed when singing like that but at the same time relieved because deep down I have always known that my voice could be deeper if I wanted to or had the courage to use it. Now that I have acknowledged the issue I can work on having the full potential of my voice available.
Emilia Sowah writes in her thesis about the singers’ identity:
“Laulajan on tärkeää tuntea oma instrumenttinsa, sen kapasiteetti ja sen vahvuudet. Aija Puurtisen (2012) mukaan hyvän äänen-käytön käsite on sidoksissa yhteiskuntaan ja kulttuuriin. Kuten muutkin muoti-virtaukset, myös populaarimusiikin estetiikka vaikuttaa alitajuisesti ihanteisiin.” (Sowah, 2012,p.15)
“It is important for a singer to know their own instrument and its capacity and strengths. According to Aija Puurtinen the concept of a good use of voice is intertwined to society and culture. Like other trends also the esthetic of popular music subcountaneously has an influence on the ideals.” (Translated from Finnish by Laura Petäjä).
Sowah had also interesting interviews in her thesis of professional singers and their path in becoming a singer. In her interviews there were many examples of how the singers had had to overcome their own prejudices about the color of their voice. Many would have wanted to have the opposite kind of voice what they had. In addition to resonating with the interviewees’ identity crisis of color of their voices I felt very connected with one interviewee who had graduated from the Jazz department of Sibelius Academy. She had been playing first the piano and sang also always but at the age of 21 she changed her main instrument to only singing and she felt that she was so old and late to start singing that she had to compensate for it by practicing a lot. (Sowah, 2012, pp. 16-18)
Last spring I experienced a prime example for me to understand the power of representation. I was watching a Spanish singing competition Operacion Triumfo and one of the contestants was a young singer Nia Correia. She sang with a very deep sound while all the other contestants sang with much smaller resonance and many times with a bit nasal sound that seems to have been the trend in popular music for a long time. Still Nia ended up being very admired and ultimately winning the competition. Of course there have always been many deep voiced singers but I have never been able to identify with them. Often they have been much older than me so that as a teenager I felt that I was too young to sound like that or they were performing a genre I had not sung like fado or jazz where it felt natural to sing with a deep timbre. I apparently needed to see a young singer winning a mainstream music competition with a deep voice. The whole time I have grown up I have felt that all of the female voices that I have heard from the radio or television have been quite similar from their resonance - a narrow and sharp timbre with a breathy and a bit nasalized sound. None of them had a very deep color in their voice. Because of this I had automatically started to imitate the sound I heard from radio without questioning it which led to rising my larynx in order to make that sound. I had not realized that it is a trend so I had just always thought that it is a quality that makes you an approved and successful singer. The most popular flamenco pop artist for the last few years has been Rosalía whose voice is not in the realm of traditional flamenco at all - the resonance of her voice is small and very light and airy. So even with a music genre that is traditionally sung with a deep and dark timbre, the most successful flamenco pop star of today, who has made many people know flamenco singing outside of Spain and who has won Latin Grammys sings with a light and a narrow resonance. That is why it felt so big to see Nia winning and to get some sort of confirmation that not only light-voiced singers are appreciated in this time in the mainstream music world.
Ever since high school I have been told by my vocal teachers that I could have a deeper voice and that maybe I was just not ready to use it yet. We talked with my current singing teacher Jenny Virkkunen that there is only that much a vocal teacher can do if the student is not yet ready mentally to let go of some things in their voice. Now finally I am happy to say I am ready to let go. I find myself surprised at why it has taken so long for me to be okay with that but during this autumn I finally realized it and started to work on showing that. It is still an ongoing process because I have made my voice smaller for a long time so my larynx still wants to rise if I do not remind myself to sing with my full voice or if I am nervous. The realization has made me feel more content and confident about my voice because now I feel that I do not have to take anyone else’s but my opinions about my voice into consideration because the voice that I sing with is honestly mine. Also for flamenco singing this realization of my deeper voice is great because it provides a good foundation for singing it. Now I feel that I can improve faster in finding my flamenco voice because I am allowing my full voice to be the base element on which I will learn new tools to make it more flamenco sounding.
