Aulis Sallinen

Currently still alive, this Finnish composer was born in Salmi, which is itself interesting: a glance at the map today would tell you that's in Russia, not Finland! To make sense of that, however, you just have to reckon with the Winter War of 1939/40 and the Moscow Treaty of 1940, which ceded that part of Finland to the Soviet Union at gun-point.

He studied at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki under Aarre Merikanto, amongst others. After graduating, he continued to teach there. He ran the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra for ten years in the 1960s, and was thereafter chairman of the board of the Society of Finnish Composers for a few years in the early 1970s. It wasn't until the mid-1970s that the Finnish government appointed him “Artist Professor”, which gave him the financial freedom to concentrate on composing in his own right, though he had been writing music before then in a fairly ad hoc, part-time manner.

He began his compositional activity in a meditative and lyrical, freely serial style, and a contemplative character remains a feature of much of his later music. In the 1960s, he added triads and other tonal elements to his work. A good example of this is his third string quartet, which is a set of variations on an old Finish folktune: it's neither traditionally folkloreistic (like Vaughan Williams might be, for example), nor Bartókian. Similarly, his first symphony opens and closes with a clearly tonal F♯ minor chord but then combines that with a bunch of note clusters and other effects which have been compared with Ligeti.

He has at present written eight symphonies, seven operas, and a handful of concertos for various instruments, along with a stack of chamber and orchestral music, including six string quartets.