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Harri Wessman in Profile
(From: Kimmo Korhonen: 1996)
A few hours into the year 1973, Harri Wessman (b. 1949) and some musician friends of his decided to found the ‘Neo-Pathos School’. The inspiration for this half jocular, half serious venture was that in the founders’ opinion “music at that time had drifted as far as possible from the idea of mimicking emotions, the mimesis of affects,†as Wessman has explained later. Even today, Wessman likes to describe his music as ‘Neo-Pathos’.
Wessman has been a dissenter in the field of Finnish music for the past twenty years or so, shunning the various forms of Modernism that have flourished at the expense of all other stylistic trends. His works are melodic, lyrical, intimate and brimming with Romantic warmth — features that are strictly taboo to the most austere Modernists. Wessman’s attitude is reflected in the titles of some of his chamber music works such as Yötä kohti (Towards the Night, 1978), Rain and Red Wine (1979) or Syksyn sävyinen fantasia (Autumnal Fantasy, 1980). The communicativeness of music is particularly important for Wessman, since, as he says, “a composition is above all a spiritual message to another human being.â€
Wessman has not gone through any great stylistic changes during his twenty years as a composer. Although his music has a tonal feel, it is in fact free-tonal, and he almost never uses key signatures, for instance. His softly dissonant harmonies typically consist of triads with added notes, over which melodies based on diatonic or symmetrical scales are woven. Thematic processing in the traditional sense is an important factor. Wessman’s rhythms are often syncopated and swinging, even dance-like. Wessman emerged as a composer in the late 1970s. He first became known for lyrical delicate pieces for flute and guitar, such as the Three Pieces for Two Futes and Guitar (1976) and the Duo for Flute and Guitar (1976). The most popular of his early vocal works is the ingenious paraphrase of ancient poetic chants from the Kalevala, Vesi väsyy lumen alle (Water Under Snow Is Weary, 1976). In the late 1970s, Wessman began to write minor instrumental works for pedagogical purposes.
The Sonata for Violin and Piano (1978) and the Sonata no. 2 for Cello and Piano (1979) were the first works in Wessman’s series of extensive chamber music works, consisting of several duo sonatas and trios to date. The Second Cello Sonata in particular demonstrated the composer’s richness of melodic invention. The Piano Quartet (1985), one of his weightiest chamber music works, contains a gamut of emotions ranging from the passion of the opening through nostalgia and resignation to the surrealism of the closing movement. The tango quotes bring additional colour. Wessman’s later chamber music works feature several sonatas for brass instruments, such as the first Tuba Sonata ever written in Finland (1995). Wessman has always liked writing for instruments that do not have very much in the way of repertoire.
Wessman has not written very many orchestral works. Four Symphonic Pictures (1977) is an early work, while Koraalialkusoitto (Chorale Overture,1984) is a later one. There are also some works for strings and for winds. Wessman’s most extensive work to date is the fairy-tale ballet Satumaan Päivikki (Päivikki of Fairyland, 1987), for orchestra and soprano.
By contrast, Wessman has written a great many concertos and works for solo instruments. Many of them are intimate and have delicate rather than showy solo parts. Some of the concertos are part of the composer’s pedagogic series, which of course in itself precludes displays of virtuoso technique. His most significant solo works are the Trumpet Concerto (1987), the Trombone Concerto (1992, sub-titled ‘Affections’), and the five-movement Concerto for Horn and Chamber Orchestra (1993), which is a modern adaptation of the Baroque dance suite.
The late 1980s brought a new dimension to Wessman’s music. As a teacher of theory of music, he had studied the principles of figuration in the Baroque era. He began to apply figuration and musical rhetoric to his own compositions, as can be seen in the title of Eine kleine Figurenlehre (1991) for chamber ensemble.
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