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Courses 2024

Two leading composers; a software developer and a leading name in audience engagement as teachers at the Viitasaari Summer Academy! Come get inspired and learn the music of our time!

The annual Summer Academy of the Music Time festival  to be arranged this year 2–7th of July offers unique opportunities  to study  music of our time under the guidance of world-famous composer-pedagogues in an inspiring and international environment. Applications for the courses are now open.

The Swedish Jesper Nordin is responsible for this year’s composition course, his music has been performed  at Time of Music before by Tuuli Lindeberg and Petri Kumela, among others. His music has strong influences from Swedish folk music, rock and improvisation. Last  October, Pekka Kuusisto and Esa-Pekka Salonen premiered Nordin’s piece Convergence for violin and orchestra with the San Francisco Orchestra.

Nordin is also active as a researcher and a software developer and has founded Reactional Music, which bridges the video games and music industries in a new way. The Reactional technology has many use cases and has been used both in commercially released video games as well as by conductors and musicians performing on virtual orchestras in real time.

Composition course is part of the ULYSSES Network project, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

Composer, oboist and curator Cathy Milliken’s course “Delight –  fluid spaces of participation” focuses on the challenges and opportunities of collaboration and also on the participation of the audience. Milliken is also known at  Time of Music, she visited the festival  in the summer of 2017 as a speaker at the Art and Autonomy seminar.

As composers, musicians and curators, Nordin and Milliken are interesting and open-minded creators of today. They work with questions that resonate our time  and link   to fluid  interaction, says Johan Tallgren, artistic director of Musiikin aika. – The profile of them both is wide-ranging. Their work reflects the ways of working today and is perfectly suited to the thematic priorities of the incoming summer, he adds.

In addition to her own artistic work, Milliken is one of the leading names in the international music field for inclusive audience work. Nordin, on the other hand, has created interactive software in the music and game fields.

Cathy Milliken’s course is part of the Sounds Now project, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

The application period for the courses 2024 has ended. Those who applied for the courses have been notified.