Small worlds: Lauri Supponen
The artistic world of Lauri Supponen is one of precarity and curiosity, one whose consequences spin out from overlooked moments of history and geography. It considers the alpine slopes of South Tyrol, Italy, where the position of a Norway spruce on one side or the other of a mountain would determine whether, when felled, it would travel downriver to the shipyards of the Venetian Arsenal or to the violin makers of Cremona. It considers the ‘Hidden Figures’ of the American Cold War space programme – women like Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson, who persevered against the sexism and racism of their age to perform the necessary maths and computer programming that got astronauts into space. And it considers the figure of Solsirépifpan, a Parisian entertainer of the nineteenth century and perhaps the first one-man band, who Supponen portrayed in his debut album of the same name in support of a Universal Basic Income for artists, ‘as a solution for our cephalopodic, multi-tasking lives’.
Photo © Pyry Kantonen
A favourite source for such moments is the Flemish and Italian Renaissance. Not, of course, as an act of heavy-handed reverence, and neither as a consolatory retreat from the modern world. Rather, Supponen is attracted to the modernity he can find there, exemplified in what he calls the ‘wonky, funky versions of Renaissance music’ that have emerged out of the historically informed performance movement of the last ten years or so. This is how, for example, his Ave maris stella (to be performed by its dedicatees, Saxtronauts, on Monday 23 November) can combine a freshly composed imitation of a Gabrieli chorale with the experimental construction of instruments from garden hoses and saxophone mouthpieces. And how both of those (via the medieval Marian hymn ‘Hail, star of the sea / Nurturing Mother of God’) can pay homage to NASA’s female scientists workshopping launch velocities and rocket trajectories. Similarly, it is how, in his Picea (to be played by Marie Schreer on Saturday 28 November), he imagines a history for the violin, from tree to instrument, by way of references to the violin music of the early Venetian Baroque.
Photo © Tuomas Tenkanen
Also at hcmf//, Supponen (an oboist and double bassist as well as composer) will be performing in his trio SYKLIT (Cycles) with percussionist Kalle Hakosalo and video artist Irene Suasalo. He is also writing a new piece, east, for the accordion and clarinet duo of Eva Zöllner and Heather Roche (Saturday 21 November). This doesn’t take us back in time but does consider a peculiarity of geography. It is the second piece in a planned cycle on the points of the compass – for which Supponen has devised four ‘sonic ecosystems’ based on the interacting gravities of a pair of chords. Each of these ecosystems can then give rise to a number of related pieces. The temptation is to think of the four directions as separate from one another but, as the composer points out, the cardinal points (and therefore their musical ecosystems) are ‘very much inter-contaminated and contained within each other’. The further east you go, for example, the more west there is. And at a certain point, if you go far enough in one direction you start to go in the other. Awareness of this seems to come naturally to him as a Finn. ‘If you go over the Arctic Circle at midnight on the summer solstice, the reason you see the sun is because you’re actually going south’, he says. Like the pines on one side of the Tyrolean mountains or the other, there’s a small pivot point with consequences much larger than itself.
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson