This craft of verse

 

Alkaa hahmottua erinäisiä seikkoja.¹

 

It has been a dream of poets for centuries, crafting a form that is also the content – a pattern of sounds and pauses.

It started from the surface of paper – a sharp and metallic sound pattern traveled into the space on the byōbu²-like installations scattered around³. It paused and started over again, repeated.

As if life was bestowed to those empty pages, the transducers excited the papers to tremble one after another –

The sound and pause of pages.

When Tuukka Pietarinen came to the stage reciting his poem, the Finnish words created a rhythm that resembled the sounding patterns from the paper. The consistent stress on the first syllable, the vowel harmony and quantity created a predictable rhythmic pattern – a consistent and clear nature of the Finnish language.

Followed by Simoné Goldschmidt-Lechner, breathiness was introduced due to a higher degree of aspiration in consonants of the German language. Along with diphthongs⁴, the rhythm was softened and gradually became waves from the sea –

The sound and pause of language.

A Finnish translation was recited right next. The different natures of the two languages brought a sudden stop to the waves. Traduttore, traditore.⁵

The sounding patterns burst into bloom when Maaria Pulakka played Tapahtui (“It Happened”) on harp –

The sound and pause of strings.

 

1. This installation concert was performed at the Runokuu (Poetry Moon) festival on 23.8.2025. ↩︎
2. Japanese paper walls that bear decorative painting and calligraphy. ↩︎
3. The installations were designed and built by multidisciplinary artist Priss Niinikoski. ↩︎
4. A sound formed by the combination of two vowels in a single syllable, in which the sound begins as one vowel and moves towards another (as in coin, loud and height ). ↩︎
5. Italian proverb, meaning “translator, traitor”. Widely used as “translator is the betrayer” in translation studies. ↩︎

 

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As composer Olli Moilanen named the performance series Seikka, which means “aspect/fact/circumstance” in Finnish, it was mind-blowing to see (or listen to) how he put together the music of different aspects together in this second part.

From Stéphane Mallarmé to Jorge Luis Borges, music has been approached as the ideal form of poetry, where sound and meaning are inseparable.

It is fascinating to see a composer “downgrading” himself to work on poetry craft – crafting with the purest form, returning language to a “magic” state where it holds a powerful, unsubstitutable resonance that goes beyond logical definitions.

Moilanen knows his agency over composition so well that he crafts with musical materials of different kind – different aspects of sounds and pauses, including “word-music”, the essence of poetry.

Yet he might not be fully aware of this great power – the meaning lies in its form; the ultimate value of a poem lies in the “magic” and resonance of its sound, which resists simple dissection and goes beyond mere meaning.

This craft of verse is fulfilling the dream of poets for centuries.

 

Performers

Olli Moilanen
Priss Niinikoski
Tuukka Pietarinen
Simoné Goldschmidt-Lechner
Maaria Pulakka