Studying Flamenco Singing and Searching for a Flamenco Voice
Ethnomusicologist, Mantle Hood, writes in his paper The Challenge of "Bi-Musicality" about the struggle when learning another musical tradition. He claims that in addition to the crucial steps of learning correct ornamentations and use of vibrato, mastering in the foreign language, hearing and being able to produce pitches that are not in Western scale, the hardest part is to find the appropriate timbre in the singing voice. (Hood, 1960, p.58). Because in Barcelona my singing teacher’s strength was not teaching the voice technique of flamenco I decided to leave experimenting with the technique to a later time of my flamenco studies. In flamenco singing you can easily hurt your voice if you are not careful and if I hurt my voice there I would not have had anyone who could have helped me with getting back to healthy singing. That is why I decided to focus on what I could get from my flamenco teacher which was still a lot. I learned a huge amount about melismas and melodies, expression and a lot about rhythm. I also heard a lot of different flamenco singers so I had a better knowledge on which way I would like to take my flamenco singing when I would get a teacher with whom I could safely explore new techniques.
I had taken singing lessons with Jenny Virkkunen for two and a half years before going to Barcelona and I continued when coming back to Sibelius Academy after my exchange year. Jenny Virkkunen is a vocal teacher (Master of Music, Sibelius Academy, 2004) and also a teacher in Estill voice training (EMT, 2016). I first decided to take lessons from her because I wanted to have a teacher who could teach me about voice techniques and her lessons have helped my singing so much that I have wanted to continue the lessons ever since. I was very excited to come back to her lessons with a new goal of finding my own deeper voice and a bit more precise idea of the direction I would like to take my flamenco singing to. I searched for some video examples of female flamenco singers from Spain who in those videos sang traditional flamenco rather than flamenco pop and showed those videos to Jenny Virkkunen. I have always admired her ability to analyse voice techniques. When I have shown her a voice example she has been able to tell me what she hears in the function of that voice and with what kind of tools I could start to search for that specific sound. I have always been very interested in what is really physically happening in the body while singing in a certain way so it was very interesting to hear Jenny’s thoughts about flamenco voice and techniques the flamenco singers used in those videos. When I showed her the videos she could hear the same tools used by all of these singers while singing flamenco. She said first the same thing that my teachers in Barcelona had been saying so that the foundation of flamenco singing is that it is sung in the speech quality. I asked her to describe with vocal terminology the flamenco voices in the examples I showed her and the following is what she heard:
”The true vocal fold body/cover is quite thick and the larynx sits fairly low in relation to the pitch that is being sung. This causes the deep, full and dark timbre used a lot in flamenco. The true vocal fold body/cover changes in a very elastic way from thick to thin, vibrating in a good contact all the time, so that the voice sounds elastic and rich in different timbres. There is a strong but elastic anchoring in the body which can be heard in the resonance and intensity. There is also a lot of tilt in the thyroid cartilage which results in the kind of a lamenting and crying sound of flamenco. There can also be heard a mid position in the false vocal folds, maybe sometimes even a little constricted.(Virkkunen, 10.11.2020, personal communication).
SECOND CHAPTER: FLAMENCO
Spanish language and Nueva Cancion as a starting point
Spanish language has been a big part of my journey both in music as well as outside of music. From the age of nine, my favourite band has been Illapu which is an ensemble inspired by Chilean folk music and Andean music formed in the 70's. In my childhood home we had a lot of albums of mainly Nueva Cancion -movement singers and songwriters and bands from South America. We got a lot of albums from my father’s friend who had travelled in South America and played there with musicians from Bolivia. I spent my whole childhood and teenage years listening to music sung in Spanish and dreaming about growing up and moving to South America. My childhood has influenced me in the choice of language that I like to sing as well as in the traditions I have chosen to try out and eventually to dig deep into.
