Outi Tarkiainen

Songs Of The Ice (Jään Lauluja)

Songs of the Ice is an orchestral work about ice. In the Arctic region, the ice breathes with the seasons, swelling in winter and shrinking in summer. Its age-old movement sings a song of its own: slowly surging, unrelenting andcovering all beneath it. It tinkles and rumbles, squeaks and laments as our ever-warmer climate breaks Nature's time-honoured laws, forcing the ice to give way. When I composed the piece, I was expecting our second child, due tobe born in the heart of winter when the bitter cold strengthens the ice, making it powerful and solid again, and I was vividly reminded of the time after our first-born. Songs of the Ice also describes the emptiness and reclosingprocess that begins in a woman's body when she parts company with the life inside her in giving birth.