The Longest Einojuhani Rautavaara Autobiography Though the resurgence of religious spirituality in late twentieth-century music is usually attributed

to the trinity of holy minimalists Part, Gorecki and Tavener some of the most profoundly spiritual music of recent years has come from the elder statesman of Finnish contemporary music, Einojuhani Rautavaara. Unlike Part and the others, Rautavaara does not write religious works as such, yet his music is imbued with a powerful mystical quality that is largely inspired by the elemental qualities of his native landscape. In recent years Rautavaara has developed a near-obsession with the idea of the angel as Jungian archetype: They repeat in my mind like a mantra that radiates musical energy, he has said. Angels have inspired several works, including the serene and expansive Symphony No. 7 (1994), subtitled by the composer Angel of Light.Check out the official page of mp3 2000 to download free mp3 music with this artist. Rautavaara regards himself as a Romantic composer because of the stylistic freedom he insists upon: A Romantic has no co-ordinates. In time he is in yesterday or tomorrow, but never in today. In an interview in April 2000 he further emphasized this need for fluidity: If an artist is not a modernist when he is young, he has no heart, and if he is a modernist when he is old, he has no brain. During his long career his music has undergone several transformations. As a student of Aare Merikanto at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, his work conformed to the neo-classicism then prevalent in Finland. At the recommendation of the 90-year-old Sibelius, he was given a scholarship for further study in the US, where he enhanced his already considerable orchestral technique under Vincent Periscetti at the Juilliard School, and Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland at Tanglewood. In 1954 he won the Thor Johnson competition in the USA with A Requiem in Our Time. Travel and yet more study in Europe in the late 1950s led him to embrace dodecaphony, but even when he followed the principles of serialism, as in the String Quartet No. 2 (1958), the music has an emotional charge that is much closer to the expressionism of Berg than the austerity of Webern. By the 1970s, however, Rautavaara had embraced an openly Romantic idiom exemplified by his bestknown work, the extraordinary Cantus Arcticus (1972). Rautavaara has also composed a number of operas, including Vincent (1990) and Aleksis Kivi (1997). Cantus Arcticus Written in 1972 for the new university of Oulu in northern Finland, Cantus Arcticus is described by the composer as a concerto for birds and orchestra. Divided into three sections (The Bog, Melancholy and Swans Migrating), it juxtaposes Rautavaaras own recordings of arctic birds with orchestral music of great subtlety and lyricism. The result is a mysterious and exotic sound-world, with the birdcalls emerging and disappearing in the sombre half-light of Rautavaaras orchestral landscapes. This is music with a strong sense of place, which while not being in any sense programmatic conjures up vivid images of the great forests and lakes of arctic Finland.