21.11.-27.11.2022

Vernissage/ Avajaiset 21.11.2022 18:00-20:00

Participating artists: Tugce Albayrak, Anna Hakula, Natalia Hogue, Miikka Lehto, Meriheini Luoto. Mateo Mena, Alex Raitanen, Teemu Ruissalo, Jarkko Räsänen, Zuzu Zaakaria.

Microtonal Music Studios is a project directed by Timo Tuhkanen
Visiting artist for the exhibition is Nicolina Stylianou.

The first Microtonal Music Studios Research and Study program exhibition and event week explores the practices of participating student practices through spatial sound, microtonality, instrument making, and embodied performance. As well as an installation the week contains discussions, concerts, and performances from all participants. More events and programme will be announced so please stay tuned for it!

Programme for the week
21.11.2022 Monday
Opening from 18:00 to 21:00

22.11.2022 Tuesday
Event 17.30 – 19.30 – Talk
Why tuning matters: Introduction to microtonality and how the world we hear is constructed. In this discussion we talk about how mass produced instruments and standardisation of tunings supports colonisation and hegemonic structures in society and how creating new tunings as well as conserving old dying tunings can resist these tendencies.

23.11.2022 Wednesday
Event 17:30 – 20:00 – Concert of microtonal improvised music
Timo Pyhälä (bass) and Markku Toikkanen (?), duo
Timo Tuhkanen (microtonal guitars) solo

24.11.2022 Thursday
Event 17:30 – 20:00 – Student performances
Teemu Mastovaara keratoconus piece (2022)

25.11.2022 Friday
tba

26.11.2022 Saturday
Event 17:30 – 20:00 – Performance
Nicolina Stylianou

27.11.2022 Sunday
Event 17:00 – 19:00 – Concert
Teemu Mastovaara and Anna Sofia Kallio perform New Music for Cello and Flute: Arola, Laaksonen, Mastovaara, Saariaho, Thorvaldsdóttir

About Microtonal Music Studios: Music Outside Keys and Cultures

Microtonal Music Studios is a relational art project with an aim to create a community and place around musical instruments. It takes the form of an educational, non-national, post-genre, and decolonized musical space for experienced musicians as well as beginners to experiment in. It is a physical space in which the whole process of musical production is included: from the conception, design and making of musical instruments, through the practice, playing, composition and interpretation of music, to the recording and the physical as well as digital distribution and promotion of instrument designs, concerts and albums, to the listening, hearing experience, and discourse of music. This all encompassing thinking-through-making is what gives the project a specific aim of directly addressing directly structural issues of diversity and canon within the music establishment. This relational practice investigates what could be achieved if the whole of musical production (from conceiving and building instruments, to choosing tonalities, to playing and listening to music) would be actively included in the future aesthetics of music. What kind of cultural formations happen when musical sounds are not controlled by any dominant idiom? How can the general audience be made more aware that musical tones, intervals, and pitches, are culturally constructed and held up by vested interests and structural norms?

Each year the Research and Study Programme supports ten students and five visiting researchers/artists at the studios.