Celestia (Eng. Heavenly) was composed between 2018 and 2019, and the music video was published in December 2020. This music video explores women's work, representations of femininity and the strengthening of female agency. During my work with Celestia, my artistic practice expanded to include a better understanding of the impact of gender norms and their entanglement with economic questions in the folk singing field in Finland and Bulgaria. Taking economic considerations into account from an intersectional point of view (see, e.g., Laukkanen and others 2018; Elonheimo and others 2022) has given me a deeper grasp of the artistic choices I can make. It has also helped me to consider how I can strengthen female musicianship – and female agency in a transnational context.
As a composition, Celestia combines Bulgarian choral singing with kantele improvisation, incorporating the aesthetics of the minimalist Karelian kantele playing tradition (Kastinen 2021). The idea for composing Celestia came to me in 2017 while flying from Sofia to Helsinki on Midsummer Eve. The sky was flaming red, and the shores of the lakes were dotted with midsummer bonfires burning in the night. This aesthetic experience later developed into a three-part composition, combining improvisation on the kantele with Bulgarian choral praise of the glory of nature.
Celestia was recorded in several parts at the Bulgarian National Television studio in 2018, and the composition took its final form in Finland. At the recording stage, I did not yet know how I would combine the choir parts with the kantele improvisation, nor what the final structure of Celestia would be like. I took an experimental and improvisational approach, allowing myself room for uncertainty. In the first part of the composition, the choir sings a theme that depicts the movement of a rainbow. The second part of Celestia depicts the dance of raindrops, and the third part is a celebration of nature on Midsummer Eve. I wrote the text for the third part before the rehearsals in Sofia, and I got help with checking the language of the lyrics from Slavina Smith (formerly Petrova), a Bulgarian living in Finland. The artistic work related to the composition was therefore partly shared. I ended up using Bulgarian lyrics for Celestia because there was so little time to rehearse with the choir, and learning the Finnish words would have taken up most of the rehearsal time. Combining the kantele parts with the choir singing required several attempts. Together with sound engineer Mikael Hakkarainen, we decided to use different echoes in the mixing of Celestia to make it easier to combine the different timbres of the choir and the kantele, and to maintain the aesthetics of freedom and experimentation.
The music video for Celestia was scripted and filmed during the global COVID-19 pandemic in autumn 2020. The video was filmed on Suomenlinna, an old fortress island off the coast of Helsinki. Part of the video was also filmed in Arabianranta, a district of Helsinki. The video portrays the reality of the pandemic in a concrete manner: due to the COVID-19 restrictions, I appeared alone in the video, without any other actors.
For the script, Vilma Metteri and I created a story about Celestia, the goddess of the sky, who descends from the stars through music to the seashore to perform tasks related to the annual natural and seasonal cycle. Our intention was to highlight women's often overlooked contributions, particularly in those areas traditionally considered to be 'women's work' due to societal gender norms.
As Vilma Metteri observes (2020):
The value of work is often defined by gender, social status, and productivity, even when these things themselves have nothing to do with the importance of the work itself. – – Celestia’s job is to play the waters into motion, tuck the plants to sleep until the spring and make nature reverberate in harmony.
Vilma Metteri, 4.12.2020
The Celestia music video continues the story of the Bird Crown. In Celestia, the Bird Crown serves as a metaphor for a person who values their work. The Bird Crown is worn by Celestia, the goddess of the sky, who celebrates her work, takes pride in it, and shows it to the universe.
I play several roles in the music video: I am the composer of the song, and I play the goddess Celestia, who collects plants and plays the kantele for the surrounding island nature. The circumstances of COVID-19 created a certain sadness and longing in the Celestia music video: I am alone in the role of the goddess, celebrating the work achieved. However, I would have liked to have been able to share the pride in what was accomplished and dance in the video in a circle with the choir singers instead of only with a braided basket.
