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Einojuhani Rautavaara
October 9, 1928 -
born in Helsinki, Finland, composed during the Contemporary period
Biography
Einojuhani Rautavaara is the best-known composer in contemporary Finnish music. He began to study at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki in the late1940s, but his professional career didn't begin until 1954 when his orchestral A Requiem in Our Time won a competition sponsored by Thor Johnson, then conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. That same year Rautavaara entered an advanced course in music composition with Aarre Merikanto and attracted the attention of Sibelius himself, who in 1955 recommended that Rautavaara be awarded a Tanglewood scholarship to study at the Julliard School for one year. In the United States Rautavaara studied with Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions, and once back in Europe, he completed his course of study in Switzerland with Wladimir Vogel and in Cologne with Rudolf Petzold.

Rautavaara, paraphrasing a statement usually made in reference to American politics, has said "If an artist is not a modernist when he is young, he has no heart. And if he is a modernist when he is old, he has no brain." Indeed, Rautavaara's style is rooted in modernism, and his earliest works are in a Nordic folk-derived idiom reminiscent of Bartók. Not surprisingly his approach shifted more strongly towards serialism after his experiences in Cologne.
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