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THIS ARTICLE is essentially related to my new piece Green Tress, which will be premiered at Time of Music festival in Viitasaari. It is part of the project “21st Century Voices/Voices reimagined” of Time of Music and Huddesfield Contemporary Music Festival.

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The project includes six contemporary composers: American Tyshawn Sorey, Ukrainian Anna Korsun, British-Rwandan Auclair, Swiss-Nigerian Charles Uzor, British Mariam Rezaei and me from Finland. Our new works comment on the song cycle Voices composed by the German composer Hans-Werner Henze in the 1970s. Voices consists of 22 political songs. New pieces are co-commissioned by Time of Music and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. They are part of the Sounds Now project funded by the EU's Creative Europe programme, and will be performed by the London Sinfonietta later in Huddersfield and London's South Bank Centre.

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My new piece should take a stand on one of the burning political questions of contemporary society. But is this even possible for a piece of music? How can a composer act politically?

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Next, I will tell you about the backgrounds and collaborators of the Green Tress tree planting project, which acts as the starting point of my work. I wanted to focus my politics on global ecological issues. I chose this project because I see similarities in its emancipatory and ecological attitude with such critical art-making practices, which I am extremely interested in. The article is an essential part of the piece Green Tress performed during Time of Music in Viitasaari. Only these two elements together can constitute a political act.

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Writing in connection with composing is also a kind of taboo. Among contemporary composers (at least in Finland) we are used to thinking that music should be enough as it is, without explanatory text or other material. I want to defy this view by writing a long and thorough text alongside my composition.