These observations can be seen in the following excerpt from my reflective text for my second year Bachelor concert:
”The Spanish language is a uniting theme in this concert, which will transport you from Spain to Cuba. I have been studying Spanish language diligently and in the near future I want to be fluent in it. I have kept going deep into pronunciation of Spanish and trying to make it as perfect as possible. I have also made my first Spanish lyrics together with my twin sister for a bachata song I composed for the transcultural ensemble. That was very fun and I will keep making more songs with Spanish lyrics and have some of those songs for the bachelor concert.” (Petäjä, 7.5.2019).
Beginning flamenco singing studies
I had heard some flamenco before starting my studies at the Global Music -program. I thought that it’s one of the most beautiful singing that I had heard but at the same time I thought that I was already too old to begin studying a new tradition again. Another big concern was the question of who can sing other people’s traditions. I had not even listened to flamenco growing up so I thought it was too much of a stretch and that I couldn’t justify it to myself or to other people. When I started at the Global Music -program, the only thing I knew was that I wanted to sing in Spanish. I looked for the teachers that teach some kind of singing traditions that were sung in Spanish. I decided to take lessons from a Finnish flamenco singer Anna Murtola who I knew from the Global Music department and who was teaching flamenco singing. My initial thought was that even though I could not dig deep into the flamenco tradition, I could still get inspiration from the vocal technique and expression in the style and learn something from it. I ended up liking the lessons a lot and Anna Murtola was such a lovely and inspiring teacher that I started to get very excited about flamenco, thinking that maybe I could study it more. I got a big push into that direction when, after one semester of flamenco studies, she encouraged me to go and do a little performance on the free stage of Global Fest. I felt so good and inspired to perform some flamenco that I began investing more time into my flamenco studies.
I found a research by Caroline Holden who is a South African dancer who dances flamenco and asks the same questions as every person practicing flamenco outside of Spain. It was very interesting to read her thoughts on who can call themselves flamenco or can a person from South Africa speak for flamenco culture? “In South Africa, where I perform and teach flamenco to fellow Africans, a range of stereotypes, prejudices and expectations arises. Can an African call herself a flamenco, and on what basis?” (Holden, 2012, p.66) It was refreshing to understand that people from all over the world who practice flamenco have this same question. And that we are geographically so far from each other as Finland and South Africa but we are thinking about these same problems. It would be lovely to do some collaboration or even to discuss with others from different parts of the world who are in the same situation. I know that Anna Murtola has done collaborations with other Nordic flamenco artists and I would be very interested in doing that also but Caroline Holden’s thesis made me interested in how far from Finland you could go and find this same question and common ground.
The Erasmus exchange in flamenco department in Barcelona
The following chapters are intended to be self reflective text looking at my experiences during the exchange period of my studies.
Ever since I started studying in Sibelius Academy I knew that I wanted to do an exchange year either in Spain or somewhere in South America. In Spain there are two schools which are part of the Erasmus program and which have flamenco departments so I applied to both of them and got accepted into Taller de músics. I wanted to learn as much Spanish as I could and I wanted to find out how studying flamenco there would feel. Before starting the exchange year I thought there would be two options for what could happen after studying flamenco just for a little under two years. The first option was that I would notice that flamenco is not for me after all, that it would feel pointless to try to learn a very difficult tradition and that flamenco would start to feel very distant for me compared to my imaginary classmates who would have sung flamenco since they were little. The other option was of course that my excitement about flamenco would grow even more and that I would start to become more connected with the music and take studying it more seriously, “owning” it instead of thinking that I would just study it a bit. The latter one came true which made me very happy and relieved.
