When students arrived for their first day at Australia’s music academy in Abbotsford last Friday, the artistic director called them together and spoke to them about music and war.
“I had to speak to them,” says Paavali Jumppanen. “Here we are, making music [while a war rages in Ukraine]. I cannot not mention something about this. I said, ‘it’s maybe naive or utopian, but we have the solution’.
Australian National Academy of Music artistic director Paavali Jumppanen, with musicians Donica Tran and Felix Pascoe.Credit:Jason South
“We are doing the kind of activities that are not harmful to the world. Art, community, creativity. We create. And it’s not a bad line of work to be occupied with.”
Jumppanen has reason to feel this personally. He arrived last month to take up the reins at ANAM – a move delayed by the pandemic – from his native Finland, a country perched precariously between the West and Russia, which has been invaded and occupied by its eastern neighbour more than once.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed Finland from fence sitting to openly debating joining NATO. But Russia has threatened “military and political consequences”.
“Finland is safe and fine for the time being but it is kind of close as well,” Jumppanen says. “And the distance between Helsinki and Kyiv is exactly the same as Adelaide to Sydney. Who knows where this is going, it’s just unbelievable.”
Loading
Music isn’t just a distraction from, or an alternative to war, he says. It can be integral to it. It’s no coincidence that social media is seeing a flood of videos of Ukrainians singing and playing their national anthem – in bomb shelters, in city squares, in protests outside Russian embassies across the world.
“I have a musicologist friend who does research on anthems. She’s said… that people feel the strongest unity when they’re together, singing. When you look at people coming together to celebrate, or to resist something, they’ll have things to sing together, and that feeling, that unity is another kind of expression.
A message to new students: even in wartime, music matters
Source: Philippines Alive
