Daughters of Music

The Daughters of Music research project (2018–2023) by Susanna Välimäki and Nuppu Koivisto-Kaasik is the first project to systematically chart the history of women composers in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Finland on a large scale. The project is based on long-term work with first-hand sources in archives both in Finland and aborad, and it has been executed within the research association Suoni as a collaborative effort between the musicology department of the University of Helsinki and the Uniarts History Forum research centre. Furthermore, this endeavour is partly joint with Suoni’s larger Music Researchers in Society research project.

In this project, we set out to find out 1) who these women composers active in Finland during the long nineteenth centry and the first half of the twentieth century actually were, 2) what kinds of music they composed, and 3) what musical, social, and cultural activities their careers entailed. During the last five years, we have been able to trace over 130 such composers, and the number is still increasing. As the results of our project show, women’s input – both in the field of composing in general as well as in Finnish music history in particular – has had a much larger significance than out patriarchal and national traditions of history-writing have previously led us to believe.

Our methodological approaches have been based on feminist and activist music history. Terms like ”composer” and ”Finnish” have been kept as open and inclusive as possible. For instance, composers with Finnish roots but active aborad, as well as those that came from abroad but stayed in Finland for most of their adult careers, have not been excluded from our research. Instead, we have wanted to make room for overlaps and diversity in terms of national or linguistic identities. Furthermore, we have wished to deconstruct artificial hierarchies between musical genres and styles by lifting up composers specialised in, e.g., pedagogical music or music for women’s gymnastics.

This research project has produced both publications and collaborative endevours together with musicians, institutions, and other actors in the cultural field. In addition to providing music editors and concert organisers with archival material, we have written texts for concert programmes and acted as concert hosts.  The Daughters of Music project has also worked closely with, e.g., the History’s Unheard Orchestral Music Network (HUOM), coordinated by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra: orchestral pieces by several historical Finnish women composers, such as Heidi Sundblad-Halme, Greta Dahlström, Agnes Tschetschulin, Laura Netzel, and Ingeborg von Bronsart, have been played at the orchestra’s rehearsal days. In addition, we have been involved in the three-part Daughters of Music sheet music edition series published by Fennica Gehrman.

The project will reach its culmination point in September 2023, when its main publication, a peer-reviewed academic book called Sävelten tyttäret: suomalaiset säveltäjänaiset 1800-luvulta 1900-luvulle [Daughters of Music: Finnish women composers from the nineteenth to the twentieth century], is published. This book, published by the Finnish Literature Society, comprises short biographies of 126 different composers, and includes a lengthy introduction as well as conclusions. However, ever since 2019, we have written academic articles, as well as texts aimed for the general public, in both Finnish and English, on the composers that we have researched. These texts have been published in, e.g., the National Biography of Finland, Finnish Music Quarterly, and Rondo. In addition, we have presented our work at conferences in Finland, the UK, Italy (via Zoom), and the US.