The exchange went really well. Every day I felt that I learned more than ever. That filled me with happiness, and I really needed that feeling of happiness because it was also extremely exhausting to study flamenco tradition very intensively while studying it and socializing only in Spanish. I had studied some Spanish in Helsinki but this was the first time that I lived in a Spanish-speaking country. My teachers were very demanding, some of them with quite questionable pedagogical styles, but I worked my way to their approval. It also helped that the first day I went to school I became friends with a girl from my class who had studied jazz but had just recently started flamenco studies. I felt that we were on the same level even though she was from Spain. I was excited to learn so much every day. In band lessons, if I wasn’t the only singer, there were only one or two more vocalists in addition to me, so in order to keep up I had to, quickly and constantly, learn more material so that my own lack of knowledge would not disturb the learning of the other students in the ensembles. This thought of possibly slowing the whole group down made me work very hard. My whole exchange period was balancing between the intensive happiness and excitement from learning so much flamenco, the Spanish language and living in Spain against the huge amount of stress and exhaustion caused by working so hard in a still rather new language and music tradition. I was very excited about the school because all the courses allowed me to focus on the very thing I had become passionate about and with other students who were also interested about the same thing and at the same student period of their lives.
Here in Finland right now I feel like I am an inbetweener because I have studied flamenco intensively but still I am a student so I feel like I am not yet considered to be a peer of musicians who are already working with flamenco but also there are no flamenco students for example in Sibelius Academy who invest all their time to learning flamenco and improving fast in it. Sometimes that makes me feel lonely. It was lovely to study with others who were in the same situation and to be able to share that learning process with others. In my exchange school I did not feel as an outsider as I had expected because by working hard and studying the flamenco tradition I could perform well in the ensemble lessons and be at the same level as the students who also had not been a part of this music for their whole lives. I was the first exchange student in the flamenco department ever and there was only one other exchange student in the whole school besides me so they had not gotten used to people outside of Spain. People were very nice to me and I was very active to talk with everyone with my so and so Spanish. I think people treated me nicely because I was so excited to study flamenco and so happy to be there. Whenever someone introduced me to another person in the flamenco department they said “Here is Laura, she is very excited about flamenco”. So by showing respect and huge interest to flamenco and being very happy to be there they accepted me in the school.
Guiris, tourists and people from outside of Spain
Even though Barcelona is considered the most open-minded city in Spain I could feel that there was a negative and degrading attitude towards tourists and because of that also towards people who looked like tourists. It is understandable that citizens of Barcelona have prejudice against tourists who often are not so thoughtful and bring many not so good side effects with them. In Spain they call tourists and people who come out of Spain with the name “guiri”. It was the tone they talked about guiris that made me uncomfortable as if all the tourists were very unintelligent and somehow of lower value than the people who lived there. I also think it is very difficult if there is just one word which means both a tourist and a person who is not from Spain because there are so many different stories behind those people and one degrading name does not fit all the cases. One time I sang a “letra”, which flamenco verses are called, that I had learned in Finland to my singing teacher in Barcelona and she said that it cannot be sung like that because the melismas and melody sound like it was sung by a guiri. That made me feel that my goal in flamenco music making is supposed to be the attempt to hide as perfectly as possible my roots, to hide that I am not from there, because my background only means bad and embarrassing things in flamenco rather than different things. Later when I was visiting a small village where my friend lived in, a car passed by and my friend remarked to me, in a very hostile tone “You see that car, it is some guiri’s car”. It was hard to know why they told me all those bad things about guiris even though I am from outside of Spain and could be considered a guiri and if they did not know me they would have seen me as just another guiri. When I said to my friend that it felt awkward when people are saying degrading things about guiris because I am also from outside of Spain, she said “But you are not like them”. So the word is problematic and because all of those people who used it had never lived in another country it was hard for them to understand how it feels to live as foreign person in another country. It was hard not to feel like I am a guiri and that I should not be there. One time my ensemble teacher said to me: “You sing the next letra, Ikea” which was of course a joke but a very inappropriate one. It felt so strange to hear those things which could be considered as racist comments from the people in the arts field because I have gotten used to that in at least Global Music and Folk Music departments people are more open-minded and try to be very conscious about what they say to be as considerate as possible. It felt so good after a half year of living in Barcelona to go to New York City to spend the holidays in a city that is very global and international so the people do not stare at everyone who looks different and I did not have to feel like people are thinking that “Oh there goes a guiri” of me.
