Day Night Day
Outi Tarkiainen was born February 7, 1985, in Rovaniemi, Lapland, Finland, and lives there. Composed in 2024 on a joint commission from the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Day Night Day was premiered by Marin Alsop leading the Berlin Philharmonic on February 20, 2025, at the Berlin Philharmonie. First Boston Symphony Orchestra performances: Andris Nelsons conducting, April 2, 3, 4, and 8, 2026, at Symphony Hall, and at Carnegie Hall on April 10.
The score of Day Night Day calls for 3 flutes (2nd doubling alto flute, 3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (3 players: I. bass drum, crotales, suspended cymbals; II. glockenspiel, suspended cymbals, crotales [with bow]; III. large gong, rain stick, suspended cymbal, tam-tam, Thai gong), harp, celesta, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Outi Tarkiainen grew up in Rovaniemi, Finland, on the 66th parallel some 40 miles below the Arctic Circle; she returned to live there following periods of study in Helsinki, the UK, and Miami, Florida. Rovaniemi, which has a population of about 65,000 and was virtually razed by the retreating German army in October 1944, is the capital of Lapland (or Lappi), the Northern Finnish region that forms part of Sápmi, or Sameland. Sápmi, which extends from northern Norway through Sweden and Finland and into Russia, is the traditional home region of the Sámi people. The people — along with the region’s unique culture and mythology, and its physical landscape — continue to have a profound impact on Tarkiainen and her art.
Tarkiainen’s musical training began on piano, but her artistic identity has always been that of a composer. She began studying classical music, then in her teens became fascinated by jazz, joining a local big band in order to perform with others and to gain experience with larger ensembles. She was soon creating arrangements and new works for the group and, in parallel with other activity, was active as a big-band composer for many years. She studied with the jazz composer and pedagogue Ron Miller at the University of Miami and also participated in master classes with the composers Vince Mendoza and Maria Schneider — all artists whose work takes an inclusive view in questions of style, embracing the continuum from jazz to contemporary classical orchestral music. Although she has since concentrated on contemporary classical music, working with jazz musicians allowed her to expand her technical range and sense of musical drama. Her saxophone concerto Saivo was composed for a jazz saxophonist, though its overall style and voice have little in common with her definitively jazz-oriented music. Studies at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and at the Guildhall School in London expanded Tarkiainen’s experience with the orchestra and its instruments.
Tarkiainen’s music has been performed throughout Europe and in the U.S. by ensembles including the San Francisco Symphony (which co-commissioned her Milky Ways for English horn and orchestra and gave the U.S. premiere in 2023), Houston Symphony Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, the BBC, Scottish, Royal Stockholm, and Netherlands symphony orchestras, Austria’s Tonkünstler Orchestra, Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, and the Lapland Chamber Orchestra, among many others. Her Mosaics was premiered by the Gothenburg (Sweden) Symphony Orchestra in February 2024. Her concerto for clarinet and strings The Seasons of Love was premiered by the Kymi Sinfonietta and clarinetist Lauri Sallinen, a frequent collaborator, in May 2024. The conductor John Storgårds has been a particular champion of her work.
In addition to its connections with Finland’s landscape and cultures, Tarkiainen’s music is often inextricable from her interest in the voice and language. Her Into the Woodland Silence sets poetry of two major Finnish poets, Eeva-Liisa Manner and Sirkka Turkka, sung in English and Finnish. Her first opera was based on Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, with a libretto by Francis Hüsers. The piece is one of many, including the chamber work The Lustful Mother and the voice-and-orchestra work The Earth, Spring’s Daughter, both of which set the Sámi poets Rauni Magga Lukkari and Rose-Marie Huuva, that explicitly explore the topic of womanhood, sexuality, and childbirth.
In her goal to express the viewpoints and emotions of women in her work, Tarkiainen acknowledges a kinship with Kaija Saariaho, with whom she formed a warm relationship after meeting the older composer in 2017. Tarkiainen found that Saariaho’s experience as an artist and a woman resonated with her own, and she was quite moved by Saariaho’s death in June 2023. Tarkiainen’s latest opera, Day of Night, is a collaboration with the director, writer, and dramaturg Aleksi Barrière, Saariaho’s son with the composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière. The opera’s libretto is primarily in English but also features other languages, including Sámi. The scenario is based on the Sámi poet and writer Niillas Holmberg’s first novel, Halla Hella (“Day of Night”). The opera was commissioned by Aalto Musiktheater Essen and Finnish National Opera and Ballet.
The musical material of Tarkiainen’s single-movement tone poem Day Night Day is derived from the music of Day of Night. The composer writes,
Day Night Day is an orchestral work about the northern light and ice that every winter invade the land but that reflect the early spring light in brilliant spectra. The work incorporates references to two Sámi melodies: a yoik of Láve Nigá Risten from the Teno region of Northern Finnish Lapland heralded by muted trumpets towards the beginning of the work, and a variation of the old South Sámi lullaby Sjamma, sjamma hummed at the end by the woodwinds.
A yoik (or joik) is a vocal genre described as being a kind of musical totem of a person, place, or animal. Day Night Day joins several other Tarkiainen pieces, including Midnight Sun Variations and Songs of the Ice, in which the Arctic Circle landscape and light exerted a powerful influence on the composer’s sound-world. The combination of the dark, roiling, colorful orchestral texture with the folk melodies creates a sense of something familiar but elusive, existing on multiple planes at once.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.