In Bulgaria, a post-socialist Eastern European country, the role of female folk singers continues to be limited, but it is gradually expanding to include various roles in the musical field. The different gender norms in Bulgaria and in Finland's folk music field are linked to folk music education. In Finland, folk music studies have included composing and improvisation lessons (Hill 2005), whereas in Bulgaria, academic education in folk music aims at a broad knowledge of styles and repertoire (Kujanpää 2016). The contemporary female singers in Bulgarian folk choirs do not often compose or arrange music for their ensembles; their role is to sing what they are asked to sing (Silverman 2004). The compositions and arrangements for folk singing choirs were, and remain, predominantly created by male composers (ibid.). However, according to Elichka Krastanova and Violeta Marinova, the long-time singers of the Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices choir, women are composing more and more music for smaller chamber ensembles (Krastanova & Marinova 2021). The gender norms of musicians in folk choirs have existed since the 1950s, when large folk music ensembles and orchestras were created in the Soviet countries (Buchanan 1995; Silverman 2004). The gender norms of women singing and men playing already existed in the villages before the socialist period (Rice 1994), and it is important to note that these gender norms were and continue to be common throughout Europe in the field of folk music. It is also worth mentioning that today, women composers are also rare in Finland (Ramstedt 2022; Partti & Devaney 2023).
Polina Paunova and Boryana Vasileva reflect on the question of how to encourage women to compose more music for folk choirs:
We have to motivate them in some way – – I don't know, just [how]...
[Трябва да ги мотивираме по някакъв начин. – – Не знам, просто [как]...]
Polina Paunova & Boryana Vasileva, 13.1.2021
Indeed, there are contemporary Bulgarian-based female folk singers who compose, arrange and write lyrics for their songs as solo projects, such as Boryana Vasileva, who has been interviewed for this exposition, and Gergana Dimitrova in her Belonoga project (Paunova & Vasileva 2021; Dimitrova 2023). The works by Vasileva and Dimitrova are an example of the active Bulgarian female musical agency (on contemporary Bulgarian folk musicians, see, e.g., Stankova 2019).
It is a fact that the grant system in Finland provides crucial support for artists, enabling them to carry out international projects and develop their artistic practice. By contrast, Bulgaria lacks a similar system to support artists, which may discourage musicians from pursuing new projects and changing established structures. I argue that the greatest difference in power between Bulgarian women musicians and me is the financial opportunities to create new music. This relates to the essential question of who is supported and given the opportunity to tell their story.
By paying the singers according to the Finnish musicians' union scale rather than the Bulgarian scale, I attempted to reduce the power relations and economic inequality between myself and the Bulgarian artists (Elonheimo and others 2022). I have been transparent about my family's financial situation in Finland, which has highlighted that the challenges faced by an artist's family can be similar across different countries, despite existing differences. I also hope that my experience of poverty as a child in Eastern Finland in the 1980s and 1990s has given me a tacit understanding of what it means to encounter serious economic problems in everyday life. Poverty can quietly manifest itself in the practical aspects of artistic collaboration, such as the choice of where to have lunch during the rehearsal day. As an artistic leader, it is important to observe who goes to a restaurant, who brings their own lunch, or who goes without eating.
I also claim that it is important to avoid arrogant assumptions about the participants' similarities in international projects, and that attention should be given to how participants from different countries may experience varying degrees of democracy, freedom of the media and economic stability in their home countries (Kujanpää, forthcoming). As an artist, it is important to understand that there are circumstances beyond my control. One such challenge that arose during the production of the music video trilogy was the differing attitudes towards the COVID-19 pandemic in Bulgaria and Finland: while most people in Finland took the government-recommended vaccines, this was not the case in Bulgaria (Buchanan 2025). The differences in gender roles among female musicians in Finland and Bulgaria can also be attributed to the two countries' distinct histories. While female musicians in Finland have been permitted greater individual expression throughout the 20th century, albeit with difficulties (see, e.g., Välimäki & Koivisto-Kaasik 2023), Bulgarian musicians and choir singers were part of the socialist regime for most of the same period. Choir singers in Bulgaria were not expected to pursue individual careers, but rather to be good state employees and represent Bulgarian women (Silverman 2004; Kujanpää 2016; Stankova 2019).
Therefore, for example, folk musicians who come from post-socialist countries should not be expected to 'develop' into performing the same roles as Nordic folk musicians and define the transnational artistic projects between 'Western' and 'Eastern' Europe. After the release of the Nani album, young Bulgarian singers expressed that they regarded my work as an ideal example for them: as a female folk musician, I compose, produce and present my music (Korhonen 2020). Although singers did not communicate this to me directly, I hope that my work serves as an inspiration for female musicians to create music in terms of their being more active artistic agents (Ahmed 2017; Välimäki & Koivisto-Kaasik 2023). My argument is that it continues to be important to note that each country and region has its own unique history and traditions, and artists should work within these possibilities and existing structures and respect them.