Who can sing flamenco or as much as call themself a flamenco singer - cantaor/a?
I have talked about the topic of singing flamenco with Anna Murtola whom I have taken lessons with before and who has thought about this issue a lot. She has written a Master’s Project “Transmitting Flamenco Studies in Nordic Countries” which was fascinating to read. In her research she had interviewed other Nordic singers who sing flamenco and found out that they share the same kind of thoughts and experiences of being a flamenco singer. They deeply respect the tradition, even so much that they have two different identities depending on which country they are. Murtola states: “When the Nordic flamenco singers are in Spain or speaking with Spanish flamenco insiders they tend to not call themselves cantaor/a. In their own countries they might use this term but even then they do not take this respected titlelightly.” (Murtola, 2017, pp.14-15)
Studying in the flamenco department in Spain with other flamenco students from there provoked many contradicting thoughts in me. It was great to see that I could keep up and study with them but it was confusing to see my classmates of whom many of them were at the same level with me thinking that they could work with flamenco in the future. Of course for them it was easier to think that as an option because even though many of them were not gitanos they were from Spain. I had thought that in Barcelona the students in the flamenco department would be in better level already at this age and so seeing people who had for example changed from jazz department to flamenco department and who were just learning the basics in flamenco but still open mindedly thinking about their future with flamenco gigs made me question the thought that a singer from another country than Spain could not work in Spain. It made me think that I should not just accept the thought that I cannot work there with flamenco since I am not from Spain because at least in an ideal world it should be that if you respect some tradition and make your life about studying that you should be allowed to practice and perform it without doubts and prejudices because of your nationality. My friend suggested to me that it could be my thing to come from the north and to sing flamenco, but maybe it would make me feel like I am a circus animal instead of an artist or at least I can imagine feeling tired about being potentially all the time questioned. It is also hard when every flamenco singer has a strong opinion how the letras should be sung so even if I would learn the letras perfectly in the same way some singer legend has done it before, many people would say that I am singing it wrong and because I look like a guiri they would be even harder on me than if I was from Spain. I have to emphasize though that these are all just my thoughts and prejudices based on my experience and discussions with others because it is hard to know what would happen without any reference.
Who can sing flamenco is also a question for Spanish people who are not of roma origin so called “gitanos”. In my flamenco repertoire class the teacher and one student, who were both as gitanos would say “payos'' so Spanish people who are not gitanos, talked about how sometimes in Barcelona’s tablaos, which are concert venues for flamenco performances mostly for tourists, you would hear a person singing flamenco not very well but because it was sung by a gitano, they could have the job in that tablao.
I have seen this kind of thinking in Finland also in that if there is for example a band who plays latin music and has people from latin countries in it, many people will think it must be good even without having any clue if the musicians in that band are any good. It always catches my ear because very often it feels like trying to benefit from your nationality and its stereotypes instead of who you are as an individual. It is not only a problem of the one who is doing that rather than the whole society’s problem of trying to perceive the world with labels and stereotypes. It is easy to fall into that. I was partly doing that also with the Finnish tradition. After just some studies of Finnish folk music we formed a band and made our versions of traditional songs and I could never do that with any other tradition than Finnish even though I have not grown up with folk music apart from a couple of Näppäri -courses (community folk music courses) as a kid.
Of course when you have grown up or lived in Finland you most likely have some picture of Finnish folk music whether it is accurate or not but if you were to ask a person who has not lived in Finland to sing a caricature of a Finnish folk song most would not have any reference. The same goes with flamenco in Spain, many people can make a caricature sound of flamenco voice but do not actually know any legends of traditional flamenco, maybe just some rock or pop bands who mix some flamenco influences to their music. It is easier to know in which way to develop your expression and voice technique if you have some kind of picture of what flamenco sounds like but if one wants to sing or play any tradition professionally everyone has to do the effort of actually studying it.
