Hauen laulu (Song of the Perch)

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(text: Aaro Hellaakoski – in Finnish)
7 min.

Invited to contribute again to Finland’s long tradition of male choir singing, having written a previous work in Swedish, I wanted to provide a piece rich in both the rhythms of the Finnish language, as well as the poetic imagery of its mythology. I found the perfect vehicle in Aaro Hellakoski’s Hauen laulu (Song of the Perch), a central poem in the Finnish modernist literature. A sort of fever dream written down in the early hours of a bright summer night, the poem depicts a perch leaving its lake home to climb a tree and sing a song that stops all of nature in its tracks to listen.

The poem’s meaning is the subject of much analysis. The imagery and meter seem to refer at least in part to the national epic, the Kalevala, and to the character Väinämöinen, who built the first zither-like kantele from the jawbone of a perch and sang just such a powerful song. However, the sudden darker turn toward the “cold embrace of loneliness” at the end leaves an emptiness, perhaps that felt by the artist having given form to the creative urge.

I rather liked the idea of a poet waking from slumber, perhaps with a few half-remembered lines from the Kalevala turning over in his mind, to write down a poem without quite understanding it himself, leaving an enigmatic verse for others to decipher. The resulting music is rhapsodic and deliberately pictorial in its representation of Hellaakoski’s words, bringing in all sorts of noises and vocal techniques to give voice to the perch’s wordless song, “so wild and vital that the birds fell silent.”

Hauen laulu was commissioned by the Polytech Choir for their 125th anniversary, and is dedicated to them.