Sound sample from a pre-project. Source: “Who Is Your Daddy? Who Is Your Mommy?” from the album Soundtrack of an Imaginary Opera Composer: Rebecka Sofia Ahvenniemi The musicians: Elisabeth Holmertz, voice; Martina Starr-Lassen, voice; Ørjan Hartveit, voice; Erik Håkon Halvorsen, synth; Owen Weaver, percussion; Jutta Morgenstern, violin; Agnese Rugevica, cello.
My aim is to develop compositional strategies that allow for music to reflect the presence of social reality, and more specifically, that acknowledge the fact that cultural codes and connotations are already present in music when it is made. I promote the idea that music is never “neutral”. The topic is relevant from the perspective of diversity: whose reality does
music reflect? And how does power of definition go unnoticed?
As the artistic result of this research, I compose and produce an album of “opera pop songs”. This music interprets critically, and takes part in, myths and topics present in historical opera and today’s popular culture. My project focuses on critiquing the operatic canon, the way the ideas are universalized. Many of my opera pop songs focus on Western representations of gender and how these come to expression in shared cultural narratives.
The original title, “a music album condemned to meaning”, refers to musicologist Susan McClary’s notion that music – just like other artforms – is “condemned to meaning” (Feminine Endings, 1991). The assumption of music’s neutrality can be viewed as problematic. McClary discusses this especially in the context of the Western history of opera,
and in terms of gender representations.
The critique that historical operas do not relate to a universal human condition is relevant today, as many opera institutions regurarly brand their program content as “universally relatable”. Yet the characters, their feelings, their moral choices, and the definitions of gender, refer to certain cultural perspectives.
The compositional strategies that rise from my research are designed to reflect on the social world present in music. One examples is “musical dumpster diving”: seeking fruitful materials in the dumpsters, among the garbage, materials that carry some kind of social stigma. To do this, I have to challenge my own hidden assumptions about what a “proper composer” ought to do in their work. Another strategy is “denaturalizing musical material”, referring to Judith Butlers term “denaturalization”. In music, this could revealing the nonneutral basis of musical materials that come across as neutral. This can be done, for example, by re-contextializing or defamiliarizing musical expressions from their common context or
“habitat”.
The research results in an album that consists of 7 opera pop songs. Some of them take on more general topics and material explorations. Vocalise, for example, explores the meslisma as virtuous singing; when does virtuous vocal technique take over at the expense of musicality, and why does this happen? Are there any similarities in pompous Baroque melismas and those of Christina Aguilera? How does this relate to diva culture?
Observing expressions from opera and popular music next to each other will result in a music that is not argumentative, but allows us to study ideas and cultural narratives that circulate among us and within us.
Rebecka Sofia Ahvenniemi (b. 1982) is a philosopher, composer, and writer living in Oslo. She was born in Finland but moved to Norway in 2004. Today Rebecka is an artistic research fellow at the Norwegian Academy of Music.
Rebecka studied at the University of Bergen, the University of Helsinki, Freie Universitet Berlin, and Columbia University. She finished her doctoral degree in philosophy in the fall 2021 with the thesis Musical Composition as Lingering Reflection. Exploring the Critical Potential of Music. Further, she has taught composition at the Grieg academy in Bergen and Musikkhøgskolen in Oslo. She has also been a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bergen.
Rebecka has been actively engaged in art politics and organizational work through board memberships, public debates, organizational work, and as a writer. In her writings she has, for example, critiqued some of the values and practices of the symphony orchestra as an institution.