My flamenco history teacher talked in our lessons how many people did not think how Camaron de la Isla became the biggest legend of flamenco singing and that they thought that Camaron was just born with all that flamenco. She explained that actually he and many other flamenco legends have been hard-working flamenco enthusiasts, studying letras and the smallest melismas from old vinyl records and investing a lot of time into practicing and studying. That is why I think it is problematic to think that someone must be good at something just by being from somewhere without knowing if they have been putting the work into the music they are performing. As Holden points out:
“Certainly, the complex cultural contexts in which Gypsy children are introduced to flamenco are different from the professional training of flamenco dancers in other areas of Spain or the rest of the world. To suggest, however, that gypsies perform flamenco as a spontaneous expression of their blood runs dangerously close to the myth that African Americans are born with the ability to dance. It is a racist assumption that ignores the specificity of the cultural practice of flamenco. This assumption is further developed and reproduced by those flamenco artists, Spanish and non-Spanish, who insist that ‘true’ flamenco (always the desired goal of any performance) can only be accomplished by people with a specific racial heritage. (Heffner Hayes, 2003, p. 108)" (Holden, 2012, pp.71-72)
Songwriting
I actually took kind of a break from composing when I started studying flamenco and Cuban traditions because I wanted to dive very deep into learning those traditions and I wanted to use all my time for that. I had noticed how clearly the music I studied prior to Global Music influenced my own compositions and the outcome felt often a bit outdated for me and I felt bored. I wanted to try what kind of compositions would naturally come out of me after concentrating my whole time on internalizing a new music tradition. I have made a whole circle with my thoughts about studying flamenco. First I thought that I will just study it a bit in order to have more tools for me and for my own music. Then I started to get very into that and thought that I would like to perform mainly traditional flamenco in the future. Now I have again started to compose a bit and it feels very fresh and meaningful to me. That has made me understand that you can not just study something a bit and use the tradition as a tool to get something for yourself or for your compositions because for me it does not feel respectful and feels more like appropriation. I think in order to get something out of some music culture into your own music you genuinely have to fall in love with it. You need to dig deep into that tradition without skimping on the time you put into studying it and not just think about the outcome for your own music. I have to believe that I could work with traditional flamenco and know it so well that when I make music that has flamenco influences, it is natural and almost by accident because only then the music comes truly from inside of me and my first intention has been to be as good as possible in traditional flamenco opposed to only make my own music out of that.
I had not thought about composing anything yet to my bachelor concert mainly because I had been in an intensive traditional flamenco bubble in Barcelona and so I had a lot of material which I wanted to share when coming back to Finland. But when I had the first meeting with Nathan, he asked if I could consider composing even just one song for my concert so it would show a bit of the journey that I am headed for after the bachelor concert in my master's studies. One day I sat on a couch and I just started to sing and I quickly made a song. It was interesting because I made that song the same way I had composed before in Finnish so that I sing the lyrics as I sing the melody and the lyrics and melody come together from me. I had not experienced that before with Spanish and I would not have thought my Spanish was ready for that kind of intuitive composing but it was and I was very surprised and excited. I worked with that song a bit more with my twin who speaks fluent Spanish and who has the same musical background as me, listening to all of those South American artists in our childhood, so she could also give me some important opinions on the melody.
When I think about how my musicianship and through that my compositions have changed after studying intensively flamenco I have noticed a couple of things. Most of all the melodies that came out of me have been influenced by flamenco. The actual melodies and its melismas are different than before and also the rhythm of melodies is more complicated. I use a lot more melismas than before and the melody is many times offbeat rather than on the beat which is typical for flamenco.
