Hi there!

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I’m Casimir Kytökorpi, a 22-year-old Finnish composer of contemporary classical music. I’m living in Helsinki at the moment, though my roots are strongly in Lahti where I grew up. As a composer, I value greatly the experience of listening to and breathing with the music I create, and this is, without a doubt, influenced by my extensive background as a performing musician. Learning the piano to a high level has given me priceless insight into the fundamentally sounding nature of music ‒ as opposed to the often primary focus

on the written score.

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Around the same time as I took on a more serious approach to playing the

piano, I discovered the joy of musical composition. In my first years of

writing music, I focused on my own instrument, the piano, and took

inspiration from the great composers I admired. These early works

I created are either romantically tonal (think Chopin ‒ if a bit

clumsier) or “contemporary pop music” tonal with simple chord

progressions and no inversions.

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As time passed, I started taking composition lessons from Inkeri

Jaakkola, and my musical understanding began to expand with

unprecedented zeal. I put on my figurative lab coat and experimented

with free tonality, free atonality, and even twelve-tone techniques. The result

is a plethora of unpolished works, each striving towards a new frontier. This sort of workflow has always felt natural to me, as I don’t like being stuck working on a single piece

for too long.

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My natural tendencies for rhapsodic, spur-of-the-moment writing eventually led me to

seek a more structured approach to composition from the Sibelius Academy. With the help of my ever so patient teacher Lauri Kilpiö, I found new ways of organizing my musical thought processes to create cohesion on all levels of music. While studying for my bachelor’s, my compositional output lessened noticeably in quantity, but perhaps there was progress to be seen in the qualitative aspects of my music.

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Nonetheless, I now find myself at the doorstep of yet another phase in my journey towards composerhood. I would be lying through my teeth if I said I knew what I’ll be doing next ‒ musically speaking. On the contrary, I have no idea what’s coming. And that’s why I’m taking a whole year off from the academic world to properly think things through.

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Anyway, please enjoy the music! And chat me up if something’s on your mind :)

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