Soloists and orchestra

Áile Songs (2026)

song cycle for yoik singer, soprano and orchestra
22'

1. Dream
2. Meahcci
3. Lullaby-Requiem
4. Njávežan and Háhtežan
5. Our Circle of Life and Death

Text: Aleksi Barrière, based on motives from Niillas Holmberg’s novel Halla Helle

Publisher: Edition Wilhelm Hansen

An adaptation of Niillas Holmberg’s novel Halla Helle (2021), the opera Day of Night tells the story of Áile, a visual artist torn between her international career and her heritage as a Sámi woman. Moving back to her hometown of Ohcejohka in Northern Finland, she reconnects with her identity by relearning the lifestyle of her ancestors and getting involved with activists who defend Sámi rights against preying outside forces; however, she remains conflicted by her belonging to two worlds, and experiences increasingly violent dreams that she lacks the tools to decipher. In the opera, Áile’s divided identity is represented by the presence on stage of two Áiles, performed by a soprano and a yoik singer respectively. Over the course of the work, spanning the seasons of Áile’s life in the Tana valley, these two sides of her identity learn to cooperate.

This song suite focuses on the dual character’s material in her two vocal guises. From a haunting presence that yields transgenerational memories and traumas, the yoiking “Áile of her Ancestors” grows into a guide, a conscience, and a refuge to “Áile the Artist.” This growth plays an important role in our construction of the opera, and presents some of the more personal musical solutions through which we have sought to invite the tradition of yoik – and Sámi voices in general – into the form of opera, not by imitation or assimilation but through dialogue and mutual inspiration.

Two Sámi melodies are heard in this piece. In the first song, Dream, the trumpet solos and yoiker’s vocalizations reference Láve Nigá Risten’s yoik, which stems from the same area as the fictional Áile. Known by her Sámi name Láve Nigá Risten, Kristine Margit Måsø (1920–1944) was a Sámi woman from Buolbmát in the Tana valley. Having married in 1940, she passed away in childbirth just four years later, together with the child she was bearing. The yoik is hers – not in the sense that she composed it, but that it was passed on as her musical portrait by her community. The third song, Lullaby-Requiem, is entirely intertwined with the ancient Southern Sámi lullaby Sjamma, sjamma.

Songs and stories are at the heart of cultural transmission, its deepest-reaching form, ingrained in a person already in their early childhood. In most cultures, this oral heritage has been transmitted specifically from woman to woman. This work, and the opera from which it is sampled, are a tribute to these secret voices that are the foundation that all cultures share, beyond the richness of their differences. Áile Songs was jointly commissioned by the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra and the Arctic Philharmonic Orchestra.

Score

Premiere: TBA