The other thing I want to pay attention to in the future studies is writing the lyrics. I have always written lyrics very intuitively and have never tried to push anything, for example I have not been able to choose beforehand what topic I will make a song about, I have just always worked with whatever lyrics come to me with the melody. So now I have thought that going more deep into songwriting I want to challenge myself by paying more attention to lyrics. It came to my mind to try to take more influences also in lyrics from different traditions I have studied. I have always admired old Finnish lyrics and how they say things with euphemisms. One thing which seems to be similar in both flamenco and Finnish traditional music is the heavy use of metaphors. Very many things are said by using metaphors, perhaps it is a picture of a period when there was a lot more tabus and it was not accepted to talk for example about love or sexuality in such a straightforward way than nowadays in lyrics. In any case that has brought many very beautiful and imaginative lyrics. I think many times while singing it sounds more smooth and beautiful when things are said with metaphors rather than with everyday language. That is why I want to study more about the metaphors and lyrics of these traditions and learn how to use them in my lyrics.
A bulerías letra from Jerez:
“Durmió el jardinero a pierna suelta
durmió y se dejaba la puerta abierta
hasta que un día la rosa la robaron
que más quería.”
(Lindroos & Helariutta & Böök & Huotari & Niinimäki, 1999, p.72)
"The gardener slept like a log
slept and let the gate open
until one day they stole the rose
that he loved the most."
(Translated from Spanish by Laura Petäjä).
Kora
Another music we have listened to a lot at home with family has been West African music because my parents liked it a lot. Those rhythms and beautiful melodies are the soundtrack of the memories of my childhood. I have listened to kora music since I was little so it feels very home but I have never thought about actually making some collaboration with a kora player until now. I want to try to combine kora with my own music. I got an idea of working with a kora player because in the flamenco history class in Barcelona we talked about African influences in flamenco and I asked if there has been done any collaboration between flamenco and kora and my teacher told me about Songhai albums made by Toumani Diabaté and Ketama. I listened to those two albums a lot and got very inspired. In fact I got more than inspired, it moved me so deeply that it felt like a shock at first. The two traditions which I had deep emotions attached to suddenly were combined together. The essence of my memories from my childhood home combined with my new passion, flamenco, which I had studied so hard and intensively lately. When I first listened to those albums I thought that the music traditions could be even more layered with each other, that it felt more like they were having a dialogue instead of a new combination. That is why I wanted to try how it would be to actually combine the two traditions more intensively than having in a flamenco song a kora interlude or in a Senegalese song a flamenco guitar solo. When I started to try that though I noticed one thing which I think would have led to that dialogue instead of mixing the two traditions. It felt a bit wrong to sing a traditional flamenco letra and in my head think of a kora accompanying that with new chords. That is why I have thought that I want to first combine kora with my own composition because then it does not interfere with an already existing tradition which is still not mine.
Musicianship
Right now I do not know what I would like to do in the future except I know I want to sing. I do not know if I will get back to playing the cello in my own projects. Neither do I know if I will work with flamenco and how much or will I work on something different in the future. But I know that I have needed the break from the cello and I still need that. In addition to me needing the clear division from the cello player to the singer role to establish the singer identity I feel like other people need it also in being able to understand, accept and lastly remember me as a singer. By studying flamenco I have broadened my musicianship rather than abandoned everything else I have done before. I believe that everything you study or experience in life has a meaningful impact on your musicianship.
I have also thought again about the rest of my studies in the Global Music Department. Instead of feeling sorry for the lack of flamenco players in Sibelius Academy I want to concentrate on taking the lovely opportunity of collaborating with the unique set of people in the school by composing more my own music and making experiments with different instruments and persons.
CONCLUSIONS
My research question was how can the process of changing the focus of a main study impact on musicianship and a musician’s sense of identity? Based on my experience the process of changing the focus of a main study has a very big impact on one’s whole life. It is due to the common issue that for many musicians the self identity and the musical or professional identity are dangerously and yet naturally interwoven. (Hargreaves, D. J., Miell, D., & MacDonald, R. A., 2002)
Of course it makes a difference whether a musician changes to study some music that is studied widely around the world and is quite acceptable to study even if it is not originally from their own country like Western classical music or popular music. If a musician starts to study a music tradition that is not from their own country and is not studied much by other people outside of its origin it increases the complexity. “If he chooses to become a professional instrumentalist or singer competing with others in the country of his chosen study (and this possibility seems to me remote), he will have to persist in practical studies considerably beyond the require- ments of basic musicianship until he attains professional status. Perhaps the best answer to the question "How far can he go" is "How much time does he have?” (Hood, 1960, p. 58)In addition to the difficulty of mastering in a foreign music tradition, practicing it also brings challenging questions. A musician has to ask themself and be asked by others why they are practicing that music, who has the permission to perform that musical tradition, can a musician's practice of the tradition by any chance change into appropriation and what is the musician’s value in this tradition where it is very hard if not impossible to accomplish the same level as the people born to that tradition.
