# Paavo Heininen



## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Rest in peace, Paavo Heininen. Your music and contributions as a teacher will be remembered.


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## Josquin13 (Nov 7, 2017)

I too am saddened to hear the news of Paavo Heininen's passing. I was just listening to a CD of his solo piano music in the car the other day, & was impressed by how imaginative & gentle the music was: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Piano-Works-UK-Jouko-Laivuori/dp/B000BLMU56.

When I consider Heininen's links to the past through his teachers--Aarre Merikanto, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Einar Englund, and Joonas Kokkonen, as well as to Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Witold Lutoslawski, Vincent Persichetti, and Eduard Steuermann, and his many notable pupils among today's composers--such as Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, Jukka Tiensuu, Jouni Kaipainen and Veli-Matti Puumala, it becomes clear that we've lost one of the world's most important teachers of composition. Such figures are becoming increasingly rare it seems.

Here's an old article from 1986, written by one of Heininen's students, the late composer, Jouni Kaipainen, for the Finnish Music Quarterly: https://fmq.fi/articles/paavo-heininen-composer-cosmopolitan-controversialist.

It would be nice to see Heininen's 8 Symphonies, 4 Piano Concertos, & various chamber and vocal works finally get recorded in their entirety. Or will his music unjustly fall into obscurity now, I wonder?


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

Waehnen said:


> Rest in peace, Paavo Heininen. Your music and contributions as a teacher will be remembered.


We do have a special thread :
Roll of Honour


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Josquin13 said:


> I too am saddened to hear the news of Paavo Heininen's passing. I was just listening to a CD of his solo piano music in the car the other day, & was impressed by how imaginative & gentle the music was: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Piano-Works-UK-Jouko-Laivuori/dp/B000BLMU56.
> 
> When I consider Heininen's links to the past through his teachers--Aarre Merikanto, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Einar Englund, and Joonas Kokkonen, as well as to Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Witold Lutoslawski, Vincent Persichetti, and Eduard Steuermann, and his many notable pupils among today's composers--such as Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, Jukka Tiensuu, Jouni Kaipainen and Veli-Matti Puumala, it becomes clear that we've lost one of the world's most important teachers of composition. Such figures are becoming increasingly rare it seems.
> 
> ...


Heininen himself described the reception of the performance of his 1st Symphony as traumatic. Hence the more accessible 2nd Symphony. He always was a controversial figure here in Finland. A true and eventually uncompromising modernist in good and bad, I would say. Heininen himself described the fight between the different aesthetic schools in Finland "a war of recources and mental depression".

Yet his music has high quality, so it will find it's way. Especially I am fond of Musique d'ete and op. 32a Piano sonata, Poesia.


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

From wiki:

*Paavo Johannes Heininen *(13 January 1938 - 18 January 2022) was a Finnish composer and pianist. He was born in Helsinki, where he studied at the Sibelius Academy and was taught composition by Aarre Merikanto, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Einar Englund, and Joonas Kokkonen. He continued his studies in Cologne with Bernd Alois Zimmermann; at the Juilliard School of Music in New York with Vincent Persichetti and Eduard Steuermann; and privately in Poland with Witold Lutosławski. He also studied musicology at the University of Helsinki.

Heininen was one of the most important Finnish modernist composers. His works can be roughly divided into two periods: dodecaphonic (c. 1957-1975) and serialist (from 1976 onwards). Due to the hostile reactions to his early works, particularly the First Symphony, his works up to the 1980s can be roughly divided in two groups: more personal and complex pieces and more approachable, audience-friendly pieces such as the Second Symphony, "Petite symphonie joyeuse".[1]

As professor of composition at the Sibelius Academy, Heininen has been highly influential in educating the next generation of Finnish composers and his pupils have included Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, Jukka Tiensuu, Jouni Kaipainen and Veli-Matti Puumala.

In addition to composing original works, Heininen has reconstructed several pieces that his composition teacher Aarre Merikanto mutilated or destroyed, including the latter's Symphonic Study (1928) and String Sextet (1932) and written the violin concerto Tuuminki (A Notion) as a "re-imagining" of Merikanto's completely destroyed third violin concerto. Alongside composition, Heininen has been active as a pianist, premiering and recording several of his own works. He is also known as an essayist and has written a large number of composer portraits.

A neo-Webern very pretty piece I enjoy a lot:


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

Sad news indeed. I never knew him personally, but I know some people who studied with him – they say he was a great teacher.


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