Tiina Myllärinen – Daydreams (2025)

Acoustics fascinate and inspire me. The same music sounds different in different spaces and the space itself creates different atmospheres. What kind of feeling do you get from music that is played in a big, reverberant cathedral-like space, where things get mixed-up and noisy? And what kind of feeling creates music that is played in a discant-sounding space, where the sounds almost hurt your ears? If the music in these two spaces is the same and the only difference is the acoustics, how differently do we experience the music?
Daydreams (2025) is my second string quartet and in this piece I continue exploring the same thing as I did in my first string quartet (Bad) Dreams come true (2022). In these quartets I try to create different acoustical spaces without changing the acoustics of the actual concert hall; I compose those acoustics, or illusions of them, inside the music. The dramaturgy of the pieces grows from the relationship between the musical material and the acoustics related to it, and from the changes in these.
In Daydreams the musical material is almost the same throughout the piece, but the space around it is changing continuously. It’s like walking through life, surrounded by different conditions, and the same things get a different kind of perspective and tension. The title refers to a different kind of world that the protagonist is dreaming about, and that world reveals itself at the end of the piece.

The piece is dedicated to and commissioned by NeoQuartet with funds provided by the Madetoja Foundation.

Tiina Myllärinen (b. 1979) writes music that has been described as cheerfully inquisitive, vigorous and original. She has composed orchestral, choral, chamber, solo and inter-art works and experimented with electroacoustic music and video. She has recently developed an interest in the application of various acoustic phenomena, such as resonance, in her music. She was awarded “the contemporary composer of the year” 2023 by the Finnish Music Publishers Association with her first string quartet (Bad) Dreams come true and she was a runner-up for Ivan Juritz Prize 2024 with her chamber music piece Delante – Detrás. Outside Finland works by her have been performed in the United States, Japan, Italy, Spain, England, Austria, Germany, Lithuania, Iceland
and Norway.