The instrument choice also affects the amount of struggles one might go through while changing the main instrument. When the cello was still my main instrument it felt easier to start to play the double bass more than to start to sing mainly as there are more singers than cellists or double bassists so it is in my experience harder to change to an instrument which many people already play or sing. Then one can be constantly asked to play their old instrument and it might provoke a feeling that the musician does not have as much value in their new instrument than they had with their old instrument. Also it can bring uncertainty whether one should listen to their heart or their brain - it can feel like going against common sense if in the old thing a musician was appreciated and in the new thing they are not yet found by others.
The change can bring happiness, enthusiasm and relief because of being honest to oneself. The struggles can on the other hand bring stress, uncertainty of one’s own value and angst. With the positive feelings from inside about doing music that one wants it is easier to encounter the negative aspects. I think that honesty is one of the most important qualities in musicianship. A musician has to be able to be honestly enthusiastic and proud of the music they are studying, making and performing. Otherwise I think being a musician would be pointless so because of that I can cope with the struggles knowing that there is no option for me.
I would like to keep reading and discussing with people about the issues when changing the instrument or genre and about peoples’ musical identities. I feel like there should be so much more studies and talking about these topics because it concerns so many and nowadays when we can easily listen to the music made at the other side of the world it will be more common to be interested in other music than your own country’s traditional music so I think it will become a bigger topic in the future. In Master’s artistic research I hope I could make more interviews and learn from those since there are not many studies made of this particular area yet.
REFERENCES
LITERATURE
Hargreaves, D. J., Miell, D., & MacDonald, R. A. (2002). What are musical identities, and why are they important. In Musical Identities 2, eds A. R. MacDonald, D. J. Hargreaves, and D. Miell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–20.
Holden, C. (2012). Flamenco in South Africa: Outsider in two places. University of Cape Town
Hood, M. (1960).The Challenge of "Bi-Musicality". Vol. 4, No. 2 University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology
Lindroos, K., & Helariutta, M., & Böök, O., & Huotari, M., & Niinimäki, A. (1999). flamenco. Like Kustannus Oy
Murtola, A. (2017).With Knowledge and Heart: Transmitting Flamenco Singing in the Nordic Countries. Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus
Rantala, J. (2012). Psykofyysinen näkökulma laulamiseen –Itsetunto, vokaalinen minäkuva ja laulaminen. Jyväskylä University music education, bachelor thesis
Sowah, E. (2012). Searching for a voice: An investigation into professional singers’ vocal development. North Carelian University of Applied Sciences music department, bachelor thesis
PERSONAL DISCUSSIONS AND JOURNAL ENTRIES
López, C (2019) personal communications. In the possession of the researcher.
Virkkunen, J (2020). Discussion with a teacher. (10.11.2020) In the possession of the researcher.
Petäjä, L (2019). Second year concert reflection - A process analysis for the jury. (7.5.2019) In the possession of the researcher.
Petäjä, L (2020). Minä ja laulu - mitä kuuluu? - An own reflective writing. (8.9.2020) In the possession of the researcher.
VIDEOS AND RECORDINGS
Heredia, M (2013). De Chocolote. Chesapik. Audio materials are in the possession of the researcher.
Cortés, M (2020). Palpitando. Casa Limón America LLC. In the possession of the researcher. Video materials are in the possession of the researcher.
Carrasco, S (2011). Video excerpt from a program El Sol, la Sal y el Son (2011) Video materials are in the possession of the researcher.
