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Timo Tuhkanen is a finnish composer, artist, translator and poet.
Born 1983 in Muscat Oman. From Närsäkkälä, resides in Helsinki, Finland
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY:
Timo Tuhkanen is a composer, poet, editor, and plastic artist. He studied composition, improvisation
and conducting at Brunel University West London with Richard Barrett, Christopher Fox and Peter
Wiegold, as well as participating at classes ranging from Stellarc to Tom Johston, Chaya Czernowin
and Rosemary Butcher. And a week long intensive workshop with Peter Ablinger. Has, among others,
worked with the London Sinfonietta participating in the Culture Collective project, Mira Calix, Peter
Wiegold, Katie Keeble, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Colin Holter, PINK TWINS, Egle Oddo, and Andrew
Bentley.
Technically works involve solo and group improvisations, orchestral and music-theatre and opera-film
works (from Opera's and Oratorio's to recitatives and sound poems) dance re-mixes mixing
contemporary classical music with pop, collaborations, and the incorporation of live electronics,
improvisation and computer software/hardware into the compositional process, inter-textual work,
novels, prose, poetry, performance art, plastic art, films, and installations.
Music has been described as non-visual musical terrorism, and a concert-goer described his solo
performance SPEL as “better then taking magic-mushrooms”.
BIOGRAPHY
Timo Tuhkanen, a Finnish national, was born in Oman to a missionary family, in Finland he has lived
in Kitee (Närsäkkälä), Tampere, Hervanta, Vantaa (Koivukylä), and Helsinki (Hernesaari). Out of
Finland he has lived in Muscat Oman, Amman Jordan, Beit Jala Palestine, Beit Safafa and Jerusalem
Israel, Courchevel France, and the London Great Britain. He has studied widely and received his
Masters in Music in 2009.
His musical experience started at 5 with the violin, and rapidly went through many instruments,
including trumpet, drums, percussion, studying drum-kit, conga, Bata (sacred music of Santeria) and
guitar, until at 17 he stumbled upon Indian Classical music.
Tabla quickly fell after moving to Finland, and he refocused on the guitar, quickly learning classical
repertoire (Heitor Villa-Lobos, Bach, Baden Powel de Aquinas etc.) and bossa nova and samba, as
well as studying Capoeira and Brazilian music intensively at this time he played guitar in the
afrosamba duet Maresia.
In 2005 he started university in London and learned to play marimba, vibraphone and studied typani
with Jim Fleeman. He has received compositions from composer such as Colin Holter who composed
a 19-tet solo guitar piece for him, and he has commissioned a polytempi-polymicrotonal composition
for 3 guitars from Los Angeles based Dr. Peter Thoegresen.
Today he has developed his own guitar technique using his vast experience in instruments and
techniques to carve out his own musical language playing two to three guitars set upon snaredrums,
using complex sound worlds and preparation combined with hand and finger independence to new
bowing techniques, moving sonically from drone music through a contemporary microtonal world
dominated by afrobrasilian sambas and bata rhythms in Classical Indian cylcles.
During all this time he has always studied literature and plastic arts as a fundamental to
understanding not only music but art in general, and his compositions rise from an intensive study of
literary, visual, and scientific observations. He also works as a poet, novelist, editor and translator,
and is currently working with the permission of the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller to finance and
produce a Finnish translation of Synergetics.