New Music and National Identity: Musical Institutions in Finland During the Cold War

This dissertation explores the role that musical institutions played in the relationship between Finnish national identity and the growth of contemporary art music in Finland during the Cold War. As commissioning bodies, the performing institutions that I study acted as sites of mediation between the competing interests of government funding, cultural policy, composers, musicians, and audiences, navigating their own financial relationships with the state through their construction and manipulation of symbols of national identity. Caught in a politically precarious position as a small neutral nation bordering the USSR, Finland used contemporary composition as a means to assert its nationhood and to culturally distinguish itself from its dangerous neighbor, much as the music of Jean Sibelius contributed to the nation's drive toward independence from Russia in 1917. In case studies of two contrasting musical institutions -- the Finnish National Opera and the Tapiola Choir --1 combine reception history and historical ethnography to analyze this process and its effect on the production and cultural value of new music, suggesting that musical nationalism in the twentieth century can be usefully understood in terms of the dichotomy between those symbols of national identity that promote internal cohesion and those that are intended for external display.;Part I of the dissertation centers on the Finnish National Opera. In its opening prelude, I outline the early history of Finnish opera and of the FNO, discussing the effects of Sibelius's failure to complete any of the large operatic projects he began and of the rediscovery of Aarre Merikanto's Juha -- completed in 1922 but left unstaged until 1963 -- on opera composition in Finland. Chapter 1 begins my investigation of the so-called "opera boom" of the 1970s and 80s and the role that the FNO played in the creation and development of this cultural narrative of the Finnish public's embrace of opera through its productions of Joonas Kokkonen s Viimeiset kiusaukset (The Last Temptations,1975) and Aulis Sallinen's Punainen viiva (The Red Line, 1978). In Chapter 2, I examine the foreign and domestic reception of a series of international tours that the FNO undertook with these works, focusing on its journeys to London in 1979, the USSR in 1982, and New York in 1983. I argue that through its efforts to secure its first purpose-built opera house from the state --which opened in 1993--the FNO succeeded in promoting contemporary opera as an emblem of Finnish national identity.;The prelude to Part II introduces the subject of my second case study, an amateur children's choir from the city of Espoo that was founded in 1963, and my approach to studying this institution through the lens of its effect on the individual experiences of its members. In Chapter 3, I analyze the development of the choir's repertoire by its founder and conductor, Erkki Pohjola. I show that Pohjola's belief that the mixed-voice children's choir could be a "new artistic instrument" influenced his construction of a twentieth-century Finnish identity for his choir through a repertoire that both contributed to the growth of its young genre and fostered a belief in the national significance of new music in its singers. Chapter 4 turns to the timbre of the choir, exploring three interpretations of the multifaceted concept of its signature "Tapiola Sound," suggesting that Pohjola developed the idea in response to the role his choir acquired on their many international tours as state-funded cultural ambassadors, to serve as both a rhetorical and performative expression of the choir's Finnishness. Together, my two case studies illustrate strategic ways in which musical institutions used the production of new music during the Cold War to further their own goals by constructing national identities both at home and abroad.